DSK, skirt-chasing, greatness, and death

The article about Dominic Strauss-Kahn and his whoring ways in the NY Times got me to thinking. First off, it took me back to the classic scene in Moonstruck where Olympia Dukakis (Rose) is out to dinner with the older guy who's courting her, while her husband is out to dinner with his floozie.

Rose: Why do men chase women?
Perry: Well, there’s a Bible story… God… God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn’t complete as a man without a woman.
Rose: [frustrated] But why would a man need more than one woman?
Perry: I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.
[Rose looks up, eyes wide, suspicions confirmed]
Rose: That’s it! That’s the reason!

This rings truer than most scenes in movies.  So it follows that "great men", from DSK to JFK to MLKJ to slick Willie to Tiger Woods, can't keep their dicks in their pants for exactly the same reasons that drive them to be "great":  they fear death in a big way, and are compelled to overcome it by projecting their egos onto both beacoup des femmes but also the great canvas of history.

The key to keeping your libido under control and your marriage intact, then, is to get over the fear of death. That would, in fact, be helpful in a lot of contexts.

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The writerly approach to this problem is, I think, better.  Here's Pushkin, who in turn riffs on Horace.  Dunno if this is the best translation. Gotta get the kids to the library, and thence to Flyfleaf Books, for which Natalie has a gift certificate burning a hole in her pocket.

I have erected a monument to myself
Not built by hands; the track of it, though trodden
By the people, shall not become overgrown,
And it stands higher than Alexander’s column.

I shall not wholly die. In my sacred lyre
My soul shall outlive my dust and escape corruption–
And I shall be famed so long as underneath
The moon a single poet remains alive.

I shall be noised abroad through all great Russia,
Her innumerable tongues shall speak my name:
The tongue of the Slavs’ proud grandson, the Finn, and now
The wild Tungus and Kalmyk, the steppes’ friend.

In centuries to come I shall be loved by the people
For having awakened noble thoughts with my lyre,
For having glorified freedom in my harsh age
And called for mercy towards the fallen.

Be attentive, Muse, to the commandments of God;
Fearing no insult, asking for no crown,
Receive with indifference both flattery and slander,
And do not argue with a fool.

Natalie on Europe

Mary and Natalie were looking at a picture of something in Europe.  There was graffiti.  Natalie said "I thought Europe was supposed to be all clean and perfect.  Except for Hitler."

Cutting through the lethargy

Just went out to buy a frisbee (after the orange one went suspiciously AWOL) and a needle to pump up the basket- and soccer balls that had become, well, frankly, flaccid from disuse. Now to corral the kids away from their books out into the fresh air.  Never an easy task with my poindexterish kids. But it's a lovely fall day, and, with Mary hard at work out in the garden, it falls to dad to get em going.

Off into the fresh blue hither.

The meaning of the humanities

Heard a very interesting lecture from Alan Liu of UC Santa Barbara yesterday at the Franklin Institute for the Humanities at Duke. Liu reflected on the state of the "Digital Humanities", a discipline/meme which has emerged since I left academe.

Much of his talk bounced off of and commented on a piece that recently came out of Stanford's Literary Lab by two guys named Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, in which the authors do some sophisticated cluster analysis of the word cohorts used in 2958 novels published in Great Britain in the 19th century.  All of this grows out of work Franco Moretti started doing in the 90s when I was at Columbia, and I chanced to work on a project he did counting and categorizing novels published all over the world. It's very cool, very interesting stuff.

Heuser and Le-Khac distill out some big trends in words used in the novels, from which they draw inferences about how society changed over the course of the century. None of what they say is great news, but it's super interesting how they do it, and raises lots of great questions.

Liu is also involved in advocating for the humanities, and is part of an initiative callled 4Humanities housed up in Alberta. All good.

Here's a core problem, it seems to me. Epistemologically, methodologically, yattayattalogically the quantitative orientation of humanistic scholarship is both fascinating and a "value-add," as we say. It points to use value for marketing people etc.

But people want to believe their individual lives matter, and telling them that they are but pieces of data in the grand machine doesn't do that, any more than telling them that they who they are is determined by their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so on. They like it about as much as they like thinking that Google, Facebook, and other crunchers of big data can predict their every whim, or that their mortgage was sold to Fannie or Freddy, then bundled several times into a CDO that got lost in MERS. Telling people they don't matter is a hard way to sell something that's intrinsically hard to sell in the first place.

Back to me and the book I'm reading. I continue to slog through Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land because I "identify" with our narrator, Frank Bascombe, and with the other characters in the book, while I recognize that I am not them and am entertained the details and stories therein. This simultaneous identification and recognition of difference helps me both ponder myself as an individual and as a participant in the grander swoop of history.

Again, the one and the many. I keep coming back to Nicolas of Cusa's interesting phrase, "on the not-other."  You gotta have both.

Register dog

Bought a cushion for the intersection of my wooden desk chair and my increasingly bony ass today at BBB, then stopped over to PetSmart to get some salmon cat treats (for the cats, not me). There was a blonde woman at the register with what I took to be her two dogs. Then she walked away. One dog remained. Turned out it was the dog of the guy behind the register. A mellow pup, one of those totally mainstream breeds whose names I can never remember.

Used car salesman

So we just bought a 2010 Prius. It is a nice silver little sipper.

We only shopped for three actual days of driving cars, after some non-trivial web research and conferring with our peeps.

I was expecting the car salespeople to be hyper aggressive, trying to sucker us, etc. In actual fact, only one of them really conformed to the stereotype. What they all generally shared was, well, that they liked to share. They were very liberal with their life stories. One of them had recently learned that he, like his dad, would have Huntington's disease. His mom, I'll have you know, was a preacher's daughter, but didn't go to church herself. Another had recently returned to selling cars after some time away working the gun show circuit selling leather holsters. That kept him away from home 3 or 4 days a week, weekends, mostly, but man did it pay well. For some reason his wife, when she got pregnant, wanted to get him off the road. Another guy had owned a bar out in the country somewhere, then went bankrupt, then flipped houses for a while.

In general, they were all very chatty.  I assume the idea was that if you talk the customer's ears off, they're unable to focus on the item at hand (evaluating the car and thinking of what questions they should be asking).

The last guy, the guy who actually sold us a car, was pretty quiet. Mostly talked about cars and the relative merits of this one or that one. Of course, he thought the Prius was great.  The car of the future, he said. Another of the guys had mentioned that Priuses tended to be driven by really smart people, "professors, doctors, engineers, lawyers...." I loved that. "I wanna be like them." I thought.

Anyhow, we're outta there. Our car passed muster with our mechanic. Hopefully it won't get all busted up real quick.

Garfield movie

Graham and I just finished watching the Garfield movie A Tale of Two Kitties.  Awesome, in its own imbecilic way. I ate lasagna.

8 years of Grousing

I got busy last week and somehow neglected to pause and reflect upon an accomplishment: as of last Friday, the Grouse has been grousing for eight years. Over that time I've published in excess of 2000 posts and garnered more than 48,000 hits, if my statcounter is to be trusted (and if it ain't, whatever). In the grand scheme of web traffic, the grouse is but a minnow, but in the grand scheme of things, so am I, and that's fine.

As the years have rolled on, my feelings towards the blog have changed. At the beginning it was like I had all this pent-up thought, all this would be genius that was being squelched by the world. It was also a great place to write about my life at home, the things the kids did, so that it would be there for me in the future. As I look back at it over time, I care less about the first part, more about the latter, and much about the feedback I've gotten from my few dedicated readers over the years. A small group of you have kept coming back and asking for more, and I like totally appreciate it, for sure.

And so, eight more years? We shall see.

Faceless Killers

I was all geared up to hate this novel.  For the first 200-odd pages, it just kept dragging. Wallander (the detective) has silly and implausible exploits, makes some somewhat astute guesses and expects to get a medal for it, is mad at his father, and drinks liquor and coffee.  Unlike Kalle Blomqvist of the Girl with the blah blah blah novels, he does not even think to complement his bottomless cups of joe with equally endless generic sandwiches.

But by the end, the author wraps things up nicely and twists things around in an interesting way. (plot spoiler coming) Because the farmer who's the victim of the novel's initial murder made a bunch of secret money back during WWII doing some profiteering, the reader is teed up to expect that the deep repressed sins of the past have revisited him and gotten him killed. This and other red herrings confuse the police team from Ystad quite considerably, but in the end the solution to the puzzle is much more mundane. Wallander impresses by being dogged and sticking to it long enough to figure it out, and the fact that he pulls out of a post-marital breakup slide into drink, burgers, stubble, and stench and sleeps with the hot though married pinch-hit prosecutor even as his colleague gets prostate cancer and his dad works through a touch of dementia somehow works.  Life goes on. Cops solve mysteries. Scandinavians sleep around.

So it's OK, even technically accomplished in a way, but not compelling.  I'll probably read another one, but not soon.

Cars on the brain

Our Subaru died. We have been car shopping.

So far, no horror stories, just the never-ending process of driving, comparing, web surfing, seeking for referrals, scheming, dreaming, and pondering. I know that, in the end, it is just a car we're talking about.  But still.

A perfect fall day

By all accounts, the Carrboro Music Festival was lovely, and the weather was perfect for it.  Unfortunately, the weather was equally nice at our house, and we neglected to make it up there. Got a lot of stuff taken care of around here, and Natalie and I shared a nice coffee at the mall while waiting for Graham to pick out library books. This has become a weekend habit for us, and an excellent one at that.

