How To Like It

Freedom

2012-02-05T14:42:00.017-05:00

I like what Bill Littlefield said so well this week on Only A Game:

"On the days that seem easiest to understand, it feels like there is a clear line between our grievances and our delights, between that which oppresses and threatens us and that which can temporarily banish our troubles by entertaining us. To the people who lost loved ones on Wednesday in Port Said, it must feel as if there is no safe place at all."

Littlefield gets right how activities that seem safe, even delightful, before a trauma, undertake more subtle considerations of risk and reward after it; how uncertainty persists in habits of self-distraction. I have written about a few of those habits--hiking and television watching, the management and medication of sleep--and also in newer writing that has yet to make the rounds. Driving, dating, everyday finance, even parenting are sometimes occasions for the integrity of a life to collapse inward; for the malevolent unreason of the world to exploit vulnerabilities and undermine confidences. As those activities, vulnerabilities, and confidences continue normalcy in a life, a corresponding over-caution becomes exhausting; however coincidental, its intrusions seem both predictive and useless.

I enjoyed very much Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. It is an energetic, well-constructed, and thoroughly unconsoling novel. Time and again, Franzen asks, what does it mean to mistake an abundance of opportunity for the absence of consequence? What binds us to our choices beyond the freedom to make or not make them? The hero, Walter Berglund, clings as dogmatically to the preservation of a minor species of songbird as the neoconservatives who coax his son to profiteer during the Iraq War shift their moral, political, and social rationalizations; as his best friend struggles to preserve in his public self the heterodox moralities of rock and roll; as his wife rejects inherited models of companionship for equally ambivalent ones. I would say that the thinking here feels very Midwestern and Catholic, except that the main characters are Lutheran and Protestant, the author Jewish. Better to say, I think, the values that resonate throughout the book seem exceptionally American: full of transformative potential, utterly blind to context.

Four years ago, I went to the wedding of a very good friend from college. During the weekend festivities, I threw up in front of a famous landmark, underdressed for the rehearsal, arrived late to the wedding the next day after trying again and agin to buy a nicer pair of shoes, and generally stood in corners of elegant rooms feeling very sorry for myself. I left the reception that night inside my own fully-inhabited, private head. Mostly, I hated feeling pitied by those other guests who did know about Katie's death. I resented those who were not aware of it.

Do I see now, in my allergic hostility to weddings then, a certain collegial narcissism, a willingness to take what I could in order to extend the terms and scope of my grief into new geographies? Whether I was merely sympathetic or understandably, justifiably overwhelmed, seems beside the point. I had no idea how to insulate myself against a world that seemed largely indifferent to my grief. I felt stuck perpetually sussing out the sympathy of strangers who, of course, attended the wedding with other, more relevant intentions.

Cait, Walt, and I are going to watch the Super Bowl this afternoon at a friend's house, with some other parent-friends we've made in the last seventeen months. It has become, gradually, an abundance of energetic and social occasions with other new parents. Walt is mobile and capable. He likes being around other kids, especially bigger ones. My mom says that Walt is as social and engaged as I was at that age, a tow-headed charmer of all ages and genders. I would like to be able to tell Walt with any certainty that the world is either a secure or insecure place, but his experience of it will finally supersede my limited perspective. I can only stand near Walt, and not too close, as he climbs then leans out from one precarious structure after another. In the meantime, this afternoon, I will glue myself to the television and root convivially for whomever is losing. Go Giants! Go Pats! What does it really matter to me who wins?

A friend recently posted to Facebook photographs from high school. As my sister pointed out then, a late-adolescent move from moon-shaped, Dynasty-style lenses to narrow rectangles updated my look a good twenty years. I have aged well, at least in the relative sense. High school, like college, was no series of peaks, not physically, intellectually, or socially. Rather, both were periods of experimentation and the practice of many kinds of failure. Gone are the short eras of chorale singing, chewed cigars and fedoras, beaded hair, not wearing jeans on principle, subscriptions to Mother Jones and The Nation, Spyro Gyra mix CDs, etc. We can, it seems, only choose so many uninherited influences. As I no doubt wrote in many yearbooks, next to so many lyrics by Jimmy Buffett and Kris Kristofferson, in the end, the truth does set us free.

Baby Ducks

2012-01-31T13:55:00.005-05:00

Walt will play for minutes—minutes!—on end and by himself these days. He hugs, points to his eyebrows, distinguishes mom from dad from grandma from the friend visiting last week who brought over for the house a head of kale and six pounds of butternut squash. Walt is drawn to wheels of every variety. He pulls the giant plastic bin filled with cars out from under the piano, dumps them on the floor, and runs a few across the carpet. The slightly larger plastic cars are self-propelled, but he hasn’t quite figured out the winding mechanism. I hold and point these cars toward the sofa, but often they run in circles—bad tire, poor alignment—and end up behind the easy chair, or under the coffee table, where we dig them out weeks later.

Last Sunday, at the park, Walt borrowed from another kid a miniature pram with a plastic baby doll inside of it. He ran the pram back and forth on the sidewalk, alternately smiling and furrow-browed, pleased and determined. The sidewalk was really a narrow strip of cement between two sports fields, beside a school. When the pram ran into the grass, Walt pushed and pulled a bit, stood back, then grabbed the doll and tossed it onto the ground. Too heavy. He labored across the grass.

We saw friends in the city last weekend: birthday parties, brunch. It’s a little more than an hour’s drive, and we timed the last trip poorly. As we drove up and over the hill, Walt started to konk out. His eyes glassed over. He went limp in the car seat. We desperately named every fire truck, ambulance. We asked Walt the same few questions, over and over. Do you want to go to a party today? Do you think you’ll see your friends there? Sluggish, a tad imperial, he replied, Dah. As we got out of the car, Walt saw other kids and perked up a bit. He ran pell-mell between fabric discs placed on a yard, racing from one iceberg to the next.

Whenever Katie and I visited Indiana, I would get a lot of mileage out of mocking animated shows: getting the words wrong, misnaming the characters, asking pointless questions about the plot. It sounds so awful now, but then, I think my nieces and nephews were at least sometimes amused. As you probably know, I love The Wonder Pets. I have fond memories of singing (the wrong lyrics for) its theme song. When did parody become sincere affection? My nieces and nephew have since moved on to more sophisticated fare, which I love, too: The Office, Friday Night Lights. Perhaps I will one day get them on board with Parenthood.

When Walt and I watch The Wonder Pets, I struggle mightily to enjoy the show and not get too sentimental. We are watching The Wonder Pets to entertain him for a few minutes. I can wax nostalgic for my personal history another time. Walt loves, especially, Ming-Ming (the Wonder Pet duck), which is to say, he loves ducks. Our bathtub is filled with plastic ducks. Our bookshelf is rich with fowl-ian tales. Duck was Walt’s first word. He points at many things still and, lacking the word, offers a heartfelt, Dah.

Perhaps the duck fascination is inherited and short-hand. When we first met in the Peace Corps twelve years ago, I liked to offer Cait false consolations about the culture shock overwhelming us. When it gets bad, I would say, just think of the baby ducks in the world! It became a running joke in our friendship, then our marriage. Walt will no doubt role his eyes one day at some duck-related anecdote from his early, precognitive youth. I keep on my desk a photo of Cait watching gulls fly across a lake in the Sierras. They swirl around her head. Cait is facing away from the camera, a little older than Walt is now. According to his mother, Walt is my spitting image, but I don’t see it. We walk around the house, yard, playground, and parking lot. He holds my finger and pulls me in one direction, then another. In safe climes, he toddles off and plays a while on his own, comes back to say hi, then heads off again.

Baby Ducks

Fragile as epiphytes,
tight as silk saris or orange peels:
the truth always gives way.

The day we met
I convinced you I overcame
childhood rickets. Later:
that I flew with John Denver
the night before he died.

Here’s a fact:
95% of baby fowl
purchased each Easter
never make it to their first birthday.

Forgive all of this
confessing—

but when I told you
if it gets bad
to think of baby ducks
I didn’t love you. Not like this.

Mrs. Bridge

2012-01-05T12:56:00.027-05:00

Walt this morning stepped onto my face to reach the cat on the bed. I managed to grab hold of his legs so he wouldn't fall, and also to toss my eyeglasses across the floor so he wouldn't stomp them, and then I waited. He poked at the cat, giggling. I have no idea if he reached the cat, or if the cat was (most likely) standing just out of reach, or if that cat cleared the bed immediately and ran into the bathroom. I waited there a while, on the floor, on my back, face-footed, until eventually Walt lost interest and climbed back down. We got dressed for the morning, went outside and walked around the block, visited the birds next door, played in the living room, had some oatmeal. A little bit later, he stood at the stairs pointing at the door to the basement apartment. Nap time.

I finished reading Mrs. Bridge last night. A good friend, and talented writer, recommended it as a kind of anti-Cheever opus of the mid-20th century. There is so much to admire about the book: its plainspoken and sparse style, the range of feeling, the mix of satire and gentle humor, the short vignettes (117 in all) that often find India Bridge just short of connecting meaningfully with the friends and family in her life. I was born and lived the first 14 years of my life in Kansas City, so there is a certain fascination with the names and places in the book. I couldn't help feeling that the book is rather cruel to India Bridge, who seems to have no curiosity about the world or engagement with it, except for the conventions of her social circle. She does not know or particularly like her children. She is prim and defensive, calculating and manipulative. Like all of the women in the book (except for the friend who kills herself, and the daughter who moves to New York City and never returns), she is both boring and bored. Still, as I finished the book, I felt intensely sad and lonely for her, and I suppose, for myself and about the world around me. Reading the book initiated that mix of feeling, thoughtfulness, and empathy that often make the best literature so satisfying, so good; that makes me want to keep reading, to find some sense of understanding about the world in which I live, and maybe also (to borrow a phrase from a colleague) to find it and myself on the page.

I like Eliot's notion, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that a poet develops his/her taste in three stages. First, he reads until he finds those other poets he really likes. Next, he reads those poets intensely, so that he understands what he likes about them. Finally, he attempts to read the rest of literature, and uses it to test those taste, and to observe how it might evolve. Of course, that last step is quite a challenge one, to which we must inevitably fall short. But I suppose it's more problematic to stop at the second step, to decide wholesale that there can be no literature except for what we know we like. To do so would seem to satisfy not a love of literature, but instead a love of compulsion, and for the accompanying anxiety about what we have not read, or worse, about how our own work might fail. Of course, it also seems difficult to decide that benign neglect is the way to go; to love everything, so as to exclude and risk valuing nothing. Liking anything, I suppose, requires a certain vulnerability about judgment: the limits of one's range of interest and exposure, alongside everything to which it might be compared.

In his review of the best films of the year, David Edelstein notes the many occasions for our cultural obsession with apocalypse. Zombie plagues, diseased plague, global warming, world war, even melancholy begins the end. Last week, the NewsHour ran a feature about extreme weather in 2011, the radical frequency and scope of it. If it is our cultural moment to decide how we feel in the abstract about annihilation, and whether we intend to fortify the bunkers or anticipate and solve the problem, then the latter feels conventional and overly confident, while the former is titillating and exotic, tinged with all the promise and release of nihilism. I suspect these are alternately economic questions, a manifestation of faith in markets and currency--Why take precaution, why not maximize the take, if it's all destined to come to an end?--and also the familiar questions of liberal democracy and empire. Will government do the work to serve the neediest, empower the capable and competent, and represent and protect everyone? Must it?

What little time Cait and I have some evenings to watch television, we've newly devoted to Parenthood. If the first season is a bit uneven, still, at its best, this is a very, very good show. Developed by the creator of Friday Night Lights, Jason Katims, and Ron Howard (director and producer of many things, including Arrested Development), Parenthood hits nearly all of my buttons these days. I could say I like it for its great writing, strong cast, Northern California setting, and gentle optimism for and about the world and family at its center, but I doubt I would have given it a chance were it not for the New Yorker's strong endorsement of it this week, and it's ready availability on demand. Parenthood is still another example of how NBC can develop excellent shows--Friday Night Lights and Community come to mind--that get critical raves and a cultish audience, for which it nonetheless can't quite find its audience. If you get a chance to check it out, do so soon, because as things currently stand, it may very well be canceled at year's end with season 3 (the best one yet).

Parenthood uses for its credit sequence Dylan's upbeat version of "Forever Young" from Planet Waves. The song also very neatly bookends its pilot with this version and his more contemplative slow-down from that same album. The folky original is absent in the episode and show. That version was Katie and I's wedding song, and I didn't know the later versions until I sought them out after her death. I might try to say something very clever here about the many manifestations of the things we both desire and grieve for in the world, but instead I'll say that I felt a tremendous relief that hearing this song, when I didn't mean to, was okay. I could handle it, and I even enjoyed it. May your heart always be joyful, may your song always be sung. I'll post below two videos. First, the pilot episode; watch it through the end of the opening baseball scene (up to the credits). Second, in keeping with a common thread on the blog, a pretty great duet of "Forever Young" by Dylan and Springsteen.

Cait, Walt, and I walked down to the campus bookstore yesterday afternoon. The academic term starts next week, when the students arrive, and I wanted to check that my course texts were in-stock. They were there, alongside the novels, poetry and story and essay collections, histories and criticisms, of the other classes offered by the English department. Such a wide range of styles, authors, and genres are read and taught and discussed and loved here, from Milton to Bishop to Chandler to Berryman, to Lowell's imitations of Berryman to Mitchells' translations of Gilgamesh to Plath's journals alternating jealousy and earnestness about her ambitions to publish poetry in The New Yorker; and this doesn't yet count the course readers, with parts and fragments to complement the full texts. We didn't linger too long there before Walt started pulling books, indiscriminately, from the shelves. Off to the upstairs cafe, then out to play in the fountain and quad, which are deserted only a day or two more, before heading back up the hill and home.

The Richest Man in Town

2011-12-05T11:38:00.018-05:00

When I was in the eighth grade, a few days before Christmas Break, the religion teacher (I went to a parochial school) showed us It's A Wonderful Life, then asked us to explain what Harry Bailey meant at the end of the film when he declared his older brother was "the richest man in town." I had thought that the message was a pretty straightforward moral contrast. George Bailey was rich because he had friends who liked him and supported him in his time of need, a kind of wealth Mr. Potter, who had more money but no real friends, nonetheless couldn't buy. It turned out that mine was something of a minority position. Steve Pittert declared, to much agreement, that George Bailey would in fact now become even wealthier than Mr. Potter because of all of the money that people had brought to him that night. Soon, he explained, Bailey would crush Potter and restore order to Bedford Falls. The teacher worked us around eventually to the former interpretation, but the lines were drawn. It was one thing to root for the restoration and continuation of George Bailey's loyal opposition to Potter; it was another to root for the rise of Bailey, and the overthrow entirely of Potter's reign of terror.

Fifteen years later, I was teaching 7th grade social studies in a public school in Chicago, when a student asked whether we might watch a movie during the upcoming holiday party. We had agreed as a faculty to again order pizzas in for lunch before the break, and to have instructionally-driven "holiday parties," which might incorporate some aspect of instruction while also entertaining the students. The previous year, we had seen students from the higher grades roaming the halls in wild packs, seeking out pizza and soda from the lower grades, and so this year's festivities were meant to have more structure and order. I chose "It's A Wonderful Life" as the class movie, and posed the same question to my students. Their answer was the standard one, and when I posed the Bailey Rebellion thesis, no one took the bait.

It was my last year teaching at the school, for which I generally felt a sense of relief. It being the holidays, that relief was shaded with more than a little nostalgia for the job and work. Who was I meant to become, if not an enthusiastic and highly capable 7th grade teacher? What more should I expect from the world? These were easy, age-appropriate questions to ask, and it was wrong to feel overwhelmed by them. I had an easy enough answer. Already, I had applied to graduate school with the aim of studying and writing poetry. That afternoon, before the movie, I took time out to open presents from students. Among the cards, cookies, chocolates, etc., one student had given me a hip-hop hamster toy that started rapping every time you squeezed its stomach. I was thrilled. I took the toy with me to our various family holidays that year, though it became harder and harder to recreate the thrill in other settings.

Cait and I drove yesterday to Rancho Siempre Verde, where we spent the afternoon with friends and family making wreaths, looking at the trees, roasting s'mores over a fire, and swinging most of the various new tree swings installed this year. It was a beautiful day for it. On the way, I kept trying to find the right mix of Christmas music to start the season. I had very little success. Albums I liked as a kid felt too customary, while the newly-discovered stuff seemed derivative, even arbitrary. Where was that first thrill of nostalgia, uncomplicated by practice and intervening time? As is their annual custom, two local Bay Area radio stations have now switched to an all-Christmas-all-the-time format through December 25th. Their offerings during the drive were a mix of the truly awful alongside the interminably familiar. How strange to recognize the voice of yet another late-career rocker making a turn at Christmas crooning, to hear instead the superior precedents of Sinatra, Bennett, Crosby. A kind of staged sing-along, I suppose.

