Stevens on the brain

The name Wallace Stevens has come up a lot recently. 2 people from way back, Jon and Hilary, invoked him practically on successive days, completely unconnectedly.

Stevens and William Carlos Williams seem like the rare poets who held down regular jobs, and who therefore should speak to the souls of those of us who also have jobs. Like a high brow Dilbert. But people appear to identify with Williams less, maybe because he was a doctor dealing with actual bodies and so not subject to the same degree of tedium as Stevens, lawyer and insurance exec. Or maybe because Williams with his red wheelbarrow became an over-anthologized icon of an insufficiently threatening avant-garde. Me, I like the guy.

But I remember when I went into consulting and found myself working for insurance companies, I thought that Stevens was gonna speak to me, that we would be sharing some deep insights into some alchemical blend of the literary and the actuarial. So I bought a collection of poems. In my old house, I never got to reading it much. When we brought our new house, the front porch seemed like the perfect place to sit and read Wallace Stevens and consider things. So I put the little book out there on the bench. And it gathered dust. Or I would pick it up and Natalie would come round the corner screaming. Or I'd start reading something and space out. And then the dog or Natalie must have mangled it, because the cover got torn up. And then fall came, and the cold winds and rain set to blowing, and it was clearly time for the poor neglected cheap used book to go inside, and wait for another spring, when maybe I would read some of it.

I've done better with Cheever. Short stories lend themselves to being read.

Bigger than a Big Box

The Grouse does not tout products or stores all that often, but today he's making an exception. Material Culture, in Philly. Like any physical place, you've got to get there, and the path to Wissahickon Ave is studded with fun.

• 95 South See billboard for the House of Wax, with a picture of a panther or something and the slogan "Prey. Slay. Display. " Man, you know we're taking the kids there.
• Exit 30, Cottman Ave: It's the kind of neighborhood we have none of down south. City Irish, with long decrepit row houses made of mixed brick and stone. Note the Block & Cleaver butcher shop. Very old school
• Left on Roosevelt Ave: Many are the attractions here, including Regan's Pub, with a separate "Ladies' Entrance". After that stop into the place advertising "24 Hours Billiards and Steaks"
• Right on Wissahickon. By now the neighborhood is all black and poor. You're almost there

Material Culture occupies a big rotting old factory building in the middle of a slum. Under mixed Turkish and Serbian management (no mean feat), staffed by groovers and people from the neighborhood. Football fields of space, with almost no climate control. It's hot in summer, today it was pouring rain and leaking inside. So they picked up Chinese copper basins from their inventory to catch the drippage. There's a pettable free range Weimaraner to entertain the kids.

What do they sell? Turkish rugs, Indian cabinets and other furniture, Romanian chests, various Chinese bits of furniture, some modern stuff, wierd folkish paintings of celebrities, tons more. Much of what ABC Carpets sells, for 1/3 the price. We paid $830 to have an antique Indian dining room table delivered too our house.

There's always a seasonally appropriate free snack and bev.

Midwesterners and Yankees like to fly to High Point, NC to buy new furniture. Which is fine. This is so much a better deal, for people from up this way. It's the coolest store I've ever been to. Makes me want to have a bigger house just to buy more furniture. It actually gives back to its neighborhood. Go there.

The Brothers Kaufman

"Equal parts Andy Kaufman, Henry Kaufman, and Walter Kaufman. And seltzer."

That's a little hermetic even for me. Here's a guide:

Andy Kaufman: Latka, prime Mighty Mouse advocate, champeen wrestler, not welcome in Memphis, Tennessee.

Henry Kaufman: Longtime economist at Salomon Brothers. Dry, grandfatherly, but very informative writer. In a characteristic flourish, he writes of his wife, Elaine: "She has been the center of my world for more than four decades, and has shared all the strains and triumphs of my life and career." Ya gotta like him.

Walter Kaufman: Professor of Philosophy at Princeton. Copious translator of Nietzsche. Oh too prone to footnoting himself, as if nobody else had written anything on a given subject. Liked to treat his introductory essays to school of thought anthologies as if they were equally weighted with the selections, so the table of contents would go: Kaufman, Kierkegaard, Dostoievskii, Heidegger and so on.

Seltzer: My beverage of choice.

Princeton Junction station. 10:15 AM

13-year old boy: "Summit," he says, utterly disgusted. "Summit is such a pathetic excuse for a place." He speaks with an authority born of years.

All hating together

The Times today published a heartwarming photo of numerous Israeli religious leaders -- Islamic, Catholic, Armenian, Ashkenazi, and Sepphardic -- coming together in opposition to a common foe: gay rights. Nothing triumphs over prejudice quite like prejudice. Anti-semitism, one of society's traditional glues, just won't work there for some reason.

I found myself driving to work singing along with the Smiths again, and my mind drifted off to Tony Thomas, a tall, well-dressed black guy who hauled himself from the under-manicured streets of East Chicago, Indiana to Yale Law School in the eighties. Between a multi-year research project on House Music, a serious appetite for tha kine, and dying at an excruciatingly young age of AIDS, he never quite made the mark that he might have. On his chest of drawers he had a picture of himself at his high school prom, in a colored tux with a good sized fro and a female date. It must not have been fun to be gay at an i high school. I miss the guy.

Special K

The cleverly named CoachK.com points out that the Spawn of Knight passed Dean Smith for total career NCAA tournament victories (66) when Duke beat Mississippi State to get into the Sweet 16. Where they lost.

Lets just take a second to note that Mr. Unspellable has coached almost all of his career in a tournament with 64 teams and six games. When Dean got started, there were 22 teams in the tournament, then 32 (1975), 40 (1979), 48 (1980), and 64 (1985). Making Dean's victory total much harder earned. There were fewer round of 64 gimmies back then. K's got no fewer than 15 of these fluff games on Dean. For now.

Like a good corporate shill, CoachK lards his site with inspirational witticisms like this: "Leaders have to give time for relationships. But more demands will be placed on their time as they become more successful. So if a person’s success is based on developing relationships, then they have to continually find new ways of getting it done.” Like delegating the relationship-building function.

This one also struck me as deep: “Visualize a wagon wheel as a complete team. A leader might be the hub of the wheel at the center. Now suppose the spokes are the connecting relationships the leader is building with people on the outer rim of the wheel. If the hub is removed, then the entire wheel collapses. In a situation like that, if a team loses the leader, the entire team collapses.” The man is smooth with his metaphors, for sure.

I'm really not sure how I made it this far in life without Coach K's quotes. I'm surprised he doesn't charge for access to them.

In the noggin

The Times reports today that out West somewhere a court invalidated a death sentence because the jurors had consulted a bible in reaching it, when the judge had clearly instructed them to use their own judgment without outside influences. What if one of them had memorized the Bible, or just cited it? What difference does the presence of the physical book make, when it's the text that matters? How is one supposed to make moral judgments in a vacuum?

The point is that the state's not supposed to be killing people, period.

Though McVeigh was worth frying. I'd say Kozlowski and the whole Enron gang should burn too. Capital punishment for crimes involving large amounts of capital, as I used to say.
(Blog sanitized here to prepare for promotional email blast).

sweet orange velvet: Issyk oh so Kul

Love is in the air of Bishkek, Kiev, Tbilisi. Who woulda thunk it. Last time I was paying close attention to the former Soviet realm, Kyrgyzstan was like a big dry Switzerland and Akaev was Mr. Nice Guy amongst a bunch of real roughsters, and now he's up and flown the country. It all takes you back to Prague in '89, almost. Problem is, Prague was all ready for its Velvet Revolution, with a favorable geographic location and an openness driven by Mitteleuropa-crazed backpackers in the 80s. Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Ukraine, on the other hand, don't have it all organized, and will probably muddle along more like Romania and Bulgaria. God forbid a power vacuum should arise in Georgia. That would be no fun.

That's where having well-placed friends helps: "(Georgian President) Saakashivili invited billionaire financier George Soros to help pay some government salaries and boost all-important tax collection."* Good idea. I think I'll invite Soros to pay for some stuff too. No but seriously, instead of providing services which supplement government (school books, salaries for nuclear scientists, etc), as he has so often, here Soros is propping it right up. It's sort of a new model.

In some ways it's odd how Soros's mission and Wolfowitz's are fellow travellers to a certain point.

In general, optimism is the tone of the day. Here's what Zbigniew Brzezinski says in the Journal today, in support of a rising democratic pluralism in the post-Soviet zone: "Russian youth are well-educated. Increasingly, many have traveled and studied in the West." Shows how long he's been away from the region. He must not have read the surveys showing that a shocking number of Russian youths don't know who Lenin was. Sure, they know about Britney Spears and the Royal Deluxe. They could probably even set me straight on Lindsey Lohan. But that's about it.

*Columbia Alumni Magazine, Winter 2004-5

Props to Ray Ray

After busting on Felton a few weeks back, credit must be given to the young man for nailing four free throws in the crunch time against those cheese-heads. How bout em?

Guru on message

Caught a PBS-like chat with a certain Jon Kabat-Zinn on the TV this weekend. The interview started off with the crusty PBS yankee guy asking the bearded Kabat-Zinn: "who was William James?" To which our guest replies: "He was the father of American psychology." And I'm sitting here thinking, he was also Henry James' brother and the father of Pragmatism as a philosophical school, so why sell him short. But as the guy went on and espoused his doctrine of mindfulness and its ramifications and all that, I came to see that he was in fact just a disciplined salesperson, relentlessly on message for his yogic theory of societal enlightenment. The guy was like, I've got 15 minutes up here on the TV and I won't spare a syllable that doesn't sell my product, nebulous though it may be. Impressive

Is he any kin to you, Z?

Oh what a beautiful morning

5:00AM Graham Screaming. Change poopy diaper.

8:00 AM Graham vomits banana and formula

9:10 AM Arrive for 9:15 Dr's appt. concerning Carpal Tunnel System

9: 45 AM Leave doctor's office without having been seen, after leaving small piece of my mind

10:00 AM Arrive Princeton Junction train station for 10:12 train. Because of holiday, metered parking available.