Update from the front

So I went with Henning Mankell, then fell asleep and overslept going to pick Natalie up from Susannah's bday party.  Woke up not sure where I was. I'm fairly certain I've seen the BBC version of this book on Masterpiece Mystery, and am in any case bothered by the fact that I clearly see Kenneth Branagh in the role of whatever his name is, the detective guy.

Later, Mary put on Fleetwood Mac, and started dancing around like a nerdy mom.  Graham, not to be outdone, displayed some of his breakdancing moves.

Being Frank Bascombe, or not

I'm about halfway through Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, the third novel in his trilogy about Frank Bascombe.  So far, maybe 12 hours have passed. On the one hand, not a ton has happened, on the other, it's been a pretty eventful 12 hours. But still. It's dragging on.  The guy has seems to have never met a doorknob he didn't know from earlier in his life, and which reminds him of something.

It's raining outside, and I might have to take a break to read a mystery novel. I kind of wish I had one about someplace sunny, though I think what I have in my to be read stack is Henning Mankell, Josephine Tey, and Alan Furst, all of whom are kind of North Atlantic and brooding. Hmmm.

Those cray cray kids

Natalie is in a phase where she and her friends in school are coining phrases fast and furiously, or are perhaps watching iCarly on the sly or somesuch and picking up slang.  For example, "totally" is "totes" (now I know that's in broad circulation), which has mutated into "totes m'goats".

Today she was saying "cray cray" instead of crazy.

Gotta love it.

Her new glasses are also making it easier for her to read the whiteboard from the back of science class, also awesome.

A few quick notes

• Had a good support experience with Mozy yesterday.  Mary's computer hadn't backed up for months, exposing a lot of photos to risk of technical outage or computer theft, either of which could have been my ass. I got chat support from a certain "Tommy J", uninstalled and reinstalled, and now we're backing up.
• Pulling out of the parking lot near Whole Foods and the thrift shop where I had picked up shirts from the cleaner, I saw a Ferrari couple pulling in. Made a mental note, "don't see so many of those around here."  Right behind it was a Maserati 4-door, which had a bewitching purr. Not that I'm into cars, or anything.
• Apparently this "Call Me Maybe" song is a big hit, I had never heard it.  The teachers at Natalie's school (also my middle school, but there were different teachers then) made this video and stuck it on YouTube.  Natalie was really into it. I must say I think it's really cool that the teachers did this, it really puts them on the same page as the students. It's literally heartwarming.

• For the record, even Graham was into Gangnam Style.

Book list

A couple of people have either asked for book recommendations or cited the blog as a source of reading ideas recently, so I'm gonna share a list of recent reading (last year or so) I drew up the other day when prepping for a question from a humanist regarding a job at UNC (the question, malheureusement, never came).

Non-fiction
Peter Hessler, River Town, Oracle Bones, Country Driving (all 3 are great, the middle is the best, read in order)

Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty (awesome), Confidence Men (stopped 80 pages in, too much rehash of crisis)

Tom Friedman, That Used to Be Us (utterly unreadable)

Alice Schroeder, The Snowball (on Warren Buffett -- good book, a little too gushing and gawkish maybe)

Howard Bryant, The Last Hero:  A Life of Henry Aaron (very good, slows down in the middle, but solid detail on both the man and race relations in our lifetime)

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker (re-read it, still good), Boomerang (good, but he's coasting)

Books by people I know
Wade Graham, Jesus is My Gardener (A Kindle Single, very good), American Eden: from Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards, (A very ambitious book.  I'm stalled about 70 pages in, maybe because it's too academic, or maybe I just don't care enough about gardening to push on through)

Frank Ryle, Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros (on the nature of project management, allegorized to golf.  In the vein of 7 Dysfunctions of a Team. Not the best book in the world, but still as readable as you're going to get and still learn something about project management.)

Jay Leutze, Stand Up that Mountain (both an infectious paean to nature, a tale of life lived otherwise, and a solid procedural on what could be the most boring stuff in the world -- how state and federal regulation work -- but it works here)

Fiction
Olen Steinhauer, The Confession (mystery novel set in cold War Slovakia or something like that. Builds slowly, but in the end it's really good)

Alan Furst, I don't know which one of his novels I read. They are all similar, and similarly good.

PD James, Original Sin (I read it because Ruth Rendell said it was the greatest mystery ever. I don't know about that, but it's pretty good)

John Lanchester Capital (A good novel, aspires perhaps to be The Novel of The Financial Crisis. Doesn't quite get there, but is nonetheless worth reading. He creates characters you can care about, which is saying something).

Business books
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (an important and useful book. Gawande has a brain, a heart, and the ability to write)


Vivek Ranadive, The Two-Second Advantage (he really wants to be Malcom Gladwell and sell Tibco's software at the same time.  Somewhat convincing, lightweight)


Eric Ries, The Lean Start-Up (good, solid, well thought out book bringing process and discipline to the wooliest of domains)

Ellen Schutz, Retirement Heist:  How Companies and Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers (an important book written, sadly, by a journalist without enough editorial help to turn it into a good book.  I am 60 pages in and should finish it, though it's just so boring)

The end of civilization

After I got done with my run and had cooled off, I went in the rec room where Graham was sitting amongst the bootie from his birthday party. I saw that he had been crying.  "What's wrong?" I asked.  "I don't like that 39 Clues book at all, I read the first five sentences and they were horrible."  So I read it and it didn't seem too bad, it seemed like we were getting set up for a pretty good mystery.

"What's the problem?" I asked again.  He said he didn't like it that, when the old lady who's dying changes her will, the book says that it "threatens civilization as we know it." That idea freaked him out. I assured him that it was a dramatic overstatement, that civilization wasn't going to end, and that it was just make believe anyway. But he wasn't consoled.

I remember when I was his age or so there was some movie made by the CTW in which Kermit and the Sesame Street gang get somehow involved in a tragic love story. I must have had to stay up very late to watch it, because the ending was very foggy for me even way back then. But I know it was tragic, and that the impression of overwhelming melancholy stuck with me for a while, though I couldn't remember exactly why.  Hell, I obviously still remember it.

But back to Graham, we must bear in mind that this is a kid who watches all manner of WWII shit on the Military and History Channels, and that I've walked into the room to see scenes of bulldozers pushing emaciated Holocaust victim corpses into pits, and he sits there unphased (though that's admittedly not his favorite part of the war). Yes, I know, we're bad parents for letting him watch it at all.

Later, Mary and I watched Stephen Soderbergh's Contagion, in which civilization does nearly end.  We won't tell Graham about that one.

Are crawlers creepy?

Watching my traffic, it's interesting to see that Google's "crawler" -- the code that goes out across the web seeking to catalog everything that's out there -- visited my most recent post a minute and forty-one seconds after it was posted. This should come as no surprise, since Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google. It makes sense for Sergei and Larry to have arranged a script to catalog every post that comes out as quickly as it does so, particularly as posting Google adwords on blogs is a revenue stream for them. I dunno how big these dollars are.  Probably small for Google in toto, but big in the incentive comp of the Adwords team, who may well have cut a deal with the crawler team to get such quick service.

But I don't think it's creepy.  I'll take all the traffic I can get for free.

Dr No

I keep getting approached by entrepreneurial types who Thave ideas, or I have ideas of my own. My natural tendency is to try to think of the things that could trip them up, make them fail, etc.

There is undoubtedly an inherent value to healthy skepticism in this context. The statistics around start-ups are not all that encouraging. Over the last couple of days in the Wall Street Journal I saw a story that said that something like 3 out of 4 venture-backed start-ups fail. And those are just the ones that are lucky enough to get venture money. So many start-ups are of the type that used to sleep in a shoebox on a lake bed, and wake up in the middle of the night to lick the lake bed dry with their tongues.

In any case, internal team members need to kick the shit out of the tires of any new enterprise on a continual basis to make sure they are road ready.

On the other hand, my deeply ingrained critical inclination may be informed by the fact that I'm the child of an alcoholic dreamer, someone who had business ideas all the time that were going to change the world, but brought very few of them to fruition. Even more so, I have a pretty strong bias towards believing that almost nothing is going to work out for the best. I basically am catastrophic in my thought patterns. As my sister and I have discussed, this would make us good risk managers.

However, there's a risk of this thought pattern degrading into a version of Zeno's paradoxes as described by Parmenides, back in the day. Basically the idea is that, because to traverse any distance, you must first traverse half of it, you can never get anywhere, because this is true for even the smallest increment. I.e. to go 8 meters, I must first go 4. To go 4, I must first go 2. To go 2, I must first go 1, etc.According to Parmenides, this proved that all motion was illusion. I wonder if my bones don't half agree.

I think that to play in the entrepreneurial world there is a need to suspend disbelief and just dive in, which is something I have been somewhat loath to do, perhaps because I spent so much time treading water in the pool of Russian Literature. Not that the water wasn't great.

The little black menace persists

Try as we might, we cannot seem to entirely shake the fleas from our homestead.  Or, perhaps, we have. I haven't actually seen one in several days, though I did see two in successive days up here in the splendid isolation of my elevated man-cave, though no cat has graced it for weeks.

And we've been putting out soap-laced water under a reading lamp, as instructed by friends and the mighty, all-knowing internet, and collecting seemingly no fleas but a sweet little collection of gnats and other winged things.

But the perception of flea risk lingers on longer than the little things themselves, or is it that they are so crafty, as if trained by the equally skitterish squirrels. Every time I feel a little itch on my arm or leg, I look. And, probably, I imagine itches that might not even rise to the attention of my brain, had it not been for the initial fleas. Oh when will they disappear from our minds?