We watched Love, Actually the other night. It is a movie that thrills Cait, and I think the sort of movie one can really only oppose in the general sense--it's a manipulative, easy, bourgeois, sell-out of the worst kind of ensemble flick--or on gender grounds: men shouldn't watch and enjoy movies like this, and if they do, they should keep it to themselves. Since acknowledging the viewing on Facebook, I've heard much of the latter but none of the former. O, Christmas season, that makes annually even George Bailey unborn and born again. No doubt, this might be the year to get that fantastic gadget, to make each other happy, that Uncle Billy and Kid Brother Harry finally come home to say nice things to each other. Like Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt, and the football: who knows, this just might be the year.

Here's my beef, now, with "It's A Wonderful Life." Who's to say who would be alive now had they not met us, and whether they would like their world more for our lack of arrival into it? That we are alive, and that we find some way to like some part of that continuing life, seems more honest, and much darker, than George Bailey's victory lap. If a better troop leader than George were organizing the sledding at the start of the movie, perhaps Harry wouldn't have fallen into the water at all. If George hadn't worked at the Savings & Loan, perhaps some of the residents of Bailey Park would have gotten free and wide of Potter's spider-web entirely. Or, perhaps one needs the settled life of a George Bailey in order to look back and declare, with certainty, that indeed the world is a better place for our inclusion in it: richer, warmer, generative to the lives around it. Certainly, Bedford Falls never gets the opportunity afforded Sam Wainwright, Harry Bailey, Violet: to forget about, and even ignore them, as things continue.

One aspect of grief that no longer seems present, for me, is a competing sense of obligations: old and new, there and here, then and now. There is plenty of space for the present and memory, and both bring forward those parts I love in a life. But it is my life I'm talking about, here. The terrible and unresolved question of how another life ends, on what terms and to what account, persists with all of the guilt and speculation of an annual season custom-made to accommodate both. Better, I think, to say that the gears turn a certain way with us stuck in them, and then, to allow more than a little whimsy in the appreciation of the many directions they might otherwise have turned, and do turn still.

The Availability Heuristic

2011-11-28T12:14:00.020-05:00

Cait and I went to see Hugo last night. It was a fun movie to watch, with its screen-popping 3D effects, and a marvelously twisted plot that came together well enough at the end. Good acting, beautiful cinematography, interesting characters, and nice to be out alone on the hometown after our holiday week in Chicago. The turn at the end, to the stage and recognition of a lifetime's work, was awfully tender-hearted, if a bit puzzling. Cait and I tried to hash it out a bit on our way home: what had happened, exactly, to that great opening mystery of the automaton, the quest of the orphan to find the message from his father? What did any part of how the movie began have, in the end, to do with film preservation? The movie seemed to jump tracks midway, turning from story to argument, character to idea. It felt a bit like propaganda, which is far too loaded a word to make the comparison exact, but the boy seemed more a reason to start the story, than to end it, and I missed losing him for the argument.

I am not a huge Weezer fan, but they absolutely kill it with their 2008 cover of "O, Holy Night." Who knew a punk cover could find a fresh angle to that most tired chestnut of holiday music? It's ardent, and entirely without sentiment or irony:

In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis has a great piece about the economist Daniel Kahneman, and the concept of the availability heuristic, which argues that we express a bias toward those outcomes we can most easily imagine, however probable or improbable they might actually prove to be. Lewis uses the availability heuristic to explain Billy Beane's competitive edge in selecting baseball players, based on privileged data analysis, in spite of the conventional wisdom about them. But the concept works generally, from politics (welfare queens, death taxes) to racial profiling to self-perceptions of obesity. Even Christmas music so easily falls prey to our expectations of angelic choirs, churches or warmly-lit rooms filled with wood furniture, snow, underdogs, and missing, until we are reminded, "true meanings." I'll skip the irony, as Weezer does. I genuinely enjoy many aspects of the holiday plunder, and I'm skeptical of too much holiday-era triangulating.

I have nearly finished reading Alexandra Styron's excellent memoir, Reading My Father. Her representation of her father's generation of writers, and their self-mythologizing and reverence for the novel, feels so fragile. What happened to these "literary lions," who were so sure of their own significance, that they could alternately dismiss or dismantle their families? I suppose this is a kind of useless moralizing that falls a bit wide of the mark--I'm reading this memoir because I'm curious about both literary Styrons--but I wonder all the same about their sense of priority in relation to ambition. And, here is the permanent warp in my own availability heuristic: how could any of these writers not have expected to die too soon?

It is devastating to read Alexandra Styron's account of her father screaming at her, calling her a creep, ungrateful, etc., at all, but especially over the most minor interactions. I suppose that I retain enough of my Midwestern roots to simultaneously marvel and wonder at the disclosure, which I think requires a certain elegance and distance to get right. The goal, it seems, is to structure against the confessional urge, to find the tension that contains it. One of the comforts of narrative is the idea that any experience might conform to a sequence, and so, contain a hierarchy: the experience can be told, and so, explained. I'm borrowing a bit from an essay I like to teach, and I think contradicting a big part of its argument, but certain experiences seem compromised by narrative's need to put everything into order; that what happens might only be secondary to the witness.

Eight years ago, Katie and I drove from Chicago to Bowling Green, Ohio, to see her good friend, meet the good friend's fiancé, and spend some time together. On our way out of town, we stopped at one of those tacky year-round Christmas stores to kill some time and miss rush-hour traffic. We bought a small plastic tree for our apartment, which we decorated with ornaments from both of our families, and also a couple of CDs to listen to on the drive. It was an odd-numbered year, so we would have spent Christmas that year with Katie's family, and Thanksgiving with mine. Crossing Indiana, a state highway patrol officer offered me a deal: unclick my seat belt, and he would cite me for driving without my safety harness, rather than going 88 in a 65.

Walt is just crossing the threshold to full holiday awareness. I suppose there is no going back. We opened presents with my family over Thanksgiving, so that we could exchange them together, and it was fun to see Walt puzzle at the boxes, and enjoy very much the toys they contained. I have this fantasy of dressing Walt in one of those Ralph Lauren Christmas numbers with the plaid and the corduroy, but instead, we keep finding good hand-me-downs. Sheila and Jeff had out some photos from last Christmas, and the changes in Walt's face are so striking. He is leaner now, and longer, his hair is curled out, he walks. I have this idea sometimes that what I write these days is a direct effort to explain something to him about my life, but there is a good chance he will roll his eyes at any story about whatever preceded him, however dramatic, just as the chains will move, ever so gradually, until they measure other distances. In the meantime, excited as I am to write and teach, I'm thoroughly engaged with the coming holiday season. Here's another revitalized Christmas chestnut, bittersweet for the passing, this year, of The Big Man.

Snap

2011-11-03T13:00:00.003-04:00

To combat Walt's croup this past weekend, we aired out the apartment both nights. Bath steam would not open his narrowed airways, so we tried instead the cold Bay air. Stacking blankets, we pulled Walt into the bed. We put the humidifier next to us and slept under the mist. Up from a solid sleep, mid-gasp, Walt seemed more often sleepily puzzled than anything. Why am I awake? Why can't I breath? We called the 24-hour help nurse, who listened to his cough and diagnosed it over the phone. We double-checked the book to confirm the tell-tale sign: stridor (seal bark). A strange, attack-copter-sounding word. Yet another minor virus, like roseola, that no one thinks to mention at the baby shower.

The last time my bedroom temperature reached the evening low was while I lived in Bangladesh, around the same time of year. Winter arrived that night all at once, following a terrific thunderstorm. I woke in the middle of the night to put on every layer of clothing in my bag, including a rain slicker and hoodie. It was cold that night, for Bangladesh at least. No humidity. I turned off the ceiling fan, closed the windows, curled into a ball, and waited for morning. As soon as the shops were open, I walked into town and paid a merchant to hand-sew a large, red quilted blanket, the Bangladeshi "lep." The blanket was sewn together from old lungis, saris, and sheet cloths. The stuffing was soft and I slept under that blanket every night for the next three months, until the early spring arrived.

I left my lep in Bangladesh, but Cait's is stowed away in the back of our chested drawers. What a quilt. Laid on top of an insulated blanket and down comforter, it's rather too warm for Northern California. The evening low last weekend evening was 43 degrees, but I had no point of reference to check it in our room. Walt slept like a champ, once he finally went down for the night. The next morning, we had that unfamiliar panic after waking naturally. Where is the baby?! He's next to us, wedged against the pillow wedged against the chair stacked with books to stand it in place.

We went out briefly for Halloween, then called it an early night. Walt was dressed as a goldfish--one of his favorite words. He didn't like to wear the top portion of the costume, so mostly he toddled around in his orange tights, the goldfish head severed and hanging to the left off his back. Macabre, at least for this household. I have spent more time outdoors in Northern California than I have any placed I've lived except Bangladesh, and I like it the most here, where we can see the golden hills (now green) off the back porch. Everything thrives in California, even during a cold snap. We moved Walt back to his crib and he slept well there, too, though not as late into the morning. Back to the grind of trading off first calls. The croup has developed into the common cold, which is apparently a pretty common turn in the cycle, a near-chronic condition and one we handle expertly--wait it out--now that Walt is going to daycare a few days a week.

Solo Dad

2011-10-01T22:33:00.007-04:00

Walt and I are alone in the house this weekend, which marks a parenting first for me: solo dad. All of the fathers I have consulted on the matter say that this is a special weekend, full of reciprocations. I get Walt all to myself. Cait gets a pampered weekend with a good friend, reading books, drinking wine, sleeping in until 8:35, 8:40am. The bed is big and wide and lonely, but I do love the extra space. I sleep the light sleep of a man worrying constantly that he is not hearing his baby cry. I preempt squawks with that coveted, rare thing: the 11pm bottle. I try to coerce Walt with that gesture of true indulgence: the 5am bottle. Here, have more milk. Let's both sleep a little longer.

I have spent all day with my boy, in the yard and kitchen, at the park, walking around campus, reading books, filling and emptying and filling buckets. I remembered the diaper cream and pretzel sticks. I forgot the sun block. I stood back a ways and did not hover too closely as Walt climbed the slide and yes, I listened to my podcasts as he turned the white wheel on the play structure all to one side, then the other, over and over, until it was time for more milk, a walk home, a second nap.

I will try to get to bed early again tonight. I will read my book, turn off the light, and stand over the crib a while, listening for his steady, slightly-nasal breathing. This morning, he kept putting small sample bottles of shampoo and lotion into the corner of his mouth. I thought, He must be teething, I'll give him some Motrin. Walt squeals and screams now, often at the drop of a hat and for no reason. I can't use entirely-fun terms anymore to describe it. What was once cooing and chirping has transformed fully into all-out, guttural moments of unchecked noise. I am so proud of my loud boy. I prefer still the ebullient chuckle, as when he stuck his fingers through the bars this afternoon while, on the other side, I stuck out my tongue.

I loved it, and a little while later, I was exhausted, and I am so happy to not do this every weekend. My hat's off to the single parents of the world, and to those parents who do not live with an extended family willing to step in at a moment's notice and offer a break to shower, pick up toys, feed the cat. Brush my teeth. How did I forget to do it this morning? Some routines are so simple as to accommodate, eventually, any interruption. It is a beautiful and mindless habit to worry constantly about one thing.

Center

2011-09-20T17:53:00.045-04:00

Last night, I started reading Elyn R. Saks's "The Center Cannot Hold." Saks's opening chapters do a deft job of defining the essential problems of living with various kinds/causes of instability: how does one expect to find a center, and then, what will give the center integrity such that one can trust it to hold? Her answer, it seems, is to begin and sustain a thoughtful dialogue about meaning and stability, so as to measure the gaps against the continuing pieces. This runs counter to one contemporary response to loss, which is to give it definitive beginnings and ends, to say that, much like an infection is cured by antibiotics, or a trash can is emptied and taken across town to the county dump, so too can we tinker with and compartmentalize the events and interruptions in a life. Later, Saks notes, "While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that helped me find a life worth living." Saks’s memoir looks to be, I think, the last entry in a summer's worth of solid memoir/essay reading (looking to my Kindle: In Pharaoh's Army, The Duke of Deception,History of a Suicide, A Journey with Two Maps, Speak, Memory, Just Kids, Memoranda During the War, Notes from No Man's Land, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, Reality Hunger).

Saks's "center" is a terrific concept. It suggests flatness, a total absence of hierarchy, and valuing by proximity, infinitely. But it also suggests limitation. Saks believes in the value of continuity, but also in defining limits, taking breaks, making choices, understanding opportunity costs. I don’t know that these are easy criteria to understand when writing about personal experience. It seems that the impulse to say everything often supersedes the selected moment, while representation in the particular event or action requires some sense of narrative, order, hierarchy. There is a nice moment at the beginning of season 2 of Breaking Bad, when a strung-out drug dealer shows up at an old friend’s house, and prattles on about how great it will be to get their band back together, while the friend feeds his toddler Cheerios, smiling, humoring him, catching every third word. As my friend Kelly once suggested, in a different context, it’s terrible to become a parody of oneself. Perhaps, also, to revisit the same old self, in the same ways, for the same reasons, again and again.

Paul Begala's recent Newsweek column makes a terrific defense of the U.S. federal government. He calls it "the greatest force for good in human history. Period." This might be a bit of an overreach--David Plotz has argued that China, in bringing basic amenities to hundreds of millions of its citizens, far outpaces other nations in the 20th century--but it is good to see someone thoughtfully, and outside of the usual Democratic talking points, taking up the cause of big government. Regulation instead of enterprise, obligation instead of need. It feels much-needed, but then I also understand that there is rarely much new under the American political sun. Perhaps Obama's reelection prospects come down to whether there is really any new way to triangulate entrenched interests. Clinton figured it out, but somehow nostalgia for the 90s seems to come forward in this conversation, rather than entitlement or tax reform. How strange to witness such nostalgia, especially considering that, as we lived through it, the dominant feeling seemed to be that we were tunneling head-first through a vacuous wasteland of recycled ideas about music, fashion, writing, and culture.

I gave a reading last week in San Francisco, as part of Jen Pitts’s terrific It’s Gotta Be True series, at Viracocha. The night before the reading, I practiced for Cait a lengthy quasi-academic introduction. It seemed important to give some kind of context for the poems, to prepare the audience a little before starting off. Cait said she liked the remarks, but they were dry; why not open instead with a story? When I was an undergraduate, I keep these two quotes pegged on note cards over my writing desk (Norman Mailer: the mark of the mediocre mind is to seek precedent;Warren Beatty: if you have a secret to keep, keep it). Then, I believed these quotes explained everything I would need to know in order to begin a writing life. Now, it seems funny, a little embarrassing, that I found such comfort in these semi-maxims, which would seem to exclude structurally much of what I try to do in my writing. How had I gotten it so wrong? Had these pithy phrases stuck with me for a reason? These seemed like important questions for understanding the creative process that enabled me to write the poems I eventually read that night.

I have alternated awe and ambivalence at the clips of Jim Corneilson singing the national anthem at Soldier Field, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks circulating via email and Facebook. Awe, because his is a magnificent and big-hearted performance, a patriotic march without the usual shock and timbre of a big brass band, that nonetheless riles a nervous crowd to dizzying heights of feeling. It's hard not to cheer along, to swell with feeling. Ambivalence, because there is something compensatory in that feeling, a desire for closure and triumph where it has yet to take, that feels, at the end, more than a little frantic and preemptive. What are we rooting for? Who are we rooting against? Where is the uncertainty, the intervening time that accommodates reflection, analysis, measured action in response? There is the initial deference, then the longer-term uncertainty that sets in and usually does not resolve with group singing. Perhaps a football game is not the right place to undertake nuanced contemplation, but then when and where is? It seems a state of permanent victimhood to insist repeatedly that one is unaffected and also stronger after a traumatic loss. It is a kind of willed imperviousness that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Perhaps this is one expression of elegy, to name those symbols that contain grief and make it portable, even durable, as the world around it changes; think of the painted nails on Meghan O'Rourke's Aunts, Jack Gilbert's potted avocado,Longfellow's Cross of Snow. Paul Simon's performance of "The Boxer" on Saturday Night Live, shortly after September 11th, gets at the uncertainty and contemplation that follows grief and trauma in a much more meaningful way for me. Will we survive, seems the right question, followed closely by, And to what will we return? I love the ovation that Simon gets at the end. It is pure catharsis, unexpected, as though the audience had forgotten for a moment that it wants to applaud, that the song might end unexpectedly, without cue or triumph. What a testament to and expression of the shock and awe of having been attacked, and of feeling defenseless--the first gesture of naming and sustaining the true center that will hold after the one we imagined fell apart.

Quitting For Katie (Kyle's Project)

2011-09-17T01:19:00.004-04:00

Katie's stepbrother (and KMF Director) Kyle Naff has undertaken a pretty impressive and unusual project, to improve his personal health and also raise money for KMF. It's called Quitting For Katie.

