The center of it all

In Stegner's Crossing to Safety, there is a moment when the narrator describes the writing cabin of the father of one of the protagonists up at their summer lake house in Vermont, and as evidence of his level of abstraction and distance shows him working on the Bogomils and Albigensians. My heart, of course, fairly leaped at this little point.

There was a moment when I was working on my dissertation, call it 1995-96, where the confluence of Bogomils and Albigensians seemed right at the heart of it all. The Bogomils were a sect that, in their day -- 12th-13th century, somewhere in there -- were amongst Slavic lands most popular in what subsequently became Bosnia. It was their relative success that made Orthodoxy weakest amongst the Bosnians, so when the Ottomans came through a couple of centuries later, Bosnians converted to Islam, whereas those who later came to call themselves Serbs and Bulgarians stayed true to Christianity. All of which was a precondition to the wars in Bosnia in the mid-90s, in which Islamic patriots from as far away as Afghanistan came and fought.

The Albigensians were a Western outcropping of the same heresy, centered in Languedoc, over between Provence and the Pyrenees. In his 1939 classic, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont somehow tied the Albigensians into the concept of tragic love that became the norm in Western romance, such as that of Lancelot and Guinevere.

So, at one feverish moment when I was deep in my dissertation on the allegorical nature of love narratives in the Russian and western novel, the Bogomil/Albigensian thing somehow was a big freaking deal, it tied together what I was working on and what I was seeing in the headlines, and made me feel like I had my hand on the pulse of history. I'll be damned if I remember exactly how it all fit together, but it did. In Stegner's novel, nobody wants to talk to the old scholar about the Bogomils, after lunch they send him packing back up to his little scholarly shed, but I would totally have loved to talk to the guy. For 10 minutes or so. Then I too would have fallen prey to the blandishments of the lake.

Archival post

Easing into this Memorial Day. Mary is away in Georgia with her photography school buddies, we're planning to have sushi with mom this evening in Carrboro. It's overcast now, and I slept in as I'm still recovering from four days of talking to people up north.

While I was up at Yale I talked for a little while to a guy who was in my residential college, but whom I didn't know well at all, to say the least. It turns out we're in the same business, nominally, though firm now manages about $28 billion with about 30 employees, orders of magnitude more than we do. I will confess to getting curious, and I looked him up at the SEC web site and also using the Google. I was somewhat comforted to see that he is in a family business, which was founded by his dad. His lifestyle was evident on the web, and he's just a ton richer than I am. His vacation house is crazy nice. He basically lives on another planet.

But the fact of the matter is that the planet I live on is just fine. Last night Graham and Natalie and I had poached eggs and asparagus with nice bread from Whole Foods (Natalie's idea). Actually Graham ate chicken. Then we gathered under the very soft blanket on the couch and watched two episodes of "Brooklyn 99." Then I watched Lebron finish off the Celtics, which was pretty boring basketball, but I have to admire him and them for getting that done in Boston.

Graham, who acceded to getting a haircut yesterday, just emptied the dishwasher and went to the curb to bring in the recycling container and get the mail. All without having been asked to do so. Then I came downstairs, with the intent of checking to see if Graham had any homework to work on before his friend came over. He was sitting on the couch working on something, "also hanging out with Rascal," he added. Rascal is sitting in one of her favorite spots on the couch, the same spot where she hunkered in amongst 70-80 people when we did a fundraiser for Josh in January.

I haven't heard Natalie fill the dishwasher. I may have to ask her. Then again, she is probably reading Anna Karenina, of her own choosing, which ain't chopped liver.

Oh yeah, yesterday Natalie had a young man over to bake scones. I will omit his name out of respect for his confidentiality, but he was a very nice young fellow. They baked both scones and banana bread. For some reason the boys at East never seem to have appreciated what a lovely young lady we have raised. Maybe she intimidated them.

On the pond again

And so, the spring travel season draws to a close. Over 8 weeks, Charleston, some swamp near Columbia, Seattle, Greenville, Asheville, New York, New Haven.

This week's was a particularly long trip, four long days, three nights, a little too late in the season from a weather perspective, though somehow I didn't wilt in Manhattan in black jeans when it was maybe 90 out. Perhaps it is a sign of aging, my mother's mild cold-naturedness setting in. How many people did I talk to, 35, 40? It's a total blur, as reunions often are.

Late Saturday at LaGuardia it was practically desolate. I suppose everyone had already hied off to wherever they were going.

Pressing forward with Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, per Emily's suggestion. When I started it, I first thought "ugh, On Golden Pond with higher sheen," but there is something about it that is worthwhile, earnest. Fact is, I actually liked On Golden Pond, though I imagine it would be feel like a period piece of its own by now.

Romance

Watching the pilot for "The Office" with Graham last night, trying to figure out what we'll watch together next. Afterwards, Graham said he didn't like the Pam-Jim plot line. "You mean the romance?" I asked. He said yes. He also said he had a list of other shows that were ruined by romance plot lines.