From Princeton

I recently finished Peter Hessler's River Town, which is the first of his three books on his time in China, though I read it last. In fact, I read the books in reverse order. Allow me to recommend reading them in order. They were plenty good read backwards, but I suspect the sweep of narrative would have worked better the other way. I'm sure I would have appreciated seeing the narrator grow, even as his subject shifted.

In the middle of River Town, I stopped off and re-read Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, which I think I blogged about. For some time I've thought Lewis one of the best writers writing in English, but I now believe that Hessler is better. Lewis is more pyrotechnics, more writerly pizzazz, and more at home with the mover and the shaker. Hessler is able to sit calmly, observe, and pull narrative out of seeming nothingness, simply because he pays attention.

Of course, I'm well aware that I share much with both of them:  we're all white boys from middle America who went off to Ivy League schools and drank our fill there (I, for sure, literally, as well as figuratively), though we weren't insiders when we got there. Wikipedia tells me that Lewis was a prep school kid, which I could have guessed simply from the fact that he's from New Orleans, but Hessler is a public school kid from a university town, like me.

I think what that means is that I probably need to read something written by a non-white, non-male, non-straight and/or non-Ivy League person before I keep piling on superlatives.

However, I've started in reading Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, which is itself set in and around Princeton (takes me back) and is all about being white, male, and middle-aged. But he's really good, I swear, or at least he knows how to push my buttons.

What all of these guys have in common with each other, and with me, is no doubt that they seek to rise up and take a really abstract, high-level view of Things In General. And that's something us white Ivy League guys want to feel good at, it's what we aspire to. Most likely because we were brought up going to church and looking at God depicted as a white guy.

Distraction

Today, as I was rushing downstairs to fix one thing on Graham's birthday Evite I spilled coffee on the stairs, so I got a paper towel to clean it up. As I was cleaning, my mind was on about 30 other pressing things related to some disturbing news I got yesterday, and I got distracted. I neglected to put my lower foot down on a step, and I actually fell backwards onto the floor, just a couple of steps below. My cat Rascal was like "WTF," and as I looked in front of me I could see that my flip flop, dragging along the floor, had left a black skid mark about 18 inches long.

But luckily, I think that was about the worst of it. Years of training as an athlete/klutz have given me good falling skills, and I fell on my butt, which has some cushioning.  There may be a little bruising and soreness, but that should be it. The skid mark wiped up good.

This, I think, is what they mean by "staying in the moment." Elsewhere, you can get in trouble quickly.

Self-worth

Today -- as we rushed to get ready to go out and meet the bus -- I was trying to show Graham how to twist the top off of his water bottle and quickly got frustrated with my inability to do so. What is the problem?  Is it that the thing (and bottle tops in general) are optimized for a right-handed population, hard for lefties like him?  Is it that he wasn't trying hard enough (possible), because he expects that we'll do it for him in the end (moral hazard)? Or does he really lack the hand strength, as a result -- partly of his " low tone" condition, partly because he only exercises outside of school if we actually go out and do something with him (this is partly a zeitgeist thing, as all parents comment these days, but to some extent has been exacerbated by our settling in a neighborhood which has a lower density of children, partly by virtue of extended longevity amongst the educated/affluent population here, partly by virtue of the hills and largish wooded lots -- which create micro-neighborhoods cut off from one another).

At some level, then, it's kinda complicated.  One thing's for sure.  I can get frustrated with this kind of thing, and did a little today. And Graham senses my tension and surely can't sort out all the complex shit I just laid out up there. He probably assumes at a gut level I'm just mad at/frustrated with him. In a best case scenario, he's just can't figure out what's up with dad.

This crazy mind-spinning is typical Al Anon behavior, and worthy of attention if, at the end of the day, not all that big a deal, which is what I must remember in my bones.

It's my party

and I'll cry if I want to.

Calm

Mary is in New York. It was a calm day here at my desk.

In the evening the kids and I had Thai food and sat at the dining room table, as opposed to the island.

I'll take it, after the violent drama of the rains yesterday. The lake was maybe 18-24 inches higher than it's ever been before, and the water poured over the dam in cascading torrents (man I'm tired if I can't think of better phrases than that, but whatever). The creek was a high as I've ever seen it, maybe 50 feet across, and the little islands in the middle were complete subsumed by the rush of it all.

After I told Graham how intense it was, he wanted to go down and check it out. We walked over to the dam and I showed it to him and held his hand while I talked to him about the deadly power of rushing water. I think he got the point.

Then we played some frisbee, for the first time in months.  It was so wet I didn't want to run after the damned thing for fear I'd slip and my phone would fall out of my pocket. My legs got wet and covered with nasty grass cuttings and, as we're still paranoid about the fleas, I did some very diligent rinsing on the way in. All told, it was good.

Natalie thinks of Sadie, and more

Mary is headed to New York today for a few days, and will be staying with Beth, Kevin, and Sadie. In the morning, before school, Mary reminded Natalie of that, and she immediately said "oh, let me see if I have a little something I can send to Sadie." This made me very proud.

Addenda:  On the way to the airport for Mary's flight to New York for Laura Letinsky's opening and birthday (won't quote a number here), I brought up Natalie's thoughtfulness with her and Mary noted that it was very sweet of her but that, when Natalie searched her room, all she could find to send to Sadie was a small shell. This is probably because Natalie, like all tweens, keeps her room very neat and tosses away old possessions as soon as she stops playing with them regularly..... JKLMFAO!

Around dinnertime, Graham noted that Mary's birthday was coming up fast and that we had better start planning for it. That is also very sweet.

We have good kids.

Reading back

Just read some entries from 2005, straight transcriptions of things I did with the kids.  Really precious. Must get back to doing more of that.

It's late now, but must narrate the trip Graham and I took to the second raft out in the lake over the weekend. Great memories.

Self-Googling of the elite

Sometime yesterday, the name "Peter Hessler" was entered into the blog search engine Icerocket by someone whose ISP is in a suburb of Cairo. Judging by some of Hessler's recent writings at The New Yorker , he could well have been the visitor himself, as he moved there sometime last year after having spent many years in China and as a China hand, and after having won an entirely well-earned MacArthur.

I certainly like to think it might have been him stopping by, for one, because I like all visitors, and particularly those I admire, and for two, because it's nice to think that even those who've reached the highest levels of attainment in their fields are curious about what's being written about them.  Hell, that's how I got a meeting with the former CEO of the biggest and most powerful insurance company of all time, perhaps the most storied insurance exec ever.  He was googling himself or, more likely, he had one of his admins do it.  Same diff.

The little black peril

The cats were scratching themselves a lot the other day, and Mary quite perceptively noted that it was fleas. So Saturday we were off to the races, give the cats pills, then vacuum the whole house top to bottom and wash every single piece of bedding, etc. It was hell.

Fleas are like communism. They're hard to see, crafty little buggers jumping around and all, and once you suspect they're around you try to root them out everywhere. Because you can't see them, and in particular you can't see their eggs, they insinuate themselves into your every waking thought.  Was that a tick? Is there something on my leg? 

Space and the divine

At an Al-Anon meeting last week a silver-haired lean white woman in Birkenstocks or similar sensible sandals shared about how being alone, in nature, particularly under the stars, was what put her in touch with her higher power, gave her a sense of oneness. I know what she's talking about, for sure, this is technically referred to as the "sublime" and is certainly a concept shared by a lot of people, particularly urban or once-urban and affluent ones who can afford to get out and see the sublime sometimes or often.

And then I thought about a story I had had a gander at recently about Chinese swimming pools.

These pools are huge, incredibly crowded and, not surprisingly, hard to keep clean, thus high in pee and poop content.

So what chance do these folx get to have a toodle with the sublime embodiment of the divine that so many affluent folx select as their god of choice?  And, for that matter, what opportunities do the lower-income residents of our own inner cities have? Or, even better, the 1% of our population that we like to keep behind bars as part of our "keep rural white males employed and with guns in their hands" government program that is commonly referred to as the "War on Drugs"? Not that much.

On the other hand, I'm currently in the middle of Peter Hessler's River Town, in which the author recounts a couple of years he spent in the Chinese city of Fuling in the late 90s (a great book, like all of Hessler's. Read it!)  Hessler recounts going to the tombs of a Fuling factory owner's family in more rural areas across the Yangtze from the city, and remarks that the rich guy, remembering what it was like to live in the countryside, didn't romanticize it at all and was happy to head back to his house in the city. I suspect this is pretty common, and that the urban affluent's apotheosization of rural tranquility is really just another instance of grass being greener.

But that Chinese pool still looks nasty.

The Hunger Games

Over the last couple of nights we watched The Hunger Games on pay-per-view with Natalie.  The first time we had done that, though it may become common practice, since the DVDs we're getting from Netflix have been coming in consistently scratched.  Or we may have to cave in to the demands of modernity and upgrade to a modern TV connected to the so-called internet (our current one is very old school), with a Wii, even.

But I digress.  The main thing is that Natalie stayed up late and watched with us. Over the course of the summer, I had tried to get her to go see The Hunger Games with me at the theater, but stuff kept coming up, and she acted unexcited. But she was thrilled to see it, though she was continually attuned to the ways in which the book is better. Both nights, as we were preparing to watch or during bathroom breaks, she bounced up and down on the little trampoline in the rec room, doing splits and other tricks.  Last night, as Mary and I were getting dinner ready, she even offered to help us get our meal on the table so as to get to the evening's main attraction.

As we watched, she sat on the couch and giggled and glowed at the excitement of staying up late to watch with mom and dad. We need to do more of this. Some of my readers may be shocked to learn that, with her already at the age of 12, we've done so little of it. But, in the end, that's the kind of uptight hard-assed WASPs we are, despite our attempts to be alternative or whatever. I don't know who we think we're fooling.