In short, Kyle will be using a blog to gather sponsors and take donations in his quest to quit smoking. All of the money he raises will go directly to support KMF's programs. At Quitting For Katie you can follow his progress and cheer him on. It's easy to support Kyle in his quest. Here's the link:

http://quittingforkatie.wordpress.com/

Please spread the word far and wide. In these tough economic times, fundraising is challenging for nonprofits. Even with our awesome donor base, KMF is no exception.

Thanks to Kyle for all of his great work. And of course, Kyle, GOOD LUCK with Quitting For Katie!

Sincerely,

John

Wrasslin'

2011-09-11T00:16:00.020-04:00

Netflix has recently put a back catalog of professional wrestling videos into its instant stream. These are low-budget compilation videos that either highlight certain career arcs or rank wrestlers from different eras according to an arbitrary, if fairly predictable, matrix of profitability and profile. On the whole, the matches have aged very poorly; a tradeoff of spectacle for skill masks over the glaring deficiencies of the most popular wrestlers, while the best technical wrestlers aren't popular enough to warrant a big-market compilation video. I might argue here that the most skillful matches of all-time are lost in the ether of memory and anecdote, somewhere between Memphis and Tuscaloosa, to the heyday of traveling circus shows and local circuits, rather than carefully scripted television events, but this would be confusing with its popularity the basic argument of wrestling. A wrestling match is spectacle. It teases and cajoles. It holds our attention until we pause a moment to catch our breath, and when we look back, against our better judgment, we wonder: how was this outcome ever in doubt?

Wrestling and politics work within similar, stable grammars of prediction and preordination. In pure wrestling terms, Barack Obama is a face, Mitt Romney is a face, and Rick Perry is a heel who has arrived on the scene quickly and forcefully to clear the ring and put Romney over with a skeptical base. If Romney beats Perry by seeming more reasonable and electable, then Perry will have done his job, in much the same way that Perry's arrival already diminishes Michelle Bachman's meteoric rise and fall. If you liked Bachman, the reasoning goes, because you wanted a charismatic fringe candidate who spoke truth to power, truth be damned, then you could do better to pick the big-state governor over the blue-state Congressperson. Perry is ultimately unstable, prone to gaffes, hyperbole, and blunder; this is his role as a heel, to show us how calm, cool, vetted, and venerable Romney seems in comparison. Perry comes forward to remind us not to elect candidates like him, to choose them as heroes, to love them as spoilers, but, in the end, root for the guy who really has the chance to win.

Roland Barthes loved wrestling. In his terrific 1957 essay, The World of Wrestling, Barthes locates wrestling in a long tradition of Western spectacles:

"...wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama, and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve...The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."

I think that I was hoping to find such a cathartic moment in flipping through the Netflix catalog of wrestling moments past, but instead, I found myself fast-forwarding, over and over, to the very ends of matches, and feeling more than a little hollow as, time and again, the hero emerged, bloodied, wobbly, and victorious. Why did I want my boyhood heroes to suffer so mightily? I don't admire it now. Their Olympian physiques seem cartoonish, yes, but also strange and vulnerable for the bulges of fat, and the absence, and the plain, blunt literalness of so much muscle on slender, small frames. Always some knee is being crushed, worked over, worn down. You can see on the foreheads of old wrestlers thin scars from where they cut themselves with razor blades. Then, you only saw the blood. Now, the gesture of suffering is symbolic, persuasive even, but the blood is still real. The audience roars. It is keen to judge the worthiness of a sacrifice. The sacrifice is rehearsed and I fear that the witness is cued, and so, performed, too. What I feel now starts as expectation and ends as nostalgia, but also disappointment that I dismiss the range of this thing I once so admired as to study and love it, passionately and exclusively as what I love now.

A friend asked recently if I was writing about Walt and the first year of his life in my poems; do new poems reflect as intense an engagement with present-day subject matter as older ones do with the past? The answer, not surprisingly, is that I don't take as much time to write the catalog of Walt's first year. We do scrapbook. We take photos and share them with friends and family members. We write email updates and every once in a while I work into this blog a paragraph about something Walt and I have done together. I think there is a predictability in what I might enjoy during my time with Walt that may seem very familiar to how our culture thinks about new parents, and to what just-parents remember about their own experience. I don't mean to deny the common ground. But I wonder if it's as interesting and useful to articulate it. The best poems, for me, are those that have a voice in which I believe, to which I want to listen, and also a subject matter that I find interesting. I really have no reason not to write poems about Walt, except that at the moment, I'm writing about and trying to make sense of other things. With that in mind, I'll close with two striking poems by Michael Longley:

The Ice-Cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

The Design

Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design
Made up of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?

Waiting

2011-08-31T14:38:00.012-04:00

The last month or so, I have been practicing the blunt art of hopeful, writerly waiting. It is an interminable end, full of false hopes and starts, only made worse by a desire to control things, to seize the reigns and drive the waiting to an ultimate, unhelpful conclusion. Success or failure. Acceptance or rejection. An unfamiliar area code on the cell phone sets the heart racing, until it turns out to be an automated calling system, or worse, an old friend. Waiting diminishes even the best surprises.

Walt is digging the books these days, and one of his favorites is John Lawrence's This Little Chick. We read it when he wakes up from his long morning nap, and sometimes again before he goes to bed at night, and even again still in the middle of the day (it's a very short book). This Little Chick is the story of a woodblock chick who visits the different animals and fits right in by making their sounds. To the pigs, he oinks, to the ducks he quacks, etc., until he finds his way again to the mother hen. Back home, the other chicks cover their ears to block out his incessant chirping, while, oblivious, he goes on and on. Nothing, it seems, could make him happier.

In Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton Oswalt argues that all adolescent fantasies are based on one of three absurd scenarios. 1. The world is overrun with zombies and a group of kids must band together to defeat them and restore the supremacy of the human race. 2. The planet is ruined and a group of kids must leave Earth on a spaceship to find a new home planet. 3. Human society has been decimated by disease or technology and a group of kids must establish a new order. All three scenarios require (and so explain) the absence of adults, and necessitate an acceleration in the natural succession of things. Boys become men, girls become women, and everyone can practice the anxieties of adulthood in the peak physical conditions of youth. The antithesis of this by-necessity precociousness, Oswalt explains, is the 1970s television show, Fantasy Island, in which a mysterious billionaire grants the wishes of his guests, who despair when they get what they thought they wanted. Here's your fantasy, but it's actually a nightmare, so how do you feel about wanting it? Now leave the island.

"Duck" was Walt's second word. He is a huge fan of ducks, and birds that resemble ducks, and also goldfish. We sit most mornings in front of the May page from his animals calendar, while he points at a giant orange-and-yellow goldfish pasted on a blank white slate. The fish, it seems, is hardly even a fish. It swims through nothing. I love this time with Walt; that he is pointing and beginning to say words; for my chance to sit him on my lap, smell his head, sneak in a few hugs, and quietly do nothing. He is entering a highly mobile stage marked by very poor choices--leaps down staircase, tumbles into swimming pools, fingers in sockets and around ceramic bird statues too heavy to hold--and I enjoy these moments of stillness. Perhaps they are not choices at all, but instead reactions, the trial-and-error that will one day help him make choices. A year ago, he was newborn, mostly still and quiet. I couldn't wait for him to be a big kid. I prefer this time, now, but the slow days have made for a very quick year.

I am writing a memoir, or a collection of essays that will serve as a memoir, and I sometimes fear that they will sit on an imaginary shelf next to the collection of poems that is also unpublished. I know that there is a steadiness required to endure the reality of writing and publishing, and for the most part I feel like I do a good job of plugging away daily and doing the work. I am terrible at sitting still. Often, there is a sense of waiting, for an acknowledgment, then the right kind of acknowledgment, then the next big thing, and then some corresponding understanding, after the fact, that what comes next is just as muddled by error, judgment, and pretense. I feel either clever or sober enough to say that this will probably never end, that it is one irrefutable aspect of a life organized around genres, arguments, subjects, forms of art. But one part of putting your work out there is asking it to be accepted or rejected by a larger audience, and even the most positive trends can feel immensely discouraging.

I tell myself that passionate self-promotion is a symptom of mediocre writing, a desire by a writer who knows the work is lacking to patch over the weak parts with bravado and bluster. But there is an undercurrent to this line of thinking, a certain defensiveness about waiting, and a corresponding eagerness to make the ends justify the means. Waiting should be distinct from a sense of entitlement; that something might happen, as opposed to it should or must, just as the writing should be due rather than the writer. I suppose it doesn't always happen this way, but I hold out hope that it usually does.

Cait and I have taken up running the last few weeks. It is hard on my poor arthritic toes, but I do okay if I only head out a couple of times a week. We make loops across the campus, usually pushing Walt in his stroller as he munches pretzels and watches everything pass. Sometimes, he falls asleep. We do not run very hard, or for very long; when I look at our times and distances now, relative to when I trained for and ran the marathon, it seems like kid's stuff. But we feel good after the run. It's nice to spend the time together, to chat a bit and work up a sweat. We are getting to know our way around town, and we are feeling and looking leaner, faster, fit. Or at least we imagine we are.

I ran cross-country for my high school team. I was a terrible runner, but I was excited to be a part of the team, and two years in a row, I won the team spirit award. That second year, we went to a meet where there was no scheduled junior varsity event. The coaches got together and decided to run it themselves, after the varsity race was timed and scored. We second-tier runners lined up on the field and my coach huddled us together for a brief chat. "Coach," I said, "I'm going to win this race. I can just feel it." "John," he said, "I'll bet you a Snapple and a slice that you won't be in first place by the time you get to that tree." We looked eight hundred yards out to a big oak, in full autumn bloom. "You're on," I said. The gun went off and I sprinted out as hard as I could, opening a huge lead. I could see my varsity teammates and my parents, a little startled, cheering me on. By george, he's hit his stride!, they were thinking. Keep going, John!" they all yelled. My lungs burned. I pushed as hard as I could. When I got to the tree I reached out my hand and slapped it, keeled over, and collapsed on the ground. The entire field caught, then passed me. I finished the race second-to-last, before an exchange student who had gotten lost in the course was retrieved in a golf cart. I thought Coach would be impressed, but clearly I had done something wrong. He said nothing the whole drive to the pizza place, where I got my free pizza and Snapple.

I am trying very hard to believe that there is no good hustle in the writing world, that eventually the work comes forward and is either strong or weak, fashionable or distinct, memorable or forgotten. And then I am also spending an awful lot of time checking email; my phone for missed calls; the mailbox for self-addressed stamped envelopes. A writer I admire once said that the early anxieties are the easiest. Waiting to get published is much easier than having your work published and realizing no one is reading it, or that no one is reading it anymore, or that it isn't getting anthologized and is largely forgotten. In this sense, it is hard not to believe that the goal posts are mobile and always moving, that much of a writing life comes down to timing and persuasion: the right reader looking at the work at the right time, and believing in it. Which, I suppose, could rightly inspire either optimism or pessimism about the process, or maybe just unrelenting confusion about taking any meaning from it.

Intermediate High

2011-07-22T15:56:00.029-04:00

Ten years ago, my proficiency in Bangla was rated "intermediate high." In its second year in Bangladesh, the Peace Corps wanted to establish a baseline level of its volunteers' capability with the language. The idea was to judge our performance against that of future volunteers, who would, in theory, improve on our progress. We were evaluated in the Peace Corps office, in Dhaka, in an air-conditioned room, by the chief cultural officer. During the interview, we were encouraged to not stop talking; better to fill the gaps with nonsense words, to even repeat ourselves, than to be silent. I remember thinking that it was not unlike preparing for a beauty pageant. Memorize a few sequences of phrases and work them into the conversation, however relevant.

When I first taught middle school in Chicago, I would doodle during meetings, on the bus, etc., by phonetically spelling out English words in Bangla. Even then, I knew that I was forgetting the finer points of the language, but I wanted a hedge against losing it entirely, and also, a reason to practice it. Bangla is an alphabet with 56 characters, many of which sometimes seem to repeat the same sounds in different pronunciations. For example, the eight g/k sounds--go (nasal), gho (nasal), go (plosive), gho (plosive), ko (nasal), kho (nasal), ko (plosive), kho (plosive)--might begin any number of common words and proper names. As the only Americans living and working in our villages and towns, we learned a mix of English and Bangla to get by in the day-to-day. Most of us took more formal language instruction on the side (the Peace Corps reimbursed it), which made daily life easier.

Toward the end of my Peace Corps service, I had this idea that I would translate of the shorter works of the modernist Bengali poet, Jibananda Das. My language teacher often brought them to our lessons. I would copy his poems into a page of my journal, then try to get an English version onto the opposite page. Then, I memorized the sounds. "Abar ashibo fire dhanshiritir teere," begins his most famous poem. "I will return again to you, my country," is one translation. The poem moves cinematically through a riverside landscape, although I understood from my Bangladeshi colleagues that the poem was really about death and exile, as much as place. I didn't quite understand the implications of the poem, and I was reluctant to impose my own meanings in their place. What matters now, I think, is that I kept wanting to read and write poetry while in Bangladesh.

In Chicago, I imagined Bangla separate of its grammar and meaning. For example, "Chicago Cubs." Did it matter whether I used the aspirated or plosive "ch" sound? Wrote the vowel on its own (impractical) or hashed it under the "ch" (typical)? The words meant nothing in Bangla, or, Bangla was becoming my personal secret code. At the end of the first year, after the exams, I was looking to pass some extra instructional time with the seventh graders. I printed out a .pdf file of the Bangla alphabet, then encouraged my students to practice spelling out English words. When they lost interest, I offered to write their names on the board in phonetical Bengali. They copied into their notebooks looping imitations of my own approximation of a language. What did our final products mean? It was a lesson of cross-cultural exploration and exposure, I explained to my colleagues. The outcome was incidental to the purpose.

Once, in a fit of guilt, I ordered a teach-yourself-Bangla language CD series. I had an idea that I would undertake graduate study in South Asian languages, and then use this knowledge to keep writing and teaching poetry. But after a few weeks, I lost interest in the repetitive instruction that seemed to intermix words I already knew with rules that didn't seem right to my memory of the language. I told myself that I still knew Bangla. I could write on job applications that I spoke and read Bangla at an intermediate high level. I had the government evaluation to prove it. And, if I really wanted to write poetry, why not go to a creative writing graduate program?

Almost exactly a month ago, on June 22, I said goodbye to my brother and his family, who were visiting from Chicago for a week. We spent our time together in a rented house in Santa Cruz. A couple of days later, Cait's sister arrived with her family from Ethiopia. One week into their month-long visit, we all left for the family cabin near Lake Tahoe, where 17 family members bunked into a 700-odd foot family cabin in the middle of the woods. I came back early from that trip, so that I could teach my EPGY classes, which met despite the holiday, on July 4th. A few days later, Cait came home with Walt. Three days after that, Beth, Emma, Chloe, and Chase arrived from Indianapolis for a week-long visit. We went again to Santa Cruz, bookended by two nights at our place. The day after they left for Indianapolis, we returned a final time to Santa Cruz, for our ten-year Peace Corps reunion. As I write this post, ten adults and five kids hunker down in a rented house near the beach. We all leave Sunday for our various family homesteads across the country; lucky for us, it's a pretty quick trip over the hills and back to Palo Alto, where we'll have a few weeks of down time before we fly to Colorado for a week-long Evans family get-together.

It has been a busy summer. I've taught three classes, and done some other minor teaching work. It is all coming to a close, for which I'm very, very grateful. The curveball has been factoring into all of the plans a ten-month-old; much as we might like to believe we can handle it all, as wonderful as Walt is, he's still a kid, we're still new parents; all of us thrive on continuity and schedule, our routines are pretty easily disrupted, and its hard to get things back into order once we start playing catch-up. We are eager to see everyone, we are lucky and grateful to gather everyone in our direction. On some level, it is all a kind of elaborate distraction from the situation we like to imagine is the center of our lives. Parenting. Being married. Work. Writing. Family. Friends. How does it all fit together? How do we establish priorities and sequence? I suppose that, with time, things will take a more predictable shape, and there will be more breathing room.

There is a moment in The Year of Magical Thinking where Joan Didion says that in order to live our lives, "we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead." I wonder if she continues to believe that, if it doesn't seem a bit dogmatic and impractical a few years later, as though she is building an elaborate bulwark, a crude warning system against something that is essentially diffuse and dormant. How do we keep any continuity in our lives without sacrificing some understanding of agency? Where do the dead have to go off to, so quickly and resolutely, anyway? How do we distinguish the memory from the circumstances of the life?

A large group of Peace Corps volunteers turned out for Katie's funeral. They arrived, on a few days' notice, from everywhere. I loved that they were there. I didn't expect it, the situation or the scope, in spite of what must have been improbable circumstances. I was, and am, grateful for their coming. At the wake, then the funeral and dinner, the Peace Corps contingent was an especially vibrant and cohesive cadre. They moved in a group. They knew each other. They remembered Katie as someone particular, in a particular place, and none of them competed to claim the loss. This period of time is never far from my mind, but is especially so recently, here. I have written an essay, "Elegy and Narrative," that deals somewhat directly with those few days. That essay is in the current issue of The Missouri Review (and is previewed here). That night, Eric bought a giant bottle of Katie's favorite scotch, Johnnie Walker Red. There was a terrific thunderstorm that night, and we sang a bunch of songs, together, until the bar closed. Ed, Katie's brother, drove me back to Katie's mom's house. I remember he said to me, "Man, those people really liked Katie," and I remember telling him, "Oh, Ed, she couldn't stand those people. They are here mostly for me."

