One thing I never wanted, which continues to feel deeply
offensive and entirely wrong, was to make some crude suggestion of cause and
effect. Things do happen in a certain order. But Katie did not die so that I
could have a life I love now. I do not have a life I love now because Katie
died.
For a while, I have felt my foot dragging a little when I think
about writing new posts here. More than anything, that feels like a sign. This
is an important year, ten years since Katie died, thirteen years since we got
married. There can only be so many distinctions, and so much looking back at
our life, fixed in place very powerfully to her favorite songs, books, movies,
and places, my memories of our life together, before I run out of things to
say, or worse, begin to repeat myself.
So I’ll stop posting here. Thank you so much for reading my
posts. At times, it has felt like a lifeline to know that what I was writing
here was being read.
I do think that I got louder after Katie
died. At least, I hope that is the case. Life is very short, whatever shape
it makes.
And if you didn't get a chance to check out the amazing work that Paul did on the trailer for Young Widower: A Memoir(University of Nebraska Press, 2014), you can see it here:
In the leadup to the 1/1/17 release of my new memoir, Should I Still Wish (University of Nebraska Press, available now for pre-order), I've been writing longer posts in a couple of other places. Here's a preview with links to each:
The University of Nebraska Press Blog / September 26, 2016 / 1,292 words
...Oswalt has spent the week before
Mother’s Day making a thoughtful time for his six-year-old daughter, one that
allows her to sidestep with extended family, more or less, the holiday. And
yet, for reasons beyond his control, the plan falls short. The ticket agent laments.
What a beautiful figure she makes for the unpredictable nature of grief and the
many masks it wears, how it speaks with understanding while impolitely forcing its
way into too many conversations and experiences, hiding both everywhere and in
plain sight. In Oswalt’s telling, like a witch in a fairy tale, grief offers
unpalatable truths. Even her candy is “made from pine bark and ink.” We may
guard vigilantly against grief, Oswalt seems to suggest, but grief is clever
and unrelenting. It is closer than we think.
Contributors on Craft Series / The Missouri Review / June 15, 2016 / 1,306 words
Certain family stories seem to have no beginning. My great-grandmother’s love of professional wrestling is one such story in my extended family. It was curated over the years to include a cooler of beer (that, in subsequent tellings, grew warm and cheap), an easy chair (floral-patterned, with a lever and swing hinge), and, in the pre-cable days of local broadcasts, a television with magical receptivity for broadcasting the squared circle day and night. With each retelling, Granny’s wrestling passion became a caricature, and eventually, a euphemism. Whatever else the news, one often said, “Yep, still watching wrestling.” Or so I imagined. I heard these stories second and third hand, after her death, and to this day, I can’t quite say who told them to me, or when, or why.
The Art of Words Series / Microsoft Blogs / September 16, 2016 / 1,012 words
As a congressman and senator, and later as the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy kept a coconut on his desk. The coconut was old and dried. Etched across its husk was a simple message: “11 Alive. Need Small Boat.” “11” was a designation for Kennedy’s patrol boat, which he commanded in the Pacific during World War II. One night, after the patrol boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, killing two of his crewmembers, Kennedy had risked life and limb to take his crew to safety on a nearby island, where, lacking pen and paper, Kennedy had improvised a distress signal, the coconut. Kennedy eventually flagged down a local fishing boat and gave them a coconut, which they took to a nearby Allied naval base. For his cunning and valor, Kennedy received the Navy Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart, two distinguished war decorations. But what Kennedy displayed for the rest of his life was the coconut.
Svetlana
Alexievich’sVoices From
Chernobyl is a marvelous and tragic book. It is also an
exceptional one, of form—Alexievich’s curates the book, as she does most of her
work, in what she calls a “genre
of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents”—and by
orientation. Voices From Chernobyl is a continuing study of consolation and
sequence at and beyond the human scale, unpredictable in its humanity but also
(especially for those in power) its immediate consequence. As Sergei Gurin
notes in his testimony:
People who’ve been through that kind of
humiliation together, or who’ve seen what people can be like, at the bottom,
run from one another. There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I
understood that I don’t really want to talk about. About the fact, for example,
that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people
don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around.
