Intermediate High

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.