10:03 AM Arrive Princeton Junction station convenience store. Thirsty. Irritated. Need caffeine. Because of holiday, store closed.

10:15 AM Mary calls my cell. Graham has puked again. Should we go to Larchmont for holiday? Will she brave the Turnpike alone with one sick kid and one boisterous one?

10:28 AM 10:12 train arrives. Because of holiday and circus at Madison Sq. Garden (take Natalie?), train full of jabbering families.

11:30 AM Train near Secaucus by now. Phone rings. It's Rick, my lunch engagement, for which I had rushed out of Dr's appointment and for which Jon, my COO and boss, was energetically polishing sales collateral for me to print in New York office. Rick is violently ill and has stayed in Princeton.

11:31 AM Call Ted at Midtown to check on replacement lunch. Ted can't do it. Conference call. Ted tells of how Henry once puked for 24 hour straight while having strep throat at the same time.

11:40 AM Arrive Penn Station. Set off for Rock. Center on foot, psyched for a falafel with hot sauce from place on 48th st.

11:58 AM Arrive 48th st. Falafelteria closed for Purim. Thankfully, nearby Noodle shop is good consolation prize.

12:15 PM Check in with Mary. Trip to Larchmont is on. Thank God I don't have to go back to Princeton, trip not entirely in vain.

New tennis courts

Out running the other day, I noticed that Princeton, the university, that is, had built and is building a bunch (16? 24?) of new tennis courts down behind the astroturf as it slopes down towards the crew sculling lake. To make up for the ones that got bulldozed to build whatever they're building up the hill. In addition to the other sizable tennis center back over there.

And I'm thinking, like, what are they thinking? Nobody plays tennis anymore, courts are so often fallow, land is at a premium, it's just another paved surface to generate run-off. But Princeton must gird up the ruling class by supporting the grand old sports.

Hey, I'm cool with it. I'm gonna be sneaking onto those mugs. I do play tennis. They're not gonna staff them with guards all the time. No way. They cain't stop the kid.

Rainy day in Jersey

Raining outside. Can't even try out my new tires, really. At least I have this funny new keyboard, bent around all funny to make me type more ergonomically. From a company they call Microsoft. I wish it had a cupholder and a picture of Shania Twain doing a rap duet with old Diff Puddy (his actual new name).

Could someone explain to me who Lindsey Lohan is? I've seen her featured on the cover of several of our finest magazines, and I don't know who the hell she is, and she's not even marginally hot, like teen stars are supposed to be. Britney Spears, a least, has well-designed silicon at work, although rumor has it that she's been taking some pointers of late from Kirstie Alley.

Was saddened to hear yesterday that an old friend got dumped and divorced not long ago for failing to perform financially. That ain't right. It's not like it was a huge surprise he didn't make a lot of money. That's the kind of thing you ought to see coming before you marry them. Rare is it for someone to remake themselves out of whole cloth just because they walk down the aisle.

Warm and foggy

The sun and its various reflections has been chasing me around the building here at Midtown. In most places, you can count on the sun to be in certain places at certain times of day. Rise East, set West, is the way I was always taught. But when you're in a glass box, surrounded by others, it's not like that. Going to the East side of the building late in the day does you no good. So here I sit, hands all clammy, trying to concentrate, thinking of hauling the laptop to another corner of this great shiny ghostly office of ours, so unlike the class B shitholes of some of the scrappier little enterprizes I've visited recently.

And it's a nice day outdoors, too. Spring springs. Had lunch at fancy Bryant Park restaurant with Hilary today, which was wierd because the joint was so swanky I felt like I should have been trying to sell her something instead of holding forth about careers, children, ponds and 40.

Running low

Was freaked out all weekend because I thought that my evident Carpal Tunnel Syndrome might be of the "gnarled up hands for the rest of your life" variant. A colleague assures me that they're not that far gone, though I've clearly booked time with the doctor not in vain. There is funky pain coursing around my pinkies and forearms.

So why am I typing so much doggeral, you may ask yourself. Because by now I feel contractually obligated to produce blogtext. Even with little to comment on. I cannot sacrifice my few, proud readers, even though I got two separate emails over the weekend from people saying that they read my blog and therefore feel in touch with me. Would that it were the case. There's more to me than meets the blog, of that you can be assured.

Tales from the Heartland

My mom's in town from North Carolina, and last night she brought us up to date on a friend of hers, whom we shall refer to as Janet. Some years back, Janet lost her husband to a massive stroke which befell him as he was out walking the dog. The cardio event seems to have been correlated with his considerable girth, which in turn derived from his habitual devotion to Southern food.

For many years, Janet didn't do any dating at all, spending all her time with her kids and grandkids and also coaching young debutantes to get ready for the cotillion (I kid you not). Last night mom tells us Janet is married. She started dating a guy in October, saw him monthly for a couple of months, wasn't tight enough with him to include him in Xmas, and now they're married.

Why the rush, you ask? Sex. Those crazy 60-year olds, they wanted to have sex, but thought it inconceivable outside of wedlock Reminds me of a great scene from the 1809 A Russian Gil-blas by Narezhny, when a woman believes that it is literally impossible for a friend of hers to have gotten pregnant because she is not married. I do hope Janet got a pre-nup.

So there's a little tale of the red-state mentality these days. Premature death by fat, premature marriage by fiat.

Diet Dr Pepper spills on train

I spilled my Diet Dr. Pepper on the train this morning, like a moron. Fortunately the car was pre-depopulated because someone else had spilled more of something else earlier, so mine commingled, unnoticed. Very fortunately, cuz people get worked up over spills on NJ Transit. Like that meshuggeneh witch in the Manolo Blahniks who went ballistic on me when someone kicked my coffee over one day and it got on her precious little shoes.

But I do knock over stuff all the time. Not long ago some lasagna slipped off my plate onto someone's white rug. Never mind the wisdom of having a white rug in the dining room, it was embarassing, but cleanable. Fortunately I've been able to confine my accidents to social rather than business contexts for the most part. I did bump into that guy and spill his wine in a pub in the fall of 2003, but he wasn't a client or anything, so it was OK.

I never run into anybody else's car or pet, so I'm good on that.

Little neuroses

In her newly needy mode, Natalie has taken to doing more than just blather on incessantly, sing at the dinner table, lean on you , and make that annoying noise with her tongue and lips that Mary's good at but I'm not. More recently, she's taken to clearing her throat with an almost pathological frequency.

More disturbingly and poignantly, she's developed a tick: she gently lets out a little "yippy," most often while reading stories. Last night while we were reading Billy and Blaze, she let out seven or eight of these "yippies." It clearly involuntary, a reflex against something. But what? Is she freaking out in advance at the onset of Kindergarten? Have we begun to displace too much frustration with other stuff (Graham, career) onto her? Is she just sick of Graham climbing all over her?

How did her parent-teacher conference go today? Crap, have a 1 pm call to get on before I can check in with Mary on that.

Soy cheese sticks to leg of high chair

I was giving Graham some soy cheese the other day and a piece of it slipped out of my hand and fell down, down, till its progress was arrested on the metal leg of his high chair. It just stuck there. I knew transfats had to be good for something.

Trip in vain

I had hoped a sales jaunt up to Northern New Jersey would yield some good blog fodder, but not really.
Yes, I saw an Assyrian Orthodox Church, as well as a Greek one and a Russian one.
Yes, I saw lots of cops waiting by the sides of roads, one even sniffed my butt.
Yes, I went through two toll booths on the Turnpike when the stupid reader wouldn't recognize my badge for jah knows what reason, when the ones on the Parkway were just fine with it.
Yes, some stupid woman in a rusty Dodge Neon spewed oil all over my car.

But really there was little of note. Probably was looking too hard. There was a thing in the New Yorker not long ago about this guy Milch who was a writer for Hill Street Blues and then NYPD Blue and now Deadwood. Mary said that I needed to read it because the guy's just like me: alkie, Yalie, visionary in his own mind. So I read it. In many ways the guy's a pretentious primadonna with Matthew Barneyesque macho stylings, but then he gives his advice to young writers: write 20 to 50 minutes a day, write dialogue, and don't think about what you're writing before you do it. Makes sense. You can't force it.

It's all gotta count

As with spirit, so with spirits: if you got it you can count it.

The Times' intrepid reporters told us the weekends of a new practice out in the red state region: "Power Hour", the hour after kids turn 21 before bars close, during which time they try to knock back 21 shots. As if just doing 21 weren't enough of an accomplishment, some of them have ambitious "to-do lists" line-iteming out specific drinks tasks, which are crafted and overseen by their very closest friends. The need for buckets is foreseen and provisioned for. Good work, America, for bringing task-oriented project and supply chain management to drinking.

Back when I was drinking, let me tell you, we didn't need to count and plan our drinking precisely to know when we were drunk. We were simply at one with alcohol, and respected its natural ebbing and flowing. Frequently. Somewhere along the way, this intrinsic, wholistic way was lost, but now young drinkers have formal best practices to help them fill the gap. There are unconfirmed rumors that, in certain elite bars across the high plains, top corporate recruiters quietly observe power hours and scout for those who dispatch their shots with the greatest dispatch, panache, and presence of mind, searching for the next Jack Welch...

I'll let you know what I hear.

The Motorcycle Diaries

Cinematography: Yah
Easy on the eye casting: Sure, Che is way dreamy and plenty genuine
Script: Ham-handed hagiography

This thing got glowing, glowing reviews. Well worth renting for a peak of the other America down there, but I think most of the reviewers probably got carried away by the good looks of the whole thing. If you really want to get a flavor of South America, rent Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs. Even if you don't want the flavor, rent it. Es muy bueno.

Non-productive labor

Economists have a concept called non-productive labor, or something like that, and the classic example is Soviet factories which put together raw materials, labor, and overhead but come up with such a shitty product that they can't charge enough to make money, never mind about fixed prices in a command economy.

Probably a better example of non-productive labor is trying to cut out words and phrases while reading children's books at night. We've all been there, bleary at 7:56 only half way through our three book quota, reading some verbose non-rhyming thing, trying to excise phrases to get the little one down in a timely enough fashion to escape spousal rebuke for poor time management ("It's past her bed time!"). But it's murderous work, trying to read aloud and read ahead at the same time and figure out how to condense without mangling the narrative. For the most part, it's more exhausting than just reading the whole thing.

