Him

To the extent possible, I try to post little about Trump. He already sucks up all too much oxygen from the world's discursive ecosystem. It is difficult to ignore him, but I try not to have him monopolize my attention. Mary's attention, to my mind, constitutes a more than sufficient investment from our household.

Yet it is hard to do so, because he is so inane, because he is so dangerous, as he tramples on all the norms of checks, balances, due process, alliances built up painstakingly at many levels by well-meaning representatives of various parties all up and down society.

But also because he does represent a fundamental truth, that there's a huge chunk of society who feels like they have been ignored and left out but that this one guy, this flaming asshole - and his analogues in different countries -- can save them. That he cannot, that they are the only people who can and that to do so they must cast down their cell phones, remote controls and Bibles and other sacred texts and figure out how to help themselves -- and that the state is desperate to help them do so while corporations are content to Taylorize them into irrelevance -- that truth has not sunk in yet.

OK. I just have to stop. It's not productive.

Level-setting

Listening to Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi in the car now, really an incredible book, the autobiography of a guy from Beijing exiled to the Gobi desert during the Cultural Revolution, where he dug ditches, cut reeds on a frozen lake, made bricks, was trained as a "barefoot doctor," and did a host of other things under rather subhuman conditions of starvation, cold, and general privation. Then how he came out, went to the US for college, and eventually becomes an investment banker and private equity deal guy.

And in parallel the story of China and its history. I started in on this book while taking a time out from Ezra Vogel's life of Deng Xiaopeng, which is a plodding court history, for the most part, about the shifting sands of decision-making at the heights of the Chinese Communist Party during much of the time period Shan describes. Shan's is a much more readable book for the general reader, which is pretty much me.

Shan's story is also just a story of an incredibly hard-working, decent guy. He has pretty much herculean stamina and forbearance, which is a nice reminder of what is possible when I am feeling put upon or grumpy.

But of course it is an autobiography, so one needs to take things with a grain of salt. It would be interesting if there were critiques out there of Shan, blogs from people who knew him that said things like: "Actually that guy is a total dick!" But I doubt it, and it is certainly nice and inspiring to read these stories. We want to believe them.

Asleep, Woke

There was a piece in the WSJ's Mansion section one recent Friday about Santa Fe as a great place to buy a house if you are "woke." I didn't read it, I never read that section, but gather it may well have been tongue in cheek about the term "woke." As well it should be.

"Woke" is a nice word for use by students who -- just venturing forth into the world -- must figure out who they are and find purchase in the big slippery world by establishing group affiliations: I am this, not that, etc. But its use by adults is not just silly, it's dangerous right about now. Right about 3 years ago we got our asses kicked by something that came at us out of the blue and was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that we had just seen it happen in the UK, and that we had seen nationalist-populism creeping forward in places like France for years. Far from being woke, we were asleep. And we still haven't actually woken up.

The problem is not that I disagree with those that like to use the word "woke" to complement themselves for their rectitude on matters of substance. Far from it. We are aligned on more issues than we are not, most likely.

But they/we still haven't figured out how to win, and we still haven't made a substantive and earnest effort on an individual basis to understand why we lost.

There was a humorous situation at our house on Saturday. I got home in the afternoon and found a Spectrum van in our driveway with its engine running. We've been planning to cut to cord and go internet only, and in the run up to that our phone was dead. I was also having trouble with the cable TV.

You don't need all the gory details, but we were pissed at Spectrum so we decided to have them send a service guy out to fix our phone and cable. So when I got there the guy made a joke about taking my parking space and I said I didn't care about that but that his engine was running. This was the day after the Climate March. He said he always left it running when it was hot. It was mid-80s and in the shade, so his van would not have gotten hot if he turned it off. But I held my tongue.

To fix our TV he grabbed the remote and turned it on. He said the TV and cable box both needed to be on. I frickin knew that, and had turned them both on. But it was mostly embarassing. But I don't really care because it's just not worth watching cable TV, or it's not worth the attention it takes to find something worth watching.

The phone -- after 45 minutes of head-scratching and trips to the van and back -- turned out to have been unplugged by the alarm company guy when he installed the cell phone alarm system we needed to have our alarm keep working once we cut the cord.

So there I was, pissed that his van was running, thinking about how Spectrum should have a policy about this, and it was all because stuff was either unplugged or I had been hitting the wrong button or just didn't care. If only Spectrum would prorate the bill for when we shut off, the issue would never have arisen.

But at a higher level, I didn't know this guy. It would have been great to have been able to have a real conversation and figure out why it was he really didn't think running his van mattered, or who had convinced him that climate change was bullshit. And the best way to have the conversation would have been really slowly, in a non-judgmental, friendly way. But I knew that if I did so, he'd just keep running his van for longer, that he was on the clock, and I really just wanted to move on with my day.

But I do hope somebody from Spectrum brand management catches this blog in their filter and they should have a policy, because at the end of the day it's costing them money. And the reason they don't care is because they have too few competitors to force them into disciplined cost control.