Bad thoughts

A friend of mine (James Romm, of Bard College) is working on a book about death in the time of Seneca.  Apparently, the Romans had a practice of getting rid of enemies of the state by forcing them to commit suicide. The deal was, if you killed yourself, your heirs would inherit your estate and you could be buried with honor, or something like that. Otherwise, you would be executed and none of the good stuff would happen, your heirs were left out in the cold and you were thrown to the dogs.

The centurions would show up at your door, and you had to go kill yourself while they were there. That's a horrific thought. Imagine being of the mindset to go and do that.

I started thinking about this this morning when my alarm went off an hour earlier than it should have (it was set for last Thursday). Not good.

I suppose I should regard the early alarm as an harbinger of the kids going back to school next Monday, which will be a blessing, honestly.

But I could have been spared this particular historical tidbit. I don't really know why I'm passing it along to you, fair reader, save that it's a gripping image.

Slipping, falling, and mindfulness

After taking a shower today I realized that the towel on the wall was wet from Mary's shower just before, so I had to go all the way over to the opposite wall to get a dry one. By the time I stepped back into the stall to dry off my legs, I was already distracted, and I nearly tripped on the step-up into the shower. It's easy to see how falling in showers is a big problem, especially for people as they age. Hell, not two weeks ago I slipped ever so slightly twice when stepping into the shower at Kirsten and Ted's back in Princeton. That is a particularly slippery shower, mind you.

It brought to mind a conversation I had not long ago at all with the CEO of a specialized insurance brokerage. He was telling me about earlier days in his career, when he worked at a larger carrier, and where he insured restaurants (not that specialized a risk). "What's the number 1 risk at restaurants?" he asked, and I luckily guessed it was falls.  Then he asks me how to mitigate the risk -- and thereby get lower premiums --, and I thought about not putting bathrooms downstairs. He tells me that's one thing, but on an even more basic level, that restaurants shouldn't have salad bars. And I'm thinking, yeah, spills of oil on the floor, and he says it's much simpler:  you just don't want people to get up.

I was also reminded of reading somewhere of work former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill had done in his healthcare consultancy which emphasized that, at all costs, hospitals and healthcare facilities should seek to minimize falls by patients, because falls were so highly correlated with increased lengths of stays, bad outcomes, and costs.  I'll be damned if I can find a link to that.

But, anyway, around the house, falling is so closely connected to mindfulness. If one can simply be attuned to situations in which you're likely to fall, you're not gonna.

I guess most people just don't.  Until they do.

I had a feeling this wasn't the first time I had written about this topic, and indeed it's not. Here's an entry from 2009.

Old tapes

The CD player in our Volvo is broken, so for now we must focus on the radio and tapes. When leaving Princeton, in an effort to cut down on stuff and clutter, I threw away almost all of my old tapes, some of them dating back to junior high school.  I could not prevail upon Mary to do the same.

So now we are listening to her old tapes. Which is great and expands and refreshes my musical landscape. Etta James, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, things we don't have CDs of.  I took one tape called "A la vie Parisienne" and popped it in there. Some of it is great, other parts (Gerard Depardieu songs, for instance), not so great. Overall it gave me the feeling that I wished I had known and gone out with Mary when we were younger.

When I told her that, she said "I have no idea where this tape came from." Even still.

Lump of focus

Played tennis with David and Frank last week in Princeton. As always, the experiences were different. David and I had, as we have always had, great parity.  We used to play each other twice, sometimes even three times a week, and we would always be fairly even.  7-6, 6-4, those kind of sets, rarely more than one, as we had neither the fitness nor the time to batter one another for much longer.

With Frank it's different. I once won a game off of Frank.  This week he beat me 6-0, 6-0, in an hour.  For some reason he enjoyed this. I almost took a game off of him, but as we walked away he told me "I'd be damned if I was gonna let you take a game off of me." In an entirely friendly way, he just needed a goal. And it was good for me to try to play over my head like that.

Frank confessed he was surprised that neither David nor I had ever figured the other one out. I thought about it and told him that I felt it would unbalance the delicate equilibrium we had amongst ourselves, the pleasure of being well-matched.  He responded that in that case, as one of us focused and challenged the other, it would raise the other's game, so that the balance would be restored.

In recent months I've often had people challenge me to be more competitive in sports, first Mumford with the triathlon thing, then Drake wanting me to get back on the track and run races. I tend to fend it off, feeling that I have more than enough to concentrate on with the other things going on in my life and that I should focus my athletics on enjoyment, relaxation, and basic fitness But maybe that is a "lump of focus" fallacy similar to the the well-known "lump of labor" fallacy cited by economists, which states that there is a fixed amount of work to do in an economy.  Maybe being more competitive and challenging myself to do more things would improve my ability to compete in various areas, and would in particular raise my confidence.  Hmmmm.

Certainly I know that certain basic facts are true: if I raise my cardio capacity, I can exercise more..... at least up until the point where my aging body pushes back with repetitive stress injuries (this is a facet of a more developed portfolio theory of exercise, which needs to be spun out some other day).

Three things is certain:  there are only 24 hours in the day, sleep is important, and the general guidelines for this blog insist that I write only 15 minutes a day, so I must stop.

Krugman vs. Estonia: my take

Having been out of town for some weeks, I only just now got around to reading the Businessweek article about the mud-slinging between Princeton economist Paul Krugman and Estonia, esp. its President Toomas Ilves.In short, in June Krugman published a blog post saying that because Estonia's austerity program shrank the country's GDP by almost 15% and that the small Baltic nation's GDP hadn't regained its 2007 levels, that proved that austerity doesn't work and that Estonia should have adopted a Krumanite program of currency devaluation and inflation to move forward from the crisis. Estonia and austerity proponents believe that the country's quick turnaround:  2.3% GDP growth in 2010 followed by 8% or so in 2011, make it a poster child for austerity. In response to Krugman, Ilves did some Tweeting from the hip that generated a lot of discussion in both Estonia and Econoblogospheria.

Here's what I think: On balance, Estonians seems happy with what they did, and that demonstrates that the sort of GDP-obsessed economic determinism for which Krugman is a mouthpiece may not be all that it's cracked up to be. Estonians are used to hardship.  Around 25% of the population died during WWII, and the memory of the Great Patriotic War is still present there and throughout the European part of the former USSR (admittedly, I haven't been back there since '98, but I'm sure they still work it like Giuliani works 9/11).

Estonia's small size and relative ethnic homogeneity (70% Estonian, and almost everybody else is some kind of Slav) and relatively low income disparity (2009 CIA Gini coefficient 31.4 as compared to EU average 30.4 or the US's 45) makes austerity relatively palatable. When people who look like you suffer like you, and it's much less bad than it used to be in WWII or under the Soviet Union, it doesn't feel so bad. Monty Python's knight would have said "It's only a flesh wound."

It's not clear how austerity would play out in larger, more ethnically mixed places where there's always somebody who looks different and sounds funny to blame things on. I think the question gets much more complicated there, or, as is the case, here.

The turn to non-fiction

In recent years I've been reading more and more non-fiction, and, not surprisingly, less and less fiction. It seems like a lot of folks, maybe particularly guys, turn this corner as their hair turns grey.

But why, I wonder? For me, much of it seems to stem from the fading dream of and belief in the idea of the "Great Genius" as something that's desirable. The canonical fiction writers, from Balzac to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Joyce and Proust and those who try to be their heirs really, in the end, want to create these worlds that are reflections of or spring from themselves. The heroic authorial ego. And I would include Toni Morrison and other women too, I don't think it's just a phallic thing.

The non-fiction writer is generally more humble, recognizing that the world provides stories which need only be captured.  And yes, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is itself just a convenient fiction, as the non-fiction narrator's point of view necessarily interjects itself and mediates between what's being described and its description, which are hard to distinguish, I get that and take it under advisement as I read, yet nonetheless the non-fiction writer's "I" somehow seems to set off from a more modest point of appreciation for the experience of others. And as a reader of non-fiction, I start from a place of greater acceptance of my own place in the great chain of being.  Maybe.

Diamonds in the rough day on the 95 corridor

10 hours to make the 470 odd miles from Princeton to Chapel Hill, though we admittedly had lovely Banh Mi (Vietnamese sandwiches -- I didn't know the term earlier in the day either -- luckily Mary did) in Newark Delaware. The story of how we ended up there is key.

I have long hated the stretch of 95 between Baltimore and the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It's one of just a few places on the East Coast 95 corridor through the heavily populated portion of the US, roughly Richmond to Boston, where 95 is the only major road, with no redundant alternate routes:  the others are between Richmond and Alexandria and between New Haven, CT and Providence, RI.  All three of these places suck for traffic, because people are just stuck on them.

But today we got caught in traffic near Newark, DE, and I could see on the traffic layer of the navigation app on my phone (Android, I understand iPhones are weaker in this regard) that the traffic extended for miles out, and the Maryland highway radio confirmed that it was on account of an accident. So I decided to get off the highway for gas and lunch.  Then I dug into my trunk for my 1995 Rand/McNally atlas, complete with duct tape on the spine, and saw that route 273 ran through rural Maryland parallel to 95, some 5-7 miles north of the road of dread. So we took it, then found the Banh Mi.  And while people on 95 sat in traffic in heat, we went 50-55 through beautiful countryside eating roast pork with spicy mayo, cucumber, and cilantro.  Killer. And as a topper we went over the Conowingo Dam over the Susquehanna River, complete with a hydroelectric plant, not an everyday site.