Katie, and her death, are everywhere this summer. Many of the ways that we made a life together have come front and center. There is no assertion of value in saying that. And, it seems ridiculous to deny it. The associations of a life get blurred, after death, by distinction and repetition. If Katie's death is not at the center of our lives, as it used to be, it does not diminish her presence. It is strange to feel gratitude for certain kinds of continuity. The last time I saw this same sequence of people--Peace Corps, Jeff and Sheila and the boys, Beth and the kids--was at Cait and I's wedding; before that, Katie's funeral; before that, Katie and I's wedding. Two years later, and ten years removed from our Peace Corps service, the people gathered this weekend in Santa Cruz are grateful to still see and know each other. We witness firsthand everyone settling into new lives. There are tradeoffs. We try to stay up late; it is too much. We go to bed early; we miss the old festivities. The space we share is transitional. We manage it, but we no longer feel at the beginning of things. Our ambitions, expectations, and limitations, and our experiences, have clearer shapes and limitations.

Did I Tell You?

2011-06-14T15:28:00.023-04:00

Most mornings, Cait is up with Walt, but a few times these last few weeks, I have taken him for early-morning walks through the neighborhood. We hit the pavement a little after dawn. We see squirrels, birds, the guy throwing newspapers out the passenger window of his Civic. Sometimes, the woman who walks four dogs. Everyone seems to water their lawns around that time, so it smells like rain, the air is clean and crisp. I carry Walt in my arms (he hates the stroller), and every couple of minutes, I switch him in a different direction. We name flowers, stop to look inside cars. Just down the street, there is a conversion van with expired plates and a policeman's benevolence sticker parked in the bushes, a box of Cheerios in the front seat. We make it around the block in fifteen minutes. Then it's back inside for breakfast, toddling, and eventually, the morning nap.

This book I have been reading about sleep and rest says the first step to getting on a reliable sleep schedule is to wake up every morning at the same time, and then exercise in bright natural light. The radiation resets your internal clock and wakes up your brain, while the oxygen jump-starts the organs. In later chapters the book is thoughtful about meditation, stretching, the nature of rest. Left to my druthers, I think that I would go to sleep around 2am and wake up a little after 10am, but this morning routine has me rethinking things. I certainly feel more rested early in the morning, although it cuts into my late-night writing and work time. I tend to believe that self-help books, by nature, are a bit of hokum, a tad under-conceptualized, but I like this one and the other one I read four years ago for their practical and condensed thoughts on daily living. I appreciate the help, even if I can think of a couple of other books (and here) that work better for the longer-term, metaphysical challenges that inspire these day-to-day symptoms.

This morning, Walt sounded the alarm around 4:15am, so we left him in his crib. We listened to him cry for about 20 minutes before he konked out again. We have moved his crib to the corner of the room, and put up a curtain, so that when he wakes and stands in the crib, he can't see us. These early morning cry-it-out sessions, when they happen, are absolute torture. He works up a good head of steam. The pitch and tone of his screaming sound like cries for help, which I suppose they are. What does he know about sleep, except that he wants to get up and start the day? Anything before 5am is too early for us, and bad for him. It makes him cranky in the morning and he doesn't nap well. Everything for a baby, and I suppose his parents, comes down to predictability, schedules, and making educated guesses. We trust that Walt will fall back asleep, and feel better for it.

This morning, as he cried, I thought, He must be very cold. We have turned off the space heater for the season, and I was deep in the covers. Walt sleeps in a fleece sleep suit and a cozy sleep sack, under one or two blankets that he tends to kick off during the night. Typing that now, I think it's actually quite a lot of insulation, but this morning, I decided, As soon as he stops crying, I'll make sure there's a blanket on him. I dozed in and out of sleep. I dreamt that I was starring with Jodie Foster in an update on Barfly, and my crucial scene was to tie my shoes in such a way as to convey deep meaning and loss. Walt stopped crying. I popped out of bed. He was on top of his blankets, so I pulled one out slowly, and just as I got it free and laid it on top of him, he woke up and started crying again. I don't think he saw me; I dropped to the ground and crawled back to bed, through the curtain, and waited him out again (no dreams). When I went back to the crib, he was again on top of the blankets, so I left him alone. He woke at 6:45am.

I got out of bed, made some coffee, stood outside for a few minutes taking deep breaths (radiation: check, oxygen: check), then took everything out of the bathroom and scrubbed it ceiling to floor. Blankets, towels, washcloths, area rug, all hung out on the line to dry. Litter box, cleaned and changed. Commode, sink, shower, and floor, swept, bleached, and rinsed. I wiped down the glass and mirrors. There was a terrific amount of dust and a few wasps in the light fixture, so I took that apart and cleaned it, too. The bathroom looked good. I caught up on some of my podcasts, zoned out to music, and whammo--clean bathroom.

Four years ago, June was the month that Katie and I were waiting out the last of her work before we came home from Romania. Three years ago, I thought, Just get through the death anniversary and deal with whatever happens next after that. Two years ago, it was, Well, it certainly won't be as hard as it was the first year. Last year: So, this is what it's going to be like. And now, this year. It starts again. I don't know whether I am describing grief or trauma; probably, some mix therein. The fact of Katie's death and her absence from the world and my life, and the sheer terror of witnessing her death, bubble up in very strange ways, periodically, and then go away. "Bubble" is the right word for how it takes shape, gets bigger, bigger, bigger, pops, and starts again. This is the time of year that I start compulsively apologizing for no reason. I worry about the minutiae of life around me. I work hard to hedge against certain feelings. Everything is some kind of study in inadequacy. I know that June is largely a matter of enduring, rather than reacting, of getting through rather than trying to counteract. I feel fragile this time of year. Nothing surprising there. There is nothing to say, or do, or tell anybody, which will change anything. Here I am again, writing feverishly through the middle of the month.

The challenge, I think, is finding some new aspect within the familiar, which I suppose is a very American, self-help-driven kind of consciousness (when life gives you lemons...). It's also at least somewhat literary. What is the combination of interpretation, exegesis, catharsis, that will make this time of year both meaningful and endurable? Does one exclude the other? It doesn't make sense to ask all of the same questions each year. There are new questions. And there is so much recurrence. It's not unlike rereading a favorite story or poem: you know the broad gestures, the outcome, so if you read it to find out what happens next, you'll be underwhelmed or disappointed. But do you like the story still? The writing? Do the technical gestures and strategies impress you in the same way? Is there a meaning or feeling that comes through for the first time?

A few months ago, the New Yorker ran this profile of Dave Eagleman. Apparently, the brain processes time cumulatively; it often either does not or cannot make a distinction between past and present. Dreams, especially, are occasions for sequential jumbles, but also illness, terror, and trauma. And, the experience of time itself speeds up and slows down depending on how the brain processes it. In one of the first studies of how the brain processes time, from the early 1800s, a A physiologist had his semi-delirious wife (flu, fever) count off sixty seconds while he was out of the room. He then compared her estimate with a stopwatch. The higher her temperature rose, the shorter her time estimate. "Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got."

I find solace in distraction, the ridiculous. Watching a recent episode of Between Two Ferns With Zack Galifianakis, I found this silly video short, "Cool Baby, Lame Baby with Vanessa Hudgens." It's kind of brilliant, for its 58 seconds. Hudgens is a former Disney child actor, who evaluates the relative hipness of babies based on their photos. The joke is, I think, five-fold: 1. that babies either are or could become pop objects 2. the inanity of asking celebrities to judge anything; 3. that there is value in the lame-cool baby binary; 4. that said binary is authoritative and exclusive; 5. that we photograph our babies in such strange, judgment-friendly poses. A friend sent around the Screen Junkies' Inappropriate Laugh Track video series, which tweaks, in a somewhat juvenile manner, the mindless authority of laugh tracks by pairing canned laughter with purposefully unfunny material. The result is asinine, but still subversive, willing at least some kind of new reaction to well-worn, familiar movie moments that, on their own, insist so much solemnity, as to leave room for little else.

In June 2008, I downloaded Yo La Tengo's greatest hits collection. I didn't know the band at all, except by reputation. I wanted new music for my last few walks around the Indiana suburbs. Here is my formula for enjoying rock music. I have to be able to hear the lyrics. I have to like the lyrics and want to memorize them. The music shouldn't get in the way of the lyrics, and also shouldn't grate on my nerves, at least for more than a few choruses. It is a fairly narrow formula but it works for me, and the few exceptions only prove the rule. I have been reading through an anthology I will use to teach creative writing to middle schoolers this summer. I know much of the work it contains, but the anthology itself is new to me. In its essay on "the art of poetry," it cites Marilyn Chin's definition of a poet's mission, "...to inspire and to illuminate; and to leave behind to our glorious descendants an intricate and varied map of humanity." It pitches a bit to the middle, but the latter part feels right to me. It's a solid starting point for talking about what writing can do, and often does. The Yo La Tengo song I absolutely love is "Did I Tell You?" For greatest hits collection, "Did I Tell You?" is redone in a quiet, thoughtful manner. I found the original track recently; it is much louder and more confrontational. The lyrics in both versions are clear and beautiful, resigned and optimistic.

The Unstoppable Juggleknob

2011-05-13T13:36:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, my dad sent me a mailing from the Republican National Committee. He included a brief note explaining how he almost tore it up before he realized the “John Evans” addressed was probably me, and surely I did not want to miss any upcoming RNC member events. Of course, the mailing was for my dad, who once confided that he would consider voting for Obama for president, but only if Frank Sinatra called him personally and asked for his support. My dad, born John M. Evans, goes by Mike. His father, John G. Evans, went by Johnny, because his father went by John. Four generations down the pike, the name has come full circle to me, the third child, the baby of the family, though not the John Evans who would receive an RNC mailing (my friend Bill might say that every “John Evan”s will eventually receive the RNC mailing, but I hold out hope). I distinguish my name with my middle initial, John W. Evans, the W. inherited from my maternal grandfather, William Botz. My dad receives most of his mail to his legal name, although for a while, when I lived in my parents’ home, it came to J. Michael Evans.

Cait and I didn’t think too hard about giving Walt my name. I like the name, John. I’m happy to share it with four generations of Evans men. I may be inclined to choose it for a different child, if that happens, down the road. We did give Walt two middle names, Michael and Robert, for his grandfathers. Walter Evans, my paternal grandfather’s younger brother, inspires a good amount of family lore, although I never met him. We also liked the nod to Walt Whitman. According to the Social Security administration website, “Walt” has placed no higher than the 943^rd most popular baby name for either gender in any of the last 100 years. Probably, this means the resurgence has either already begun or is just around the corner. So far, we’ve met a Whit (son of another poet) and a Walter in parents’ group, but no other monosyllabic Walt’s.

KMF (The Katie Memorial Foundation) had a conference call last night to decide whether to attend this year’s APHA conference in Washington, DC, and present in the Exhibit Hall. In a larger sense, we have been trying to figure out what the “next step” will be for the organization. In the last four years, we’ve done steady fundraising, clarified and focused our mission and vision, and grown all of our programs. Our board and volunteer base are growing and active, and by the end of 2011, we will have awarded three times as many scholarships and grants this year as compared with any previous year. What started as an annual interest to come together, remember Katie, and recognize a single FIU graduate student in her honor, has now become a full-blown national effort to identify, support, and recognize “future Katies.” There are so many ways to improve and sustain what we do, to extend and improve our outreach efforts, to involve still more people—Cait, Cait’s sister Gen, and Katie’s stepbrother all came on board this year, and are active in KMF—and yet, at the end of the day, we all pursue KMF as one avocation outside of our daily lives and routines, impressed and maybe a bit shocked that we’ve become what we are.

Two nights ago, I came home from my office a little after midnight. Cait and Walt are gone to Los Angeles for three days, to visit family. With no family obligation to rush home to after a reading, I went back to my office and got to work on a large stack of outstanding tasks: grading papers, lesson planning, sending our student emails, setting my syllabus and course texts to teach at EPGY this summer, putting together a new batch of submissions, applying for a grant that supports working artists who are parents. Next thing I knew, it was 11pm; how had that happened? A colleague, also just leaving, stopped by my office and we chatted a bit. I am used to working late at night, usually after Walt has gone to bed, then Cait, but it was refreshing to have a big block of silent, uninterrupted time, in a big, bright room, with nowhere in particular to go.

Walking across campus, toward home, I came upon what could only be described as well-lit adventures; late-night joggers, a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee toss, skateboarders videotaping each other on the stone planters in front of the chapel. The whole campus is lit-up in concentric circles that just overlap. I thought of that essay by Tanizaki, where he talks about the Western preference for bright light, and all of its suggestions of progress; of course, James Franco is adapting the essay into a short film. I got home, turned on all of the lights, and stayed up another few hours, listening to Johnny Cash’s 1971 cover of “I’ll Fly Away,” from his eponymous television show, revising a couple of poems that seemed to get a little better. I didn’t have to teach the next day, or get up with Walt. What did it matter, really, when I went to bed or woke up?

My goodness, Johnny Cash looks good in 1971. Strong, handsome, sturdy. I thought of that anecdote about how he used to walk around parties in the mid-60s, drunk or stoned, introducing Vivian as “my first wife,” and probably feeling slick as hell. What a jerk. By then, of course, he was touring with the Carter Family and carrying on, or trying his best to carry on, with June Carter. And yet, look at what he became. Even if it’s only partially true, I like the idea that Johnny Cash turned his life around through the love of a good woman, the bible, and a sense that a second chance might be his last. But my goodness, isn’t that corny? A little too tidy? By all accounts a devoted husband and devout Christian, didn’t Cash really alternate long periods of sobriety and insobriety for the rest of his life? End up in rehab a few times, join The Highwaymen? And why do I care, anyway, about Johnny Cash’s personal life, so long as the music is good?

I have been writing essays recently. I find myself remembering and understanding aspects of my life and Katie’s death that don’t otherwise always come to mind. This is helpful, in the sense that I think there are set narratives in my mind which are tidy enough for polite conversations but maybe gloss over the complexities of actual human experience. But then I wonder: how much explanation is enough? Don’t we inevitably set our minds to a certain version of events and then move forward with our lives? In his essay, “Elegiac,” Stanly Plumly says that grief is the most straightforward of our emotions, but is also the one most easily twisted by irony. I think the manipulations might happen indiscriminately, even by proxy. One challenge of writing in an elegaic mode is that the focus resists any kind of narrative continuity. It’s like capturing a cat under a blanket; odds are that 9 out of 10 times you’ll lift up the blanket and the sucker will wriggle free. But, of course, you eventually have to lift up the blanket, or what was the point of working so hard in the first place?

The title of this post comes from a fantastic throwaway moment during the season finale of Community. Rallying the Greendale community to deny City College their paintball conquest of the campus (don’t ask), Troy implores them to oppose the “unstoppable juggleknob” in any way they can. “Juggernaut,” Abed instantly corrects him. I suppose I like that joke because it is goofy and incidental, a mix of dead-on parody (Troy is trying so hard to inspire!) and silly wordplay. I have blogged before about my favorite shows—Friday Night Lights, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Veronica Mars—going or headed off the air in the last couple of years. Community is the refreshing if lonely exception, an instant keeper, the one-armed Rajon Rondo to a television universe of scrub Heat benchwarmers. One of the best things about Community is it’s associative aspect, its capacity to import and then discard whole aspects of the zeitgeist, episode to episode, all the while nurturing meaningful characters and relationships that we genuinely care about. It can be hard to nail down Community because it is so sharp, smart, and quick, but I do enjoy trying to keep up.

In Flagrante Delicto

2011-04-07T03:07:00.013-04:00

When I was nine or ten years old, growing up in suburban Kansas, I used to wonder where Andy Philman disappeared to, and why no teacher ever noticed he was gone. I would sit in math or social studies or religion class, crunching numbers, pondering the divination of the corporeal form, counting down minutes on the clock. I hated school the way most kids did. I paid attention, made up games, and eagerly competed at whichever task was set before us. It terrified me to think I might not be the smartest person I knew. A few years later, this got me into serious trouble, when I laughed at a teacher for asking me when Malcolm the Tenth (X) was Pope. She stood a different friend and me against the wall in the hallway, pointing at the ceiling and shouting that we thought we were up there and everybody else is down here. Her hands shook as she closed the gap.

