A Separation

Over the weekend we watched "A Separation," an Iranian movie from 2011 which I remember had a super-dramatic trailer, really an impressive one, and which I snuck into our Netflix list while Mary wasn't looking.  I have had a hard time selling Mary on movies from Iran, ever since I dragged her and some other hapless victim (Eric Schwab) to Lincoln Plaza in 1995 to see Abbas Kiorastami's "The White Balloon."  This was a very slow movie.  Very "atmospheric," as they say.  That we are now married and have two fine and healthy children is a tribute to her good nature.

And so, "A Separation."   Also not a plot-driven movie.  No car chases.  But a very rich picture of the complexities of living, of living in Iran, to a certain extent, but really not so much. There are no saints in this movie, and no villains, really, just people trying to get by and deal with complicated shit. Getting the hell out of the country.  Being the only child of a dad that has Alzheimer's.  Being poor and having a hotheaded husband.  Having a little more money and privilege.  Being torn between two parents, each with a compelling need to do things that tear them apart.

In short, it's a good movie.  Watch it.

Spooky!

Interesting article in the Times sports section this morning about a the old Hilton in Oklahoma City, which is reputedly haunted.  This spooks out the opposing players who stay there, meaning they get less sleep, and play less well the next day.  So they call it the "6th man" for the OKC Thunder.

This caused a few reflections.  First off, you can see how this place might need to be Ghostbusted.  Pretty spooky.

But why would a bunch of NBA players be particularly freaked out.  For one, it was build in 1911, and you can imagine how old buildings from back in the day from slave areas (Oklahoma was not admitted to the Union till 1907, but it was a "slave territory") might not elicit the warmest of fuzzies from a predominantly African-American cohort.

You might also think that these black guys, many of whom cut their college careers short so they could assure themselves of big paydays before they messed up their knees or ankles, and so are perhaps on average less-educated than the typical wealthy clientele of high-end hotels like this, are easily spooked.  Compounded by the persistence of Christian faith in the African-American population, which leaves the door open to thinking about the dark side of things.  I thought this stuff for a minute or two, and there may be something there.  But that's 10% of it, if that.

But I will say this. Me, with my Ivy League PhD and all that, I don't really believe in ghosts.  But scary movies freak me the fuck out.  The end of "The Blair Witch Movie"? I prefer not to think of it, too real.  I still have scary associations from "The Sixth Sense." None of this stops me from getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  But I will tell you honestly that I prefer not to sleep in the house alone. Not because I'm really afraid ghosts are gonna get me, not because I think somebody's gonna break in, and certainly I don't think Graham would protect me in either of those cases. But still.  Would rather not be alone.

And hotel rooms?  I don't like em when I'm alone.  Particularly the first night I'm in one.  That is when I am most likely to have recourse to the sleeping pills I make sure I take with me when I'm on the road.

So I feel for these guys.  The fact that they are able to perform at a high level going from hotel room to hotel room night after night is impressive.  As for Oklahoma City my suggestion is this:  go down the road to another hotel. I'm sure that OKC/NBA has a special deal worked out with this hotel, but they should cut another deal with another one. Let the guys sleep.

Cleaning my All Clad stainless steel pans

Now, I'm sure you really give a flying hoot about this.  However, I Googled it once before but couldn't remember it exactly, so I'm putting it here on my blog so I'll know where to find it next time.

Barkeeper's Helper is nice if you really want to work out your arms.  This is easier and works better. 

Fill your pan as high as possible/necessary with water mixed with baking soda.  Boil it.  Put a top on it if you have one (I guess.  I do.  Maybe not necessary but I think it helps get the edges up where you can't quite get the water).  Let it sit there.  Drain it.  Now scrub it.  Burnt on crap comes off pretty easy.  You'll still have to apply a little elbow grease, but not too much.  I find that, honestly, fingernails are the most helpful in getting the crap off.  It's a little gross, but rewarding.

The sadness of one

I try not to immerse myself in the tragedies of the headlines of any given moment, probably because if I do, I am susceptible to overidentification.  I just get too sad, so I have to wall myself off a little.  But as the story of the Korean ferry unfolds -- to the extent that there is any unfolding, as opposed to a ship at the bottom of the sea with 270-odd people aboard it, almost certainly with us no more -- I can't help but to think back to the Economist's survey of Korea some months back.

Thing is, the birth rate in Korea is about 1.25.  Most families have only one kid, and they pour their heart and sole into that kid.  Everything depends upon the big college entrance exam, because you have to go to one of the top universities to get a job at one of the few chaebols, the big conglomerates -- Samsung, Hyundai, or LG.  Otherwise, the perception is, you have failed.  So the day of the big exam is a day of pressure unlike anything we know.  It's like our Ivy League focus cubed. So these families have lost not only a child, they've lost their only lifeline to the future.

In general, these birthrate issues are a big big problem.  Was just reading how Japan's had gone up froom 1.25 to 1.41 as more women entered the workplace.  Better, but still not great.  It is difficult to imagine how Japan and Korea will not look a whole lot different in 30-40 years.  Not just greyer, but different.  They need to open up to immigration, or the societies will die.  Western Europe has the same problem, but the societies there are marginally more open, have had to be, because of all the land borders down through time.

But we know that, this is getting boring, so I'll quit here.

Resistance

You would think that Graham would want to go and see the new Captain America movie, now wouldn't you.  But no, he doesn't.  And why, you may ask? Because he has read the plot summary on Wikipedia, and therefore doesn't see the need. Ridiculous. I may be able to get him to go see the new Muppet movie, we shall see. 

He like to had ripped my eyeball out wrestling earlier.  I kid you not.  And tomorrow he starts a new level at his martial arts studio.

Cinema in Graham

While waiting to witness a neighbor executing some documents, I was talking to a couple of paralegals who had come out from his attorney's office.  One was from Graham, one from Apex (which tells you something already about the affordability of Chapel Hill real estate and its perverse impact on sustainability -- they have to drive in to their jobs).

I started talking to the one from Graham about their awesome downtown, and asked in particular the movie theater there.  She said it was nice, and I like it's business model:  $4 tickets, $6 all you can eat soda and popcorn, self-serve ("as much butter as you want.")  She also said the movie theater has a balcony.  That is kicking it old school indeed. (picture below slightly dated)

I asked if it did good business, and she said that right now it was showing "God's Not Dead" and that it had lines around the corner.

Having not heard of the movie, I looked it up.  "God's Not Dead" is a typical story of the culture wars:  it narrates the tale of a Christian kid in college who is being oppressed by radical secularism, and then debates his leftist professor on the existence of God and wins. Some people die, but are born again beforehand, etc.  Panned by the mainstream press, it's been a big box office smash, raking in $41 mln in 4 weeks on a budget of $2 mln.  Certainly it speaks to the hunger of small-town, Christian America for cultural production that speaks to them.

The theater also shows other stuff, so I'm gonna keep my eye out for something I'd like.

The Woman Upstairs

Just finished Claire Messud's most recent book, titled just like this post.  I was excited to read it, though not excited enough to buy it hardcover.  I am one cheap bastard.

But the book got me back. I was reading it while flying to Austin for spring break, having just heard the news about Akin.  As I got rolling, I was getting really into it, was kind of in an emotional place, understandably.  Then, in the hustle and bustle of getting off the plane, I left it in the seat pocket, just like I left a copy of You Can't Go Home Again on a plane 5 years ago when we were considering moving home to Chapel Hill.