Later, in Virginia, I used route 1 to get around traffic on 95.  Some of that went well, other parts, less well.

And at the end we went to Bullock's in Durham and got even more pig.  All told, a good day.

And, in the future, I have an alternate route for 95 in Maryland, which is a great blessing indeed.

Books from Larchmont

Graham "borrowed" a couple of books from grandma's house:

1. The Fall of Japan, a WWII book
2. Pippi Longstockings

 You gotta love it.

Liar's Poker

I talked briefly with George about wanting to re-read Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker.  This after having decided that Lewis has grown decidedly lazy in recent years, a writer so gifted that anything he deigns to touch spins out into a nice story, a guy so smart and confident that he can master almost any material. So I saw the book on Rob's shelf and plowed through it in a few days.

All these traits and more are present in Lewis's first book. Just the fact that I went through it so quickly tells you a lot about its quality.

I was surprised, I confess, at the bit role played by John Meriwether in the book.  For some reason I had assumed he was a major player in Lewis's mindspace, but he wasn't, though he does take part in the opening anecdote from which the book takes its name. It wasn't until the '90-'91 period of Salomon's bid-rigging problems (chronicled most recently in The Snowball) that Meriwether strode onto center stage at Salomon.  I still think the guy would make the material of an engrossing biopic.

Now must pack to get the family across the Hudson to The Garden State.

Guitar hero

I was watching the first quarter of the Olympic gold medal basketball game.  The US was beating Spain, but not by much, and it occurred to me that for any given sporting event one might watch, there will always be another one, while the opportunity to exercise on any given day can easily slip away to lethargy and/or the demands of family, work, etc. So I went for a run.

It's hot here in Westchester County, so I've taken to running with my shirt off, like lots of people do in North Carolina, though nobody does it here.  I wonder at times if there's an ordinance forbidding it.  I passed a cross-street as a police cruiser went past, saw the cop step on his brakes and slow down, and figured he might be coming back to bust me for toplessness.  But he didn't.

Towards the end of my run I went past the Larchmont Yacht Club, the place of my wedding, a lovely event except for all the boats marring the view of the water.  Several sets of white women in whites were playing doubles on clay courts. Across from the gatehouse of the club, there's a very nice blue house, at one end of which there was a window open.  In there somewhere, a guy (I assume it was a guy) was playing electrical guitar, working out a rhythm guitar riff. It could have been a John Cougar Mellencamp tune, or a Tom Petty one, or even Wilco, or just something that sounded like that. Nothing earthshaking, but still it was great to hear somebody just playing the guitar, feeling it. I stood and listened and tried to figure out if the guy was actually in his teens or whether he was older and trying to just feel the freedom of his youth, but then continued on after deciding that it really didn't matter.

Poughkeepsie

On the way back from Tanya and Jamie's we drove down 9G for a while instead of going straight to the Taconic.  When we got close to Hyde Park, we saw a sign for the Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site and drove in to check it out. It was a lovely looking place, nice house, fields, a pond, bucolic. Everything a white person could want.  Except Graham, who just wanted to get back to Grandma's house to beat her again at chess.  So we stayed in the car, kept driving.

Heading south into Poughkeepsie, things went downhill fast. At one point in time, 5 of 7 businesses we passed were shuttered:  pizza joints, delis, drycleaners, etc. All told, the city was a close to being a ghost town as I had seen in some time. Really derelict. No hope.  Nothing going on. Nice houses rotting. People lounging on front porches or insolently pushing their way through traffic at stop lights, as if to assert their humanity in whatever context offered itself, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man.

Somehow Beacon got the Dia Foundation to come in and do a lot of good. Poughkeepsie is still waiting, as, I suspect, is Peekskill.  Vassar ain't done shit.

Sharing the burden of tech support

For so many years I was alone in my household with technical problems. If something happened with a computer, a phone, a remote control, anything, it fell to me to know how to figure out how to make it work.

But now Natalie is 12, and lives with a lot of Apple products. So if something goes wrong with one of them, very often she knows how to fix it. I sometimes forget this, and bang my head against it before thinking to ask her.  This is a bad habit, and one I need to grow out of.  In any case, it is a huge relief not to be alone with all of these pesky devices.

Sprint for the train

After a very enjoyable meal with a friend on 46th Street last night, I planned to hop on a 9:40 train by slipping onto the Grand Central tracks at their north end at 47th and Madison.  However, I arrived at the door at 9:34, only to discover it had been locked at 9:30.

Which meant that I needed to haul myself down to the station itself and enter the train from its south end. Trouble was, I was wearing flip flops. I might not make the train if I kept them on, so I did the only logical thing.  I took them off and ran barefoot through the streets of midtown. I had pretty good faith in the MidTown Alliance to keep broken glass off the streets and sidewalks.

Going along the west side of Vanderbilt Avenue, in the shadow of a big JP Morgan's world headquarters, just north and across the street from the Yale Club, I couldn't help but notice a few homeless guys camped out in doorways, just as I had seen one in a doorway back on 46th. Anecdotally, it feels like the homeless population is on the rise in NYC. At least Bloomberg is protecting them from themselves by limiting their ability to buy super-sized sodas and, as of yesterday, would encourage the women amongst them to breast feed.

Scarsdale

Standing on a corner in Scarsdale, waiting for Dave Berck.  I don't know why the sight of 19-year olds driving $50,000 cars never ceases to amaze me, but it doesn't.  I am perhaps naive, or I've just been away for too long.

Across the way, the Westchester Band prepares to play a free concert, and an audience more advanced in years is showing up with folding chairs. Then Berck shows up.

Trusting your mechanic

Before driving north the other morning I took our Volvo S40 into the garage because the left hand tail light was out, and the left hand turn signal was clicking in double time.  The latter had been happening a couple of weeks before (when the left headlight was out), so I assumed the mechanic had somehow not fixed something.

I got there right when they opened at 7:30, because I needed to drive 540 miles that day, and Graham had told me very plainly that he didn't want to get to Grandma's house after his bedtime. I thought it was great he was so clear with me.  I described my problem, handed over my keys, and sat down to eat my breakfast biscuit from Sunrise.  I ate and read, but by 8:40 I was feeling a little nervous.  Was there something systemic that they were trying to diagnose?  So I went up and asked the guy what was up with my car, he went back, and then came out and said it was almost done, he'd ring me up.  $15.33.  They just needed to put in a bulb, which they didn't have on hand and had to have delivered from a parts store.  Turns out, the fast blinking of the turn signal is just meant to tell you that a bulb had blown out.

So here's my question:  why didn't they tell me that from the outset?  I was sitting there nervous, thinking something might be wrong and that maybe we'd need to drive north the next day, when the hold up was all about needing to get a part delivered?  So did they not tell me that because they like for you to be nervous, and then to be relieved to find out how cheap the repair was? It's not like they're making a profit on a fifteen buck repair.  If you charge that little money, it's purely a relationship management play.  You want the customer to appreciate your honesty.  So be freaking honest.  I probably wasted 15-30 minutes concerned about what might be going on. If I could have had full concentration during that time, I would have been able to read and retain more.

East Durham

I was talking to a realtor over in Durham a couple of weeks back, and she said to me "you've probably never even been over to East Durham," and she was right.  So after a meeting today at the Golden Arts Center, seemingly the easternmost outpost of the much ballyhooed New Durham, I drove around a bit. It was a pretty rough area, indeed. I found Joe's Diner, which I had read about, and it was like an oasis in the midst of much rundownness, and I saw the spot near it where the TROSA grocery store venture that failed must have been.


I drove past NCCU, and saw some very nice facilities there.  But just off campus, things degenerated quickly.  Once nice houses deteriorating or boarded up.

I went into a gas station to get some gas.  There was no place to put a credit card into the pump, which, on closer inspection, seemed pretty moribund. The couple of cars parked next to the other pump proved empty, and when I went inside the store, a guy came out from the back talking on his cellphone.  I asked, "does the gas work?" and he said "no gas."  Not that I asked, but he might have said that there's an operating gas station just under the nearby underpass.

All told, it was not inspiring. I was comforted by a conversation I had with a soon-to-retire Durham cop a few weeks back. He worked in HQ downtown, and I asked him if all the development and attention that Durham was getting recently translated into decreased violent crime statistics. He assured me that it did.  Whether any of the new money coming into town is changing the lives of the inner city black population, that's a different question. Still, all the activity around the American Tobacco campus and the arrival of new tenants like FHI360 moving its global headquarters downtown at the end of 2013 should produce at least some jobs for inner city folx, one must assume. Maybe not the best jobs, but some jobs.

After the fact

We made it to the floating dock. Well, actually, Graham swam alongside me with the kickboard for a while, and then he took over the kickboard himself, but in any case we went all the way out to the dock and climbed up on it.  And then Graham got into the water and swam around the dock a little, sans kickboard.

Later, he decided to lash the kickboard to his wrist and free wheel it, and I swam up to 20 feet away.  This did not by any chance enhance his swimming technique, which is, it must be owned, not perfect, but he developed confidence being in the water by himself at depths well over his head and knowing that he could get the kickboard back when he wanted to, which was all good. He also insisted that we revisit the dock down by the kayaks and canoes, where he had had a mishap a couple of years back, when he fell into the water while playing with a toy boat, when he wasn't even supposed to be down by the lake at all. Graham felt a clear need to investigate that dock, test its depth, and demonstrate to it who was the boss. Namely, him.

In any case, a big day.

Graham was, though, not excited at all when mom told him when snuggling this evening that he had a swimming lesson tomorrow morning. Oh well.