Andy Philman was small-framed, pale-skinned, crafty, and very clever in a quiet kind of way. He always knew the right time to go to the back of the room, sign for the hall pass, and climb out the bathroom window. It seemed to me, at the time, that no one could possibly leave our school. Surely, there was an alarm rigged to the latch, or a laser, and didn't the principal keep vigilant watch for trespassers? The hill outside the bathroom window was sloped and gradual. It opened onto the teacher's parking lot, a stone's throw from the crossing signal on 95th Street. Get across there, I used to think, and the world was your oyster. Hardee's. McDonald's. The card store with the big candy bins in the back. Andy Philman never got that far, but he got away, or at least he got out, and when he came back into the room, signed back in the pass, and returned to his seat, there was a hitch in his step. If we doubted him, he would pass around a handful of grass, then later, during recess, show us the patch where he had pulled it up.

It's a minor memory, and one that hadn't come to mind for years, until yesterday, when my infant son tumbled off the bed. I was running the bath at the time, Cait was at school. I had left Walt sitting on the middle of the bed, with some toys. All that makes sense to say now is that we just didn't think he was crawling yet. I had gone into the bathroom, turned on the water. What I remember is that suddenly everything was very quiet in the bedroom, and how strange that was (Walt babbles a lot), and when I went back out, Walt was face down, just off the bed. Which at first I thought was a good thing, because he was so quiet, but when I picked him up he was beet-red, building up steam, just getting very, very ready to go off.

I took Walt upstairs, found my mother-in-law. She gave him the once-over. No bruises, no cuts, no blood. Lots of color in the face, thriving. Good sound. Take him outside and stand in the garden a while, he'll calm down. He's just scared. He had a good fall. It happens. So we went outside and stood in the garden, and sure enough, he calmed down. We walked around the garden and I made up the names of all the flowers. Oooh, snapper's pendulum! Dog-whisker! Cait came home a few minutes later and I gave her the update. And then I broke down. Which, I knew at the time, was pretty stupid. It wasn't like I had fallen off the bed, precognitive, without the capacity for language or object permanence, trusting that big guy because I didn't know any better. And also, it was on my watch, so who was I trying to kid? Wasn't it enough that Walt was fine? We were standing in the garden, naming flowers neither of us knew we'd ever seen before.

I have been thinking a lot about Chicago recently. Cait and I watched a couple of episodes of The Chicago Code, and I was surprised to recognize a bunch of the locations. Chicago occupies a strange middle ground in my mind. On the one hand, it is where I went to college, then lived after the Peace Corps. It is where my brother, my sister, and their families live, as well as some good friends and, further north, most of Katie's family. I have these great memories of running along the lakefront with Katie, out to the edge of the pier near North Avenue Beach or further north past our old place in Uptown. We had two apartments during our three years there, a bunch of friends, regular hang-outs--Carol's, Nookie's, The Old Town School of Folk Music, The Music Box Theater. We went to local theater, shows, walked everywhere, took public transportation to our jobs, ran a bunch of road races.

But then there is the figurative Chicago, the one that broadly means something, even if it isn't exactly, you know, Chicago. For example, I often tell people when they ask that I am "from Chicago," which is much tidier and simpler than "I grew up in Kansas, moved to New York when my dad took a new job right before high school started, went to college in Evanston, then came back from a Peace Corps stint in Bangladesh and lived with my girlfriend for three years in Chicago before we got married and moved to Miami, then Romania, where she died." Or, I say, "I am a die-hard Cubs fan," which really means, "when I lived in Chicago, I couldn't freaking stand Cubs fans, especially during the 2003 run when I secretly rooted against them, thinking all those loud and drunk fans were kind of irritating, but then when the whole Bartman thing happened, and they improbably blew the series with the Marlins, I felt really bad, like maybe my rooting against them had messed up the city's karma, so when I moved to Florida, I became a long-distance Cubs fan, which is easier to manage than rooting for the Cubs in Chicago, anyway--have you ever been to Wrigleyville in the summer?--and now, what the heck, I mean, it's been 103 years, right?"

I have been listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" recently, that magnificent tribute to the idea of Chicago, the stripped-down genius of Tweedy mixed, mashed together, orchestrated and elevated by Jay Bennett, before they had their big falling out. You get this terrific effect completely if you watch the opening credits to the documentary about the making of that album, "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart": the eponymous opening track stripped down to acoustics and lead vocals, the beautiful black-and-white cinematography of Chicago in the late 1990s. It looks better than Manhattan in "Manhattan," more imagined and gray and rainy, the way good Chicago days somehow make you happy about it getting dark and cold so early.

The first instance of anyone saying "caught red-handed" comes in Ivanhoe, when a minor character who commits murder is discovered later with blood on his hands, where as the Latin phrase "in flagrante delicto," adapted to mean roughly the same in contemporary law, does not translate exactly. It is more subtle and suggestive, some cross between "caught in blazing offense" and "being found having sex." I am very good in crisis situations. I may fail spectacularly, but I do it with a really calm head on my shoulders. No panicking, screaming hysteric, me. But I hate to not have control, or worse, to miss things. It terrifies me to understand and witness limitation. I think that, for a while, Jeff Tweedy got around this by surrounding himself with smarter and more talented people, and just slowly learning the moves.

I haven't yet figured out how to explain the sense of obligation that accompanies survival. It is a kind of nostalgia, a fear of things long since passed. When I lived in Chicago, I missed Bangladesh. When I lived in Miami, I missed Chicago. In Romania, I didn't miss Miami, but I think a lot now about Indiana, and I still have a hard time looking at photographs of Bucharest. Even now. It's such a common phrase in poetry, implying simultaneous surprise and resignation. “Memory revises me. / Even now a letter / comes from a place / I don’t know, from someone / with my name / and postmarked years ago.”

I don't suppose that Walt is ruined forever on beds, or me, though I'm sure at some point down the road he will remind me, conveniently, that whatever he has done, he isn't the one in the relationship who let the other crash bodily to the ground. And, he will be right. Perhaps then we will still live in California, or somewhere that a few days each year resembles California. I suppose if the point of reference is made broadly, anywhere resembles someplace else. Chicago is a convenient shorthand for a former life, a place where I never felt completely comfortable or wanted to live long-term, but that is nonetheless a place I know a lot about, and can navigate my way around pretty easily. When Walt fell off of the bed, I swore it was my fault, which is a careless distinction. He is my responsibility. Nostalgia and obligation are two common variations on regret, an emotion that prepares one well for absolutely nothing.

Whac-A-Mole

2011-02-23T13:42:00.030-05:00

Friday Night Lights has made its graceful exit from television. What a loss. There is no good reason why Friday Night Lights should have struggled as it did to stay on the air for five seasons, or really, that it should end now. The show had great acting and writing, and a ton of critical attention. DirecTV deserves major kudos for its joint production deal with NBC during the last three seasons, and here's hoping it will keep a keen eye out for future shows not quite making it on broadcast television.

When I recommend Friday Night to friends and family members (and you), most folks seem to take the recommendation, put the first season on their Netflix queue, and then keep bumping up shows and movies past it. I suppose it's a hard sell. The best way I know to recommend Friday Night Lights, by contrast and proxy, hardly helps matters: I do not have especially fond feelings for my own high school experience, football, or Texas, but man, I love this show. I can't think of another show I have so often stopped mid-episode to debate with Cait and fellow fans the relative virtues of each character involved in whatever on-screen negotiation. Parenthood, marriage, power dynamics, politics, friendships, relationships. All are handled with an exceptional degree of thoughtfulness and humanity. Still, taste being what it is, it became wonderful these last few seasons just to see it keep coming back. And, it is to the credit of the writers, and creator Peter Berg, that story-lines were kept open and closed down where they could be, without straining credulity. I wish Coach Taylor luck in Philadelphia, and hope Mrs. Coach looks up my sister sooner rather than later at Bryn Mawr.

Apparently, 90% of the music that we hear in .mp3 format gets lost in the compression, so that we only process a fraction of the original recording. For the last week or so, I have been listening to music and podcasts on a variety of second-rate headphones that we keep in the top desk drawer. My beloved Bose IE2 headphones have gone missing, and I haven't found the time yet to track them down, probably somewhere under the floorboards of the car or in one of the pockets of the diaper bag. I have a terrible habit of replacing the headset for my Blackberry Storm with $3 knock-offs that ship for free via Amazon Prime. So, toggling between my phone and iPod, walking back and forth from classes or out with Walt on one of the epic walks that puts him out for an afternoon nap, I have apparently recently heard only 10% of Terry Gross's sonorous baritone, Diane Rehm's raspy and authoritative questioning, the man Johnny Cash called the greatest living singer. It is a strange thing to think that what sounds like the full deal is a mere and minor facsimile, not unlike my feelings now about that Kenny G concert I eagerly attended in the sixth grade: I owned a saxophone, I wanted to be a real jazz man, and Kenny G could cycle-breath his carefully annotated solos.

I was talking with a friend the other day about writers who were decent people and had lives that ended, more or less, well. We had a hard time drawing out the list. She was surprised that Robert Frost wasn't such a nice guy as we often imagine him, that Wallace Stevens's personal assistant used to joke around the office that the policy he most looked forward to paying out was his boss's. I suppose it was a kind of straw-man hypothetical; regardless of the human being, the work is what matters most now. When I was teaching in North Carolina in the summer of 1998, I remember driving some students to the airport and hearing, on the way back, a Scott Simon interview with Norman Mailer, in which Mailer said that the mark of mediocrity was to seek precedent. I remember thinking, "Hey, that's pretty good--I'm going to remember that," and also having no idea what it meant. Marcus can back me up on this, but probably I went back for my senior year at Northwestern and dropped the phrase into conversation as an indicator of my own cleverness.

After Katie died, a good friend reminded me of that maxim, "May you live in interesting times." Much of our life together was constructed around travel and against convention. I had a good sense at the time that, whatever we were doing, it was against expectation and probably would prove to be very interesting. Teaching middle school and working at a nonprofit in Chicago, we bucked profiteering. Going to graduate school at FIU, we eschewed larger programs for the certainty of funding and plenty of time to write and study. Living in Romania, as in Bangladesh six years earlier, we were true expatriates, participating in theater troupes, taking overnight trains across Europe, working for issues of social justice and public health. Katie's death made for a sudden and disturbing conclusion to this approach to living; returning to Indiana, I was eager for stability, I wanted a family, I wanted, to quote one of my own poems, to make my place certain.

There are clear limits to a reactive approach to living. Then (as now, I suppose) I was much more clear about what I did not want, than what I did. Even making a "place certain" is artful and rather abstract, an expression of certain values rather than a tangible plan for the future. My student teaching mentor was fond of saying that the willow bends where the oak breaks, and I remember thinking that this kind of flexibility, essential in a secondary education classroom, made for a pretty happy life as a Peace Corps volunteer, a middle school teacher in an over-crowded classroom, a grieving widower. The problem is that it also set out a kind of professional adaptability that I don't seem able to transform into an iron-willed certainty of place or professional self, a whac-a-mole sensibility of wanting to nail down anything that pops up within reach, where quality of writing, and time and freedom to write, and freedom to publish where and when I want to, might be the more logical reaches. Put another way, having made homes in Bangladesh, Romania, Indiana, Illinois, and Miami, I am hard-pressed to not believe that wherever I end up, I'll either be or find a way to feel pretty happy with it all. But shouldn't I also at least try a little harder?

It is hard not to think of the writing world as an essentially competitive one, full of all kinds of markers of certain success and failure. First-book competitions, for poets, are exhausting and expensive. Submissions are slow and tedious work for editors and writers. Placing work with presses and magazines can seem like divining tea-leaves. I have yet to try out the job market, but I imagine that when I do, it will in some ways bring more of the same. Balancing a belief in the exceptional with an expectation of indifference; in most other human undertakings, we might conflate the two as a bit of delusion. And, in the meantime, isn't it time to order more stamps, envelopes, and toner cartridge?

My run of favorite TV shows going off the air is approaching near-epic proportions. Friday Night Lights, LOST, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development, Rubicon. And soon, Steve Carrell to leave The Office. How much longer can Community sustain its fragmented and eclectic anti-narrative; how long can any show thrive on being an anti-show? Cait and I have little time to watch television these days and our lifestyle has adjusted accordingly; in that rare, golden two-hour period after Walt goes down for the night but before we go to bed, it's more satisfying to read and talk, then for me to write and Cait to catch up on work and school. Of course, we make the worthy exception. But for the most part, new and long-developing tv-narratives seem, finally, a bit formulaic to invest so much on the front-end. I'd like to say that this reflects some cultivation or evolution of taste. But really, new motivations are taking hold in my and our conception of life. Baby Walt, but also a kind of longer view about poetry, writing, teaching, and reading. Fear of failure is a good motivator, but perhaps fear of formula is a better one?

One frequent criticism of Friday Night Lights was that it got the football all wrong. Week after week of improbable come-from-behind-victory situations strained the credibility of Coach Taylor's genius. If he was so good at winning games, why was he so bad at managing the clock, making substitutions, and recruiting tall athletes? There is merit in these arguments, but I could care less about the football on Friday Night Lights. Its an occasion for the narratives and characters that I care about. Still, if football accuracy is your criteria, or football your passion, I can imagine the show seems shoddy, manipulative, and opportunistic.

I made the mistake of recommending recently one of my former favorite movies, Waking The Dead. I used to love this movie. Now, even the trailer makes me cringe. Jennifer Connelly's terrible accent. The dopey exclamations of feeling. The left/ride schism in the main characters. And that's not even getting started on the portrayals of grief and mourning. What has happened in the intervening eleven years to so clearly change my feeling about this movie? I suppose that I'm getting older and I'm less attracted to improbable stories about love and loss. But I can't say that I've seen more movies in the last ten years than in the preceding; in high school and college I pursued a veritable self-education in film, watching four or five movies in a row, director after director, Best Picture and Palm d'Or winners, foreign and rare imports, the whole works. I'd like to think that I'll go underground eventually, and stop recommending bad things to good people. But that would be a kind of self-scam. I like liking things. I don't like hedging my favorites. The benefit of naming out-loud the things you like at least forces a kind of scrutiny of favorites and the criteria applied to decide them. And, the benefit of tending to the under-confident is that it allows some space to reconsider and, who knows, even improve upon the list, the awareness that informs it, as well as what gets missed.

Stephen Dobyns reading "How To Like It" tonight

2011-02-01T03:41:00.006-05:00

Stephen Dobyns wrote one of my favorite poems, for which this blog is titled. He is this year's selection for the prestigious Mohr Visiting Poet Series in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. As the Mohr Visiting Poet, Dobyns gave tonight's reading at Cubberley Auditorium. I was there with my friend Kelly, who gave me Dobyns's Velocities: New and Selected Poems back during our first year in graduate school in 2004; she was a huge fan of the collection, and of "How To Like It," and I know the work because of her. We have remained close friends while living near each other in Miami, and now in Northern California, and during our various travels and living elsewhere in-between. Kelly knew Katie. She came and visited us in Romania, and she was at Katie's service in Antioch, IL. Katie liked "How To Like It," too--I would put it right up there with Catherine Bowman's "Spice Night" and B.H. Fairchild's "The Blue Buick," as her favorites. "How To Like It" offers bittersweet consolations. It is a complicated and intelligent poem about desire and meaning that is alternately withstanding, confined, energetic, despondent, hopeful, and resigned--often within the same sentence. It deserves much more careful praise, but I want to also add here that it is a poem that I go to, time and again, to find strength and meaning, and to offer same to friends and family members. It is a wonderful poem, and I feel very lucky to have heard it read by the author himself, with my good friend, to whom I am indebted for knowing it.

Here is the video of Dobyns reading "How To Like It" tonight:

Pilots Industry

2010-11-28T17:04:00.065-05:00

Katie once told me about a date that she went on, to a Kenny Rogers concert. Rogers kept up a pretty good stage rapport with a man in the front row, who finally admitted he was there against his will and only at his wife's request. Amused, Rogers offered the man $10 cash on the spot for every song of his the guy could name. "The Gambler." "Lady." $20, and that was it. Apparently, Rogers was then in the habit of wearing shoes with large heels, and took a number of pot-shots at his wardrobe, himself, and his songs, stopping periodically to offer the man more money with the first verse of each hit: "Lucille," "Coward of the County," "We Got Tonight," "I Just Dropped In...," "Through the Years," etc. A quick YouTube search of Kenny Rogers turns up karaoke versions of these and still other hit songs, movie clips from The Gambler (Parts I-V) and The Coward of the County, appearances on the Muppet Show and in Jackass, covers by fans, live performances, and the background songs to any number of family video collages. And, of course, postings for the original hipster website, Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers Dot Com.

Here's some trivia about the 1983 country hit, "Islands in the Stream," recorded and made famous by Rogers and Dolly Parton. It was originally composed by the Bee Gees in a late-70's R&B style, to be sung as a duet by Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross. It is named for a tragic novel written by Ernest Hemingway, published posthumously in 1970, meant to rehabilitate his career. While the tune is clear and catchy, its lyrics are widely misunderstood to state, alternately, "Violence in the Streets, that is what we want," "Pilots industry," "Aliens in the Street," "Hives of industry, that is what we start." The Rogers-Parton version of "Islands in the Stream" was the only country song to hit #1 on the Billboards charts for the next seventeen years. In 2005, it was voted the best country duet of all time by Country Music Television. In April 2008, a South Bend radio station played it continuously for several days to announce a format change to all country music. In 2009, Tom Jones recorded a popular version for the Comic Relief charity (the video here) that earned him the distinction of the oldest living person to record a #1 hit on the British charts. During a classic moment in Season 2 of The Office, Jim bails out Michael's awful falsetto rendition by singing the Parton portion.