And then there's the well-documented problem of kid memorization: "No dad, you forgot to say 'I like your shirt, Henry.'" There's nothing like getting caught red-handed.

Your best bet is non-narrative rhyming books with lots of pages, of which you can skip . Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo is a perfect example. You have to begin by never reading all the pages, so they never have a chance to memorize or internalize the sequence of creatures. Never ever read the whole book, and certainly not two nights in a row.

Takes the prize

Being somewhat curmudgeonly, I don't usually blog on subjects suggested to me, as the suggestion of appropriateness makes me feel boxed in. As A Flock of Seagulls so famously brushed off the "New Wave" label when signing autographs at Northgate Mall in 1983 with the incisive comment, "We don't like labels." History, of course, has vindicated them entirely.

But yesterday Gene suggested that I blog about Templeton Prize, about $1.5 million dollars given by the Templeton of mutual fund fame for "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." The prize wants to catch spiritual progress up with progress made in other, practical realms such as "research and innovation in food products," where things have gotten better by at least "a hundredfold." So we should make things "a hundredfold better" in the realm of spirit. Gotcha.

There are some critics who think it absurd to try to attach a dollar figure to progress in matters spiritual, that the only appropriate prize would be to send a very nice note to the prizewinner so as not to sully their accomplishment with a quantitative and monetary appraisal.

The Grouse cannot sanction this viewpoint. No no, the offense is not in the monetary component of the award, but that it is a flat fee or lump sum. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of compensation theory should see immediately that this is absurd. The only way to properly incent anything, spiritual discovery in particular, is with a scalable variable pay structure, say, 2% up front for progress as it occurs, accrued monthly and 50-75 basis point trailing fees. Since spiritual improvement is, apparently, eminently countable, passing twentyfold and twentyonefold all the way up to a hundredfold, the accounting on this should not be daunting.

Drop off

One wonders why dropping Natalie off at school is the best moment of my day. All the kids are happy, psyched about going to school, greeting each other bouncily. And I see all the parents too, which is very cool. Some from my old neighborhood, some from my new one, some humanists, some business people, sometimes somebody I know from college, some actual Princeton natives. There's a pretty thick sense of community. "Did you get that job?" "How's the renovation coming?" "Did Jenny get over that bug yet?"

After the drop off, the drop off. Back to that.

Enormous brownies

Was talking to Jane in the cafeteria the other day about the outlandishly sized brownies they have. They're as big as 5 or 6 normal brownies. Even I know they're too big. And Jane tells me how one woman routinely buys two, one for snack, one for the evening when she has a class. That's a pretty scary thought. That's much brownie.

And look at the women in the office across the hall from ours. They have at least one cake or cookies or brownies or something every day. Somebody brings it in for sake of camaraderie, some cheap grocery store baked good. That's pretty scary. They eat the stuff every day.

This bespeaks one of two things: either the abject failure of public health education or total fatalism.

And that's coming from me, scarcely a poster child for good diet.

More on "Ray Ray"

Alright alright. Offline chatter is busting me for neglecting Felton's 3pt prowess (not in evidence in game's I've seen). We can only assume Felton's NBA career will eclipse those of Duke's point guards Hurley and J. Williams. I guess coach K teaches them how to drive the lane, but not how to drive within their lanes. Dooohhh.

Natterie

Natalie swore she wanted to watch the Tar Heels, then she spent the whole time being in the way of the TV, or climbing on me, or talking incessantly, or using her tongue to make that incredibly annoying sound she's so fond of and she usually reserves for drowning out Graham, or waving her magic wand around really close to Graham's head so that I would yell at her, or doing her gymnastics on the floor right in front of the TV, etc. And she's surprised when she gets a time out.

It's understandable for a kid such as herself (ie. w/younger sibling) to be continually needy for and competing for attention. In some ways it's pretty impressive because it calls for such tremendous stamina to be so consistently annoying over a long time span.

But it's particularly interesting when this tendency persists into adulthood, when deep insecurity holds on for so long that there's a constant need to comment on everything, as if something doesn't exist if you haven't talked about it, giving rise to a sort of continual play by play of existence. I guess it's the oral equivalent of having a blog and incessantly updating it everyday and then monitoring traffic closely.

Dean domesticity

Well the Tar Heels squeaked past Duke yesterday, and we'll be #1 this week, which is astonishing, given that we hardly hit an outside shot all day. Raymond Felton needs to hire a good financial planner, because the $3-4 million guaranteed he may pick up as a late 1st round early 2nd round pick is all the money he'll ever earn playing basketball. I love the kid to death, but you can't be an NBA point guard and not shoot free throws and go 3 for 13 when it's all on the line.

That was moral victory #2 for Duke though. We should have crushed their scrawny little butts. We should have been having fun yesterday, not sweating it. Maybe this will set us up to really nail them properly in the tournament.

Looking for birth certificate

Natalie's gotta get registered for Kindergarten next week, and to sign her up we need her birth certificate, so Mary sent me on a mission to our files to track it down. I'm a fairly archival person, so I thought I'd find it somewhere, but not yet.

Here's what I did find:

• Model releases from a 1995-7 photo project
• Letters from as far back as 1986
• Trivial receipts from many tax years
• Mary's college and grad school transcripts
  
• Course materials for 1994 teaching gig
• Student evaluations
• High quality paper like we used to print resumes on
• Very cute pictures of me and Mary from Tanya and Jamey's wedding, 1992
  
  And, best of all
  

• Certificate of completion of course for birthing a child (Natalie)

Which is just pathetic.

The Usual Suspects

3:33 AM. Hungry, which is shocking. You would think lentil soup and a salad would carry you for days. Foraging in kitchen. Same old candidates.

• Nuts, which get stuck between your teeth and keep you up.
• Peanut butter, which is all good and well.
• "Empty carbs," a category which makes more sense from the middle of night perspective than the diurnal one.
• Complex carbs, which do not excite.
• Leftover lentil soup.

Why is there never any sausage pizza or cheeseburgers around the time you need em?

Must get back to bed without waking up baby, or else.

Into the ether

Cheated today, probably spent 20 minutes mucking about with the grouse's look and feel, so I can't write much.

It's astonishing how much it sucks out of you to be continually hoisting emails out into the ether, to people you just met professionally, to people you haven't seen in a long time but are trying to reestablish contact with for whatever reason. When your net outflow of emails is high, there's a sense of tremendous exposure, of being all laid out for rejection. Particularly when you're trying to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of services and you don't really know what the services are.

And then in comes an email out of nowhere. Lor Gould. Haven't talked to that guy in many years and here he is gonna fill me in on what's up down in Cary. Beautiful.

Robert Belknap once made a good point, s that the plot conventions of well-constructed comedies in particular (but really of any traditional genre) spoke to a general belief that there is order in the universe, and that instilling this belief was their function. Marxist critics said the same thing, but with a twist. It would appear that the internet has a similar sense of orderliness.

Levels of Service

Graham and I were in Eckerd's today picking up some drugs, and got some slow, bad service from a woman who was new there. It took me back to 2000, when unemployment was as low everywhere as it is in the great Garden State now.

I even wrote a little riff on it then and got it published on the Motley Fool's Fribble. For those too lazy to read that, the basic idea is that bad service indicates that people who couldn't used to get jobs are now getting them, and that it portends an overall rise in quality of services in the future, plus better distribution of wealth etc. Gotta like it.

Not much else to tell you. Waiting for a word on whether or not I'll be walking merrily to work for the next 5 months or so.

Went to a hedge fund industry do yesterday at Jasna Polana, former residence of the Johnson & Johnson Johnsons before a clever Polish maid snaked it from them. It was fancier than most of the places I usually hang out. Much fun was had when a guy from a moderately-sized university's endowment stuck it to a cocky bulge bracket I-bank Fund of Funds manager by suggesting that Fund of Funds managers in general shouldn't be paid incentive fees. They were rolling in the aisles.

Those French are so smart

They have a different word for everything.

But, seriously, who can make sense of the frogs? First they shake their jowls and decline to join us in gloriously importing a new paradigm of freedom to the liberty-thirsting Iraqis, and now get this.

A friend of mine was visiting Paris with his wife and baby, and they visit the so-called "Louvre." They check out some of the art in there, and find themselves in a room of Italian paintings with breasty Madonnas and hungry but restrained little baby Jesuses, and the child gets inspired, crying out for la lait maternelle. So the mom sits down and discreetly arranges to feed her baby in the gallery a la faison naturelle. A guard comes up and tells them that breast-feeding is not cool in the gallery, that they need to repair to a more appropriate location. A mild uproar ensues. "But look at the art in here, " they cry, but it falls on deaf ears.

So they go and talk to a manager, who straight-facedly confirms that, while there is no official policy on breast feeding, guards are empowered to take action to enforce la bien seance pour tous. Which is ridiculous. Everybody knows the French like tits. Shoot, just look at I. M. Pei's pyramid entrance to the museum, which so clearly references the bustiers made by Jean-Paul Gaultier for Madonna.

I beseech you. Don't let this bit of franco-absurdite pass by in silence. Since the morons don't post a comments email address on their website, pick up a pen and write to the Director of the Louvre at the address below to demand justice. And a frickin pain au chocolat for good measure.

Henri Loyrette Président-directeur du musée du Louvre Pavillon Mollien 75058 Paris Cedex 01.

Where's all the traffic coming from?

Yesterday saw a huge spike in first-time visitors to the Grouse, with no particular pattern: no obvious search term, no link in from another site. I'm befuddled. Whassup out there? Who are all you people from all over this big blue marble coming by my little blog? I'm vaguely reminded of the scene at the end of the 1975 classic Race With the Devil, where Peter Fonda, Loretta Swit and friends witness a ritual Satanic massacre (admittedly, a fairly run of the mill disembowelling). They hop in their RV and race off, thinking that they've gotten out safely. Only in the final scene, when the Winnebago is surrounded by everyone they've met since the massacre, all of them with a funny gleam in their eye, do they realize that the seemingly pleasant rustic types all in fact have Lucifer on the brain. Whoops.