So I had to have a copy delivered to my iPad.  Which negated the money I saved waiting for the trade paperback. Talk about poetic justice.

The book is entirely character-driven, not plot-driven.  There's a 40-ish woman who teaches school, wanted to be an artist but got nudged away from her dreams.  She becomes obsessed with a kind of glamorous Euro-intellectual family living there in Cambridge, mother artist, father scholar, son precocious and sweet.  She gets her groove on, and then she gets got.  As it were. You wouldn't think it would be a page-turner, but in its own way it was.  You want the character to do well, break out of her rut, keep going.  And she kind of does...

I will say that I read it with some mixed feelings, as I have the same sort of envy of Claire's glittering success as the narrator does of her seeming BFF.  I knew her pretty well in college, she was a writer then, talented, and she kept at it, and now look at her.  I, by contrast, dabbled at writing, and now all I have is this blog. I'm sure that this is part of the book's considerable success. Most everybody can identify with the theme of compromise and diminished expectations, and the sometimes crushing envy of those who didn't compromise and rocked. And knowing how ridiculous it is to feel that envy, and wishing them well at the same time. More than any book I can think of, this one is optimized for the book club market.  Why sell 1 book at a time when you can market to groups of 8 or 12?

One last thing.  Early on, our narrator says outright that she is not The Underground Man (from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground).  And in truth, she ain't him, but she has no closer literary cousin, as the book's very title hints.  And, as I remember like it was yesterday reading the Dostoevsky for the first time maybe 31 years ago, sweaty, sitting up in bed in my room directly downstairs from this where I sit now, now the guest room, it's no wonder it resonates with me so.  I am the Reader Upstairs.

The day after

Akin's service yesterday was beautiful, but intense.  So many people, reaching so far back, so many memories, some good, some hard.  John Howie's Clash cover at the end of the service was hauntingly beautiful.  But then, when the Veldt came on, I dunno, I lost it.  I guess I had been holding back.  Glad Jared was sitting there next to me to calm me a little.

Today, just recovering mostly, trying to enjoy my birthday a little while getting back into my coursework, where I've fallen behind a little.  Breakfast with the Liners, Drake, Tim Brower, that was awesome, then a nice birthday feast and a delish coconut cake made by the ever-talented Natalie.

And then I got started watching these My Brightest Diamond videos, more listening than watching I guess.  Shara Worden is an epic talent.


And, an update to yesterday's post.  It appears that I have reinjured my left big toenail and will likely lose it again.  The astute readers amongst you will recognize that this is in fact a bad omen, owing to this toenail's prior history as a marker of recessions.  It is in fact painful.  However, it is not painful enough to make me not want to go out and play again tomorrow, weather permitting.  Because it is game on time.

Rejuvenation

Since Akin died I have been feeling old.  Physically.

Then yesterday I played soccer.  It was hot out there, and I had just been sitting out in the sun watching Natalie's team play field hockey for an hour (they won!). I had a little time off to go get some Gatorade, which was good.

Then I went over to where we were gonna play to warm up.  I wasn't sure I should play, because my aches and pulls from the last time I had played, two weeks and change before, hadn't entirely subsided.  But I love the game.

There was a baseball field right there, and a dad was working with three boys, maybe 12-14 years old, on their hitting.  I went into the dugout to change into my soccer gear, because there was shade there.

He had a boombox in there and was blasting some tunes, and they were his tunes, not his kids.  Now, I'm generally no big Rush fan.  Geddy Lee had really bad hair, not a great voice.  But those guys were real musicians, and listening to their lyrics we could hear some commonality with what we punks were about.  The song "Limelight" was playing, one I had never listened to, and I caught the chorus.

Living in the limelight,
The universal dream,
of those who wish to seem,
those who wish to be,
must put aside alienation,
get on with the fascination,
the real relation,
the underlying theme.

Now, I think he overplays his lyrical hand with the last two lines of the stanza there.  His point was already well made.  Then again, I've never written a song that good, and could never play like that.

Then I played soccer, and it was great. Niklaus and Spruyt were there, had some good combinations.  No new injuries, ran pretty hard, not too hard.  Talked to a couple of the other older guys on the team about how they avoid injury.  Made one big mistake in play, but it didn't result in a goal.  And we won, without injuring any opponents.  What's not to like?

Visit with a tenant

We've had a water leak at one of our 8 rental units in my mom's home town, and though we've dealt with the major issue, we suspect a toilet or two might be leaking. Over the years when she was more hands on in the business, mom developed the practice of going in and showing renters how to use red food coloring to determine if they had a leak/faulty clapper. When we were up there the other day, we went into a unit and engaged in this little educational effort.*

One lucky tenant was at home, as if just waiting for us. My description here is not meant to be judgmental, I'm just trying to catalog as much detail as I saw. Most of us fortunate enough to have been blessed with income, education, and/or assets (and they do run together, don't they?) don't spend a lot of time with those who don't.

She was sitting near the door, watching Korean soaps on an old Wintel machine, eating an orange or maybe a clementine or something. She has another laptop sitting on a wheeled walker thingie near the door. She was heavyset, probably technically obese. When I shook her hand, it was calloused, so it was clear she had done more manual labor than I had in her life. The apartment was hot and stuffy, on a beautiful spring day. And dark, with something covering the windows.

In the kitchen I saw white bread, not perfectly ripe tangerines or whatever she was eating, pasta, and potatoes. Aside from the desk chair she was sitting at while watching the soap opera on maybe a 17" monitor, there was no TV, and maybe two other chairs. But her internet service was pretty good. I don't remember if there were any books.

We went through her bedroom into her bathroom. It was really pretty dirty. Mom put red food coloring into the back reservoir of her toilet while we looked down at the toilet bowl to see if any came through. But the toilet bowl was really dirty, and the light in there was not great, so it's not like there was a perfect white backdrop on which to see red leaking through.

This tenant is on Section 8. This means that, in her case, about 2/3rds of her rent comes from a Federally-supported program. On the one hand, that gives us incentives to vote for Democrats, who support the program. In the larger picture, we'd rather see strong economic development to help this woman find a better job so she wouldn't need the Federal program. On balance, it didn't seem like she had the happiest life.

*Part of the backstory is that, while landlords cannot legally charge for water, we can and really must try to put incentives in place to keep our interests aligned: we need tenants to pay attention and tell us when there's a leak or other problem, or water bills can go nuts, and money goes to the water utility instead of to maintenance or upgrades of the property.

More on Texas history

After visiting the Texas History Museum, we ambled onto the campus of UT, letting Sergei and Larry guide us to the nearest fine purveyor of coffees, yes, that one, which I will not name outright until they pay me some money.  Having slaked our thirst for caffeine (or lemonade, in Graham's case), we made our way up to the campus's iconic bell tower, which protrudes from the massive central main building of the campus. It's hard to get an idea of the depth of the thing, but the overall impression is like in kind, if not quite in scale, to that of the main building of Moscow State (the one at the bottom).  In this case, however, Texas flat out loses the battle for size.

The next day we checked out the Texas state capitol.  Here, the Texans have tried to be big, and in some regards I think they told us it was even bigger than Our Nation's Capitol in Washington.

But the really striking thing I learned from the tour, aside from the depth of Texas's unique myth of origin in the glorious Texas Revolution for independence from Mexico, after which they deigned to enter the union, is Texans' pride in membership in the confederacy.  There's a huge memorial to the valiant confederate soldiers outside the Capitol, which tells of the heavy losses of the confederate army, and basically says:  "we lost because we were small and they killed all of our soldiers."