We're getting there.

Parallels

Late yesterday afternoon, on Facebook, I came across a post from someone I know from high school. Her son, whose middle name was Clark, had died at the age of 25. I looked closely. He was a musician who had struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, and finally lost his struggle. The specifics weren't clear, they do not matter.

All I can say is that I am infinitely fortunate to have found help when I did, at the age of 24, helped on by conscientious law enforcement and mental health professionals, and also that my challenges came to light when they did historically, long before it was socially acceptable for middle-class kids to dabble in opiates.

It was late in the day when I saw the post. After reading the kid's obit, I packed up my computer and went home to see my family.

The beginning, not the end

I have to keep telling myself that. I was just ordering tickets for Natalie's last show at East, and I had "an emotional moment", as men say (i.e. I started crying). The idea that she's leaving continues to be pretty overwhelming.

In happier news, we were delighted to hear that Brooklyn 99 has been picked up by another network. Natalie and I have been watching in recent months on one of the streaming services.  We have a tradition of singing along to the theme music, developed during Parks and Rec and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Since there are no words to the theme for this show, we dance.

Before sitting down on the couch with me and getting under the couch (where she sticks her feet in my lap and wiggles her toes to beg for a foot and calf rub), Natalie gets a jar full of "bubbly" (i.e. sparkling water), so we have bubbly together. All very civilized.

The archive

Yesterday at Mother's Day dinner Natalie started asking about when she learned to read, so I checked the archive, which is of course this here blog. Somewhere in there I found this post detailing what the putting the kids to bed routine looked like back in December 2005. Natalie really dug it.

And I will confess that those posts, the deeply archival ones, personal memories, are the ones that I like best too, when I re-read them. All the philosophizing comes off a little shallow. Though I am who I am, and I gotta be me somehow.

So perhaps I should rededicate myself to the memoiristic function, perhaps with the aid of family photos.

As for yesterday, I attacked several of those chores which needed to be done, though a couple of them were over my head. Often, I just need professional help. I am not mr fix-it.

Late in the day I went for a swim, really planning to wake my swimming muscles up from their slumber. While on Saturday I play 80 minutes of soccer in the mid-day heat and came out sore but fine, yesterday swimming for maybe 15 minutes totally called out to a bunch of muscles that had forgotten they had work to do. Bodies are wierd.

Just walking down to the lake, swimming, and coming back, I ran into and talked to 15 people.

Natalie pitched in and went to the store for flowers and asparagus, then cooked a little. Graham swept the back deck, including the seam between the deck and the wall, which he felt was a little futile. I explained to him the Pareto Principle, that the first 20% of effort typically gives you 80% of the benefit of the whole kit and kaboodle. Hopefully he got it.

Mother's Day

Somehow, it is almost noon.  I promise I haven't been just messing around all morning. I have been reading, sent some important emails, renewing books, put in laundry...

And yet, somehow it is almost noon and it feels as if I am way behind in the list of things I should be getting done for Mother's Day, primarily things related to home improvement. Things I hate thinking about but generally feel good about having done once I have done them, however half-assedly.

They include:

1. Get ashes out of fireplace
2. Caulk around back of kitchen sink
3. Assemble coffee table for porch
4. Take Subaru to car wash, clean it up, take pix and post to Craigslist so I can get some $ out of this thing before I fall entirely in love with it
5. Sweep pollen off of back porch (the ultimate Sisyphian chore)
6. Make sure I have all I need to cook dinner
7. Fix faucet in Graham's bathroom (before Mary's mom and Rob come for Natalie's graduation
   
   Also
   
8. Go for long swim in lake
9. Try to talk Graham into getting a haircut.  If so, get it done (mine too)

That's a lot of stuff. Better hop to it.

The world on my coffee table

Some months back I got basically free subscriptions to a bunch of magazines out of unused airline miles: Inc, Fast Company, and News China.  Mostly they sit on the coffee table and gather dust along with alumni mags and things like North Carolina Agriculture that I pick up at conferences. I barely scratch the surface of the Journal on a daily basis and The Economist weekly.

Which is a shame, particularly in the case of News China, a shared venture with Newsweek. Although it is totally state-sponsored media, undoubtedly heavily vetted and blessed by Chinese censors, it nonetheless provides a lot of insight into what's going on in China. Which is, not surprisingly, a lot. Today I picked up and article about a guy who custom paints sneakers, and does an awesome job, charging $100-$300 per pair.

It is not surprising to see this happening in China. On the one hand, I remember well how David Winters, the portfolio manager at the Wintergreen Fund, was some years ago very heavily overweight luxury watch manufacturers on the theory that the emerging Chinese middle class favored watches as a means of displaying wealth because they couldn't do it with their homes (everybody lives in apartments) or cars (too expensive to keep and maintain for many, plus no driveways to park them in). Then there was the West African guy -- a friend of my friend Alan -- who told of travelling to China just on an exploratory trip and discovering that in Beijing there is a shopping mall dedicated to nothing but sneakers. Ponder that.