Hopefully, I'm not seeing the cyber equivalent of that. Though it's similarly spooky. Maybe the blogger "next blog" button got stuck and my traffic monitor was broken at the same time.

A gay cut

For years I've patronized gruff Italian barbers who don't talk much, save to tell me they're from Sicily, and a motley assortment of women in various places who really don't seem to care much about my hair. Like that bored 19-year old at the mall in Lincoln, Nebraska who put the buzzer on 2 and went to town while examining her nails. Mostly I have done this in support of a "get a cheap cut whenever it's convenient" policy.

Finally, I've decided to play the extra 10-15 dollars for a more quality cut, and have found a convenient gay male to do the cutting. Gay guys combine a genuine interest in male hair with an ability to hold down a conversation that straight barbers and women cannot combine. All the great feathering haircuts of my youth were done by gay men, as well as some of the classic mullets.

However, this guy rambled on a little bit too much, telling me all about his boyfriend "in the AV industry", who lives up in Bergen County, wants to retire but is only 53, just sold his business, found a great job with a former competitor, likes to go on long weekends to Europe every quarter, how they fight jetlag with a couple of drinks and a sleeping pill, and so on and on and on. He seemed to have forgotten that the conversational bit is to pass the time of haircut, not draw it out interminably. I should have suggested that he start a blog.

And I should have have him take off a little more.

More cute things Natalie says (or has historically said)

Just saw that this was marked "draft." If anybody out there remembers other good stuff (that means you, family), use the comment feature.

Age 2 and down
Cockdaloo -- (for "Cock a doodle doo")
Mom -- (when speaking to Dad, and vice versa)
Basteers ("Downstairs")

Age 3
Waters. As in, "Look at the waters" or "Can I have some waters?"
Moneys Underwears Bacons shaushiges
Gigine (for "Vagina". It's great when she says this while standing on line in stores)
Morningtime
Eveningtime
Falltime
Today night
Jelly and sandwich
Bas-a-ket
Pic-a-nic
Buckley pancakes (for Buckwheat)
What's that making sound?
Wha're you got?
Way up high the sky

Age 4 and up
How down it goes ("Make the window how down it goes")
How on it goes ("Turn the light how on it goes")
Alladem. As in, "Which one is your favorite?" "Alladem"
Thassalot. As in, "How many minutes are you gonna snuggle wis me?" "7" "Thassalot"
("No. no. You're not supposed to like alladem")
Is I gonna...?
Wheoo ("Wheoo's there?")
Tweoo ("One, tweoo....")
I don't like to (As in "Pick up your toys now." "I don't like to pick them up."
Momta -- (As in. Clark: "I'll do that for you" Natalie "No, Momta")
Fer -- As in "What's that fer?"
Brace-a-let
Neck-a-lace

I luv Huckabees

The critics were of pretty mixed mind about this flick, but we weren't. It's funny. Sure there's lots of hokey stuff going on, and it's all undermotivated, but we laughed often and vigorously. The most distinctive sex scene in quite some time. Lily Tomlin's in it. Isabelle Huppert. Markie Mark doing his best work yet. A definite renter.

Boarding at Jay Street / Borough Hall

After seeing some people on Wall Street, fuzzy headedly sit down on the A train going the wrong way, to Brooklyn. My cold's getting to me (while back in Princeton Mary tells me Graham's screaming his head off for like the third day in a row. Natalie's listless, or just pretending to be to watch TV). I need to make Penn Station by 3:01 to catch the express.

And at 2:34 I look up and see that I've slipped under the East River to Borough Hall. Doooohhh. Exit, cross over to train going the other way. An A train comes quickly. Across from me a rather large couple plunks down. In their 50s, she in some sort of fake fur, he in a leather jacket and some sort of black satiny pants with white piping down the seams, with a wierd combover and mutton chop sideburns that joined seemlessly with a bushy moustache. Caucasian. And they're eating candy, that's the kicker. She's got a Reese's Peanut butter cup, held between long black nails, and she's savoring it, taking small, slow bites, like Natalie would. He, on the other hand, prefers some sort of M & Ms in a tan bag, and is snarfing them, pouring them two or three at a time into the palm of his hand, popping em in his mouth. More like I would eat them, if I ever bought candy. Who buys candy like that at that age? Walking down the street, you know, I think I need some candy.

This is the kind of shit that pops up only on the subway.

I made my train.

Another big day

The guy at National Tire and Battery picked up the phone like this the other day: "It's a great day at National Tire and Battery!" He had great cadence and verve, and I was almost convinced, and might have run down there, were it not for the fact the TireRack is the greatest web retailer ever and will eventually run the brick and mortar tire people out of business. But you gotta love the guy on the phone, really putting his heart into it for whatever minimal hourly wage they give him. He was not kidding.

Driving the Subaru this week after a little Check Engine light incident over the weekend, so that if it has a reversion Mary won't be in there with the kids. Time for me to bond with the old girl, all 150 odd thousand miles of her. Today the turn signal light went off for a spell after I used the hazards, just like the cruise control crapped out one day and then worked the next. Is the electrical system a little moody. Hmmm.

No CD player, so I break out a bunch of old tapes. Try one of Mary's, old New Order it says on there, looking for one old song ("Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got grey eyes....") that was on the CD New Order released in 1982 following Ian Curtis's suicide, and then remastered and rereleased in the 90s in an act of savagery. The tape is in fact a mixed party tape with an outsize portion of New Order, but also with other 80s goodies, some of which I listened to, some of which I never would have. But all told it fleshes out a picture of Mary as someone I would have totally gone out with in college, no question. I see us at this party, dancing, drinking, smelling, smoking, loving those Brits and their synths.

Long and short around the house

There's an eternal struggle around the house about how the money flows out. Tell me something else new, I hear you saying.

I don't know if there's a standard gender breakdown, but I know in my household Mary is long in orientation, biased towards making purchases of furniture and other durable goods, ready to cost-control on a day by day basis to do so. I tend to view a lot of that stuff as adding overhead: it can get messed up, it needs to be maintained, it generally ups the ante so that it makes other stuff look cheaper. It also needs to be carried out when you move. And the old stuff it replaces needs to get carried out of the house, which is easier said than done.

I, on the other hand, have a short-term bias. I want to spend money on things that relieve stress in the short term. Mostly we're talking about take out, which removes the need for stressful cooking and dishwashing. Or going out, for the same reason. It's wasteful, but there's not future labor commitment built into it. The same goes for travel. I'm all for it, just too lazy to get it done.

On the other hand, for some perverse reason, I always feel somehow enriched after doing real and quasi-real capital expenditures. I got a warm fuzzy after plowing 700 odd bucks into brakes for the 1996 Subaru the other day, as if it brought me and the car closer together. Not really rational.

Trip to the mall

I made a rare appearance at the mall yesterday, being in need of respectable looking casual clothes to wear to social events so as to reflect well upon and please the eye of Mary. The black jeans I took through Moscow in 97-98 with holes in the crotch somehow weren't making it.

Once I hit the mall, I fell quickly into strutting and swaggering mode, what with all the high-schoolers around setting the tone. The best clump of them was a mixed-race, totally stoned bunch of 4 in all kinds of baggie whatnot coming through Lord & Taylors. I think they were looking for ascots.

It's hard to shop when you have no particular image you want to project. Who am I supposed to be in my off hours these days? I have no frame of reference. This didn't used to be a problem. Now most of the time I see people in suits, so ties and shirts for the office are easier. I know what I want to look like there. But casual shoes? I don't want to look unhip, but all the hip shoes look like something out of a Japanese comic books.

I left the mall with a tie and some black socks. All on sale at Macy's.

Why is there a booth selling tub backsplashes for at the mall? It doesn't seem like a big walkby item. Must be a front for Al Qaeda.

Stopped to by the sick Natalie a glow-in-the-dark necklace from a quarter machine by the door. Homies (www.homies.tv) are also on sale. I was shocked when I first saw these caricaturish little guys and gals in the bathroom by the food court in the Lincoln, Nebraska, mall. I thought it was a toy for redneck kids. Now I see that it's a respectable groove in the ghetto. Wierd.

An honest church?

Natalie's sick again. Why is there so much puking going around this year? Surely there's some sort of conspiracy theory and/or eschatological subtext here. There always is.

Anyway, if Graham just stops screaming for a little while I should have time to catch up on reading some of these magazines around the house. The Economist was just reporting on the deep and continuing schism in the Episcopalian Church, caused by the ordination of a gay bishop and the tentative endorsement of gay marriage. The grouse is already on the record about gay marriage: don't let em both wear white and make sure the appetizers are good, that's whay I say. But openly gay clergy? Hmm. I guess it probably is better to force them, as the Catholic Church does, to stay in the closet and abuse altar boys. As if you're ever going to be able to coop a bunch of guys up together for a long time and not let them have sex. I know I can go years without having sex, and it doesn't bug me at all.

It's ridiculous. Gay clergy have been a fact of life forever. What the conservative wing of the church is opposing is honesty, or, as the financial markets would have it, transparency. Suppressing gay clergy is like saying to Enron that it should keep all its off the book entities hidden because it's unseemly to have them. This is, in fact, much like what the Japanese banking system has been doing with its bad loan portfolios for well over a decade. That's worked great!

Ladies Night

Mary read a good review of the USA Network original dramatic presentation Ladies Night, in which Starsky swindles and kills a bunch of women, so we watched it. I hadn't watched any USA programming for over a decade, since I quit drinking, really, and there is a correlation between the two. Nothing has changed. It's a wierd parallel universe, the USA world, I guess it's much like most network TV, but I never watch that easy. Everybody's always swaggering around in and out of convenience stores, malls, pawn shops, ogling each other and trying to act clever and jump bones. All the actors are good-looking, but unknown (i.e. cheap). The dialogue appears to have been autogenerated. Only cheap cars are used in chase scenes. I think this is the America I don't live in. It's more appealing if you're drunk around midnight. Then maybe it makes sense.