And then in the Texas Senate there's a big portrait of Jefferson Davis, hanging to the right of that of Sam Houston.  The tour guide doesn't call it out, but he's right there.

And so on and so on.

Maybe there's more official pride in the confederacy throughout the south that just isn't condoned in Chapel Hill and the Triangle.  Certainly, yes, there are memorials to confederate soldiers -- there's one in front of the old Durham Courthouse, one right in front of the Alamance County Courthouse, there's Silent Sam on UNC's campus.  But mostly we try to pass by them and ignore them, tolerate them as part of our history.

In Texas, they love it big time.

Courthouse as Cathedral

While in Texas over spring break, we visited the Texas Museum of History in Austin.  On the wall there was a picture of a courthouse being built in some small town.  It was magnificent, and I was reminded of nothing so much as the construction of the great cathedrals in Europe like Chartres, built over many decades to exult God.  And it took me back to some of the stunning courthouses around here, the Caswell County Courthouse in Yanceyville, or the Alamance County Courthouse in Graham.

Each is grander than anything that surrounds it by a factor of 5.  Does this tendency to build grand courthouse reflect an elevation of the principle of the Rule of Law in America to a position similar to that of the God's Law in medieval society?

Like all questions, it's pretty complex.  Let's look at Texas, for example.  On the one hand, you've got a society that projects an image of the wild wild west, each man a law unto himself.  But you go out on the highways, at least around Austin, San Antonio, the hill country, and nobody was speeding.  If the speed limit was 65, traffic was going 65.  If 70, 70.  My host Justin said that wasn't true in other parts of Texas.

Then again, this is the part of the country where sherriffs have taken it upon themselves to become arbiters of constitutionality in recent years, refusing to enforce laws that seem to them wrong.

My mind also races back to the story I was reading about Anadarko and its $5.2 billion settlement to remediate something like 2700 waste sites from the last 50 years or so.

Maybe it's the myth of the rule of law that is sacred.

Back from Texas

The family and I were out in Texas for a week, more on that later.  As we were being dropped off at the airport (thanks, Mom!), I got a call from a friend.  I asked to call him back, but he said it was urgent.   A friend of ours had killed himself.  Stephen Akin.

Turns out, he didn't kill himself, though in some ways he precipitated his death by not taking care of himself.  It was a lot like my dad's death, in fact, a year ago in just a few days.  I am tempted to reflect on the parallels between their deaths, but why.  I already talked about it in a meeting.

So it was a melancholy vacation in some ways, with my phone ringing off the hook and buzzing from texts for a couple of days, and me reaching out to friends in different places so they wouldn't find out on Facebook.  Until I learned he hadn't killed himself, I lost sleep a couple of nights thinking about what he must have gone through leading up to his death, and even knowing he didn't quite kill himself, the basic situation isn't changed much.

He had a big laugh, a big smile, but is no more.  We played a lot of soccer together, backpacked through Europe together at the tender ages of 17 and 18, were in our first band together.  And yes, we drank a lot of beer together, and ate a lot of junk food too.

I will no doubt return to this over time, thought I have been returning to it all too much over the last week. Right now, I gotta go feed Graham lunch before granny comes to take him to get his new bike adjusted.

Pain, and Texas

Played soccer again yesterday, first practice we've been able to have because of all the rain and the swamplike conditions. Once again, I am in pain, though the good news is that the pain continues to be spread around to relatively new parts of my body.  In 3 times out, I've only been hurt in the same place twice!  Otherwise it's pretty equitably distributed around my lower body.

Yesterday there were a number of young ladies out there, and I had my first experience of playing against several really highly skilled and well-coached women.  There were three of them, all in there mid- to upper-twenties.  Graduate students, it would seem, who probably played at the college level.  And they were all playing up front, along with this kid who plays on my team who plays for a local high school now.  So these ladies weren't that fast, but they were composed, and they were picking us old dudes in the back apart pretty good.  Receiving, seeing the field, distributing, crossing.  One of them even deftly lifted the ball over my head.  It was pretty cool.  Several times I pretty much knew where one of them was gonna pass it, but couldn't get my foot there to block it.

And so, I am getting a new perspective on constraints on the soccer field.  I had already some years ago come to grips with the fact that I couldn't slide tackle, because people gotta get to work the next day.  Now, I am having to accept that maybe my reactions are a little slower.

I'm watching some of the other older dudes out there kicking the ball with their toe, which is technically a no-no but..... I'm wondering if they do it because it's less painful than swinging for the ball with a proper kick. Which is one of the places I'm having some pain. I may have to ask.

Tomorrow, however, we go to Texas.  Austin. BBQ.  Hill Country. Wild Flowers. The Museum of the War in the Pacific.  Alamo.  And, begrudgingly, because Natalie has surely read about it, the River Walk in San Antonio, which is really kind of a shit hole.

UPDATE:   After going on the River Walk on a beautiful spring day, I revise my earlier opinion.  It was really quite lovely, without the throngs and all the alcohol and the tepid water of summer.

Great prose

I've moved on from a Ruth Rendell novel which dragged on a bit (maybe more on that later) to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  At the beginning, Pollan spent a little too much ink and energy attacking the poor Twinkie.  I mean, what food writer and non-extrusion specialist doesn't have it in for the Twinkie, it's too easy a target.  I thought he had gotten lazy.  But he hadn't.

Aside from the fact that they're white males, there's one commonality between some of the authors I'm coming to view (and, admittedly, it's a pretty canonical list) as the great non-fiction writers of the last generation or two:  Robert Caro, John McPhee, Peter Hessler, Michael Lewis, Pollan.  They are able to infuse small observations and conclusions within their arguments as not just necessary but monumental:. note how the specific procreative methods of corn destine it for dominance!  Even as a child, Lyndon Johnson had already acquired the devious habits that would carry him to greatness!  How the specific geological properties of the soil in the mountains above LA contribute to the growth of fire-prone brush and the preconditions of massive mud slides!

There's all this little stuff, but it concatenates into a narrative of necessity, as if of its own accord.  Thing is, it's a narrative no one other than the author has ever seen, or at least nobody's ever patched it together. I think that what holds these guys' best work together is enthusiasm, which lets them spelunk into the details and then spin it together in a lovely but robust yarn.

Back to the point on the white maleness of it all.  First off, as Caro fully and repeatedly acknowledges, the success of his enterprise derived from his decades-long partnership with his wife Ina, his sole researcher for many decades.  She's got books of her own, maybe I should check them out, though the subject matter's not so compelling. I do need to look for more women non-fiction writers.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed, by contrast, is held together by outrage rather than enthusiasm, and she delves into stuff we already kinda know but don't want to think about, just like we don't want to think about how hamburger happens.  It could be that enthusiasm is just another privilege of which I like to avail myself.

Mindful running

I don't know if I've posted about this before, and my computer is running so slowly these days that I dare not try to run a search on the blog to figure it out, so oh well.

When I'm out running, I try to run on the grass next to the sidewalks or road as much as possible to mitigate the pounding my mighty frame imposes on my knees, feet, ankles, etc., and also to get the benefits of running on an uneven surface for tendons, balance, and -- some lead me to believe -- core strength.  Because lord knows I hate doing all manner of crunches and other stuff that really strengthens your core. And I incorporate trails into my circuit wherever possible too.