Big swim

Tomorrow should be an exciting day.  Graham and I have been talking about swimming out to the raft at the lake for a couple of summers.  Last year we didn't get him enough lessons for it to be a goal within reach.

This evening I suggested that perhaps tomorrow he and I could swim out to the raft with him using a kickboard.  He suggested that, instead, we should use a technique he and Granny had used to swim a lap, with him swimming and her moving along beside him with a kickboard, which he could rest on when he needed to. Sounds good to me.

Capital, by John Lanchester

The Economist published such a gushing review of this novel about a street in London that I ran out and had it delivered to my Kindle. The old "newspaper" led me to believe that this was gonna be the novel that really drew in the full scope of the financial crisis, really dug down and made whole the many intricacies and contradictions of the period.  In truth, it did not, though there was a lot in there about real estate and materialism and all the other stuff that characterized oughts and its not-so thrilling climax. We'll need to wait for Richard Ford or Delillo or someone to bring us The Novel of the Crisis.

But that's OK. Lanchester in fact does something perhaps better.  He populates the book with a bunch of engaging characters you can like and mostly care about.  Not all of them are fully "round" in the Forsterian sense of the term, but that's OK too.  There are a fair number of them, and not even 600 pages in which to develop them.  It's a fine novel, and by the end there are enough of the characters you like that you just want to see things work out for them, or at least most of them.  And Lanchester wraps things up pretty nicely, perhaps too neatly in some sense, but who cares. It's a good read, light enough for the beach, weighty enough for the shelf.

Life events

I went to a memorial service yesterday, the 3rd I've been to in the last couple of years, for someone I didn't know all that well and hadn't seen for many many years, but remembered quite fondly from an earlier crisis period of my life.  In fact, all of these services have been for people I didn't know particularly well, one for the mother of a neighbor where we felt that it was a good idea for our household to be represented. It is incredible how much you learn about someone after they are gone, how much you can appreciate them and others' feelings for them. It's as if a whole new dimension of human experience opens to you, not in the abstract, but in the very very specific points of others' rich memories of the one now sadly absent, and it's rather beautiful.

Similarly, I looked today at the Facebook page of someone I haven't seen in the flesh for 20 years.  And there, as his background picture, was a picture of a lovely daughter about Natalie's age.  And this was a person whom I had known through the rock-n-roll beer-drinking pot-smoking days of my early 20s.  It's very moving to see that, to see someone whom you know from days of self-destruction and, in one image, you can see how their direction has turned.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm getting old.

Tenants

My mom and I were up at some rental properties we own in her home town recently.  She had told me that the couple there had not been able to keep up with their rent for some time -- years -- but that they took good care of the place.  So we were going to stop in and see if there was any way we could help them navigate the state resources that are available to them to get more assistance.  They've been consistently paying $200-250 on a $350 a month 1-bedroom unit.

So we went in there, and they were a couple my age, maybe a little older.  There were teddy bears all over the place, on the coffee table, tacked to the wall.  "I love bears," she explained.  There were also some crystal bottles and other gewgaws.  On the wall were pictures of a bunch of kids and other relatives, maybe 20-25 of them.  I don't know which were kids, nephews, nieces, siblings, what have you. An extended family. She had recently had a 9-pound tumor removed and had diabetes, and had a huge bag of medications she needed to take. They were both as nice as they could be.

He was working as much as he could.  He had picked up 32 hours at WalMart, but, none too mysteriously, no more. They had been able to wrangle a whopping $14 in food stamps a month. In terms of private charities, there was an interchurch council of sorts from whom they had been able to get one month's utility bill picked up.

So that was pretty much it. You know the guy would work more if he could.  In fact, my mom's rental agent said her brother was a manager on the 3rd shift at WalMart and that she would talk to him about maybe getting this guy some more hours.

The state has pretty much washed its hands, the church in a not-too affluent town doesn't have the resources to supplement too much, so we just have to cut the people some slack on their rent because we can't throw them out in the street and, at the end of the day, they take good care of the apartment, so we'd be lucky to find a better tenant.

Small miracles

Our phone, internet, and cable crapped out last night -- thankfully after Tosh.0 was over -- and I resisted the temptation to try to fix it.  In the morning it was working again.

I showed Graham some Andy Griffith over the weekend during the TVLand marathon tribute.  Yesterday evening Graham asked me what channel Andy Griffith was on.  It may be time to get a DVD, however often the reruns are on.  It's just good viewing, and good for your kid to want to watch it.

Stillness

My desk looks out onto the front yard, where there are trees, a road, a house and then, as you might surmise, still more trees. When there is no breeze, all is still.  And when it is hot and the sun is high, it is oppressive, and it reminds me of when I was young, and I would look out on those same trees and have a hard time imagine escaping the heat and the stillness. And now I am back.

But when the sun goes down and it gets cooler, as it usually does, there is promise. And I can get in my car, roll down the windows, crank up the stereo, and experience the possibility of a summer evening. Even though the things that are possible are somewhat different.

Bacon arbitrage

At Whole Foods yesterday a woman took a to go box and was filling it with bacon. Nothing but bacon. Her 5 or 6-year old son was pestering her and she told him that they were getting it to make bacon sandwiches.  She was not small, but not as large as the amount of bacon she was buying might imply.

Honestly, at $7.99 a pound at the hot bar, cooked bacon is a brilliant deal. I don't know what portion of the weight of a package of bacon is cooked out in the pan, but it's a lot.  We bought Graham bacon in a couple of iterations.  I bought one piece and the scale weighed it in at 24 cents, and then Mary bought two pieces and paid 9 cents. I'll bet she bought pieces that were more well done, but part of the difference was probably in the sensitivity of the scale.

If I had a small restaurant or a food cart or truck, I'd totally go to Whole Foods in the morning and buy a container of bacon.  It would probably be cheaper than buying or cooking, and would probably save a lot of cooking and cleaning too, if you don't have a big flat grill.

From the Whole Foods perspective, it's OK to have a few arbitrageurs like that because you'll make it up the other lower weight to value items (biscuits, eggs, etc.).  But if I saw this happening a lot, I'd quickly reprice the bacon (just like their cheese grits, which you purchase by the square unit rather than by weight).  The problem would come when the check-out line starts to get slowed down by more items to ring up and people in line get pissed off as their eggs get cold.

Letting go

Graham finished up a week's camp at the NC Autism Society yesterday.  This was a week for kids at the kids at the high-functioning, Asperger's end of the spectrum.  To close off the week, they had a talent show where each kid got to showcase a unique talent of his or her own.  Graham didn't feel like he had a specific talent he wanted to share, so he decided to be the MC, and for the whole second half of the proceedings, Graham introduced kids and complemented those who had just gone on what they had just done.  With a little coaching from the counsellors, Graham did a truly fine job.  One kid had decided to demonstrate his basketball prowess.  Graham took the mike and said "Please direct your attention to the left side of the gym, where Billy (not necessarily his real name) will be shooting hoops."

It was pretty striking to watch the assembled kids.  Some of those in this cohort of ostensibly "high-functioning" kids did not appear to be all that high-functioning. Graham really held his own, but I felt myself being consumed with much of the fear that Mary manifests, that this adorable, sweet boy of ours my indeed have a difficult time making it in the world on his own. I wonder if he will take the turns that his cousin Daniel has, maturing from a challenged kid with a diagnosis into a very fine specimen of homo sapiens.  Or will he always need a lot of support?


It seems characteristic of fathers of special needs kids to keep themselves in denial of their kids special needs, and I do often find myself wondering how much Graham differs from how I was as a kid.  After all, I was as skinny and geeky and bullied as they come and I made it out OK (current career challenges  notwithstanding).  What would my diagnosis have been? How much of this is denial, how much reality?

But I am also mindful that adult kids of alcoholics like myself tend to let their minds race to spiraling negative scenarios about everything.  As in, "Oh my God, my child is doomed!!"  And that does nobody any good. Anyhow, days full of thoughts and feelings.

But, it must be owned, Graham was one kick ass MC.  I gotta load up one of those videos for yall to see.

To camp

As promised, Natalie and I hied off to the mountains this weekend, first stopping off in Shelby, where we drank Cheerwine and ate western NC BBQ at Red Bridges, where they serve up the Q with a red slaw that basically reiterates and confirms the flavor of the meat, rather than delicately and dialectically counteracting it, as does the light but creamy slaw of our part of the state.  Good nonetheless, and a classic joint. After dinner, we took in the Olympic Trials in the cool of our hotel room, where Natalie got excited about swimming and track and field ("they run the 200 in 20 seconds!!!  it takes me 40!!!")  Isn't it amazing how the Olympics transform sports often considered boring into something rather interesting indeed?

Next, it was on to Gwynn Valley, where Natalie found herself in a cabin where something like 7 of 10 girls had been in the same cabin last year.  Delight.

Epic heat

After it had been doing some unwelcome shuddering on the highway, I took the Volvo in to the shop this morning, because I didn't feel like driving Natalie to the mountains in that car.  This is, of course, the same car that I once if not twice took in to the shop only to be told that "the wheel was loose."  This time, it turns out the thing needed new front brakes, which is, sadly, a common malady for the S40 of a certain vintage.

So I got to the shop and picked it up, and it had been sitting in 105 degree heat in the parking lot for some time. The seats were hot, and the gearshift and the steering wheel were so hot they practically burnt my hands.  It cooled down.

Tomorrow Natalie and I will hie off to Shelby, NC, where we will stay in the Hampton Inn for a mere 7500 points, will most likely take a dip in the pool before dining at Red Bridges BBQ Lodge just across highway 54, where they have blue leather booths and fountain Cheerwine. Good living.