People aren’t heroes.
In the book, there
are heroes, the many heroic individual who race to the scene (words of national
admiration—heroes, victory, sacrifice—are often shorthand for impending illness
and early death), but also, those many who speak now of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, recount the
devastating effects of its initial denial by the Soviet government, name
the politicos who denied and exploited it, and give witness to the continuing, decades-long poisoning that follows it in
the region, especially Belarus. Always, the human perspective comes forward.
The interest to deny and “move on,” whether political or national or personal,
is denied at every turn. Memory is lived with, rather than past. In this way, Voices From Chernobyl is a moral and democratic
work, willing a perspective—arbitrary, individual, vulnerable to memory and
time and bias, felt and continuous—that un-writes, with each recounting, the
oppressiveness of a single (national, official, historical) narrative. We are,
as Alexievich notes in her postscript, at a debt to these people who have prematurely
fixed their relationship with death and time. "These people had already seen what for everyone
else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future."
I have not so
actively read a book in years. I was showing Cait my copy this evening, and the
progression of my notations is positively manic, beginning with a periodic
single line that becomes underlining passages, then double-underlining and writing
in the margins, making all kinds of symbols to distinguish one passage within
another, one form of admiration against the next, a shorthand I’m still not
sure I really understand. Surely, this was part of Alexievich’s design, the
accumulation of testimonials, their impact and effect. Still, I feel at a loss
to describe exactly how I enjoyed this
book. I did enjoy reading it. I felt very alive while reading it. The book is
full of feeling, and with each account made, an overwhelming sense of the
ephemeral is twinned with some magnificent intrusion of the natural world. The
forests turn, in the days after the accident, yellow, then orange. An abundance
of cows and chickens are seized and eaten by bandits returning to the city. Rusting,
radioactive hulks are unearthed from mass graves and deep pits, scavenged and
sold across the region. Alexievich has said that she is interested in
what happens to the human being, what happens to it in our time. How does
man behave and react. How much of the biological man is in him, how much of the
man of his time, how much man of the man.
Nowhere in Voices From Chernobyl issuffering ornamented. Suffering is
never secondary to anything except, perhaps, feeling. But the natural world,
modified and, with some 48,000-odd years of inhabitation to follow and certain
to be neglected in large swaths, persists in spite of a human sense of
consequence, much less the individual.
There is a Danish
proverb, Old sins cast long shadows. I
came across it while watching an episode of Riveron Netflix. River is the sort of
excellent BBC show that I am less and less interested to watch. Beautifully
shot, very well written and acted, full of unpredictable twists that elegantly
resolve across scenes, episodes, and seasons, River suggests a kind of familiarity to the crime drama that feels
strangely lifeless. Stellan Skaarsgard is terrific in the lead, as a police
detective who lives between the worlds of the living and the dead. His
partner—his best friend and confidante—is recently murdered. He works to piece
his life together and solve her murder. He is a brilliant mess. At the end of
the second episode, I thought, Okay, I
sort of know where this is going, right? Big twist. Revelation. Someone is
either not dead or really dead. The external will gradually become the
internal, or vice versa. Life will go on but it really won’t. Was I so
wrong? I have no idea.I can’t
emphasize how essentially good the
show was, and how disinterested I was in its excellence. I don’t think it's a
disinterest in the show, so much as a dread at whatever horrible final
twist—the excellent Broadchurch, the
pretty-good-until-the-end London Spy, the
thoroughly okay The Fall—will
finally release our hero from his suffering. What is there to live with,
finally, that will not inevitably come next?
A couple of weeks
ago, Bruce Springsteen gave out a free download of his recent Chicago live show.