But, because I'm running most of the time in a residential neighborhood, and next to streams and a lake, I try to be mindful of the impact my feet have on the soil.  Because I know that compacting the soil just increases run-off and cuts into the soil's ability to absorb water.  Not that that's too much of an issue right now, because we've had so much precip over the last n months that nothing can soak up anything.  It's all running straight out to the ocean, I figure. If only UPS could ship some of this rain out west.

I also take the condition of the grass into account.  In places where people have been taking good care of the strip between the sidewalk and the road, I tend to respect it and stay off it.  By contrast, if it looks like crap, I'm there.  I also stay off of the strip in front of Dr. Tucker's house, always have. When he was still around, I'd see him out there gardening, and he was so wonderful with Graham, that even though his grass was pretty scraggly, I left it alone.

But today, in one place where I'd been running on the grass, this friendly-looking guy a little younger than me -- in a very fetching flannel shirt, I'll have you know -- had been laying down some grass seed.  So that's one more place I've gotta stay off.

I know, I know, yet another example of ridiculous overthinking.  But recently I have gone and done something that would seemed inconceivable when I was young.  I have gotten myself put on the Lake Forest Association Board.  I swim in the lake all the time.  I need to get out in front of issues involving its health.  But I may have to start leaving everybody's grass free to grow, if just for political reasons.

But then will I have to do ab videos?

Taking Russia in

Умом Россию не понять,
Аршином общим не измерить:
У ней особенная стать —
В Россию можно только верить.

The mind cannot understand Russia
Nor grasp it by a common measure
It has a peculiar trait
In Russia one can only believe.

This short poem by the nineteenth-century poet Fedor Tiutchev are amongst the favorite and most-cited of poems by Russians, many of whom still value and esteem poetry, distant as that may seem from our mindset.  And there's a lot of this going on in Russia right now, stuff that it's just hard to get.



Russians want to believe in Russia right now.  They perceive that they have been beat down but that Putin can restore the nation to its rightful greatness by swaggering and throwing its weight around.  Actually, it's not so far afield. Chinese nationalism is being stoked by the perceived humiliation of western imperial domination, followed by hard times under Mao and the Cultural Revolution. They are sticking it to the west with fake Guccis and whatever else and a fleet of Audis and snapping up farmland in Africa and Smithfield Hams, they feel they are restoring themselves to their rightful place in the world. 

Moreover, why the hell did we go into Iraq?  Why did Americans back that?  It was because, after 9/11, we felt that somebody else had to get hurt, and Afghanistan wasn't big enough.  Saddam seemed about right-sized.

But, to return to Russia, we threaten them with sanctions.  But Russia's proudest moments in history have been times of deprivation, when they have been brought together by war.  The 900-day siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad, the Great Patriotic War (WWII) generally, these are greatest hits in Russia.  Russia loves to martyr itself to defeat the enemy from without.



Check out this blog post from 2005.  Russians beat their chests with pride when remembering self-sacrifice.

We are in a bit of a pickle just now.  We can only hope that the westernization/consumerization of Russia has progressed far enough to outweigh their deeply ingrained ascetic tendencies.  Often enough, they prefer swords to plowshares.

If only, however, they had done more birthing of babies.  They are a bit depleted of army-age males, as they have been drinking and smoking themselves to death for some time now.

Just to post: a soccer update.

God I hate it when I look at my traffic counter and there's only one hit for the day.  I know it's ridiculous, but that's how I feel.

So today I played soccer for the first time since the fall, and in a league for the first time in, oh, 26 years.  It was awesome, which is more than I can say for myself. Actually, I did OK, but somewhere early in the 2nd half I started cramping up in my left calf.  I chased down a kid 20 years younger than me (I should have been playing behind him, honestly, so it was my bad that I had to run him down), but that was really more stress than my hamstrings/gluteal muscles were used to, reminding me that, after all, sprinting is different from jogging.  Therefore I need to do more sprinting.  However, in the end, I was able to finish the game with no injuries that would fall into the debilitating camp.  And that's the main thing.

For those with an interest in the score, and that would be people confined largely to people whose names begin in Z, we won 4-3.  Actually, the we scored 6 goals to their 1.  Problem was, two of our goals were own goals.  Ah well.

Feng shui of the soul

It is the time of year when students begin planning for next year, and in Natalie's case that means planning for 9th grade and doing course selection. This morning over coffee with a couple of people -- one of them a guidance counselor -- we were discussing this process and the way it ramps into career planning and projects out into life with what seem at times to be alternately momentous or grave consequences.

Trying to arrive at what I would ultimately like to see for my children in terms of how the order the various components of their lives and selves:  professional, personal, blah blah blah, I arrived at the phrase:  feng shui.  I.e. that there should be a feng shui of the soul itself.

I'm not sure what this means, but it sure is a catchy phrase.  Now I must repeat it 10,000 times, until, in Malcolm Gladwell terms, I have mastered it.

Forces tugging

Being blessed with the gift of relative hour-to-hour freedom, it is all too easy to get swept up in the chorus of voices that tug at me from all directions, inside and out:  "you should call that guy, he needs a successor," "we need to clean this or that," "you're already in business for yourself," "get your taxes done," "I should really get involved in this or that to make a difference over time and justify myself at a higher level."

This morning I woke up from an anxiety dream about something dissertation-like.  My advisor/reader, modeled on this French Professor from Columbia who always reminded me of Roland Barthes (and I think he was working that look, frankly [pun intended]), was going through this project of mine going "it's brilliant in all these places, but it doesn't make sense."  And I awoke in a tizzy, thinking "what project is this he was talking about?  I defended my dissertation years ago.  And it occurred to me that the dissertation in this case was probably a metaphor for my life.

But then, at the bus stop in the morning, I noticed that Graham has been habitually tying his shoes very loosely, and that it's a danger for him out on the playground.  I remember how tricky that was as a kid, not just the tying part, but holding them taught while you do it.  It's hard for little hands. Hell, I haven't entirely mastered it myself.  That is something I need to come back to in the evening, lest he bust his face on the asphalt.

Continual adjustment

Sore as hell after the once-a-year glee of playing basketball yesterday, my organism is surprised again that it's dark in the morning the day after daylight savings time kicks in. And then Graham, in his excitement to get onto the bus, runs into its path as it approaches.  No problem, as the driver is very professional, on top of being oh-so-punctual.  But still.  It's worth discussing with the youngun.

Speaking of, last night Natalie came out and watched the first installment of "Cosmos" with Neil Degrasse Tyson with us. As I may have said, Natalie has of late been joining Mary and me for a little Sunday evening TV with us.  "Downton Abbey", "Sherlock," she has developed a taste for PBS/BBC goodies.  Which is great. Most of her consumption is on her iPod from the comfort of her bed or beanbag chair.

So it's nice to have her out with us, absolutely.  But during the commercials, she whipped out her iPod and chatted with her friends.  On the one hand, I'm glad she has friends.  I would like to see more of them physically, and we encourage sleepovers and play dates, or whatever you call it for a teenager.  Coming over.  But physical presence is apparently overrated for her lot, when a few bits and the occasional byte will do. So I actually told her to put the iPod away, but didn't enforce it too energetically, and it snuck out again.

One cannot command presence, I guess.  We need to make it worthwhile. Which is a tall order for someone who doesn't really want it.  Ahh, but what else is new?  Teenagers.