On skill in literature

At the end of my class on Eugene Onegin on Monday, a guy asked "If it doesn't have a particularly deep meaning and it's not particularly uplifting, why is it so acclaimed? Why should we care?" Although the entirety of my lecture had been dedicated to addressing this question in a complex fashion, I didn't have a one-line answer for him other than to say that it wasn't generally a requirement for literature to have one or the other quality, and I cited Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicide epidemic it had kicked off in the decades prior to Onegin as an instance (I had the timing of it wrong in my mind, Werther was published in 1774 though Goethe was still alive as Onegin came out).

But it does raise an overall question: why is skill and/or technical accomplishment not a sufficient attainment for literature? In painting (Vermeer), sculpture (Michelangelo), music (any number of people) skill and technical complexity in and of themselves are more or less considered adequate to get an artist into the canon, or at least it's understood why they are monumental accomplishments when they first are published.

With literature, it's different. We do want something more, almost from day 1, though verisimilitude often gets you brownie points in the early days.

The Fall

It's a lovely morning, and I was all teed up to write about the crispness of the air, how nice it is to have on sweatpants, etc, when I started watching a video of an interview on CNBC (which I try not to watch) with Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine (who is indeed very smart). I didn't get very far, because the day is too short to watch this kind of thing, or, rather, I have higher impact things that I need to do.

But it did take me back to a fundamental point: there is so much discussion and thought in the markets about monetary determinism: interest rates, money supply, blah blah blah. When fundamentally the drivers of economic growth are population size and productivity. The developing world is troubled by shrinking populations. Everywhere birth rates are below 2.1, including the USA. It's worst in Japan, South Korea, Finland (I think), but everywhere rates are low. Meanwhile there are people around the developing world who want in.

We need to let more of them in, to support economic growth. Which doesn't necessarily need to mean more interstates and McMansions. And our lives are so much happier and better when we let more of them in. The food is more interesting, people get more interesting and beautiful when people from different places fall in love and have children, music gets better... It's all good.

But our political culture is going in exactly the wrong direction with the expansion of neo-nationalism. And we need to fix that.

I don't know who is having conversations with the angry white men and women of the hinterlands about what they are doing on at least a monthly if not a weekly/daily basis to expand their skillsets and become more marketable. Do they listen to books in the car, or do they listen to talk radio that just pisses them off? I suspect the latter.

Missing books

I culled my library a couple of times over the years, once when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane in Princeton in 2003 in anticipation of the birth of Graham (who will be 16 tomorrow) and once more in 2009 as we were paring down to come home to Chapel Hill. So that would have been right around the time of George Sr's passing. So, at watershed moments in life.

My Russian library was what suffered most, of course, as my distance from my academic field grew greater and more pronounced. I have retained a bunch of books, to be sure. Complete sets of Mayakovsky, Turgenev, and partial ones of Goncharov, Belinsky, Pisarev, Pushkin, plus the core canon in translation and a bit of reference.

But getting ready for this Pushkin talk has brought to light that I let go of some important ones. First and foremost, that brown criticism anthology edited by Victor Ehrlich that contained translations of both Shklovsky's article on Pushkin and Sterne -- which I would really have liked to have had over the last couple of weeks -- and, more importantly, Jacobson's "On the Generation the Squandered its Poets," written shortly after the Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, a very special and rare little gem. Yes I can find these things on the internet, and yet I feel like they are part of my life and I'd like to have them around. I may yet hunt for them again. But not on the internet, that would be like cheating. In the used bookstores of America.

Hustling over here

Still a little snowed in under Pushkin, after a decent soccer game with a came by DC Whitenack and a lovely 35th reunion this weekend. Gotta run Graham up to Carrboro shortly.

Yesterday I took Graham to the Service Fair at Carrboro High School to learn about various organizations through which he could earn service hours. At first he appeared to be just rambling around aimlessly, so I tried to give him some direction about some he could check out. After standing with him at a couple of booths, he says to me: "I'm happy to learn more about these, but it's not helpful to have you breathing down my neck." So I backed the hell off, proud that he could tell me that straight up like that. The boy is learning.

Saying no, and specializing

Somewhere recently I heard it said that the difference between successful and very successful people is that the latter say no to almost everything. By that measure, I am an abject failure, but I am getting better.

But this notion aligns with so much that is wise. Today I had a long meeting with a new client, then got a haircut and took Mary to the office, before hopping on a conference call for a Board thing, wherein I pushed something forward without getting formally stuck with leading a project, though I did suggest that I could do some nudging.

Then I heard that one client got a job, while received news that another had had a baby. Both were extremely welcome.

Most business gurus suggest that to have a successful business, you should really specialize quite narrowly -- which is really just a very specific way of saying no to a lot of possibilities -- and I get that. But the problem is that by doing so close yourself off to a lot of experience. So you narrow yourself. So in the end I still come down on balancing specialization and generalization.