It was a gesture to his New York fans. Winter Storm Jonas had postponed the
Madison Square Garden show of his tour in support of the 30th
anniversary of The Riverand the wonderful
bells-and-whistles box set reissue, The Ties That Bind. So, The Boss offered
all of his fans a fantastic consolation prize. It’s a terrific live show and
recording, and of course, amazing that The
E Street Band is more or less at it still, and so well, all these years
later. I liked it so well that I downloaded much of The River that I hadn’t really listened in a while, which led me to
this terrific 1980 (Tempe, Arizona) live version of “Out in the Street”:
Bruce is skinny.
Little Steven is really skinny! Clarence Clemons is dapper, in full force. The
tone on his tenor is unbelievable. The song is up-tempo compared with the
Chicago version. The vocals have a bigger range. The arrangement is so tight:
fast. It’s hard to believe that this is the same song as the Chicago concert. It
sounds like the original that it is. The new version sounds almost like a
cover. Both sound wonderful. YouTube is well populated with great Springsteen
tunes from across the years but those prime middle years feel distinctly
uncurated and live, (sorry to use this word) visceral. Near the end of his 1980 review in Rolling Stone rock
journalist Paul Nelson says this about The
River:
While most of The River
runs wide and deep, there are a few problems. Ever since he started
conceptualizing and thinking in terms of trilogies, Springsteen has lost some
of his naturalness and seemed more than a bit self-conscious about being an
artist. At times, you think he's closed off his casualness altogether, that he
can't bear the idea of playing around with a phrase when he could be
underlining it instead. Will we never hear the spring and summer of "Wild
Billy's Circus Story," "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),"
"Thunder Road" and "Born to Run" again? Must even the
brightest days now be touched by autumnal tones and winter light? Bruce
Springsteen isn't an old man yet. Isn't it odd that he's trying so hard to
adopt the visions of one?
''Suffering and I,'' Mr. Updike concludes,
''have had a basically glancing, flirtatious acquaintanceship.'' I see no harm
in that, no reason why those flirtations should not continue. I trust they
will. Mr. Updike writes, in ''Self-Consciousness,'' as if he had nothing to
look forward to but sunset and the western porch: ''Between now and the grave
lies a long slide of forestallment, a slew of dutiful, dutifully paid-for
maintenance routines in which dermatological makeshift joins periodontal work
and prostate examinations on the crowded appointment calendar of dwindling
days.''
Meanwhile I note that he is four years
younger than I am.
A few weeks before
he died, Cait and I saw Clarence Clemons getting out of a car in Marin. He was
using crutches, or a cane, I think. I remember that he was moving really
slowly. I said to Cait, “Hey, that’s Clarence Clemons!” and she had no idea who
he was, and by the time I explained it, he was smiling and talking with
someone, and we didn’t really want to interrupt him, so we kept walking.
Clemons is 38 in the above video. Which is to say, he is my age. It’s hard to
think that there is anything more representative of this time in life than
sitting here, writing a blog post, listening to Sam snore loudly in the
bedroom, the baby waking and crying, Cait grading papers, Walt finally gone to
sleep after some epic Minecraft-related page-turning. Sure, yes, there is an
eagerness in my attentiveness. It feels a bit too on the nose, a warmness to
the kitchen (autumnal?) light and wistfulness for Bruce Springsteen that is maybe
quasi-elegiac in its anticipation, or worse pre-nostalgic, a sure symptom of what
the Chicago doc calls an unease with happiness, or perhaps even a wariness for what
Josh
Billings notes is “the
only difference between the poor and the rich…the poor suffer misery, while the
rich have to enjoy it.” Better, I think, to try to leave such happiness alone,
rather than topple it with acknowledgments and testimonials and evaluations, to
“just
for this evening” let it alone, a line I curated right out of Mary
Szybist’s Incarnadine, a collection
that begins with an epigraph from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace:
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they
are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they
should be an object of contemplation.
Walt loves the
1980s television game show, Press Your
Luck. We watch it most nights. I turned it on in a moment
of desperation a couple of weeks ago, when Walt and Sam were home sick, and I
haven’t heard the end of it since. His enthusiasm and our watching have led me
down any number of internet rabbit holes, the least fascinating of which might
be my extensive knowledge of the life of Peter Tomarken, the
creator and host of Press Your Luck.