Reflections on reflections

In preparation for a 2nd interview on Monday, where I'm being asked to discuss my network and what would be reasonable expectations for me in terms of bringing assets into a firm I'm talking to (and it's one I really like, I should add), I decided to see what kind of analytical tools are available for me to answer this question.  Breaking it down into sections like, based on my Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, how many people do I know around here?   And elsewhere?

So I plugged my Facebook network into Wolfram Alpha.  And it chugged through my Facebook data and came back with a report.

And the most interesting thing is that the most liked and commented upon post was the picture my sister took of my dad on his 75th birthday, sitting in his favorite cafe in Hillsborough, gaunt and smiling in an old sweater.  She had just showed him something, I think it was on Facebook, about some preacher lady in Manhattan who had read some of his poetry or preached about He's Not Here or something.

It was validation from afar of the worth of something he did, which was very important to him, because so much of his life was spent resolutely marching to the tune of his own drummer, in the face of society, really saying fuck you much of the way.  But he desperately wanted approval.  Especially from pretty women.  And I know that it was hugely validating for him, in that moment, to feel it from afar, over this crazy thing the internet, which he knew fuck all about.

And what this says to me, just now, is that I must go and play with my kids.  Probably, in fact, get them some dinner.

Yet again, but why not?

This morning, over coffee, I found myself once more discussing work, life, balance, mission, marketing, composting, blogging, parenting, who should talk to whom about what, etc.  All over 45 minutes.  This time with someone who's written a book on the life-career stuff and is trying to grow her business.

And part of me thinks, oh no, not this work-life-mission discussion again, I've been at this for years.  But then I think, well, what better to talk about, in truth.  UNC's foul shooting woes?  The academic scandals?  The way an 12-game winning streak seems to wipe the slate clean and put the other stuff in the rearview?

Fact is, it's all part of one discussion, anyway, and if it we weren't talking about it, it would be like we had all the answers, in a sense.  Which we don't. So, the big questions inhere in both the themes and the mechanics of it all down beneath.


As an addendum, let me say that this morning's coffee mate had read the Grouse and was FULL OF praise for the Grouse commentariat, even venturing to say that the comments were part of the HUGE success of the blog, not just for their LENGTH, but for the BREADTH, or -- dare I even say -- the GIRTH, of the wisdom they offer to the reader on a topic of interest to everyone. And so, to my dedicated readers and commenters, let me just encourage you to KEEP IT UP.

To Liberty

Yesterday Graham and I drove out to Liberty, NC, to visit with our distant relative Guy T--y.*  My dad met and then introduced me to Guy back in the eighties, when he got on his geneaology kick, which is something that men of a certain age apparently do.  I wanted Graham to meet Guy because of Graham's abiding interest in all things military, and because Guy had been a military guy.

So we rolled on out there.  It was supposed to be cloudy, but it wasn't, and it was beautiful cruising through the NC countryside.  Interesting to note the changes as well.  At Eli Whitney, there is a Tienda now, attached to a Mexican Restaurant called Ulvia's.  Open till 10, looks pretty good.  Me, I want to go.  Out in the middle of a field somewhere in there, also a soccer field rather than a baseball field.  But there were also some old Anglo greasy spoons that also had appeal, and golf courses hiding out here and there, and maybe hippy pottery places or art studios or something.  All in all, I was just curious.

Certainly more so than Graham was.  We stopped at Johnny's in Carrboro to get coffee for me, lemonade for him, and maybe 5 minutes later I turned off of 54 west to make my way down towards Old Greensboro Highway, and Graham says:  "are we almost there?"  I had said it was gonna be an hour, and it apparently already felt like an hour to him, even though Ira Glass and crew were aboard a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier on "This American Life" (what could be better than that?)

Anyhow, we made our way out to Liberty and turned onto T--y Estate Road, which led us to the home of Guy.  Guy is in his 90s now, but still possessed of the characteristic vigor of a career army guy who was also an Olympic pentathlete in 1952 in Helsinki, bounding up stairs two at a time, with a very firm handshake.  Guy regaled us with tales of the Olympics, and of an interesting military career that culminated in a lengthy stay in military intelligence based in Vienna.  We also petted his dog Dixie, herself kind of an old-timer (and with the flatulence to prove it) and dug into some of Guy's substantial library of military books.  Then Guy and I skyped with his son out on the West Coast and updated some stuff on Ancestry.com, which they're very into.  Somehow Graham has not acquired this taste for digging into the details of relatives, and preferred to bury his nose in a classic tome on the history of WWI.

All in all, a fine afternoon.



*I'm obscuring names here a little out of respect for Guy's privacy and his household security.  I think you know the middle letters of his name.

Things the kids say

Mary sent me this article from the New Yorker "Downton Abbey" with Cats, and I must confess, it pretty much nailed us.  We've been watching Downton Abbey with Natalie as much as possible this year, and it's been a ton of fun, since she never watches television with us, preferring to watch downloaded sitcoms on her iPod from the comfort of her bed.

So, allowing for the fact that John Hodgman wrote the article with his tongue lodged pretty fully in his cheek (so I have to assume it's better as a written document than it would have been delivered orally), he intimates something rather interesting:  other people often don't really care much about stories you tell about the things your kids say or used to say.  The irony here is that, for me, nothing is more poignant than remembering the kids our things used to say, and the richest moments in life are often when we are milling about the kitchen, perhaps pretending to prep food or clean while secretly trying to get the other one to do the lion's share of it, and Mary or I digs up some chestnut from back when the kids were younger:  "You remember how Natalie used to get us confused and call me 'mom'?"  I might say, and we get a warm feeling.  There's not much better than that in life.

And I post that sort of thing here on the blog, and I'm pretty sure that at least our family members, particularly those who know and love our kids but live far away, dig it.  But maybe it's of little interest to others.

Similarly, lots of people will say of Facebook:  "It's a time sink.  I don't really care to see pictures of other people's kids doing sports or getting ready for the prom."  Me, though I can't spend that much time on it -- because it can become a time sink -- I love that stuff. Like Amy's pix of her kids playing volleyball, or Jeff's of hunting and fishing with his son. I think it's because it's less about the specifics of this kid or that doing or having done thing X, but because I identify so strongly with the love for and pride in their kids that the parents demonstrate by posting the pics.  And often the outfits are great too.

A couple of points here on different levels:

1. It is one of the key tasks of representational narrative art to bridge these gaps between the specific (picture of or anecdote about a child) and the general (the love of a parent for a child).  Good realistic novels and movies do this.
   A further codicil to this thought:  to the extent that social media usurp this function from traditional forms (novel, movie, etc.), they threaten the economics of those industries.
2. Although one hates to overgeneralize (but hell, it's my blog), I think that most people get this:  they want to be in a position to be proud of their children.  It is to some extent a first world, bourgeois luxury to be able to do so. If you are trying to subsist and need to have a lot of kids so that you'll be certain someone will be there to take care of you where you're old, you don't have that luxury. 
   
   This means that it must be a goal policy to seek to universalize this luxury to the greatest extent possible. There is a delicate dance between letting the private sector and markets operate as freely as possible and having the public sector step in and supplement and control in the right places, and we will never figure out the perfect balance between them.  Optimizing the fluid and dynamic relationship between public and private sectors what policy is all about.

Parataxis

Some years ago, when Boris Gasparov was teaching a course on medieval Russian narrative, he called our attention to something curious in one of the very earliest examples of literary prose in Russian.  Maybe it was the "Life of the Archpriest Avvakum," maybe something older, I dunno because I sold my 12-volume set of medieval Russian stuff to some Princeton graduate student when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane back in 2003.