Also learned that Pizza Hut has new pizza strips for dunking with three separate sauces (I think Pizza Hut is illegal in New Jersey). And Dunkin Donuts has new apple pie. And couples fight over driving the Mercury. I thought those were just for renting.

Holiday weekend closure

Somebody remind me not to buy cheap suits. I'm embarassed to say how little I paid for it, but it's pretty scratchy. And, get this, I just looked at it, because I thought I was wearing the even scratchier one. Now that's bad.

Anyway, a long week draws to a close. Good meeting today up at the hedge fund. Feeling positive about making a big-assed sale, and keeping on walking to work for 5 months before we even get into overruns.

And last night we settled with the Russian developers across the fence. They pushed their big ugly houses 10 feet further from my property and made it a little smaller. Probably not less ugly, but what can you do?

I realize this is all pretty lame and prosaic, but hey, sometimes things actually happen. I could tell you the story about how Word mucked up some complex formatting on my document, but that's not very fun either. Better just stop.

A big day!

Things are moving here in the heart of NJ, my friends. Here at work, we're pulling together a fat "deliverable" out of a hodgepodge of documents made in various Microsoft apps: from Word to Powerpoint to Visio to Excel. Delight! The client always loves it when we break out the pictures and the color. But first we have to pass it by our boss, so he can sprinkle holy water on it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it looks like 20 months of wrangling with the delevopers over our back fence is coming to a close. We've beat them down pretty good, got some reasonable concessions, but still there's gonna be a McMansion kinda thing I can see out my back window where now I gots trees. At least I won't have to go to meetings.

Also, all you NC people. I see you're coming by the site and I asked you a question. Are you going to be in the Triangle for Memorial Day? Is that too much to ask? Let me know.

Sorry no real with today.

All that traffic

Lots of people coming by the grouse today, can't figure it out. Because I was making fun of the press blitz around the swimsuit issue yesterday? That's pretty sad.

One kindly lad, terms himself the Hittite, seems to have misunderstood me. It's not that I'm shocked that SI can make $10 mln off the swimsuit issue. My point is that $10 million is not money. The guy in the office across from me is probably worth 30. The point is that it's not news.

Here's the big news. Last night Graham started making guttural consonant sounds, either a "g" or a "k" followed by an unaccented schwa. I had never heard him making these sounds. And then, when I started saying "daadaa" to him, he responded "daadaa." He's working on it. When he speaks, you'll know.

And there's more

Not to be outdone, CNN's Money cobranded link off its front page informs us that the Sport Illustrated swimsite edition has spawned at $10 million industry. Think about that. Ten million dollars. Whew. For perspective, the US economy is only $10 trillion. My employer only grosses in the $10 million range annually. Wow. That's big news, and its front page placement has nothing to do with the fact that SI is a fellow TimeWarner property.

Read all about it!

USA Today weighed in with a monster scoop today, proclaiming "Florida model to be on cover of Sports Illustrated." This made my day. Florida models have had a hard time of it, of late, and for no good reason. They are every bit as beautiful and cheery as Czech models, Montanan models, or Iowan or Brazillian models. It's good to see that order is restoring itself in the universe.

Working

Sadly, I'm working today and haven't been thinking much. Maybe that's better for all of us.

In any case, Chew Your Grouse is very happy to announce the betrothal of its brother-in-law, known in the house as Uncle Rogoboggoli, to a certain Candice, also known as Kansas, a most pleasant radiation oncologist with a very nice dog. There were times we weren't certain that Rob was going to hook up, despite his model-like good looks and boyish charm, but in the end he's done rather well for himself and the family as well. Lets all raise a virtual glass.

We're also working on scheduling becoming traditional late spring trip to North Carolina. If any of our Tar Heel readership has a strong bias against a Memorial Day weekend lake party at Joan's house, weigh in here or give me an email.

Gotta go. Bladder and work both call.

Garden State, pt 2

Again, a little too hokey, too Linklateresque. I had hoped for a little more, and a little more New Jersey. But still one of the better movies we've watched recently.

I'm so sure

I saw in the store that Yoga International magazine features an article this month entitled "Everyday yoga in Bali." Yeah right. Even my friends with second homes in Bali find it hard to make it out there regularly on weekends. There's nothing everyday about it. Yoga in Bali is always a really special treat.

Garden State, pt 1

Basically a good movie, if a little bit more bittersweet and Miramaxy than I thought from the reviews. Less edge.

The infelicitously named Natalie Portman (who with Merchant is driving up the popularity of our daughter's name) is good if a little excessive in the "perky-girl-who-helps-the-out-of-touch-with-his-feelings guy" do, guess what. Is she trying to recharge her career with a little indie cred, or was she square from some Sci-Fi pix I never watch? Dunno. Looks wise, she's a little reminiscent of Gerda Stein in this picture.

Feels like NJ, though. He's got that OK. And without close-ups of italian sausage or shots of the skyline in the distance (yet).

I'll weigh in on the second part tomorrow. Time for bed now.

Mr. Popularity

"Heaven forbid, Clark, that anyone should dislike you -- isn't that it? And the more admirers the better"
--N, New Haven, 1987

I found that in an old box of letters when I was cleaning out the attic at my mom's house. It was written by a young woman, who shall remain nameless, who had recently been drenched, along with me, back in 1987, with beer flung from a plastic cup at the Rockingham Club on Howe Street in New Haven, a pseudo-aristocratic shithole which surely long since vanished from the face of the earth. The beer had been flung by another jeune femme, also remaining nameless, who was underjoyed to see me with the co-drenchee, and with whom I ran off that night, in an act of utter cluelessness, as N so kindly pointed out. Needless to say, my actual girlfriend wasn't in town that night.

The comment struck me as so perceptive when I read it 8 months ago, so indicative of the psychological acuity that would later make her an award-winning writer. And very polite, when she had every reason to want me dead at the time (including reasons not disclosed here). When I dug the letter out a few weeks ago looking for blog fodder, the insight seemed less riveting, what's more striking is how strongly I took it, and how symptomatic that is of my own insecurity.

Like you give a fuck about that. You just want more stories about women throwing beer at me.

But it's still true, how rejection averse I am. I've been known to curry favor with assholes half for the sport of it, half because I scarcely know how not to. That's OK, right?

Soft Evangelism, plus

Moderate evangelicals say that the "evangelical" part of their name is from their devotion to the principle of outreach, of seeking to convert. Mainline churches in fact say that they do the same thing, but do even less of it. It sounds potentially offensive, but, on the other hand, it's epistemologically similar to the paradox of aesthetic judgment: everyone is always seeking to universalize judgement, otherwise why bother expressing opinions? There's no difference between saying "X is good" and "In my opinion X is good", since everybody knows that, in the latter case, it's just one person talking. The difference is only of rhetorical strategy, how hard you're trying to sell. So the "evangelicals" who never try to push Christ are actually just doing a really soft sell.

Plus, I can't believe North Carolina didn't get a shot off against Duke at the end of last night's game. Morons. I tuned in at the very end, and I thought, from the way we were holding the ball, that we were up. Whoops. A team for the ages, my friends were telling me. OK.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

This Wilco album is growing on me. They've got their own sound, the Pavement I noted before leavened with Moody Blues and Steely Dan, and it's not always my sound. But on balance it's pretty solid. And Tweedy is a real songwriter.

Driving with the family last weeked, I'm hearing these lyrics "Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs... skyscrapers scraping together, last cigarette is all you can get". And I just started losing it, having a mild panic attack thinking about the jumpers. I think it's emblematic of the fact that there's so little real popular art about 9/11. Sure, lots of pious documentaries about firefighters and architects and whatnot, and there are lots of clever and ironic pictorial juxtapositions of towers and this or that, but very few songs, movies, or works of fiction that I know of. I mean, it's only the defining event of a generation. [Or it was, until Bush fucked up so royally (pun intended) with Iraq]. We've come to terms with representing the Holocaust, but not 9/11.

Where's Jim?

Can't type for long, as I continue to feel like crap, but I just want to say that I'm outraged at my inability to find the Rockford Files anywhere on daytime TV. All those channels and nobody's showing Jim. And with Garner teed up to get an Oscar for lifetime achievement (I read about it in People!). It's beyond comprehension.

The singing stomach

Looks like this year's gastrointestinal greatest hits have caught up with me. After placing all of dinner in the toilet using traditional technique, I started sipping on ginger ale. I had the chills. At about 1am I woke up to go to the bathroom, had a swig. Back in bed, my stomach started in on a little song. Buzzing softly, every five seconds or so, like a cellphone on vibrate. About 30 times. Under other circumstances, it would have been charming.

Pix of Russia

After looking at some children's book about Russia, went through my Moscow pictures from 97-98 when I was doing dissertation research. While it was nice to see the old churches and streets and stuff, the astonishing thing was really how moving it was to see all these pictures of Mary from that long ago and think how simultaneously moving and impressive it is to have been married for so long. It was extremely sentimental to see all this, even though I knew, rationally, that we had been arguing about some ridiculous demand of hers immediately prior to taking the picture, that she had surely bitchily manifested her stunning inability to admit that I had been right.

No but seriously. Back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, everybody was always getting divorced (or else should have), and at some level whole marriage thing seemed like a joke. If it wasn't affairs there was always alcohol and wife beating to round things out. I remember thinking that surely I'd get married and that I'd try very hard to make it work, but thought it a pretty quixotic enterprise, all told.

But it turns out their was a deeply misguided ideology of self-actualization afoot, which guys (and ladies, to be sure) used to paint themselves the victims of marriage, work, etc. and justify any number of misconceptions and misdeeds. As if facial hair made the man.

Mongolia, how I miss thee

The late 80s early 90s ushered in a small wave of Mongolian-set films, including Ulrike Ottinger's slow but lovely and sometimes intense Joan of Arc of Mongolia and Nikita Mikhalkov's Urga, released in the States as Close to Heaven. I think even Wim Wenders snuck out there at some point in time. Mongolia is always presented as the purest of modernity's others, an otherworldy pastoral idyll subject to various incursions by modernity, be it in the form of elegant Euroladies, a drunken Russian soldier (himself scarcely modern), television, computers, etc.