What Walt loves, of course, are the whammies. Before every episode begins I
have to reassure him that we are cheering for the whammies, we want the
whammies to win, even if we like one of the contestants, which isn’t really the
point of the show, we want to see more whammies. Walt loves the Tarzan whammy
the best. The Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper whammies are beyond him. I love
that this is one way to spend time with him now that’s new, a way to share what
I know will one day become his sense of humor, a concept I associate frequently
with leisure and silliness, as opposed to the gallows, the satirical, the ironic, and feel
fortunate to do so.
The Leftovers is a show to
watch and wonder why and how one enjoys television. Alternately reviewed as the
bleakest show on television, the
most brutal, and even, television
S&M, The Leftovers is now
rightly earning
recognition asthe best showon
television. The second season, it turns out, is even better than the first. Yes, The Leftovers is a show to be enjoyed. There is dark humor and plenty
of puzzle: blackouts, ghosts, chain-smoking occultists dressed
head-to-toe in white, murky histories, sane fathers, and even, in a strange
throwaway moment this season, Cousin Larry from
Perfect Strangers. Cousin Larry, of course, is one of the non-leftovers, that
2% of the world that one day went missing and never came back. Three years later
the leftovers still struggle to make sense of their absence, to grieve and hope
and wonder, and essentially, to plod along in the world, alternately terrified
and liberated, depending on the person, the day of the week, the place, the
efforts of said occultists to never let anyone ever forget that part of the world
disappeared and has never come back. It is to the show’s great credit that the
event--Rapture? scientific phenomenon? hoax?--is taken as fact, documented but never explained. The periodic
flashbacks to the particular day of the disappearance are less contrived and
more fluid in their structure and sequencing than Lost’s similar
then-now schism (Damon
Lindelof created both shows). We learned what happened without ever skewing toward some ah-ha! why. Here’s hoping that Lindelof, et
al, continue to let that mystery be, which seems possible, even likely, since
the current season’s credits newly run to Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be,” a new
recording of the old classic that previously closed down the series finale of Northern Exposure.
The
persistent knock on The Leftovers is
that it is exhausting
and too dark. Indeed, the show is set in shades of bleakness. But that
bleakness rewards its viewing with some mighty moments of catharsis and, if not
quite hope, then allegorical uncertainty. Watching The Leftovers is to experience e.e. cumming's famous beach visit, that whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it's always ourselves we find in the sea. I like what Emily
Nussbaum said about The Leftovers,
that it is, in essence, a show about “grief and terror… [that] captures the
disorientation of grief in a way that is provocative and rare for television.”
I would add that the show also gives a realistic sense of how people live with
loss, in that complicated range of choices that distinguish a middle ground of
simultaneously living with and after. My favorite characters on The Leftovers struggle to do it well. I can’t think of the word for it. Grace seems high-handed, vaguely sacred.
Withstanding, a little too
self-congratulatory. Perhaps what I admire is the honesty of watching
characters who live practically with grief, rolling the rock each time a little
further up the hill. Certainly, they are not models of past-purging
self-help, though in a clever twist, a whole cottage industry of counseling,
insurance, life-like replicas, and pseudoscience thrives in the three-years-later world of the
show.
Exhaustion is a key talking point among
friends these days. With the kids stuck up on the play structure, or a babysitter safely
installed at home, we wear our exhaustion with honor, alternately lamenting the
bad exhaustion—kid is sick (again!), second and third dinners of (what else?) noodles,
where can one possibly plant a succulent in the yard that it doesn’t get unearthed a few
hours later by tiny hands—and glorying in the good exhaustion. How many cute
photographs can one take of a Halloween pumpkin? Have we shown you the numbers chart? Did we tell you about the time
our son brought over the Kit-Kat to share with Mom because he had given me
his box of Dots to Dad and didn’t want her to feel left out? What empathy! Such sweet boys. Hard to believe he is the same boy who refuses to touch any part of the Chipotle brown rice
that has already touched the cilantro, or caterwauls to the heavens the predictable and shocking arrival of bedtime. How else should we account for the burst of color in our monotonous and delicious mounds of salted, whole grain
goodness? I suppose what strikes me in such moments is the boy's failsafe-seeming
action of living explicitly in two modes. One moment, humane exemplar. The
next, rice catastrophic. There seems little middle ground, which makes life
intense and vibrant, and prone to enormous inflections of emotion. All healthy,
normal, yes, of course. And so vivid!