Anyway, it was way back there.  And what Gasparov pointed out was this:  in the narrative, events were conjoined almost exclusively with the word "and".  What this indicated was that the author wasn't used to narrating things sequentially, that the very act of telling a story was uncomfortable, which makes sense when you think about moving from a literary style conducted exclusively in verse, which permits and downright encourages looping back and deviating from sequence, to one in prose. That kinda blew my mind.

But when I blog, I find myself overusing the word "and" a lot. On good days, in the morning in particular, thoughts just flow out of me naturally and seem to be naturally related, so it makes all the sense in the world to me to tie them together with a bunch of "ands". But the writerly way is not to overuse any given word, for example, the word "and." Moreover, often the "andness" of the connection between the thoughts I'm tying together is resident exclusively in my mind, and what I really need to do is go back and tie things up for the reader in a more considerate fashion. In a sense, I need to go back and clarify what it is I mean when a say "and", perhaps much as Clinton needed to clarify the meaning of the word "is.":

The Solace of Leaving Early

This book, by Haven Kimmel, had been stacked on top of my chest of drawers for some time before I promoted it to the stack on my bedside table.  Where, in turn, it sat for a while longer.

Then I picked it up.  And blew through it in a week.  A lovely book, really compelling, about a geeky girl who walks out of a PhD program in lit to return to a very small town in a pretty eccentric family with lots of repressed shit of its own.  And a couple of small girls orphaned when their parents killed each other with their respective handguns. And a quirky preacher who is equally well-suited to this three cow town. I think most readers can do the math and see where this story must go, but when it gets there, it's really quite moving.

Oh hell, I can't even begin to do it justice -- I had all sorts of fine thoughts about it the day before yesterday but now my brain is encumbered by a belly full or treats from a function this evening -- but I really had a hard time putting it down, I promise.

It even featured a quote from the same John Donne poem we had read at our wedding.

Stores

In preparation for tomorrow's neighborhood potluck at our house, which will happen on a warm afternoon, I was cleaning some of the rather massive stores of kindling and mid-sized branches I had put up on the screened-in porch in advance of the big storm a week and change ago, in fear that we might lose power.  Mary characterized it rather short-sightedly as "an eyesore."  So I cut the pile down by about 2/3rds and tidied up what I left up there on the porch, which I want for some nights in the 20s we have coming up next week.

Now, if you must know the truth, I really don't like the concept of "yard waste."  I view branches that come down as either potential kindling, or future compost.  Seems stupid to me to have a truck come and haul the stuff off somewhere, where it can become compost for someone else.  So, having gathered all these fine branches up, I was loathe to part with them.  So I did the only rational thing to do, I carried them up under the deck where they can await next year's burning season.

And, in this big urn type planter, there was a cardboard box, and I wondered to myself:  what's in there?  Upon closer inspection I found that it was.... some very lovely pieces of good-sized firewood that I must have carried down there about this time last year, in preparation for this year.

Next year, I tell ya, is gonna be prime burning time.

After academia

I met yesterday evening with a guy who, like me, left academia and entered finance.  He told me how he was so glad he left, because of "the pettiness, the infighting," other stuff, I can't remember.  He said he was glad he had gotten a PhD, for some reason, I can't remember.  It wasn't really convincing.

I hear this line of commentary/criticism often from people who have both left academia and who have remained within it.  Here's what I think:  universities are institutions like others, and some of them are large and complex.  So their institutional dynamics are complex.

Having been out in the corporate world for a while, I don't view academia as being particularly messed up.  Complicated, yes.  Threatened and challenged, for sure.  For-profit (and non-profit) corporations have their own difficulties and tendencies to fight through and surmount.  Universities and non-profits at least have the benefit, for the most part, of being populated with people who by and large, in principle, aligned with their employer's mission.  This alignment is not easy to maintain, for many reasons, but that's a good starting point.

As for the people in academia, I have no qualms.  I have only good memories of the people in my department, I learned lots of valuable stuff there, both in the classroom and outside of it.  I miss seeing them.  I wish they had done a better job of supporting me when I was on the job market, but maybe they did a better job than I thought they did, and I just shot myself in the foot because of my own internal conflicts and contradictions.  That's life.

There's always something to do

At my uncle Ballard's funeral weekend before last, I was talking to my cousin Bill.  Somehow the topic of home ownership arose, and Bill said "the thing is, when you own a home, you'll be sitting in your chair and you turn your head and you see something that needs doing.  There's always something to do."  And I confess, I wasn't 100% in agreement with him.  I was thinking that it depends on how much of a fix-it guy you are, and I'm not always that much of one.  And somewhere deep in the back of my mind that made me think I was less of a man.

But as I was sitting in my armchair earlier this morning, working through some of my stack of AM reading, I looked over and saw the pile of wood in the yard that needs chopping.  And I turned my head to the right and saw a Swiffer there, and below it the sun highlighting the layer of dust on my very old copy of Commodores:  Live, which we danced too in the late 70s, which in turn leans on my copy of Proust's Swann's Way, which I was supposed to read for class sometime in the mid-80s, but which I only read maybe 80 pages of, because it was damned hard and boring, especially given the other things I had on my mind (the parties, the ladies, and the like, or, to be honest, "the kind").  And, at this particular moment, that dust remains.

And yet, home maintenance issues do beckon: I still need to get something on the deck, and it has come to our attention that our mattress exceeds considerably the age at which mattresses should be replaced, and there's some efflorescence in certain walls in the basement, meaning we need to do some small things to keep moisture out of them.  We have one quote, but need others.  And we're having a neighborhood party on Sunday, meaning there's some touch-up painting needed on dings the kitchen cabinets -- at the tender age of two and change -- have acquired.  And I'm sure many more tasks will come to light and rise up the task list before the party, which is only meet and right, because hosting is the great motivator for cleaning and tweaking, which is nothing but an attempt to present to guests an impression that you have a handle on the inexorable processes of nature.

So yes, there are always things to do, the question is always:  which of them are worth doing, and why?  And do they bump the other things that need tending?  For example, the blog.  For it is all part of the great dance with entropy, which is just another face of flux.

Variously good to see things in Durham

Had lunch with my friend Scott today in Durham.  We'd been thinking we'd go to the new pizza place, but it hasn't opened for lunch yet.  What are they thinking?  What Durham needs is specifically a slice place, where you can go in and get a couple of slices and a soda for $5.  It doesn't need another dinner pizza place, which is unlikely to compete well with Pizzeria Toro (if the owner Grey could ever stop it from freaking setting itself on fire, that is).

As we were leaving, Scott remarked that, for one, the old bank building on the corner of Mangum and Main would be make a good restaurant, and, for two, that downtown Durham needed some places one could shop.  Upon closer inspection, the building in question was being gutted (for what?  I don't know), and there was a new bookstore, primarily used books, down Main Street towards Five Points.  Ask and ye shall receive.

There's also a new soul food restaurant as well as a new cafe (owned by some ex-Green Beret philosopher dude) on Parrish as well as a new pub on Main between Mangum and Roxboro.  And ground has been broken on the new apartments to rise right near the old old courthouse.  Now they just gotta figure out what to do with the hulking Albanyesque thing that is the merely old courthouse.

And the gutting of the old CCB building proceeds apace, for it to be turned into a "boutique hotel."