But The Weeping Camel, now in the video stores, is probably the best version of all. The modernity theme is secondary. What we get is really intense and compelling footage of camels and their complex family dynamics. Seriously. And slow, respectful footage of real people doing human stuff, coming of age stuff. No chase scenes, gunplay, or silicone, but worth watching nonetheless.

Nowhere do they mention the necessity of eating boiled mutton all the time, though we do get to see fermented camel's milk. I remember when Ted used to take El Paso taco mix to Ulaan Bataar so that Soros's office manager could have a fix. That dude was bored. That's the dirty little secret about Mongolia. It's a fine place to watch a movie about, but it's dead boring.

Correspondences

I used to be blown away with the volume of correspondence that a Turgenev, George Sand, or any other number of 19th century writerly types used to crank out. Now that I have email and (dare I say it) a blog, I can see how you can churn out a ton. If you're reading and thinking a lot and staying in touch with people, number of combinations and connections of ideas, people, and things seems limitless. Correspondences beget correspondence. And if you have a lot of free time, you just keep cranking and cranking.

It is really impressive that they did it with pens. My hand aches from taking a bunch of notes this week. Boring but bill-paying stuff. I can't imagine hand-writing as much as they did, particularly with all the floral phraseology ("I was most delighted to be informed of your potential upcoming visit to our sun-blessed little corner of Alsace, particularly as the market fair is approaching, promising a plethora of most compelling repasts..."). All those adjectives and parenthetical must have added up.

(This post was actually half-canned and waiting to be finished. I think it's pretty clear that the basic thought is sort of stale and uninteresting. But I want to post something, if only to reward my loyal if paltry readership. Most of the posts that I leave up on the shelf in draft form end up kind of bloodless, even if they seem interesting.

I'm also shocked and hurt. I feel like posts were lost by Blogger server over the last couple of days. Or maybe I fucked up the dates. Whatever. Gotta go work).

Consignment to hell, bitches

(Whoops! Looks like I published my notes to myself last night instead of hitting draft. Whatever. It's a blog.)

Certain of you may have noticed that I have arrogated the right to consign people to hell here on the Grouse. So far John Ashcroft and James Earl Ray have been shipped out. And you may have asked yourself, who is this guy to be sending people to burn in eternal damnation?

I can explain. First, let me cite as precedent the fact that I, as a charter member in the Young Amateur Byzantinist Society, was involved in the routine arbitration of orthodoxy in the modern world. Collectively, we admitted Led Zeppelin, Absolut vodka, Wheat Thins (not the low-salt variety), Bob Dylan, and chicks (with a couple of explicit exceptions) into the realm of the orthodox. The Minutemen, sadly never made it through because of a filibuster on the part of some classic rock fanatics.

And that was when I was in college. Since then, I've matured considerably and grown wiser too, so that now I've taken on the weight of the hell or no decision. It really doesn't even take up much of my day. I mean, who else is gonna do it? The Christian Right? I don't think so. Carrot Top? Too busy. No no. I've got this one under control.

Pictures on the fridge

With the holiday season having drawn to a close, we've taken the kids' pix from the seasonal cards and refreshed our refrigerator for the year. Some of it is pretty intense. Right there on the fridge is Eric's kid, next to a picture of Hilary's kids. Which is wierd, because Eric used to go out with Hilary before I did way back in the 80s, years before Eric and Laura introduced Mary and me. And it speaks particularly well of Mary that she's hanging a pic of an ex's kids on the fridge, even if, as she says, it has nothing to do with the kids and everything to do with the fact that, photographically speaking, it's the best picture of the season, which appeals to the photographer in Mary.

Now back to work. Settling into a new cube right here in the heart of Princeton, America's most corporate university town. Walking to work, strolling past the Lindt chocolate store, Banana Republic, Coach store, fishmonger, patisserie and other ridiculous stuff. The only useful thing is the drug store, where to stop on the way home to get hair gel (this being New Jersey) and benadryl. Gotta love doing it on foot.

Project management

So now I've sold a project, albeit a small one, and I've got to manage it. Management's an odd thing. It's one of the things you've basically got to do to make more money if you're operating outside of a real "star" context. It's an interesting problem, I suppose, without being a really compelling one. Would be easier if I had a strong drive to dominate. But don't.

And now I'm called on to make all of these kinds of decisions I hadn't thought of as being managerial. Will we wear suits? Can we expense lunch? What time do we come in? Hmm.

In other news, I'm not yet convinced that Wilco is all that, like I've read. Seems awfully derivative from Pavement.

Showdown day nears

That's right, fair readers. On February 3 some New Russian developers will present plans for some tacky houses with fake siding that they plan to build across the fence from our backyard. They like to stomp around and bluster about how they're being mistreated. We like to haul our merry band of academic misfits and smooth VC types to local government meeting and break out the big words and the violins about how this is going to tear out neighborhood up. It will. Keerist, I have a stand of trees across the back fence from my yard. Princeton Borough wants to let it happen to get revenue from the property taxes. It's gonna be interesting.

My outfit today

Ended up wearing my green suit today because I pulled brown socks out of the sock drawer in the dark, so I had to go with the brown shoes. Then I had to go with a pinkish-red checked shirt and red tie because all the white shirts I had had shrunk too much to be worn with a tie. So I look like Christmas.

So what's up with white shirts, I ask you? Do they not seem to shrink more quickly than colored ones? Is there something in the dye of the colored ones that guards against shrinkage? I'm befuddled.

I was going to write a quasi-indignant thing about the anniversary of the opening of Auschwitz and reading Andrew Sullivan's review of some Abu Ghraib books, but I'm sure that line of thinking is readily available elsewhere. Never again? Great idea.

Paradoxes of positivity

Generally speaking, if you try to stay positive, you'll be happier. Stands to reason. However, if you're positive about everything, continually look on the bright side, you really internalize this practice, and in time it gets harder to figure out what you don't like. When you don't know what the bright side is anymore, it's hard to know what you actually want.

I suspect that many mid-life crises grow out of this. In the absence of positive desires, you pick the inverse of what you've been doing. You can only take the long view for so long, then the subconscious snaps back and says: "Since a sports car etc. is the last thing you've been thinking about for god knows how long, it must be what you want."

Of course, this is only true of more abstract things. There's no confusing the relative charms of, say, overcooked broccoli and sausage pizza, even if, as I discussed somewhere below, adults are prone to fake enjoyment of less than tasty vegetables for the benefit of their children, in a rather perverse flipping of the old eros/thanatos thing.

Great Moments in Me -- Nailing the Nobel Laureate

The year was 1989, Gorbachev was king, Eastern Europe was cool, art, literature, what have you. It was in this context the Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1980 and a man with a deeply furrowed brow, came to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the "southern part of heaven," to give a reading. The University of North Carolina put him up in fine style, hosting the reading in a lovely newish 300-seat auditorium space in the addition to the art gallery. The house filled.

In comes Milosz, who swaggers around on stage and reads many a poem, including a new one, which included a line like

"and I look at you seated on the edge of my bathtub naked --
Jane, or Jennifer, or Mary, or Ingrid, or whatever your name is this week --
as at an abstraction."

This was not cool. I was not generally Mr. PC, but I knew odious when I heard it. He offended otherwise, as well, and at one point in time between poems he said: "One thing is certain, man's greatest enemy is abstraction." Hmmm.

I was dressed well that evening, wearing a nice blue blazer with a costume jewelry pin in the lapel and my great uncle RB's demi-bowler, so I was ready to testify. When question and answer time came, I raised my hand, was recognized, and stood up: "Mr. Milosz, you've told us that man's greatest enemy is abstraction. Which man?" Almost everyone in the house broke out laughing, save for the oldsters who were shocked, shocked.

And I sat down, having achieved my two aims. For I had escorted to the reading the stylish Claudine Murphy, Colorodan MA candidate in English, waitress at the esteemed Pyewacket, for whose attentions I was vying at that time with one Norwood "Chip" Cheeks, formerly of the Sex Police but more recently directing videos and appearing in VW and Sony commercials, and this tall floppy-banged guy Rick who looked like Brendan Fraser and rode and adult trike around campus in an act of substantial anti-macho defiance. In time, Rick and Claudine would hunker down and form a very tall couple, but on that evening, embarassing the desperately retrograde Nobel Laureate before a good-sized crowd as well as his date, your blogger did well in general and in particular.

Semion Pavlych, pt 1

It's cold outside, about 15 F, or -9 C. But I can't even think the thought "It's cold out" without hearing another voice break in: "Cold. You call that cold? I'll tell you when it was cold. November 7, 1941, our troops were gathered on Red Square to set out to face the Fascists, and it was -22 C (-8 F). Now that's cold for you." In Russia, you must understand, the WWII generation is even more revered than in the Brokaw generation: everything was more heroic then, even the weather.

This was the voice of Semion Pavlych, or Senya, dedushka (grandfather) extraordinaire. It was the fall of '97, I was in Moscow doing research and living with a young self-declared radical intellectual in an apartment belonging to his grandfather, Senya. Senya was happy to see me. The 200-odd dollars I gave him a month was the most money he had ever earned. So he was thrilled to provide me with his version of bespoke service. When he saw me haul a 5-liter dispenser of distilled water into the apartment, he proposed -- for the same price -- to bring me water from the spring out on the farm where he lived a couple of hours away. So that's how I got my drinking water, personal delivery by train, then subway, then bus: probably 24 hours work for about 8 dollars, and he loved each and every one of them.

Note that it was all made possible by deeply subsidized public transportation, one of the many subsidies so taken for granted by the Russians that it can't be taken away. Like our mortgage interest tax deduction.

Semion Pavlych, pt 2

There is a well-known literary type in Russia, from Gogol's Korobochka (in Dead Souls) to Ilya Kabakov's aptly named "Man Who Never Threw Anything Away," from his 10 Characters series of the eighties, of people so extremely retentive that they never get rid of anything. I didn't know they actually existed, but that's what Senya was. When I got to Moscow, the room where I was going to live was filled with an enormous mound of old papers, milk cartons, tools, parts of pieces of furniture, picture frames, in short, anything composed of physical matter, and therefore valuable. While I recovered from jet lag sleeping in a room only half full of stuff (and into which the mound would be moved), Senya sorted through the mountain and distributed it elsewhere throughout the apartment.