Quick reviews

I recently made my way through P.D. James's Original Sin because I had read somewhere that Rendell had cooed about it so lovelily.  And it was, truth be told, a very good mystery indeed. I had to feel, however, that James worked a little too hard trying to ladle on layer after layer of character to make the headiest brew possible. It was, in the end, a little overwrought.  Every action needed to be deeply motivated, each character needed to be as round as possible, to the extent that it was a little like a bunch of Pere Ubus wobbling round the text bumping their great stomachs against one another, muttering, "By my green candle!"  The novel could have clocked in 150 pages lighter without much loss. That said, somehow this was my first novel by James, and I will read more.

This weekend we watched Sophia Coppola's Somewhere.  Don't. At such a tender age, she has degenerated into a pale shadow of her already wispish self. There is no there there.

Let them eat start-up!

There was an interesting piece in called "The New Busking" in the Times "Week in Review" section (or whatever they're calling it these days) by musician Terre Roche, ex-of a band called the Roches. In it she laments how using crowdfunding sources to fund new recordings/releases devolved into a huge waste of time for her, emailing, soliciting, responding, etc.

This rings oh so true. I remember a couple of years ago reading Stephen Johnson's book Emergence, in which he details a variety of phenomena demonstrating that a "bottom-up" paradigm was taking shape that would fundamentally reshape the way we do a whole range of things.  To his credit, he did a great job explicating how ant colonies work together in ways that are very difficult to understand, and tied that in to other things going on in the world in an interesting way.

But what was hard to swallow in Johnson's basic line of argument was that bottom-up was necessarily good.  Yes, as aging punk rockers and people weaned on the Jeffersonian tradition of entrepreneurialism and the little guy, we like bottom-up stuff. Who doesn't love the story of the small shopkeeper made good?

And yet, how well does bottom-up work for everybody?  Much as we love to rag on them, where would we be without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Sergei and Larry, shit, Henry Ford?  Our prosperity is built on the back of enterprises that scaled, the mass production that came of it, and the standards they put in place.  Their stories are great because they started small and then they built into something bigger, so that things got cheaper.  And at the end of the story, there's always the people at Foxconn/Hon Hai, workers ground to parch so fine that they jump out of dormitory windows to their deaths. And the guys at the top became, each in their own ways, simultaneously control freaks, assholes, saints, and heros.

Similarly with government.  The idea and promise of the Giving Pledge is that all these people who got super rich -- aided by effective tax rates made low by accountants who help the affluent and corporations minimize tax bills -- can aggregate capital and then disburse resources in a way that's more cost effective than can government: Let the Gates Foundation assume the functions of the NIH and, eventually, HHS.

It has not been demonstrated that they do a better job.  Non-profits can, in fact, cherry-pick the causes that are more amenable by focused solutions.

There is a bubble just now in start-ups and social entrepreneurship specifically just now, ironically at a time when the IPO market has dried up, making it more difficult to build a business and exit. If a social entrepreneur venture cannot scale effectively, it is, as we say in IT terms, "lossy." Markets will weed this out in time, as they should.

This shouldn't all be taken to mean that I am anti-bottom up, pro top-down, nor do I think that the government will or should solve everything.  There is a healthy ferment of ideas in the entrepreneurial world that can at once help governments and non- and for-profit enterprises deliver services more efficiently and scale more effectively and at the same time pressure them to do so.  But just having a start-up should not earn someone a gold star.

Due process

Your blogger thought he was being all slick in preparing for a Chapel Hill Town Council meeting regarding a proposed development, spending half an hour on the phone trying to piece together a clever argument or two with which to dazzle the audience.  But, oh no, that was not to be the case.  I arrived there to find a meeting packed with lawyers making arguments based on hair-splitting procedural arguments, referencing obscure precedents dating back to 1976. Other concerned citizens -- who had been fighting an aligned but different battle with the same developers for years now -- arrived with well-thought out powerpoint.

In the end, your scribe saw fit to raise his hand to show that he was a member of a potentially impacted group, and that was all.  Actual arguments were left to those who knew WTF they were up to...


Earlier in the day, while meeting with somebody in Carrboro for coffee, I let Natalie loose upon the town with several weeks worth of allowance and her cell phone. I thought to ask her if the durned thing was turned on, but decided that was patronizing.  But no, it would have been a good idea, for when I called, I went straight through to non-existent voice mail.  After a few minutes of anxiously rooting around for my first born, I found her in the place one would have expected, the children's/young adults' section of a used book store, loading up on printed matter.

Two words Graham said today

"Easilier" -- i.e. "more easily"
"Averagely" -- I think that needs no explanation.

These are, I think, keepers.

In DC

At the National Museum of the American Indian, an exhibit made a big point of how the original inhabitants of our fair continent did not call themselves Indians or Americans or anything like that.  So there were quotes from some guy and at the end it said "nmai" and I thought "oh, maybe that's what they call themselves, like the gypsies call themselves Roma." So I Googled it, and it turns out that NMAI stands for
... National Museum of the American Indian.

Checklist and the frontier

(This post violates my 15 minutes of writing rule, and I keep delaying its publication thinking about it, so I'm just letting it rip)

At the end of Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto", the author calls attention between the simultaneous importance of checklists and the discipline required to adhere to them and peoples' resistance to them.  "Discipline is hard -- harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness.  We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures.  We can't even keep from snacking between meals.  We are not built for discipline.  We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at." Indeed. We hate for some little piece of paper to tell us what to do, no matter how beneficial their potential effects.

At the extreme end, this called to mind the resistance to the Direct Instruction methodology that Ian Ayres details in "Super Crunchers."  Direct Instruction, for those to whom the term is new, is a methodology for teaching kids math and reading and other core blocks of learning using extremely scripted techiques, like teachers metronomically tapping out a beat on the blackboard and having kids read along one word at a time to the teacher's beat.  Ayres claims that many studies show it to be the most effective way of teaching kids a lot of basic stuff. I'm sure this is debatable, I don't have time to do any kind of review of the literature on the topic, but the key thing is that it sounds horrible for the teacher. Where's the carpe diem in beating out a beat on the black board? Where is the teacher's ego?  Checked at the door. The teacher becomes a mere vessel for the delivery of rote learning. However effective it may be, it sounds horrible.

I suspect that, particularly for Americans, a lot of this aversion goes back to the basic dynamic that Frederick Jackson Turner laid out in 1893 in his landmark "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  The 1890 census had shown that the frontier, defined as a realm of unsettled land into which Americans might move when the mood so struck them -- had disappeared, and that this would profoundly alter the American character:  "That coarsenees and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier." Again, there are many critiques of Turner, but this rings true.  This is how we are raised to think of ourselves.  Having lost the physical frontier, we kept looking for others, eventually finding space, the final frontier, where Kirk, Spock, Bones McCoy and the crew could act out the dialectic of constraint and individuation for us.

I remember working at that big investment bank back in 2008, being disenchanted by the extreme transactionality of the people:  they would never sit back and talk to you qua you. It was all "nice to meet you, what are we doing here, what do you need from me?"  I found it very demeaning, but in fact it was just that they were in tune with what their organization was there for and focused on doing it. They were trying to optimize their status as cogs in a wheel because they believed in the wheel and that it would bring them more money and even fulfillment.


Over time, I see that that's what truly high-achieving people are like.  They figure out what they're up to and then the subordinate their personality to it, or integrate their personality with it.  You just have to. At the end of the day, you need to get home to your kids and take care of things and chill. Different cultures tolerate different degrees of "play" in this principle, or deviation from it.


A really extreme example would be Keith Ferrazzi's concept of the "deep bump." Ferrazzi, master networker of the world, tells us that to develop real and deep relationships with the people we come into contact with, we should be ready to be vulnerable with them quickly and share some deep memory from our development to create an emotional bond with them and loosen them up. Having created such a "real" relationship, one is better positioned to transact.

Anyway, back to Gawande.  The guy is great. He's very focused on his concept and makes a strong case for it, but by the time I finished the book, I was sitting outside of University Mall by the temporary public library, crying copiously. It was embarrassing. Thankfully, nobody was there to see me.

The early time

So often when I have something coming up during the day, I wake up a little early and start obsessing about some aspect of it.  Today, this happened again, but instead of being counterproductive, what I was thinking about actually made a lot of sense and was helpful.  I have no idea how that happened.  Sheer dumb luck I reckon.  It had to happen sometime.

Fruits of the bush

Nothing quite like the blackberry bush.

Home again

Today completed a successful move of my office back from Carrboro to the new study in the freshly renovated crib. I'm surprised at how whole I feel to have all of my books and the comfortable armchair that I use all too infrequently under one roof, together with this trusty library table we snagged in '98 back in Somerville, NJ. I should post a picture but am, in truth, too lazy to go downstairs and get my phone.  Maybe tomorrow.

Beach Ball

After Graham had a good time playing volleyball with the Girl Scouts at their spring gathering last week, Mary picked up a cheap plastic ball at the drug store yesterday so that we'd have something to play volleyball with out by the lake.  So yesterday afternoon Graham and I took the ball and a frisbee and headed out by the lake. But first, we had to take a detour to the blackberry bush where Graham and Sam had discovered some ripe berries the week before. Graham pointed out that there were some more ripe and tasty ones, and I sampled a couple, which were in fact a little sour. I drifted off over to the tetherball court where I played a little soccer tetherball, but Graham remained focused on harvesting all of the blackberries he could find, and he stood there with the ball tucked under his arm doing so.  Maybe 10 minutes later, when the bush was picked clean, he came down to where I was,  with a slowly deflating ball under his arm. Whether by the force of his arm, or by being punctured by a briar or something, the ball was now dead, which I had to point out to Graham, so deeply had he been in the berry-harvesting groove. At least he wasn't upset by the ball's demise.