In a post-hipster/tentatively-twee age, who better encapsulates our simultaneous deep yearning for and well-earned suspicion of sentiment than Kenny Rogers? Parton and Rogers's 2005 duet at the CMT Awards, coupled with his appearance that year on Reno 911!, gets at this schism beautifully. Rogers and Parton nail their performance: perfect choreography, pitch, hair, and teeth. On Reno 911!, Deputies Garcia and Wiegel grill Kenny Rogers about Gambler IV and encourage him to give up singing ("I really think you should get out there and really act more and, you know, leave that other singing stuff behind"), while Lieutenant Dangle keeps insisting on more protection for the Rhinestone Cowboy. Toward the end of the season, Kenny appears in Dangle's dreams, then his bed; then Rogers is stabbed by a maniac fan who distracts his police escort by announcing a Kenny Rogers look-alike in the food court. Only someone with a sincere appreciation of his own talents, who is also comfortable enough in his own skin to have fun with his public image and laugh at himself, could be the quiet center of both considerable adoration and merciless skewering.

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a long essay for my wrestling and politics blog comparing the echo chamber of information about Andre The Giant (most of it comes from a DVD interview with his Princess Bride co-star, Cary Elwes, recorded after Andre's death) to the swarm of wild criticisms being hurled in the direction of health care reform legislation (death panels, etc., being imagined and perpetuated by a few wily, if irresponsible future Republican presidential nominees). Last night, Cait, Walt, and I went over to her brother Bart's house last night, and watched The Princess Bride. I had forgotten all of the clever wordplay throughout The Princess Bride, from Fezzik and Inigo's rhyming game, to Wallace Shawn's "Inconceivable!" to the extended con that Westley uses to best Prince Humperdinck. But maybe best of all is the subtle persuasion that Peter Falk works on Fred Savage throughout, steady, trusting the material to work its magic. It took Bart's boys a few minutes to catch on, but by the end we were all watching with rapt attention.

I have found myself listening over and over to two songs from Bruce Springsteen's 1987 album, Tunnel of Love, "One Step Up" and "Brilliant Disguise." The songs are bookends, of a sort, about failure in relationships. Bruce wrote the album by himself, while in the process of breaking up the E Street Band, and also divorcing his first wife, the actress Julianne Phillips, to marry his then-backup-singer, now-wife, Patti Scialfa. The video for "Brilliant Disguise" is amazing--a single, continuous, and unedited shot of Bruce playing the song in a kitchen, with the camera moving in closer and closer until only his face is in frame. His singing during that take is mic'd over the recorded version, and so there is more inflection and interruption in the video version of his voice. That Bruce found a space to speak directly and unflinchingly about complication in his life, even to his discredit, creates the space for a kind of honesty that makes listening to the whole album (for which he recorded many of the backing tracks) feel intensely personal and revealing.

Last year, I memorized the poem this blog is named for, "How To Like It," and I still find myself at random times, in random places, working over lines from it. It's stuck in my mind in a welcome way. I've added alongside it eight or nine other poems. I find myself thinking through my interest in memorizing a poem; usually, it's to understand better why I like it. I can think of only one poem that I've committed to memory and found that I liked considerably less after the fact. There is a quality to exceptional poetry, and I guess, art, that seems beyond aesthetic, dealing explicitly with transformation and transcendence. Rarely does it work the other way, and when it seems to--the life enhancing the art--I often find myself mired in nostalgic anthems for "old" times. Putting it another way, I can listen to "Islands in the Stream" over and over for a couple of days, sure, but eventually, I feel more than a little dirty and snap out of it.

In his introduction to Marianne Moore's 1935 Selected Poems, T.S. Eliot declares that poets "have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and secret release; and that is a personal affair." I'd like to think that there is some kind of continuity in my life worth thinking and writing about, for lack of a better word, between "then" and "now." I'm not sure exactly what those words mean in this context, except that, for a project about circumstances, memory, commemoration, withstanding, I seem to be the connective tissue. A friend who is also a colleague remarked recently that there is a kind of comfortable mystery to interacting with me on a social level, because one knows that something terrible happened to me a while back, but because I don't require strangers to participate in the tragedy after the fact, they can sort of acknowledge it by not acknowledging it, they can imagine it without need to verify it, and so they are allowed to be close to something awful without having to take either part in or responsibility for it. The Guy With A Past.

Walt is a beautiful boy. He smiles a lot, laughs every once in a while. He holds his head up. He drools. He eats a thoroughly mystifying amount of food. He rarely sleeps through the night. He has gray eyes that are changing, over time, to pale blue. He has thin blond hair that clumps at his neck in a strange mullet. He is growing and gaining weight at an incredible pace; there is more of him to hold every day. He has preferences, grabs fingers, tracks his own hand. He has figured out that he has hands and wants to put them constantly in his mouth. The soft spot on his head is getting smaller. He has endured his first head cold. A friend said that this time in life is slow days, quick years. There is a poem by Thomas Lux, "A Little Tooth," that gets at that sense in an incredibly concise and heartbreaking way, even if it move swiftly past these great, early days.

Happiness is a passive state of being: lazy, static and complacent. Happy songs often run together, are unmemorable and full of insistent choruses proclaiming states of mind unpersuasive to everyday living. Fine, you're happy but are you going to take out the trash or what? Happy lyrics feel familiar and run all together over time. Like happiness itself, happy songs are easy to appreciate and difficult to actively enjoy. Often, it does not matter that you get the words to the verse right, as long as you sing at just the right moment, say, "Islands in the stream, that is what we are!" Whole batches of happy songs get partially memorized and eventually farmed out to happy-song radio stations, with dulcet tones and promises of, if not happiness exactly, then a carefully managed range of neutral feelings.

Melancholy, on the other hand, is absence right at the center of your being. It allows for commiseration when you need it, isolation when you don't, and separation all of the time anyway. If you withdraw from the world, you don't need to bring much to do because withdrawal is a full-time job. It pays well. It is fertile ground for creativity. And melancholy is chronic. Not feeling happy today? That's too bad. Not feeling melancholic today? Give it a few hours. Melancholic songs are intensive, all-consuming affairs. You memorize the lyrics, then you go back through and check the articles, prepositions, and spellings of foreign cities. You read the liner notes for biographical data and insights into the melancholy articulated, as manifest in the author. You sing a melancholic anthem full-throated, so that you might find, wherever, someone else certain to know the kind of suffering that consumes you. You exchange phone numbers, and as long as you both remain melancholic, and neither one of you gets happy, you will be friends for life.

If you look at Kenny Rogers now, you'll notice that he's had some work done, his range is limited, he sings hokey, cloying Christmas carols surrounded by small children. It would be easy to say it's his right, but when does the intention to stay relevant and appeal to any audience--to keep working--trump the production of meaningful and memorable work? Isn't it just as easy to keep touring and singing the greatest hits? Bruce Springsteen's last great album was The Rising, his 2002 response to the attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. I've talked about this album a bit before, here. It is a lush, exhausting, willfully exuberant statement of elegy and grace. It is of a different order than the albums that preceded and, ultimately, followed it, and equal to his best work. In keeping his chops fresh and in shape, Springsteen arrived at a different kind of witness and withstanding to express in his work, as well as a good deal of reflection and scrutiny, an insane, ridiculous tragedy transformed into anthem. Anthem. Or, maybe, a gift, a love life / Utterly unasked for, especially that first track, "Lonesome Day," it's double-barrel-or-double-express-trains, optimism and anger. What an awesome, gut-kicking, leave-it-all-on-the-floor declaration of meaning. When I listen to the live version below a few times in a row, I notice more the artistry, the lyrics, the layering of guitar and saxophone at the bridge, the key changes. The singing along to the opening chords that is both reverent for and enthusiastically withstanding the tragedy that inspired it.

Prosaic

2010-10-10T05:55:00.002-04:00

I have been trying, in recent writing and thinking, to map out one conversation that I began in large part through this blog after Katie's death. That conversation is about living with and after the violent death of a spouse. Even the phrase, "living with and after the violent death of a spouse" feels well-examined and appropriate, maybe even rehearsed. On the one hand, I have set firmly in my mind many of the markers of Katie and I's life together and life after her death. I don't find much to admire in the stages approach to grieving, but the intense emotion I felt after Katie's death, in many directions, has cooled and reshaped itself into gratitude and appreciation. I've tried to document that, here, and I think I've done an okay job. On the other hand, ironically, distance seems like a really good place from which to write about and understand things. Is it appropriate to continue to pursue a writing project when I'm not sure: 1) I want to say anything more, and 2) whether I really have anything more to say?

Certain obvious tropes about this kind of writing do not shape how I think about it. I am not writing to keep my dead alive, nor am I worried that, if I stop writing, Katie will somehow disappear or pass on from my life. Symbolic "deaths" are pale imitations of the real thing. And yet, to quote Robert Hass, there are limits to imagination, and so, limits to the connections we can invent and sustain, whatever our intentions. There is a wonderful literary/art project up currently at The Owls, in which authors respond in 200 words or less to photographs from Ben Walters's graffiti-tunnel series. The range of content posted so far is surprisingly grim: stories about death, murder, baseball, siblings, victims, tragedy. I wonder if, the more compressed our stories become, the more limited our tonal range becomes in narrating the experiences in those stories. Of course, photographs of graffiti might by default suggest stories about grime, grit, transgression, etc.

These last six weeks, while awake with Walt for middle-of-the-night feedings, I have rewatched the first six seasons of The Office. I first watched The Office while living in Indiana, during the year after Katie's death. I had held off on watching it until then because I was a strict fan of the British-Ricky Gervais Office, and I believed that watching the American version of The Office would only dilute my devotion (I am prone to such ridiculous postures). Anyway, once I started watching, I was hooked. I remember staying up late to watch The Office, watching it first thing in the morning, rewatching especially wonderful episodes, and crying--giant, man-sized tears--when Pam made her big speech to Jim during the Beach Games episode. My devotion to The Office made me realize, and feel comfortable with via many degrees of separation, something about which I initially felt a great deal of shame: I missed being in love and I wanted to love again. Maybe that wasn't such a remarkable desire; it seems now pretty reasonable and, given how I am programmed, inevitable. Then, I couldn't and didn't want to do much with that realization, and I also didn't want to deny it. It was there, at a very safe distance from reality, courtesy of Dunder-Mifflin.

Walt's arrival and first six weeks of existence deserve more of an acknowledgment than a mere sidebar reference via The Office, but that's one of the limits with this blog. It's a blog about grief, and living with and after...well, you know how the rest goes. I cannot stop writing about these things, but I worry more and more that what I continue to have to say about them is, well, prosaic. Transformations, like deaths, only happen once (maybe understanding them takes longer). There is living with death, living after death, loving again. And then there is all of the getting on, meaning, wonder, passion, fortune, senselessness, fear, and unpredictability/instability that is life still after that. Katie hated feeling pinned down. She fiercely safeguarded a considerable degree of personal freedom. I don't want to make her life just some occasion for my evolution as a human being; I don't want to trap her, here, without some tonic perspective. I also can't think of a better tribute to her role in my life, our love and life together, and my memory of that.

In a couple of weeks, KMF will gather for our third annual Fun Run & Walk, followed by our annual meeting. I've said plenty, previously, about what Katie's name means to the thousands of strangers who apply each year for her scholarships. I do want to say that this year, we'll talk during our annual meeting with the 2010 scholarship recipients, and I'm really looking forward to that conversation. The meeting is open to the public and you're invited and very welcome to join us at the conference room of The Comfort Inn in Antioch, IL on Saturday, 10/23, at 12pm.

I miss writing with the certainty and authority that elegy required of me. Working to understand death, and living with death, made the page seem especially bright and empty. I sometimes miss feeling sad and hopeless, and those great, if wild and desperate, stabs at meaning and clarity that often followed. "I am a good uncle" is one that comes especially to mind, but probably this blog is full of them. Still, it's one thing to clear the air and do something new, another entirely to keep filling the room with smoke.

What a terrible show The Office would have been if they had decided to keep dialing back, speeding up, dialing back, speeding up the Jim and Pam thing, a la Ross and Rachel, Maddie and David, et al. The pregnancy, Jim's fake then real proposals, the house, the wedding, the baby, nursing the wrong baby at the hospital, the Michael Scott Paper Company sales team, Jim as co-manager: wonderful stuff. I've never done a coal walk and I imagine I am past the point in my life when I might. And, anyway, similes are the weakest kind of comparison (think: life is like a box of chocolates), so instead, I'll close with this.

Anthems

2010-08-11T02:32:00.005-04:00

There are many reasons I love the song, "I And Love And You" by the Avett Brothers. The lyrics are not one of those reasons. For every sparse and true line, there are two or three that feel clunky and too easy. I think it was PJ Harvey who said that the first reason we love songs is that they sound like other songs we've heard before. So, the familiarity is a kind of burden on our ability to synthesize new experiences and develop broader, more inclusive aesthetics. I think this is only partially true. When I was in the fourth grade, I loved any song that had a catchy and easy-to-memorize refrain. I would record them from the radio, then listen to them over and over until I learned all of the words. I remember driving around in the backseat of a car with my brother and his friends, listening to the radio, singing the whole way through four or five songs in a row. Whoever was driving thought it was strange that I knew every word. Around that time, my dad asked me if I understood what the lyrics to Papa Don't Preach meant. The video was everywhere that summer and I had no idea. I didn't want to seem unknowing, so I fumbled something about a teenage daughter not wanting her dad to tell her what to do all the time. In middle school, this kid Dave and I recorded at least the refrain for a song for every state, as part of a school project on patriotism, or maybe it was civic duty. My dad had made a list of songs that he knew, and then recorded himself singing what he could remember of them on a tape recorder, which we them mimicked. We got A-minuses for the project, because the teacher suspected that, really, we hadn't done all of the research ourselves, or because the songs didn't exactly meet the requirements of the assignment. We created our first mashup, circa 1989. The 49ers beat the Bengals that January in Super Bowl 23. Dave copied over the tape to record Bon Jovi's New Jersey. I remember one section from our project that went, "...in bluuuuuuue Hawaii...hey there, Roy, ain't that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo!..."

The National's Alligator has replaced Sufjan Stevens's Illinois as my go-to album when I need to get to writing. I didn't like Alligator, at first. I only discovered it after The AV Club listed it as one of the best albums of the last decade. I was ready to chalk it up as an official "Hold Steady"--songs/albums universally lauded by folks whose taste I respect but that I nonetheless can't get into--when I heard, "Daughters of the Soho Riots," which hooked me in enough to think, well, if they can write one good song, chances are I've missed others. The lead singer of The National has one of those deep, mellow voices that clearly enunciates lyrics I miss wholesale unless I really listen. I went online and read the lyrics to the album. "The Geese of Beverly Road," especially, just knocked my socks off:

Hey, Love, we'll get away with it
We'll run like we're awesome, totally genius
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world...

That juxtaposition of awesome, totally, and genius, the idea of inheriting a glimmering world, and the incantatory quality of repeating such simple and optimistic ideas: yes. When I went back and listened to "Daughters of the Soho Riots," I found another line that totally hooked me:

How can anybody know how we got to be this way?
You must have known, I'd do this someday.

I never used to understand why it was that Stevens's "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us" could jump-start things in the writing department. Placing it alongside "Daughters..." I think I get it. Both songs initiate thoughtful, sacred spaces where contemplation becomes generative, possibly sentimental, definitely full of feeling, and is framed by a kind of heartsick optimism that wants to feel its way through, then beyond, experience. The change did me good. After a bit of a dry spell, July was an especially productive writing month.

I'm finally reading, and really enjoying, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I kept not reading it these last ten-odd years because I figured that if it was so popular, and sometimes being derided by fellow writers for its popularity, then it must be too easy and sentimental a work. And, that title. But, of course, I was completely wrong to be skeptical. AHWOSG is beautiful and singular. It fully inhabits and justifies the claim of its title. Having lived until recently near the 826 Valencia universe, I long admired the wit and post-ironic verve of The Pirate Supply Store, The Believer, McSweeney's, etc., and also secretly believed that it couldn't possibly be legit or serious. In reading AHWOSG, though, I understand that the Eggers ethos gets at a kind of post-traumatic reality that refuses to invent difficulty for its own sake. The world provides enough trauma and suffering, we certainly don't need to invite or invent it. But we can talk about it, engage our experience of it, and in that act of translating, hopefully make honest and clear whatever wisdom we have to offer from our experience. This kind of thinking dovetails nicely with a lot of my own writing ambition. Annie Clark's work as St. Vincent, especially, blurs that line between sentiment and feeling, making wild lyrical turns whose underlying gravity is deftly twinned with seeming whimsy.