Collecting was not a habit Senya had gotten over. If Oleg (the grandson) or I tried to dispose of a bottle or a TetraPak when Senya was around, the diligent grandfather would always rescue it from an ignominious end in the waste basket and file it in a more appropriate location. Tetrapaks, after all, are good for storing nails and screws. So we got into the habit of hiding the trash whenever we thought Senya might be by with a load of water. Or even, perhaps, of taking it out.

There was a little ukelele in my room, the strings long since too rigid to play. It hung in the corner. Later, in the depths of the Moscow winter when somehow the charms of neither Moscow television nor my dissertation could entertain me, I pulled an old photoalbum from the wall of books in my room. The album showed a history of Senya's brood, including a great many shots from within the Stalin-era (stalinka) apartment building on Ulitsa akademika Vavilova. Apparently, Oleg's whole family had lived in the room I was then in back when Oleg was born (ca 1975), for there was a lot of diaper changing and cooing going on in the pictures. And in the pictures, in the corner, hung the ukelele.

Things the kids say, plus

Natalie, at age 4 and a half, says "I willn't". You gotta love that.

Also, let the record show that I called the bad guy in The Bourne Supremacy correctly (we watched the second half of the movie tonight). Not that I deserve a medal or anything. With a PhD in literature I had damned well better be able to read plots. Otherwise Columbia and the State Dept. would have wasted all that money they spent on me. Suckers.

Videoconferencing for freedom and family

Recently read about how videoconferencing is being marketed to immigrants so that they can see their families back home that they haven't seen for, oh, say, 8 years. Great idea.

But what about terrorism? Couldn't Al Qaeda use these same video links to exchange top secret coded messages about destroying freedom and democracy? Shouldn't we send in thick necked types to monitor these transmissions? Surely the CIA and/or FBI will have trained multilingual professionals analyzing all video traffic and sniffing around. Otherwise they will have failed in their duty to secure the homeland, right? Or maybe we're better off leaving videoconferencing in the hands of trained executives.

Beware what you ask for

I think I was recently bitching about global warming. Now it's cold as all get out, eight degrees right here in Princeton tonight, and the walls of our house aren't doing much to stanch the flow of energy outwards. If any of you young folks out there are thinking of purchasing a home, let me just say this: look out for so-called "masonry frame" walls. That's an inspector's way of saying concrete, alias no insulation. Not a warm fuzzy.

Watching The Bourne Supremacy tonight. That Jason Bourne sure does have a temper. Running around killing people, pointing a gun at poor Julia Stiles's pretty little head (though the It girl of a few years back is really just happy for a role, honestly. She's too old to make the high school romances with a black guy movie yet again). Makes me think of Rodney King: why can't we all just get along. I see where this plot is headed, however. The guy who's about to retire is the one who hosed the whole Treadstone unit, mark my words. We'll check back in tomorrow night when we watch the other half of the flick.

Underlining

Thumbing through my old copy of Fear and Trembling looking for a specific passage from 20 years ago, I found lots of underlining. In college, it seemed like if I didn't underline stuff, I wasn't really studying. Now I look at these cool old marked-up editions and it's almost unbearable, I can't read em. It's a terrible shame.

In other news, Mary and I spent a little time watching the "50 Greatest Moments in Reality TV" the other night. I was thinking the "50 Greatest" feature might lead to enhanced quality, but I was wrong. The only good thing about reality TV is that, like football, it keeps people stupid enough to watch it off the streets and out of restaurants, at least temporarily.

Too much diet soda. Why don't they keep more seltzer here at the office? Is it really so challenging?

I'm obviously just sitting here trying to think of things to write, no. I think my blog is much more compelling when I get out in the streets and see stuff.

Oh yes, oh yes. It's time for a return to a little feature we like to call song du jour. Today's feature comes from a Detroit-area band called Northwind, ca 1979, a band fronted by the father of a colleague of ours right here in the great Garden State. With no further ado, I give you Zandor.

More signs of aging

I remember how galling it was when, growing up, some friend of the family or distant aunt says "I remember when you were only as tall as my hip," or whatever marker. I just thought "oh please." But when you see somebody's kids after three years or so, it's all you can say, or think. Ah well, one for the ages.

Mixed bag with a dream

I looked through recent posts and saw that I had twice held forth on Graham's attempts to master speech. Very similar posts. I guess you can see we're sort of fixated on this. I guess also that it's not unusual to see topics get revisited on my blog. It's like hanging out with me in written form, so I'm gonna repeat myself.

Had brussel sprouts for dinner tonight. Somebody in Karla Cook's vegetable coop snagged them at the Trenton Farmer's market. I'm not a big fan, but I pretended to like em because Natalie was watching. I wonder how prevalent this is, adults not actually liking individual vegetables but feigning pleasure because we're trying to indoctrinate our kids. I never really trusted my parents when they made all those "mmmmmm..." noises while eating vegetables, although it was down South so there could have been a lot of butter on there. I mean, there are some vegetables that are good, but very few of them are good at all without adding fat and/or something in the garlic/onion family. Honestly.

Had a dream the other night in which I went to a used car lot where my old Volvo was on sale for $800. The catalytic converter had been fixed, and it appeared to have been detailed. The engine sounded good, and it drove well. I was conflicted, despite the fact that my newer Volvo is swankier, perkier, and has a CD player. But it lacks those classic Volvo good looks and the general air with academic disdain. I suspect this was an inverted midlife crisis dream, where my subconscious pretends want the boxier, frumpier car because it's in denial.

Jimmy Kimmel to head Harvard

In response to the unfortunate remarks by Larry Summers on gender and quantitative aptitude last week, the Corporation of Harvard University has unanimously decided to rusticate Mr. Summers and install in his place Jimmy Kimmel, formerly of Comedy Central and ABC. Commentators are viewing the move as an attempt to appease and mollify the community of feminist scholars. Kimmel, whose tenure at The Man Show established him as a preeminent authority on contemporary gender issues, could not be reached for comment, but issued a statement through a spokesperson attesting to his desire to: "Work with the many and diverse communities within the greater Harvard community to refocus on the core missions of that fine institution, lux, and, to a not significantly reduced extent except when constrained by unforeseeable budgetary exigencies or strongly voiced alumni opinion, veritas."

KK Krushed

It's been pretty amusing to watch Krispy Kreme slide down from it's greasy perch, aided by Marketwatch's Herb Greenburg, who's kept the donuttier front and center for some time. When I was a kid, there were two Krispy Kreme's in North Carolina that we went passed with any frequency, one in Winston Salem and one in Morehead City. A few times a year we'd be near them and we'd stop in and get a dozen or so of the little melt-in-your-mouthers, and inhale them. Pure joy.

So when, ca 1995, I was on the pier off Christopher Street letting the dog run off the leash and I heard that a store had opened in Chelsea, I promptly leashed up the pup and went up and got a dozen. As good as ever. A week or so later, I got more.

Then the novelty wore off. Krispy Kremes are the culinary equivalent of cocaine or a dotcom. Pure fluff, plenty nice, but no staying power. Sure, I still inhale them when they're free, but I'd actually rather go to a Duncan Donuts, where the coffee is better and the donut at least weighs your hand down a little. And Tim Horton's donuts tower over both of them, despite the satisfaction it may give our friends from Canadia to hear that.

Update from Graham

We've always said we need to keep a journal of the things Natalie, and then Graham, do and say. Here's where it's gonna happen. Thanks, blogspot!

Graham is still dragging his feet on speech a little. "Mamamamama....", "Dadadadada", perhaps "Up" (Mary's convinced that's what he's saying when he points up the stairs). Certainly "Nanana..." means food.

Graham has been on a basketball kick recently. He throws things into any repository, particularly those containing water, the toilet, the tub. In the last few days he's taken to throwing things over the top of the gate at the top of the stairs, so they go crashing down stairs. This has been particularly cute with the plastic basket that holds the bath toys, which he can barely heft up to the top of the gate but makes a great sound going down. He's so proud when he carries that one.

Undercelebrated

Ahhh, MLKJ day, the most undercelebrated of all holidays. We too are guilty, though we did do some jogging around in Natalie's new sneakers with the flashing red lights. Takes me back to MLKJ days of yore, like the time I tried to call a party the same day when I was living in that freezing house outside of Chapel Hill and nobody at all showed up, despite the fact that I made some epic recordings by overdubbing my classical guitar to some fine percussive effects I got by banging my bass against the coal stove. Or MLKJ day of 1990, must have been, when I went onstage at Cats Cradle and pretended to be imitating Morrissey doing a tribute cover of Public Enemy's "Louder than a Bomb." It made a lot of sense, lyrically. Think of Morrissey singing this:

In my home,
I got a call from Tony Rone,
The FBI was tapping my telephone,
I never live alone, I never walk alone,
My posse's always ready and they're waiting in my zone.

Yes, that was a fine moment in MLKJ day history. May James Earl Ray burn in hell, right next to Ashcroft.

Flemington

Today we went to Flemington for some outlet action. A sad, declining outlet town, lots of vacant space, nothing like Woodbury Commons or the one at the end of the LIE. Predictably, Graham falls asleep in the back seat as we pull in and I sit in the cold car with him as he sleeps, reading old issues of the Economist that were stuffed into the pocket of the backseat. Review of a book about the Steve Ovett-Sebastian Coe rivalry. That was good stuff. Those pale Brits were fast, good role models for us back in the early 80s. And they hated each other.

Natalie and Mary have lunch in and bring me sandwich from little restaurant with chintzy curtains, slow moving Santa and Ms. Claus, and other porcelain figures. Also a hard working fireplace. When Mary takes a turn I go inside and find that, old ladylike as the place may be, I like the it. Further indication that I'm turning into an old lady. I eat a piece of Natalie's leftover pizza that turns out, by Mary's account, to have fallen on the floor. Still was OK.