And now, off to meet NC's next Treasurer, and then buy soy milk for Graham, before helping with math homework, and maybe working on my Pushkin lecture for next Monday. Sigh.

Home Improvements for Dummies

There was a copy of this book sitting out on our coffee table. I had taken it off the shelf and put it there for some reason before we went to the Northeast in August, but had forgotten why it was there. Then, sometime last week, I remembered that it was because I had to fix something in Graham's toilet, the black plastic floatie mechanism, not the clapper (I have long since mastered that one).

In a moment of pride I mentioned to Mary that I had remembered why I had the book out and she looked at me and, in perfect deadpan, said: "I don't know why we even have that book in our house." We both like to had fell out laughing.

There is really nothing much better to making your spouse crack up hard. After a couple of decades it ain't always easy.

Time out

Need to focus on prepping for lecture on Onegin on the 16th. I called up NC State yesterday to find out how many were signed up. After being on an "Alternative Career Path" panel at an academic conference attended by 3 in February in New Orleans, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.
Instead I learned that there will be 22 people there. So I'd better get my game geared up.

Also, soccer game at noon and a very busy week coming up.

Therefore, most of my brain is occupied by stuff to do, not much of the relaxation that typically lets me blog interestingly. But I'm thinking of you, fair readers.

Chappelle special

Watched a bit of Dave Chappelle's most recent show on Netflix last night. He's doing stand-up in Atlanta.

The thing that impressed me first and foremost is how surprisingly much his groove dovetailed with the Trumpians and other male whiners about what is being taken away from him. How hard it is on celebrities these days, when everybody is all up in Michael Jackson and R Kelly's business just because they were having sex with children. All celebrities have targets on their heads, he tells us. And then he was complaining about how come he couldn't say "faggot" when he could say "nigger." Oh cry me a river.

Throughout history comics have played an important role in critiquing society's repressive tendencies: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, SNL, etc. They burst through boundaries for us. That's great, thanks. But right now Chappelle just sounds like a little too much like some dude on Reddit whose had his Nth Amendment freedom taken away.

Still, he's pretty funny here and there. Because he's Dave Chappelle, bitch. Not as funny as the first season of his show, but that was like an all-time peak for comedy, he ain't never going back there.

A donut

After all my deeply insightful blogging and after a fine showing last time out, Adam crushed me 6-0 today. But it was a competitive 6-0. The first game probably had 8 points at deuce.

One thing I need to remember is that, sad though it may be, I really have to be careful with my swimming as we turn the corner into soccer season. I slightly strained a quad today running for a particularly deft drop shop of Z's because I was still tight from an extra-long swim on Monday. Swimming doesn't dovetail nicely with the sports involving sprinting and changing direction quickly. Which is particularly sad, because as the days get shorter and less hot, the water in the lake gets fresher, so it's a nice time of year to swim. I guess I'll have to stick to recreational as opposed to exercise swimming.

Didn't do anything terribly today, though there were three double faults, mostly I just went for winners and missed too many shots. Though there were some beauties to be sure.

Next time.

Watching the transactions

One of the great things about having shared bank accounts with our kids -- along with being able to move $ into them easily -- is being able to observe their spending. Graham doesn't spend on anything -- except the time he signed up for some "Free TV" thing on the internet and some German company was dinging him for $35 a month for a while. That was fun. BofA credited it back to our account.

But Natalie is out in the world, so I can see what she's up to. Laundry. Book store. A coffee or two a week. Now and then a Lyft or Metro North to NY. She is a good kid, which is a beautiful thing.

What more can I say?

How things are done

At our Lake Board meeting the other night, the Chair was describing how the staff currently sweep the sometimes copious goose poop off the floating docks into a bucket and carry it in a boat or canoe back into the woods to dump it there. Because meetings always run too late and this was much too small a topic to kick off a potentially contentious discussion, I didn't say anything. It has always been my practice to kick the stuff off the dam with my foot, or if necessary my hand, into the lake, and then splash off the remnant using lake water. This tends to get the dock to an appropriate Pareto or 20/80 level of cleanliness.

It is a frickin lake, after all, and animals are pooping in it 24/7.

Often there are parents over on the beach 20-30 yards away, and none of them has ever said "oh my god! My child is swimming in this lake and you are putting goose poop in there." Far from it, I believe they are actually thinking "thank God that guy is taking care of that nasty work. I just had to change a diaper (or just got through that stage a couple of years ago) and am tired of dealing with poop."

The next day, I and another member of the Board, a scientist who tests the water and deals with environmental contamination professionally (teaches at Duke, consults with Beijing, New Delhi on air quality) if it would be Ok if the staff just swept the poop into the lake. Of course it would, I said.

Today I was sitting on the porch reading The Economist, and I was very happy to see some kid float out to the docks on a boat and do exactly what I described above. Did a great job of it, in fact.