I also had momentary twinges of guilt upon reading the article, because I really haven't taken the kids travelling as much as would be ideal. Natalie is headed off to college and has never been to Asia. Shit, I've never been to Asia. Graham would at least love the dumplings and noodles, even if he was exhausted and overwhelmed by the travel.

In any case, Natalie will get there one day if she really wants to. As will I.

Autism, individuality, and the division of labor

Richard Grinker of George Washington University came and talked at Duke a couple of weeks ago as part of Autism Awareness Month. He had a very interesting and thoughful presentation on autism, mental illness, and stigma. One of the most fundamental points he made was that capitalism, to the extent that it forcibly normalizes a model in which people grow up, leave home, find a place in the global economic machine, and replicate the model in their own families -- stigmatizes those who are challenged, through no fault of their own, in so doing. Good point.

As a counter-example Grinker, an anthropologist, told the story of a kid in some African tribe who was non-verbal, probably autistic, but had a remarkable facility with understanding the sheep and getting them in and out from pasture, finding lost ones, something like that. This kid, his point was, has no place in modern, thoroughly functionalized, societies.  I get that. It rings true and, by pointing out that an modern economic construct unnecessarily stigmatizes people who don't conform, is humane and hopeful.

However, we can flip this. Thinking back to economist Ryan Avent's work (see Kindle single The Gated City) on the benefits of highly granularized division of labor and how it boosts aggregate productivity, it's easy to argue that the only way we get an anthropologist who can tell the autism story in this way is through capitalism: i.e. we need very fine-grained division of labor, high amounts of generalized economic surplus, for Roy Grinker's work to exist.

In AA yesterday I was thinking about how this phenomenon connects as well to the effacing of individuality and regionalism and the increase in homogeneity in the corporate workplace. There is a tendency amongst the cultural elite to decry this cultural flattening. But the fact of the matter is, that to have people on far-flung teams working together, they have to be able to work together on things like conference calls, which means their language must be more or less interoperable. And they must be expected to behave more or less the same way. You can't have people being perceived to undercut and diss one another in emails, text threads, conference calls etc. because they have different dialects, intonational patterns, and in jokes. Team players have to gravitate towards a center, more or less, to be able to work together and get the benefits of working in a corporation (so you don't have to hunt down specialized vendors and service providers every time you need one - which takes time. This was the essential insight of Ronald Coase into the nature of firms: see this thumbnail). It is sad that individuality suffers. People need to reclaim that for themselves.

As in so many things, there is a need for balance between the One and the Many, and lord knows it's complicated.

Knocked off kilter

Came upstairs with the firm intent of writing something and then got derailed by my phone beeping: somebody wants to move this meeting by 30 minutes, somebody else wants confirmation on dinner. I got sucked into an article about how the Indonesian market has been hit hard over the last few days, and how a bunch of very wealthy people, including Betsy Devos, have gotten spanked by the collapse of Theranos. That's why they are "accredited investors." They can take those losses, and anybody who put a bunch of money into a company because its blonde, attractive, twenty-something female CEO did a remarkable imitation of Steve Jobs deserves to get spanked.

This is how it unfolds.

But now I have to get on the road.

The Cave

I hadn't been there for many years, I don't know how many. Certainly I hadn't hung out there since I quit drinking, so a quarter century or so. But I was sad to hear that it was closing, so, after some internal back and forth, I pulled on some jeans after Graham and I had watched our show yesterday evening and went up there.

It was packed, sweaty, and stinky. At first I didn't see anybody I knew, just an endless sea of people who looked like I used to look back in the day. Scruffy, bearded, smelly, funky. They looked right past me as if I wasn't there, because to them I was just encroaching on their scene and its twilight. I would have done the same in my day.

Then I found a few people I knew and settled in. A few more happened by. Also a guy who had a pretty decent-sized dog on his shoulders. There was barely room for him to make it through the crowd. The dog was remarkably chill.

I was surprised and pleased to see the size of the crowd, it made me nostalgic for those "good old days." In truth, they weren't all that great, as epochs of my life go. The years between college and grad school were hard times, I was fucked up and kind of clueless. But I was surrounded by similar people who supported me, and they were by no means bad people, just wayward idealists, many of them with substance abuse problems. But not evil. A necessary part of society. It is sad to figure out where they will go in Chapel Hill in the future. Probably Durham. Hopefully Roxboro, eventually. We have some land to sell, and the "creative class" plays an important role in the lifecycle of communities.

At the same time, I've started reading Leslie Jamison's The Recovering, in which she details her own path to sobriety. In the early chapters she focuses a lot on the mythology of the drunken writer which guided her in some of her early days:  Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys. Frankly, I am bored by that stuff. I think her editor could have trimmed a little.

But I'll keep going.