Open Season

2005 Visiting season opened today as Frank Miller of Columbia's Dept. of Slavic Languages stopped in to America's most corporate college town for a visit, earning himself a sure slot on next year's holiday letter roll of honor. Who will be next to join the few, the proud, the italicized non-family member out-of-town visitors? No wait, Kirill Postoutenko of USC slipped in earlier, though that was technically 2004.

Saw the new version of the Manchurian Candidate this weekend. It's good to see Meryl Streep getting roles and even having an opportunity to act some, though it's hard to see her as the Angela Lansbury evil one. The funny thing is that the Manchurian thing in the title is a private equity firm, clearly modelled on Carlyle. Private equity just sort of sounds evil, I guess. Oxymoronic, even. Much is imputed to the PE firm, though, as if they had Halliburton or Bechtel-like infrastructure. I kind of doubt it. They just like money.

New kid on the block

Took a friend to lunch the other day near the office, which is to say, in the jewelry district, the heart of kosher lunchland. I thought we'd go to Gan Eden, our longstanding favorite for Bukharan Glatt Kosher delicacies, but when we got to the familiar staircase leading up to it, we found that it no longer existed, having given way to a Barbeque place. But there is still Taam Tov, back at 46 West 47th.

Lets see how they stack up

Taam Tov vs. Gan Eden

Access
Gan Eden - Stairs only, three floors up above wholesale jewelry polishers
Taam Tov -- Elevator, enter through retail jeweler, proceed along left wall, ride in comfort to fourth floor

Food and Bev
Gan Eden -- Good soup and shashlyk, in various flavors. Never remembered to pre-order manty.
Taam Tov -- No complaints. Fabulous Bulgarian bread and cool pickled salad plate with little purple eggplants. Good kebab. They even had seltzer.

Decor
Gan Eden -- Like a Soviet library or school cafeteria, no color, no windows
Taam Tov -- Like the cafe at a small Russian museum, for example, the Akhmatova museum off the Fontanka in Petersburg. Colored tablecloths with flowers. Notes of warmth.

Feeling of Security
Gan Eden -- You felt a little bit naked without a Kalashnikov. Most women present carried food.
Taam Tov -- Small sidearms should suffice in most situations. Several women sat and ate food.

In short, what initially seemed like a loss would in fact appear to be a huge gain. And there are free deliveries for order $6 and up!

More and Morrissey

(incidentally, is anyone else getting sick of the stupid puns I use as titles for the days blog? They're just as bad as the ones on the daily PlanSponsor.com email, yet I can't stop myself!)

Some kind family member gave The Smiths album Rank, an OK live record. I thought I had all The Smiths studio work, but I guess not because there on songs on this record I don't know (B-sides?). In any case, a new Smiths song is often a breath of fresh air. Stephin Merritt had it right when, reviewing a Morrissey show in the Times, he said that the songwriter suffered from association with lame studio musicians. The Smiths hit on multiple cylinders, so it's worth having their records around for more than just homophobe baiting.

No no, Morrissey is the most singalongable of all. Nothing beats cranking up the car stereo and really belting it out with the guy, pure catharsis. You have to really breath and think about what you're doing to keep up. The challenge would be to get up and sing like that not in a car, but in front of people, really let loose. I remember when Jeff, the guy who owns Print Space on 21st st, had a New Year's Party back in the 90s in the lab with a Karaoke machine, and he just kept getting up there, taking the mike and singing his heart out. It was something to see cut loose like that, and it's hard to imagine letting down ones guard like that it without alcohol.

Taking it back

Upon further reflection, I was a little bit dissatisfied with yesterday's post, particularly the second half, which was a perfect example of sardonicism as a defensive posture (see Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason for more). The Christian Right's generosity with both money and time to humane causes can be genuinely befuddling to those of us in the My Dinner with Andre set. They advocate such nasty policies, and then do good stuff. Whassup?

Us blue staters have to fight against our own version of the paradox of anti-semiticism of which Slavoj Zhizhek has written so fondly. Here's how that plays out:

Gentile 1: "You can't trust that Jew merchant as far as you can throw him"
Gentile 2: "But he seems so honest."
Gentile 1: "Yeah yeah, but I see right through it"

Giving it up

Anyone who's ever travelled much in the Second and Third Worlds will surely have witnessed lots of rosy-cheeked, corn-fed thumpers returning from missions in various exotic and miserable places. Sometimes they seem to just stand around handing out bibles, but they also do a lot of real charitable work. Similarly, I recall doing research on a hedge fund manager who had made huge contributions to things like prostheses for mine victims and a rehab clinic for lower-income women, but then was also a big RNC contributor. In short, born-again Christians seem more apt to volunteer than us secular lefties, showing a real tendency to give despite the fact that they advocate such heinous, xenophobic and morally reprehensible policies.

I'm sure that the there's typically some propagandizing point of delivery, you know, pro-life counseling and thumping lessons for the women in rehab, etc. And that's certainly the key, good works allow for proselytization, and the unit cost for delivery is pretty low. In fact, one can imagine some, and particularly Mormons, who can back-convert ancestors, running complex calculations to figure out where it can get the highest soul-yield per missionary hour. "Send em to Mozambique! They used to have a high birth rate there! We'll get oodles!" Canny subject populations probably sense an arbitrage opportunity and attempt to extract payment for each soul. Payment in kind, admittedly, might be problematic.

Nice weather we're having

I hate it when, on a warm day in winter, some dipshit says "Nice weather we're having." That's like saying, "this cheeseburger deluxe tastes good, so it must be good for me." This is classic Eros / Thanatos confusion. "Good idea," I think. "You leave your coat at home today, and we'll relocate millions a couple of decades hence."

This is an especially warm, and therefore bad, winter. Global warming is no joke. It's a much bigger threat to us, long term, than Al Qaeda. Even if, as our friend Hemant the Scientist has pointed out, the evidence for global warming is by no means incontrovertible and rising temps over the last however many years appear to be correlated with solar activity, the anecdotal case for global warming is so strong and the risks of being mistaken so huge that we have to act as if it were true.

From an economic, if not human life, POV, the tsunami just a mellow dress rehearsal for the coastal destruction that will come from rising sea levels.

Disagree? So tsunami.

A great feast, which I sadly missed

In late from the dentist, so I missed the pig-out at Famous Dave's, just south of the Raritan River bridge off of Route 1 here in the great state of new jersey!

If rumor is to be believed, two intrepid consultants consumed, in one sitting, Dave's Famous Feast, earmarked for 4-5. This after another, "senior" consultant quailed at the quantity. Much to his shame.

Dave's Famous Feast
1 Slab St. Louis style ribs
1 Whole Chicken
1/2 lb beef brisket
Wilbur beans
Cole Slaw
Famous Fries
4 small ears corn
4 corn muffings

They done us proud.

Na na

"Na na" is apparently Graham's generic term for food, which is good, insofar as it appears to be a "word", or syllables actually signifying something. "Ma ma ma ma" also seems to be significant. It's damned frustrating when your kid crawls, walks, and talks late. Particularly when you've gone to fancy dancy schools and the expectation is that your kids are going to be perfect too. But sometimes they're just slackers, or, rather, they are precocious in their slackerdom, underachieving at an age where I never would have dreamed of it.

This is kind of a bad week for blog wit, I think. How are you going to wisecrack in the wake of 150,000-odd deaths? At least for once 9/11 seems to have been sort of put in the rearview. Not only does the US have a chance to do something defensible for the world and burnish its rep, it really brings to the forefront some reality that poor design and a lack of planning can quickly kill many more people than all the sneaky Ay-rabs you can shake a stick at.

Some text, seriously

I drafted something very deep and reflective this morning, but if I flesh it out and post it, I'm going to start looking like some nudgenik of high seriousness. Sontag's dead, damn it, and I'll never have grey highlights that fetching, so there's no need to be all deep all the time.

No no. The Grouse must offer comic relief, even if he's sort of at a luck for fresh material.

Wooza wooza?

The Blog and the Fragment

(This is an example of the kind of crap I leave lying around in draft form for days that I can't write anything. Simultaneously deep and pretentious. Like pretending I'm still in college)

Walter Benjamin once said that he wanted to put together a book which was nothing but quotes from other people. That was one the most of the most extreme versions of the enthusiasm for the fragment that was rampant in the eighties. Books or any intricately developed argument, it was assumed, could only distort ultimate truth and totality, insofar as the latter always resisted representation.

The blog, then, would seem like a godsend for those of the anti-representational bent. Surely as close to discursive cubism as Gertrude Stein ever got.

And yet, the blog seems so often so insubstantial, more like intellectual Captain Crunch. I remember discussing in hushed tones with Franco Moretti how important it was to one's intellectual development to flesh out a book-length argument, even if you know that the argument is scarcely water-tight, and that it becomes more attackable simply by virtue of its length. We whispered this so as not to offend another lefty luminary in the Columbia Comp Lit department, who had only collections of essays and a translation to justify her lofty perch. The point is, it's not about words adequately describing truth, it's about human brains growing.

Back as far as Heraclitus and through Socrates, the fragment has been a hip way to hide out, to adopt a defensive intellectual position. The example of the recently departed Sidney Morgenbesser, an intellectual legend who somehow never got a real book together, demonstrates this well. Lets see how the Morgenbesser Haggadah develops over time. You can't even make a biopic for this guy.

"Arghhhh!" redux

Some of the more attentive readers may recall the post "Arghhhh", in which I attributed gastro-intestinal discomfort to a chicken sausage from Whole Foods. The sausage deserves an apology.

As the days rolled on and various members of my family and friends throughout the greater Tri-State area puked and experienced abdominal pain said to exceed that of childbirth in its combined intensity and protraction, it became clear that no individual foodstuff was responsible. Mary speculated through clenched teeth that terrorists had finally poisoned the food supply.

In fact, there has been no authoritative refutation of this hypothesis. The CDC had no mention of an outbreak. Googling "Stomach Flu" (apparently a misnomer) brought only corroborative anecdotes, and few at that. HomelandSecurity.com says nothing about any food supply poisoning. Which is suspicious, when you think of it.

Not for naught, then, did your Grouser ring in the New Year covered in a thick coating of Graham's copious vomit. No no. We stood at the front-line of the centuries old struggle to preserve our enduring freedoms. And reeked.