Anis Shivani's ridiculous piece, The 15 Most Over-Rated Contemporary American Writers, recently published in The Huffington Post, has already consumed intellectual oxygen well in excess of its worth. I won't justify the posture (snark is good), over-inflated premise (MFAs are bad) or deliberate misrepresentation of authorial accomplishments (Mary Oliver, especially), except to crib what I have said elsewhere. I don’t mind “mixing it up”–it’s fun to argue about writers and writing, and popular writers often get the brunt of the criticism (jealousy?). But when the criticisms are so sloppy and borrowed, it feels more like responding to a Fox News report than to a serious venture in criticism–one wastes too much energy trying to reframe a conversation deliberately misrepresenting its fundamental premise.

Today, Cait is 38 weeks pregnant. She feels well, except for the head cold which has her feeling beat today. Things continue to look good and we keep knocking on wood and trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves. We took the last of our baby classes last night, practicing infant and child CPR on Manikins, dislodging imagined pieces of candy from imagined mouths. If all of our knowledge is hypothetical/theoretical to this point, still it feels right to at least try to learn this stuff. We have made six or seven trips to Target in the last couple of weeks, stocking up, and friends, family, and Amazon.Com have mailed us boxes upon boxes filled with good stuff. We are so grateful, happy, eager. When I try to think of anthems for happiness, I come up with songs about suffering, enduring, understanding. I suppose it is easier to write about heartbreak than love. So many "happy" songs are treacly, predictable, banal. So, instead, I've been trying to celebrate abundance and mindfulness, and to sleep as much as possible.

"A Natural History of My Husky Frame"

2010-07-14T17:00:00.004-04:00

Here's an essay, "A Natural History of My Husky Frame" that I wrote for The Owls.

It's a lighter take on things than I've published here recently, and hopefully, it amuses.

2010-06-24T02:17:00.006-04:00

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)
from Let Evening Come (Graywolf, 1990)

Reasons To Survive June

2010-06-11T14:25:00.010-04:00

Four years ago, upon my arrival in Bucharest, Katie and I commenced a whirlwind two weeks of watching World Cup Soccer. Europe was frenzied in a way that I think I've only personally witnessed once in the United States. In the final week of competition, that frenzy became singular and astonishing. In those intervening three weeks, I went from a neophyte to a Zidane-loving every-night-of-action enthusiast. Romanians would congregate in over-crowded beer gardens around all of the major parks in the city, to watch the matches on temporary big-screens set-up with rear projectors. We drank Ursus by the tall glass, ate pizzas and freshly-popped popcorn, sat tipsy, warm, and curiously satisfied under the tall trees and open skies, next to the big lakes. I remember thinking that Bucharest was a beautiful, vibrant city, full of emotion, appetite, post-Communism cynicism, capitalist optimism, and much, much cigarette smoke and exhaust. I loved it all, and I loved being there with Katie, who had adapted her European co-workers night-owl lifestyle--dinner, World Cup soccer, disco, espressos and crepes, in bed around 4 and back at work around 10--and showed me the ropes. Waking up around noon, heading out into the city for a long walk, exploring some historical place or museum, then meeting up at her office to walk or cab it home and head out on the town again: fun summer.

The last two Junes have been challenging, and this one is shaping up to be more of the same. I struggle with understanding how to keep the memory of Katie's death date in a way that seems significant, respectful, honest--and manageable. How to encompass the day, the events before and after? Life before and after that day? June is also a month of intrusions, of horrible things witnessed directly, of sudden bouts of nausea, of strange and sometimes bad dreams. These intrusions are not new. I know they are there, that they are coming. I'm rattled, but I'm not impressed by them. But they do impress upon me. I can't ignore them. Something simple, direct, and controllable--a memory--becomes something ambiguous and chaotic--remembering. Too much attention paid directly to the situation of Katie's death feels indulgent, seems to invite more awfulness.

This afternoon, I'm sitting in the cardiology clinic at Stanford University hospital, having just finished my every-six-months echocardiogram, waiting to see the doctor in a couple of hours, to discuss the results and get my check-up. In two weeks, Cait and I are moving out of San Francisco, into the garden apartment of the big house at 770. Cait is 29 weeks and 3 days pregnant, which means that we can start another kind of accounting: 10 weeks and 4 days until Spartacus's due date, which coincides exactly with Cait's grandfather Zait's 99th birthday. Roughly four weeks after that, I start my new job at Stanford. On faculty at Stanford, where I live with my wife and our first child! So freaking awesome! So incredibly unreal. What is fortune? How can so much good fortune follow bad fortune? How is one ever mindful of all aspects and all potential outcomes of all kinds of good and bad experience?

I would like to say here that I've figured something out, or feel close to figuring something out, but the truth is that I what I understand is how to endure and be grateful. On the morning of June 23rd, I will get up, drive down to Stanford, teach a middle school creative writing class into the afternoon. I don't know how I'll spend the rest of the day. I'll probably struggle trying to understand what is the proper way to spend the day. That I'll get through the day is a different kind of comfort than knowing what's right. Probably, whatever I do on June 23rd, I'll do pretty much the same the day before and after. The last two June 23rds, I've found the week leading up to the day much harder than the day itself, the weekend before especially challenging. I'm not trying to evoke sympathy, here. I'm not much of a moper, and my generally positive outlook tends to keep its shape, despite intense intrusions of intense emotion. However things go, they'll resume a larger shape, eventually, too. June 2006 was World Cup soccer, reunion, dark beer, travel, unique and unusual fun. June 2008 was the beginning of a transition to this life out West.

Here are two poems that I admire very much, that have given me some strength during difficult times these last three years. Dave Cashman read the first poem, by Mary Oliver, at Cait and I's wedding last July, in memory of Katie, and all of our loved ones who are no longer with us. The latter is by Tony Hoagland. It is quite the vogue to say that both Oliver and Hoagland are sentimental dreck-masters, that a kind of heartfelt, direct poem that they sometimes write is, by default, wrong-minded. Fashionable critis dismiss Mary Oliver as the Denny's Restaurant of American Poetry (consistent and banal), because she is widely read outside of the usual poetry circles (read: other poets), is accessible, and writes directly and deliberately about experience. Tony Hoagland suffers a similar kind of neglect, for writing poems that some critics feel are boring, impolite, anachronistic, and lonely.

It is easy to name, in someone else's public expression of or reaction to private experience, the inadequate, inappropriate, insincere, etc., aspect. In simply approaching this territory, one can dismiss it for trying certain things (to communicate, to feel) that many say poetry just shouldn't do. If we're lucky, a certain kind of expression can find the common and communal, and so comfort. It seems awful, to me, to concede that such territory cannot exist. But it's entirely understandable that we maybe over-measure that territory, and expect too much of it when we meet each other there.

The Summer Day (Mary Oliver)

from New And Selected Poems (Beacon, 2005)

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Reasons to Survive November (Tony Hoagland)
from What Narcissism Means To Me (Graywolf, 2003)

November like a train wreck—
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

—Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

On The Radio

2010-05-12T03:05:00.008-04:00

Since I left Carmel, Indiana two years ago to move out to California, I have kept a pretty good line of communication open to my Indy nieces, Emma and Chloe; text messages, Facebook updates, blogs, emails, and cell phone calls make for easy checking in and catching up, as does the occasional well-timed letter/package coming and going. We had last seen each other at the 2009 KMF weekend in Lake Villa, IL, and like Cait and I's wedding before it, and a short visit the previous Christmas, most of the time we had spent together since Indy had been great, but also pretty hasty, and thoroughly surrounded by other people. With Cait 24 weeks pregnant, and who knows what big changes just around our corner, Beth and I exchanged a few emails and decided it was as good a spring as any for some quality uncle-nieces time (with Chase, yes, to follow in a few years). She did the legwork on her end to arrange the best airlines, then the best times/dates, and then Emma and Chloe followed Kayla's 2009 precedent and came west last weekend for a long weekend visit. Beth watched them board the airplane at 6am, and I met them 8 hours later at Gate 32 of San Francisco International, as they stepped down from the a Milwaukee connection for four-and-a-half days of touring around, hanging out, and catching up.

The night before their arrival, I worried myself into a good state of minor frenzy. I thought about all of the incidental, day-to-day fun of living in Indy, talking about school, playing MarioKart, watching Little Manhattan or Stranger Than Fiction or Music and Lyrics, going to the art museum, the Mellow Mushroom. Weren't those all built into the fabric of their daily lives and my living in their home? Was there really a winning equal in my new digs and daily writing, reading, and walking to the coffee shop? What if I had become boring in my two years of California living? What if, like Obama, my 2008 message had worn thin with my 2010 constituency? What if, like Iron Man 2, I could only staple a few bells and whistles to the same old costumes? Excepting even Cait's more-than-Mickey-Rourke-worthy star turn, what if I had lost my uncle groove? Would they have any fun or just politely count the hours until they could get back home?

Fortunately, it turned out to be a pretty amazing visit. From eating pizza in Golden Gate Park, to touring the Academy of Sciences and Alcatraz, walking across the Bridge and around Stanford campus, wandering through the City Lights bookstore and into North Beach, even watching the aforementioned thoroughly mediocre Iron Man 2, we settled into a pretty easygoing pattern of late mornings and long days out touring. We also found our old, familiar patterns. Chloe reminding me I had gained weight and lost hairline since the wedding. Emma talking me through the finer points of her quadruple-accelerated (or so it seems) freshman year schedule for next year and the ins and outs of appreciating the Decemberists and The Shins. I don't want to say too much more, for fear of drawing Chloe's ire that I talk too much about her here, and out of a sense of trying to keep things in proportion, but it meant the world to me to get this time together, and to enjoy it--and them--with so much admiration, affection, and joy.

Their last night in town, making homemade pizzas, listening to KFOG's Acoustic Sunset, getting ready to brave The Dark Knight, we got to realizing that, six years ago that weekend, we had all been in Carmel, IN, for Katie and I's wedding at the County Line Orchard, during which they served with Kayla as the maids of honor. Emma noted how nice it was, now, for her to think about Katie and think about good things, happy memories. It made me appreciate how much of Katie they carried in their daily lives, just in who they were as people and how they negotiate their daily lives, Emma's natural leadership and consideration, Chloe's exceptional will and strong sense of right and wrong, and all of that overlap in between. And how that was an amazing gift, both in what they had received and learned from Katie, but also in who they choose to be and what they choose to keep alive in their daily lives. Which I hadn't really thought of, in such explicit terms, since I had lived with them in Indy.

It's strange to think about not having control over when and how I think about Katie. I was contacted a few weeks ago by a producer for Animal Planet, who said they had read Katie's story on the KMF website, and would I be interested to talk about Katie's death for a show they were putting together about survivors of traumatic animal attacks? Ultimately, I decided, this wasn't the right thing either for me or KMF, and I thanked the producer for her interest, who in turn very decently congratulated KMF on its good work and wished us well. Still, the exchange really shook me. I hadn't thought so directly about Katie's death, in such explicit terms, in some time. I can and do talk about Katie on a regular basis, and I think about her from the safe distances of poetry, KMF work, talks with Cait and family and friends, as a point of reference for so many experiences in my life; doing so gives me a kind of privilege in selecting and controlling those memories, from my end, which is both wonderful (good stuff to remember) and necessary (filter). I was left feeling shaken by the whole experience, really kicked in the gut, I think, because I just hadn't thought about Katie as a victim, in plain and stark terms, in a good while. Which I think is also good: she hated the thought of being considered a victim to anyone or anything.

Driving to the airport, Emma plugged in her iPod and played Regina Spektor's "On The Radio." I think I brought this album to the LaPlante household, and I listened to it a lot my first few months living there. It was one of Katie's favorites and, over time, it had become Emma's, and hearing it driving south on Highway 101, it reminded me of Katie and sitting out on our balcony overlooking Bucharest; of walking across 126th Street to get ice cream at Baskin Robbins; and now, I suppose, of the incredible gift of getting to spend time together in San Francisco thinking about all of those things. These lyrics, in particular:

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

I wrote on this blog, a while back, that Katie used to bring me out of funks by reminding me that I was a good uncle, and that being a good uncle, however lighthearted its origins, had become a kind of organizing principle for my life during hard times. It's important to me now, too, that times are plentiful with their blessings. I think the difference is instead of being something to fall back on when all else seems to be failing, I can embrace it, maybe learn to enjoy it. It's the difference between need and want, maybe, or of figuring out how things that aren't right in the center of life can still be vital and necessary, and wonderful. I feel like I keep using that word but its appropriate. Thinking of the people I love, get to love, and who love me, I am pretty full of wonder.

KMF Names It's 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship Recipients!

2010-03-29T12:42:00.009-04:00

(from the KMF website)

After reviewing 119 submitted applications from 38 universities, the Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is proud to announce three recipients of the 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship. They are:

Mara K. Hansen (Harvard University)

Mara K. Hansen will spend parts of the next year working in India and Morocco to design a comprehensive program to reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STI's) in Morocco.  Specifically, Mara will study the success of The  Corridors  Project, an  internationally  renowned  project , supported by the Gates Foundation, that has  been  working  on  the  reduction  of  STI  and  HIV/AIDS  transmission  among  commercial  sex  workers  in  three  districts  of  Karnataka,  India  since  2005.  Mara intends to use the Corridors Project as a template for a similarly successful program that she will design for and present to her Moroccan colleagues. As  a Peace Corps  volunteer  working previously with  the  Moroccan  Ministry  of  Health, Mara created  educational,  prevention , and  testing  programs  to  protect  the  health  of sex workers in the city of Boumia.  She is currently a master  of  science degree candidate  in  global  health  and population   studies at the School of Public Health at Harvard University.

Norah Herzog Meyerson (The University of Washington)

Norah Herzog Meyerson will work with Health Alliance International (HAI) in the newly independent country of Timor-Leste, to encourage healthy practices regarding maternal and child health at HAI's Birth-Friendly Facilities. Birth-Friendly Facilities (BFF's) are culturally competent, effective and sustainable medical facilities that provide an institutional alternative to home-births. In Timor-Leste, roughly 90% of women deliver at home, where medical complications are not handled safely - leading to one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Norah's program will ultimately expand the function of BFF's to include use as a women’s community center for education, discussion, and access to family planning methods in addition to offering mentorship to women in becoming champions of health in their own households and communities at large. Norah was previously a health care professional in Seattle, WA and Brooklyn, NY and a graduate of Pitzer College, where she received a scholarship based on leadership and community service. She is currently enrolled as a master of public health degree candidate at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.

Megan C. Slaughter (The University of Minnesota)
Megan C. Slaughter will work this summer with the Uganda Village Project to improve preventative health education and healthcare provisions related to malaria, safe water, hygiene and sanitation, reproductive health, and immunizations in the marginalized Iganga district. Megan will serve as the leader of a team that develops partnerships with local community members and other organizations to facilitate collaboration in reducing health disparities, while increasing the sustainability of community health programs. Megan has worked previously with Americorps, the Independent Medico Legal Unit in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She is currently a master of public health degree candidate in community health education, with a concentration in global health and human rights, at the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.

The recipients, finalists, and semi-finalists for this year’s scholarship are listed below and posted on the KMF website shortly.

This year’s applications were reviewed by multiple board members, KMF volunteers, and public health experts, in a six-stage evaluation process. Among many impressive applicants, we feel that this year’s recipients and their projects embody those qualities of leadership, innovation, and sustainability that we are especially keen to recognize with Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships.

The Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships award one-time scholarships of up to $3,000 to graduate students in support of work in the field of international health. They are the only graduate scholarships awarded annually by a family foundation in support of grassroots international public health projects in the developing world.

Since 2007, the Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships have supported public health pioneers doing important work in communities from Mae Sot, Thailand to Pohnpei, Micronesia to Kingstown, Jamaica, at schools including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona, and Katie’s alma mater, Florida International University.

The Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission to advance excellence in the international field of public health by supporting innovative, pioneering, grassroots-level projects undertaken by students follows from the things that Katie Evans believed and did throughout her remarkable life.

RECIPIENTS

Mara K. Hansen, Harvard University

Megan C. Slaughter, The University of Minnesota

Norah H. Myerson, The University of Washington

FINALISTS

Michelle Desmond, University of Washington

Devina Kuo, University of California, Berkeley

Jesse McKenna, Boston University School of Public Health

Brooke Nichols, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

David Sanders, Oregon Health and Science University

SEMI-FINALISTS

Elizabeth Bunde, Tulane University

Patrick Ercole, Saint Louis University

Kathleen Maloney, Tulane University

Krystal Rampalli, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

Sean Trafficante, Tulane University

The Long View

2010-03-13T04:07:00.009-05:00

Today, Cait is sixteen weeks and four days pregnant. She is beautiful, her energy is coming back, the nausea is going away, the test results look within the right ranges: so far, so good. I am so excited at the prospect of being a parent! And I am encouraged that so many family members and friends with kids are excited for us to join the tribe. It says something that they wish us so well at such an early stage, that despite the potential for [and their experience of] exhaustion and frustration, they are so eager and happy for us. Both Cait and I are blessed to be younger siblings, and to have had wonderful experiences with nieces and nephews, as well as friend’s kids, that suggest, to us at least, that we’re pointed in the right direction.