Atul Gawande

I think I blogged earlier about trying to read The Checklist Manifesto and being put off by the blood and gore and other medical detail.  I have continued to push through the book, to great results.  I was a little frustrated by Gawande's seemingly lengthy digression into the methods of commercial builders, but now that I've seen how he loops his learnings there back into his own work on harm mitigation in surgery, I'm getting it. When Gawande is on task (and, it turns out, he pretty much always is, it's just not always as apparent), his writing shines with the light of what could be called true religion, but what the Hungarian guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow."  He is deeply engaged with what he's trying to do and it's catching.  I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.

The Power Broker

I have been looking through the used book stores around here recently for a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. It's a book I've thought about in the past, but the recent slew of publicity about the release of the fourth volume of his biography of LBJ recently made it clear that I need to read that book. I mean, it's not every day that Bill Clinton writes a book review. Caro sounds as one of a kind as was Moses himself, though in a good rather than bad way, and I might as well start with the book that made him what he is.  I could order it from Amazon, but that's kind of cheating, and who wants to pay postage on a book that 800 or so pages long.

Junebug

I was just at the Mediterranean Deli and talked to Tony King, who told me of the recent passing of Reggie Junebug Burnette.  This is sad news. Junebug was a good guy.  I could tell some stories, but I'll save them for another day.

Lives of the Novelists

Just read a review of John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists.  While the review was mixed, it did convey Sutherland's enthusiasm for his subject, and gave me a couple of ideas for my Amazon.list. Certainly Sutherland sounds like someone I'd love to sit next to at a dinner party or, better yet, a cook out.

Much to do to day, so must fly.  Good days are ones in which the things to do appear as opportunities rather than burdens.

Graham on "embarassment"

Graham brought a picture of a couple of air-brushed models in the NY Times magazine over to me and Mary at the dining room table the other day.  The woman in the picture was in a bathing suit, the guy was in some underwear.  Graham said that he found the picture "embarassing."  When Mary asked him what he meant ("because the guy is in his underwear?" she suggested, somewhat plausibly), he said it was because their skin was so shiny.  He has had some trouble grasping the concept of embarassment. Which is OK?

He did point out that the guy in the picture had "six-pack abs", unlike dad. Sigh.

Leaves of Grass

I've been reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass recently, usually a couple of pages when I put Graham to bed. Both of my precociously smart-assed kids have pointed out that the title doesn't make sense. They are more lawyers than poets at this stage.

But it's quite a breath of fresh air to read Whitman. I was initially inspired by recalling the line "I embrace multitudes," which it turns out comes from him, and indeed he does. Whitman invokes the whole of America that was known to him at the time, from sea to shining sea, from head to toe, from peak to vale, from club to gutter. I am reminded of the comparisons that were made between Whitman and Mayakovsky a quarter century ago when I was writing about the latter.

The most important thing I find in reading Whitman, and perhaps I need to move to this strategy for all poetry, is to just read the words that are written there and keep going, to not continually loop back and go over it again and try to read into it and suss it out.

LIke Magic, but differently

(Was about to title the post "Like magic", then saw that that was the title of my April 12 post)

In the NY Times today, Harvey Araton writes of Magic Johnson that "At 52... Johnson may be the closest American celebrity of color to reach a true postracial eminence."  Hmmm.  I guess he's pretty much a sportswriter through and through. I would have thought that Oprah, Morgan Freeman, J Lo, Bill Cosby, and probably a bunch of others had kind of made it there. To say nothing of Obama. It just goes to show you that is that, in newspapers, as in blogs and elsewhere throughout the world of "influencers", pithy statements and superlatives sell.

On the hunt for voles

Mary has been slaving away in the garden now for over a month, and has made immense progress getting many holes in the ground and filling them with plants. And, praise God, they are growing.

But now comes a critical time, as we wait to see how the various measures to counter the rapacious vole population take effect.  To date we have taken delivery of a huge load of gravel, which David helped Mary till into the soil, so as to cut into the skin of those pesky little fuckers and they tunnel their way towards the roots of our fresh plantings. Our cat Rascal has been on the prowl constantly, and has killed many a vole, as well as mice and chipmunks.  Mary has secured a supply of pigs' blood, which she sprinkles round the bases of the little plantings to ward off the wee furred demons.

But there's more to be done.  Voles love to nest in stone walls and in fields of rocks, so we are undertaking a non-trivial stone abatement program. Your blogger has, truth be told, lugged many plastic planters full of rocks down to the bottom of the ravine in our yard, where we couldn't possibly ever seek to grow anything, where I have strewn them around in a way entirely in keeping with town ordinances seeking to prevent erosion around stream beds (I think the term the bureaucrats use is "riparian buffers" or something like that) to control algae blooms down in Jordan Lake. This is backbreaking and probably foolhardy labor, sort of an inversion of Sisyphus's chore, but in essence probably just as effective, given how many rocks we have in our yard. But it draws me closer to the land in some primordial sense, and is likely good for my core, and certainly a boon to my marriage.

Skills-based giving for alumni associations

My illustrious alma mater is trying to get a local chapter back up and running, and this year for its annual "day of service" alumni gathered together to pick up trash around a nature trail or something like that that would be of profound value to affluent white people just like us.  Afterwards, the plan was to go for lunch and chardonnay.

I did not attend. I don't see that kind of thing as particularly impactful giving, and opted instead to hang out with my children. I was thinking it would be better to take the skills of these highly educated folx and somehow make them available to organizations in the community that could use them.

Last week I had breakfast in NYC with a friend from grad school who's in the corporate learning and development world, and we got to talking about trends in non-profits, and she mentioned that "skills-based giving" is all the rage. So now I have a buzzword to glom onto and see if it has been applied in the alumni context.

Most likely it has or, indeed, the skills-based trend will outrun and supercede the whole idea of giving based on institutional affiliation.  Why should I worry that any giving I do should redound to the glory of some place I went to college? If it can be channeled through something like taproot.org and be really beneficial somewhere, that's fine and dandy.  6 or 7 years ago my college put together a proto-social network that allowed alumni to see where each other lived, what they were doing, etc, and contact one another..  Then came LinkedIn and Facebook and that whole construct was blown away, and now all the in-house social network is presumably just sitting there gathering dust.

I'm not Chris

I was out running today in Carrboro near Bolin Creek when a guy passed me on the street. He looked awfully like one Chris B., master impresario of running socks, so I said to him, not too loud "Hey Chris." I was pretty sure it was Chris, so after a few seconds, thinking he might not have heard me for some reason, I repeated, louder this time: "Chris."  At which point in time he turned back to me and said "I'm not Chris," in an annoyed tone of voice. At that point in time I quite politely said something like:  "I'm terribly sorry, you look an awful lot like him, yatta yatta yatta..." and the guy kept running, saying nothing more.

I'll confess, I was annoyed.  I had gone out of my way to be polite and acknowledged my error, but this guy really couldn't budget more than 3 syllables out of his busy day. And I wanted to say to him, "Hey buddy, this may be Carrboro, but we're still in the South here and people make a little bit more of an effort to work on manners with one another here.

In the end, I let it go, and I suppose that I really shouldn't get too worked up about controlling the behavior of complete strangers. Even when they are assholes.

Wilson Library

I went to a noon meeting on campus today and afterwards, went and checked out Wilson Library, where I had gotten my first library card when I was 13 or so.  Soon after that, I handed in a paper to my 7th grade biology paper on the influence of radiation on cell membranes.... and was promptly and rightly dinged for plagiarism, and grounded for some weeks.  That's precisely the kind of lesson that middle school is for.

I was thinking that Wilson had become an administrative building, but it is in fact the home of various special collections, and the grand old reading room is still open for "quiet study."  I may well make my way back there in upcoming weeks.  I peeked my head into the rooms of some of the special collections, and was struck by all the empty shelves on the walls around them. Dunno what's up with that. Library shelves should not be empty. It looked rather sad, in fact.

In other book news, somebody on Facebook today invited me to join "Goodreads," some kinda book social network.  I spent 20 minutes rating a bunch of books I had read to see if the thing could suggest anything I might like:  not really.  The suggestions are really facile and mechanical, a grade below what Netflix or Pandora can do for you, and well below Amazon's engine. Save your precious time and watch Sportscenter or something.

In the city

Walking west towards the High Line Monday afternoon, I was passed by a couple of young women out running. As they hit 9th avenue, some guy in a grey suit blazed past on a bicycle.  One of  them called out to the guy, pretty loud: "whoa!! You are attractive!" Well, I wasn't going to take that lying down, so when I pulled even with them as they waited for the light to change, I told her that i was shocked and offended to hear a fellow male objectified and denigrated like that.  To which she responded, laughing, "but I was right, wasn't I?"

More things the kids say

One evening in bed with Graham, a day or so after I had told the kids I had left my current job and would be finding a better one, he looked over at me and asked:  "So if you've left your job, what will be our primary source of income?"

I'm as sure about the first half of that sentence, but the part in italics were the actual words of our little 8-year old.

I assured him that we were OK.

Shells

I was putting a load of laundry in the washer, and I found a very smooth sea shell in the pocket of one of Natalie's pairs of shorts. Being a good dad, I took it back to her. "I found this nice shell in the pocket of your shorts", I told her.

"Actually, there were very pretty shells in the pockets of two pairs of shorts," she replied, and went and rummaged in the dryer for the other one, but couldn't find it.

I found it at the bottom of the hamper.