I didn't even have time to head off into the warehouse district to see what's going on there.

Chapel Hill is getting lapped.

Fiction, FOMO, and the male ego (at least this one)

Sometime recently, my contemporary Liesl Schillinger made a comment on Facebook about guys of a certain age not reading much fiction anymore, and I said to myself "Hmmmmm."  I fall into that bucket myself.

For the last little bit of my life, I've been reading predominantly if not exclusively nonfiction, and for the last year or so it has been dominated by biography.  Admittedly, not just any biography, ones by Robert Caro.  I just got to the end of the 2nd volume on LBJ, and not a minute too soon, because I'm about ready to shoot the guy.  And when I've not been reading nonfiction or bios, I've been cleansing my palate with mysteries and post-espionage fiction, mostly Ruth Rendell, Alan Furst, and Olen Steinhauer. Admittedly, I did somewhere slip in Jhumpa Lahiri's most recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which was quite good, until she started writing in the 2nd person, which I just have limited tolerance for.

But, by and large, for the last couple of years, I've had a hard time biting into serious fiction and chewing, preferring (to extend the Francis Bacon metaphor) those that are predigested by their genres.  And I have to wonder:  what's up with that?  For me, at least, there's an odd utilitarianism at work. Given my limited time to read non-professional books (nights, a little during the the weekend), I find myself nonetheless grasping for ways to explain things to myself, and if when I was younger I worked more in a speculative, abstract vein, pondering the evolution of society, the psyche, etc., by now I'm just trying to get a handle on shit.  What's up with China?  How does power work?

The younguns have the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out), and I remember it well.  When I was in my 20s, any weekend night when I was single, I was desperate to figure out where the party was at, lest I might miss meeting the One. Or, failing that, an opportunity to tie one on.  Now I'm experiencing an adult form of FOMO.  What if the world passes me by and I don't get diddly done by the time I get carted off?  And so, the focus on the concrete, history, deeds of the great and grand, as a yardstick for myself.  I reckon.

But of course, as I say it, I realize how silly it is.  Comparing my insides to other peoples' outsides, as they say...

 
At least, in the case of Caro's second volume, we have LBJ set off against Coke Stephenson, from whom Johnson stole the 1948 Texas Senate race.  Stephenson is a great figure, an utterly mythic self-made guy, stoic cowboy who rises in politics because he is serially called by the citizenry to ever-higher office, but maintains his love for his self-built ranch with a river running through it, and who returns to his ranch when defeated by Johnson to dig post holes, fall in love again, try cases in court, swim in the river, and drink whiskey by the fire.  It is, no doubt, a romantic portrait if perhaps not exaggerated, and it is set off against the manic amoral efficacy of LBJ by Caro, who is posing a very clear question about the ends of life.

But for now, I'm on to some fiction.  Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early.  Am liking it.

Squirrelling biomass

In keeping with the wood theme of yesterday, before the big storm blew in, I got busy in the yard gathering wood to burn in case we lose power.  The wood I've been chopping has some curing to do, won't be ready till fall, yet there's enough of it there that I'm loath to shell out for more wood now.  So I'm a little short.  Certainly am short if I need to heat the house for a few days, which, knock wood, it now looks like I won't need to.

So I dove deep into the back yard looking for sizable branches that would be worth burning, the kind of thing the neat-minded are sometimes wont to call "yard litter."  I think of it as brown gold. And I got a bunch, limbs that had fallen off trees or ones that I had trimmed a year or two back when I was trying to open up the view from our rear windows down onto the lake, and then had let lie there.  All in all, a good hunk o'biomass.

Of course, not all of it is perfect. Having been lingering on the ground for a while, some of it has a little moss or a little white stuff on it.  OK, mold, a little.  Technically, if you go by what the EPA says, I shouldn't be burning the stuff, because the mold spores get into the house.  Turns out, wood is supposed to be kept dry.

This was, honestly, a surprise to me, because when I was growing up, we burnt wet wood whenever it felt right, which was often. My dad was of the opinion -- and it was substantiated -- that if the fire was hot enough anything would burn.  So we would chop wood and leave it laying about on the ground or stacked outside, uncovered, until it was time to burn it.  The key was, of course, to have some dry stuff to burn to get started, and then we would throw whatever we had in there.

In retrospect, this is sort of ill-advised alcoholic damn-the-torpedoes bravado, made practicable by the fact that we had a wood stove (so any mold spores would just get sent on up the chimney), not an open fireplace as we have now (after we got rid of the wood stove because it was rather 70s, and not in a good way).  Which returns me to the question:  do I burn what I got, or not?  Do I waste all that effort of yesterday afternoon, gathering up some of this less than perfect wood, or do I just burn it?:

Chopping wood

I've been chopping wood of late, since the power company took down trees on our street and my friend Greg brought me a maul.  It feels good, takes me back to when I was a teenager and dad and I would go out and chop wood to feed the woodstove.  It was totally a hobby, no doubt, a nostalgic turn, but I liked it, and I like the kind of tired my body gets when I do it.  Ditto for raking, which is one of the main reasons I don't use the leaf blower.

It reminds me of Roy Atwater, the old black guy who I rented from on 15-501 towards Pittsboro just after college, who always said that a good day was when he'd work hard enough to fall asleep on the front porch. I get that.

At some point in time during his poet/prophet of simple living phase, my dad opined that I'd be better off getting a job doing something simple and physical. It was when he said shit like that that I wanted to a) slap him and b) go get wasted, because it seemed so disrespectful to me and the path I had taken.

But sometimes I think he may have had a point.  In fact, there is wisdom in much of what he wrote.  It's just that he was so overbearing in his presentation of it, and he himself never really executed well on it.

Diner, College Park, MD

Early Sunday morning, mom, Leslie and I had breakfast with our cousins Carol and Annette at this diner.  It wasn't fancy.

On my way to the loo, I passed an older African-American couple, dressed up to go to church.  He had on a nice suit and tie, but she was the one who was noteworthy.  She had a hat with some costume jewelry in a triangle on the front, and a blouse also with some spangles of some sort.  Not over the top like one sees sometimes, she was just dressed up to go and give thanks and praise that morning.  It was a good look.  And she was quite pretty, in a rather austere way.

He was having some french toast or similar breakfast fare, but she had a plate of vegetables cooked on the grill.  I'm talking broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Serious vegetables.  At 9 am.  That is some hard-core discipline.

Sausage-making

Am rounding the corner on the second volume of Robert Caro's bio of LBJ, wherein our hero -- with the help of his Texas patrons -- debases himself before ultra-reactionary funders and then outright steals the 1948 Senate election from Mr. Texas, celebrated governor Coke Stephenson.  It really is quite foul, how it happened, and right now all I want to do is get through the book so I can have some time away from LBJ and his cronies to digest.

And this is, in the end, Caro's message, at least what I take thus far.  Both Robert Moses and LBJ were -- each in his own way -- crooked scumbags.  Moses, at least, began as an idealist of sorts who became corrupted by the power and money to which he became privy.  LBJ was from a very young age quite slimy, a troubled child with deep deep insecurity about some basic guy stuff, like physical strength and comfort in his body.  What they shared was energy, an understanding of the craft of politics and where the levers of power were, and a relentless focus on getting things done.  In the end, what each of them got done was a very mixed bag.  In the case of Moses, mostly negative, in the case of LBJ, more positive on balance, though there was that little thing about Vietnam.

I will keep reading for sure, but I'm about ready for a little break.