The Chicago doc says that fatherhood is more a state of mind than a physical change; unlike the moms, “future” dads do a lot of speculating and watching, but don’t experience much directly and personally until the child arrives. That makes sense to me. So far, caretaking and bearing witness seem to be the things I can really contribute on a day-to-day basis.

Driving down to the doctor's office for our first second-trimester visit this morning, Cait and I both marveled at Morning Edition's "The Long View" feature interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the 1981 book about grief and suffering, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The interview is one of the best radio programs I have heard in a long while and I highly recommend devoting the roughly 8 minutes needed to listen to the whole thing. In the interview, reflecting on his teenage son's painful, tragic death from a genetic condition, Rabbi Kushner revisits the basic insights that led to the writing of the book:

"What I realized is, Where did we ever get the notion that worshiping power was the greatest compliment we could pay to God? Why is power the most admirable virtue? If I, walking through the wards of a hospital, have to face the fact that either God is all-powerful but not kind, or thoroughly kind and loving but not totally powerful, I would rather compromise God’s power and affirm his love...The theological conclusion I came to is that...God chose to designate two areas of life off-limits to his power: he would not arbitrarily interfere with laws of nature, and he would not take away our freedom to choose between good and evil."

After Katie’s death, a doctor friend of the LaPlante family offered referrals to two kinds of therapists. The first, which I ultimately settled on, was basic talk therapy. The second, which I tried and rejected, was what I jokingly referred to as “pen-light therapy,” but is more commonly known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is a common and well-received treatment for PTSD, in which the brain is stimulated, through eye movement, to heal parts of the brain broken by traumatic experience (it’s more complicated, but that’s the basic gist). My experience of the process was of paying $250 to have a person wave a pen light against a darkened wall while touching my thigh and repeating Katie’s name, but no doubt there are more accomplished practitioners of the therapy. A friend who is working to get her acupuncture degree is looking into combinations of acupuncture and talk therapy to address PTSD in veterans, and a recent New Yorker article about psychiatry suggests that combinations of therapeutic approaches often bear out as good as or better results than prescriptions or talk therapy alone.

Looking back, I think that the Indiana doc’s approach to therapy was to allow space for grieving and sense-making, while also hammering home three or four basic insights into the grieving process and living after grief that affirmed generally the value of life and living, and specifically the value of my own life among the people I loved. These were simple, temporary structures to lean against the building of my life and keep it standing until the foundation could be put back together, but they worked. One of the first things the Indiana doc said, and then repeated at pretty much every other session, was that one day I would be sitting watching my child at a little league game, see the back of a woman's head, think for a second it's Katie, and lose it. And in this gentle mixing of two possible experiences, seemingly divergent, a new kind of narrative was suggested: I was young, I would remarry, I would become a father.

As of today’s visit, the heartbeat is strong. Cait feels good. We are feeling some very tentative enthusiasm for things. I don’t mean to presume anything about the potential experience of parenthood, other than to try to anticipate and act with humility and grace. One of the recurrent themes of this blog is an attempt to accept the fragility inherent in being alive, and the beauty that such fragility offers in the contemporary world. After watching Jim and Pam deliver their baby in last week’s episode of The Office, Cait and I signed up for a whole bevy of new-parent courses offered at the hospital where she will deliver. If Jim can diaper a football and cat, it seems, I’ve got some work to do to catch up.

Two days ago, I was offered and accepted the Jones lectureship in poetry at Stanford University, where starting this fall, I’ll be teaching undergraduate creative writing courses for the next two years. I am ecstatic at the opportunity to continue to work in the creative writing department, among so many talented peers and faculty members who have shaped my writing and writing life, and I look forward to putting in the time and energy to similarly support other, younger writers, as well as to grow in my teaching and continued writing. The group of poems I submitted with my application for the lectureship came from an elegy manuscript I finished last fall, “No Season.” Seven of these poems were accepted this week for publication by The Missouri Review, which means that the bulk of the manuscript will soon be published in various journals (see the left-side menu for links).

“No Season” follows the unexpected arc of grief and mourning, within the eventual context of finding new love. There’s this great moment at the end of Rabbi Kushner’s interview, where he says that his relationship with God hasn’t changed all that much during his lifetime:

"My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of, and we care very much about each other."

For me, finishing “No Season,” reflects the sense I’m capable of generating at this point in my life, regarding Katie’s death and my experience of living after it. If that sense contains inconsistencies, or even seems to embrace certain contradictions, I’m okay with that. There is a kind of reverence that I find personally meaningful in both having written those poems and now stopping their writing. I don’t believe that there is a clear beginning or end to love, any more than there is to life, but there are new manifestations of both that, if we’re lucky, get born again into this world, needing us to be better versions of our current selves. Probably, I’m cribbing that from somewhere else, but I can’t call to mind from where, exactly.

Selections from "Katie Ghazals" online at HFR

2009-12-04T13:59:00.001-05:00

Five sections from my longer elegy project, "Katie Ghazals," appear in the current issue #45 of Hayden's Ferry Review. They are also featured on the HFR website, as work excerpted from the issue. Click Here to see them.

"We Get To Have Our Birthdays."

2009-12-04T02:29:00.018-05:00

To anyone who will listen, these last two years, I've insisted that Friday Night Lights (FNL) is the best thing going on television, bar none. What I usually say is that I'm not a big fan, generally, of high school, football, or Texas, but the show makes me appreciate all three (as well as what are definitively the best marriage and family dynamics on TV). I blogged earlier this year about why I like this show so much, so I won't repeat myself, except to say that Friday Night Lights exists through a strange partnership between NBC and Direct TV, by which the latter underwrites some of the costs of making the show in exchange for exclusive rights to air the episodes to subscribers in advance of the regular broadcast season. The current season (#4) airs right now on Direct TV and will air on NBC in summer 2010. I am not a Direct TV subscriber, but I have found various online sites by which I've been able to watch this season. I strongly encourage you to check it out, especially if you follow this blog because you appreciate what I've written previously about living with and through grief and mourning.

I don't think I'm ruining the show if I say that one of the plot points of this season is the character Matt's experience of grieving for his dad, who has died while serving in the military in Iraq. Two scenes from this week's episode just felt right on, in their portrayal of throwaway aspects of grief. The first is Matt, after deciding to view his father's body (against the advice of the funeral home director), struggling to sit still at a dinner table. The second is Matt's grandmother (his father's mother) tending to her hairstyle before leaving home to attend the funeral. In the former, Matt winds himself tighter and tighter, refusing to eat, then feeling guilty for not eating a meal offered to him, then going back and forth between apologizing and declaring he can't eat, until he breaks down. In the latter, the grandmother needs to control the only part of the upcoming funeral that she can--a long day, no doubt, and she knows it's going to be hard, so she takes the time to get this one detail right before facing the world.

There is a heartbreaking moment during the episode where Matt tells his girlfriend that what he's going through is what people go through, have always gone through, will always go through. It's what she'll go through one day. And it plays so deftly on that feeling that grief overwhelms and consumes life, and if you thought it wasn't coming for you, man, were you kidding yourself. Except that, of course, the anxiety sets in quickly for someone who isn't grieving, at least not yet, and she starts to worry about the people around her, who are dying only in the most general and gradual sense (her parents are the shows stars, after all). The Chicago doc used to say that living and finding meaning in life requires rejecting the certainty and finality of death, and that it was especially hard for people who have experienced death and loss at an early age to embrace this denial. I liken it to what I understand the experience of being born again is: until you've experienced it, you can't really explain it to other people, but who could ever go back?

If death is something that can't be denied, then it has to be transformed into something to live with. But what transforms grief? Is it (for some) elegy? Then what makes it that part of elegy that instructs the living? Watching Coach walk with Matt back to his house, I realize that there is so much nuance to being supportive and empathetic, not least of which is finding ways to remove yourself from the center of the experience--to be the guy who knows about it, can talk about it and understand it, make sense of it and help with it, instead of just the guy who's going through it.

The project of elegy is to find in the intensely personal experience of loss those universal qualities that contribute something back to a society: to honor the dead, acknowledge the loss, and instruct the living. So, it seems lazy to insist that the experience of loss is something so exclusive and inscrutable. It is, of course, but so is traveling in outer space, and playing third base for the Yankees, and both of these experiences are regularly chronicled and translated to the uninitiated. And then I also wonder if all loss can really be captured under such a broad umbrella as "grief." Is grieving for a wife the same as grieving for a father? Is grieving for a young wife the same as grieving for an older wife? Is grieving for a child the same as grieving for a parent? Is grieving for a sibling the same as grieving for a friend? I can list all of these permutations, but you get the point. In many ways, we’re not all in the same boat. We may not even want to be in the same boat.

Matt gives a eulogy for his dad, in which he observes that he got to have so many birthdays at home because his father was working in the military, providing for his family, and that we all get to have our birthdays because the military provides the kind of security that allows for prosperity and rituals. It's simple, honest, and beautiful. It gives a sense of meaning and appreciation to the people at the service. But then there's a second part of the scene at the funeral. The honor guard steps forward and folds the flag draped across the coffin, then presents it to Matt's grandmother. They thank her for her son's service, on behalf of the country. They fire the guns into the air. Eventually, everyone leaves except for Matt and his girlfriend, who sit awhile. Then, Matt gets up, takes the shovel from a groundsperson, and starts to fill his father's grave. He takes off his coat, works at it harder, the camera moves to looking up from the grave, and is covered. Matt has been a public witness for his father, but the act of burial itself is something he undertakes with a lot of energy and determination. Soon, he'll be finished with the act of burial, and then what? What keeps us busy is entirely different from what sustains us.

My Reading at a Benefit in San Francisco

2009-12-03T16:16:00.002-05:00

On Saturday, November 14th, I read at a San Francisco benefit for the International Studies Academy. The audience featured many younger children, so I read the Ogden Nash poem, "The Tale of Custard The Dragon," followed by my own wrestling poem, "Rock Is Coking." Evan Karp, a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner, who also read at the event, filed this report, which features the video below.

Mick "Mankind" Foley, Civil Rights Champion!

2009-11-20T11:39:00.006-05:00

This whole clip is pretty awesome, but especially starting at 2:10. It's great to see a professional wrestler stepping it up to defend a boy being bullied by his peers for his beliefs about gay rights.

Cactus Jack, you make us proud!

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Feed The World

2009-11-17T18:49:00.037-05:00

Pop-minded holiday music is generally awful: off-tune renditions of over-sung, hyper-produced chestnuts like "Ave Maria," "What Child Is This?" and "O Holy Night". But some of it, like Bruce's cover of "Santa Clause is Coming To Town" or Run-DMC's original "Christmas in Hollis" is pretty awesome. Who doesn't dig those Adidas jumpsuits, the jammaster elf, The Boss asking Clarence Clemons if he's going to be on the naughty or nice list?

November 24th marks the 25th anniversary of the original Band-Aid supergroup collaboration, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" If you're like me, seeing the video on television that winter was a formative game-changer. Who were these weird British dudes in plaid with awful hair intercut with images of skinny black people in weird clothes, living in poor places? Why were my sister and all of her friends buying and playing the single nonstop? Were there really places where people didn't know it was Christmas time and were too poor to celebrate it? (Admittedly, my seven-year-old mind didn't quite grasp the great questions of the day but, hey, it was a start).

The story goes like this: producer Bob Geldof watched a BBC television report on the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, called up his friend Midge Ure, and together they quickly wrote the song, just in time for Geldof's promotional appearance the next night on BBC Radio, where, instead of promoting his new album, he made a general plea to all like-minded musicians and artists from the Commonwealth who wanted to perform the new song to join him the next week in a recording studio. Expecting a few friends, nearly 50 turned out. Expecting to raise around $100,000, they instead, eventually, raised nearly $300 million for famine relief. Sting laid down the vocals so that everyone could learn it in the one day they had to record all of the parts. The single sold more copies than any other British release in history--during the brief period that Wham hit #1 with "Last Christmas," Andrew Ridgley and George Michael felt so bad that they donated the proceeds to Band-Aid--and the next year's Live Aid international mega-concert furthered the charity effort.

Katie used to say that she decided to join the Peace Corps after spending a long evening doing her holiday shopping at a mall where "Happy XMas (War Is Over)" was playing over and over. She never noted this fact with much appreciation--the song made her feel so bad about what she hadn't done to change the world that, years later, she still couldn't listen to the song without feeling guilty. I used to secret away to listen to the song in private, appreciating its political punch and ability to make sing-along-worthy and happy its statement of serious moral uncertainty. Now, it's a song I can't stand much to listen to without bursting into tears.

Both "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "Happy XMas (War Is Over)" are regularly criticized for being self-righteous, preachy, bloated statements of liberalism that say a lot but do very little. And, if you're looking to celebrities to develop nuanced, long-term policies that address the subtle intricacies of foreign development and military strategy in four-minute pop tunes, then you've hit on a crucial point. But consider the sheer leveraging power of these songs to provide bully pulpits to speak to broad audiences about politically-inconvenient issues of the day. Following his re-election, Reagan spoke candidly about his religious beliefs that Christmas season, instituting a children's Pageant of Peace to accompany the annual tree lighting ceremony, while also insisting that Ethiopia's famine that year was the result of its adherence to godless Communism (rather than, say, bad luck or natural cycles of the Earth). Similarly, the 1971 release of "Happy XMas (War Is Over)" followed on the heels of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, nearly three years after President Nixon had reveled he possessed a secret plan to end the Vietnam War (it would formally end after still another four years).

Seven years after "Do They Know It's Christmas?" American recording artists came together to record their own super-song, "Voices That Care," a statement of support for American troops serving in the first Gulf War, which also doubled as the launching event for the ubiquitous yellow ribbon of support. Nelson, Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, Chevy Chase, the Pointer Sisters, and Bobby Brown, among others, came together to express their personal support for the troops, independent of any political feeling. The result--a cloying, poorly-lyricized, Kenny-G-happy sing-along--was a staple of my summer playlist. I wasn't going to let the nearly 26% of Americans who opposed this war silence my support! I had a voice that cared, which was crying out loud, knowing in my heart that my love burned bright with patriotism:

I like to think that my susceptibility to celebrity acts of charity and Christmas music has been boosted, like some mega-dose of Vitamin C, by the ironic detachment I've cultivated in my years of watching baseball heroes commit manslaughter, pop heroes prey on small children, and family-values Seantors arrested soliciting gay-sex in bathrooms. Instead, with Thanksgiving just around the corner, I'm wondering what the contemporary political super-statement has evolved into. Has Obama cornered the market as the uber-celebrity? Does Sean Penn's paddling a rowboat into New Orleans or visiting Iraq qualify as an act of political conscience? Brangelina adopting foreign-born babies? If so, why are these acts so singular? Where has the collaborative spirit gone? What's the intended outcome? And, where's the risk?

President Bush used to like to say that, whether or not you like him, you always knew where he stood. What bothered me about that declaration was that his opinions were never really controversial--that there was more potential for controversy in John Lennon and Yoko Ono refusing to spell out "Christ" in the title of "Happy XMas" than there was in all of George Bush's statements about Iraq and Afghanistan put together. If it is fashionable to speak like an "average American," then it also seems fashionable to claim to do outlandish things while never actually rocking the boat. This past Sunday's New York Times profile of Megan Fox absolutely skewers the actress's penchant for manufacturing controversies that are not at all controversial--that are conventionally salacious ("sometimes I like girls") but lack the substance of and commitment to dissent ("but I'm also in a long-term stable relationship with a man for the past 6 years") that inspire actual controversy.

The only example of true controversies that I can think of in the past eight years both involved prominent African-American artists whose careers were permanently unsettled by their boldness. The first, Janet Jackson's famous nipple exposure, has been plenty picked over. The second, though, remains positively harrowing, impacting, scary, and thoroughly masterful--and silenced. Amiri Baraka's spoken-word performance, "Somebody Blew Up America," is a disturbing poetic statement of dissent. I strongly disagree with the quality and substance of Mr. Baraka's easy generalizations about race, gender, sex, and consequence, but I cannot deny the power of his performance, and I very much admire his commitment to the work despite having lost nearly everything for his commitment to it. One day, I'm certain, "Somebody Blew Up America" will find its way into the major poetry anthologies of work from this era. But, for now, it's too hot to handle, too cold to hold, and too singular for anyone else to sing:

My Chapbook, Zugzwang (RockSaw Press, November 2009

2009-11-11T15:11:00.005-05:00

RockSaw Press, an independent publisher based out of Mankato, MN, will publish later this month my chapbook, Zugwang. They've devoted some nice attention to the chapbook at their website, which includes a sneak peak at the cover, brief description, author's bio, and self-interview.

If you're interested to do so, please check it out!

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.

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