I’ve
been listening to Surf
on a near constant loop the last couple of days. I know very little about Chance the Rapper, much less Donnie Trumpet or The
Social Experiment, any of whose name I suspect could be a giant put-on; that, as
soon as I publish this post I’ll get a few emails to the effect of, Oh, wow, you really fell for that one, eh?
I only found my way to Chance (another fear: his fans call him something
familiar, and writing “Chance” is the equivalent of that time in college I tried
to impress a stranger by insisting, oh yes, I was absolutely familiar with the
work of ANN-IE DI-FRAHNK-OH) because a few of my students recommended the album. Ask
an honest question. I love especially “Sunday Candy,” a song about familial
love, in particular a grandmother’s unwavering “president of my fan club”
affections, with lovely shades of the ecstatic and spiritual alongside the grand-paternal:
“Let
the Mystery Be” was the song that Amanda sang at Katie and I’s wedding. I’ve written
elsewhere about going to see John Prine and Iris DeMent at the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra in 2002. I think of that song still as particularly “Katie,” one she loved, whose worldview suited hers, and whose elegant guitar accompaniment she instantly recognized. It made her smile. "Let the Mystery Be" is a song I find myself
listening to around the time of her birthday, and again, in June. I don’t mean
to put a particularly dramatic marker in the ground for the song, by the way.
Much of my affection for it was diminished in those weeks and months after
Katie died, if only that listening to it became at least as much a memory of grieving
as it was of so many wonderful evenings. When I hear the song at the start of The Leftovers, I feel as though some
cosmic force in the universe has twinned the wonderful and awful in an
incredibly convenient and personal way: that I can hear the song, watch for all
the disappeared faces and bodies in the credits, and recognize that strange mix
of resignation and rawness that is sometimes thinking about one life while
living in the next. I mentioned to a friend recently that it was Katie’s
birthday, what would have been the start of her fortieth year (just to be
clear, she would have turned 39 this past October 27), and my friend asked
whether I thought about Katie still. Pretty much every day, I said. Was I
supposed to say something else, I wondered? This is my life. That was, too. She's right at
the heart of all of it.
I won’t admire particular moments from The Leftovers, if only to avoid spoilers for what turns out to be a
very nuanced and well-developed plot. I do hope that you’ll watch it, and then
tell everyone you know what great taste I have. Seriously, I really do thing its worth the
investment of time and frustration, even bleakness. When I think of shows that I absolutely love—Friday Night Lights,
The West Wing, Lost, The Office, Veronica Mars—I think of
some unspoken and satisfied expectation that each satisfies, to make me think and feel some excess
of what I think I know about the world, my life, the people I love, all of our regrets,
hopes, failures, ambitions, etc. Like Lost,
The Leftovers presents infinite
variations on an impossible proposition. We live with or we live after. We live with and we live after. There
is no moral or ethical aspect to the proposition, or even, consistency to when
or where it is well-applied or ignored. But the choice shapes us. Whenever I
watch The Leftovers, I’m left feeling
engaged and alive, if pretty exhausted. I suppose the exhaustion is a fair indication
of my own vitality. The life I return to from the week’s latest episode is
recognizable and beautiful, precious and fleeting, and marked fairly by the absurdity that is loving
anything, much less loving it well:
It would be a mistake to say that happiness
necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the
feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is
well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and
limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted.
It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and
a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must
be settled among men. (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