Decompressing

And so, after 5 months of being more or less chained to my desk for a succession of very solid work weeks while grinding through the 5 topic area courses of the College for Financial Planning's CFP® curriculum, I'm done for now.  Passed my last exam, now have one more course before I can sit for the final board exam in July.

Thus, I am faced with that other question, the big one, what's next?  I have a big spreadsheet of firms to reach out to, one conversation already ongoing with a firm and, thankfully, some trips and social events already lined up on my calendar so I don't have to kick everything up whole cloth.

And, to my right, my task list, filled with all manner of chores and small tasks I've been putting off, could probably keep me busy for weeks.  Most pressingly, change the oil on the Prius, probably need to have the brakes looked at on the Volvo because 1. That always needs tending and 2.  There's a mild shudder when I travel up around 70 on the interstate.  I just walked downstairs to get a banana and was reminded I need to call Marvin about putting some sort of sealant on the deck, which he pressure-washed a few weeks back (at a most reasonable price, I might add!).  Better stop, the list goes on and on.

So I must balance the high-level questions (should I go for a safer salaried job at a larger firm or take the risk of breaking out into a wholly fee-based construct in which I would have more control over my life over time), with the smaller ones.

Which is to say, it's life.  Just another day.  But a rainy one, so hopefully Natalie's away game in Durham is cancelled and I don't have to sweat the question of getting over there to spectate and dad.

Dancing man plus

The very sad news of Pete Seeger's passing yesterday took me back to something I hadn't thought about for some time.

It was Spring, 1990, a lively time for the Grouse, to say the least.  I had been translating Ilya Kabakov, along with other Russian Conceptualist and Post-Conceptualist (no kidding)* artists for a magazine and a couple of gallery shows, so when there was a big Kabakov show at the Hirshhorn in DC, along with something else I wanted to see, I hopped in my car and drove up there one weekend I had off.  I even took my beat-up classical guitar, figuring I might do a little busking.  I was kinda freewheeling.

Now, since I had just finished college a couple of years before and I knew that people my age had gravitated to the Adams Morgan area, and since I had neither money nor inclination to spend on lodging, I figured I would just drive up to DC, go to Adams Morgan, and walk around and pop into bars and restaurants until I ran into somebody.  So that's what I did.  And in the first restaurant I went into I saw my friends John, Gretchen, and maybe somebody else I knew having sangria.  So I joined them at there table and asked John if I could stay with him.  "Sure," he said (at least that's how I remembered it).  And it's a good thing it worked out like that, because, though Spring was on its way by then, it was chilly out.

John had a nice place, and he put me up real nice.  In the morning, I took the metro down to the mall and was headed across to the Hirshhorn, when I saw a big crowd of scruffy types gathering.  I went over to check out what it was. Turns out, it was a launch party for a movie called Romero, starring Raul Julia, about a Salvadoran clergyman who faught the military regime there and got iced for his efforts. I saw people carrying banners, and figured I might find even more friends there if I tried, and saw that there were people up in a sort of tower.

But when I tried to get over there, I was told that it was for press only.  Not to be easily deterred, I told them that I represented Social Text and "several Russian journals," or somesuch, but I didn't have my credentials handy.  Somehow they let me in, I dunno, and when I went in I saw that there was a staging tent, so I went in there.  And as soon as I got in there, there was Pete Seeger with his banjo, dancing and glowing and showing some cool lick to a guy I'm pretty sure was Bishop Paul Moore. I didn't really know that much about Pete Seeger, honestly, I was a young badassed punk rocker, but I knew who he was, and he had a great smile, a great aura all around.  And, in the back of the tent, I saw something that was even more amazing for me, a true hero:  Ed Asner.  He was sitting there quietly in the back, on his own, just chilling.

Now, even then I knew that it was better not to bother celebrities too much, but for Ed Asner I had to make an exception. He was great in Mary Tyler More, better even in Lou Grant (note to self, check Netflix), but I really loved him from a schmaltzy TV movie they used to show every year around Xmas, The Gathering. I'll spare you the details, because I'm running on here.  Anyway, I went up to him, introduced myself, told him how much I loved his work, asked him what he was working on, and then left him in piece, apologizing for bothering him. To this day, that was probably my best celebrity encounter ever, precisely because I loved the guy, I told him that, and then moved on.

Then I went and saw the art show, and it was nice too, then drove home to NC, taking some back roads for some portion of the way, just because that's how contrarian I was/am.  I'm still amazed I pulled off that trip and found a place to stay.  It was a fine day.



*ps. I had never heard of Conceptualism either before that, and I knew me some isms!  I also had never heard of the Hirshhorn, but somehow figured out where it was, in those pre-internet days.

Being sick

A thousand pardons for the relative silence, I've been studying hard for the last few weeks, getting ready for the Estate Planning exam, and then I got sick.  Not once but twice.  Mighty stuffed up and achey, to the level where I don't even have the strength of will to read books, so I've dipped into the pile of New Yorkers that sporadically pile up on the floor next to my bed after I rescue them from the purgatory that is Mary's bedside table.

And so I found myself reading an article about Aaron Schwarz. Not being particularly hip anymore in matter interweb-related, I never knew who the guy was until he hung himself, and even when I was flipping to the article I was wondering if he might be some minor actor the Coen brothers like.

Then I remembered, and it was very touching to read about the guy, this delicate boy genius of the internet, Quixote of information wanting to be free, had he been more task-oriented.  Clearly somewhere on the spectrum, ripped by affective disorders and sensory issues and ulcerative colitis, he reminded me a little too much of members of my family, wandering around with fine if grandiose ideas about changing the world.

It reminds me how important it is to stick to my knitting when I get too ambitious in my thinking about writing. Rest. Study. Earn. Save. Take kids on trips.  Raise $ for the causes of friends, and go to meetings and be of service in 12-step programs. And yes, blog a little. It is all too easy to drift off into delusions of grandeur.  Time to go downstairs and hang with the fam.

Code Talker

Over our last couple of family drives, we've listened to the book on CD of Code Talker:  The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII, by Chester Nez.  For those of you who don't know what a Code Talker is -- and I didn't until I had a kid who was gaga for WWII -- they are Navajo Marines (and maybe members of other armed services) who were used as primary communications personnel during the war, since the Japanese had managed to figure out all other codes we could dream up.  There were no grammars of Navajo, nor foreign speakers, so it was indecipherable to them.

The book tells the story of a Navajo kid who first gets sent away to school forceably, made to speak English and cut his hair (something the Navajo didn't do) and otherwise do the things the white man told him to do.  Eventually he enlists and then becomes a Code Talker.  Then he goes across the Pacific with the Marines, all the way to Okinawa, whence the nuclear missions took off.

It's a fine book, at once matter of fact but unapologetically detailing the experience of a group of people who were not treated well by the US government, but who yet identified with it enough to want to fight. But by the time he gets out into the really brutal Pacific battles, especially Iwo Jima and Okinawa, much of the experience is just straight up battles:  what it's like to be there in the trenches with the smell of sulfur and charred skin suffusing everything, the pain of stepping over the corpses of people you had breakfast with a few hours ago.  For a bit I was thinking:  "this is pretty generic, we're not getting much of the specific experience of being a Navajo here."  But then I realized that that was the point, at a very basic level he was just a soldier, at once scared shitless and in the thick of it. And he spends a lot of time talking about how he grows close with a few white guys, especially these two guys Smitty and Georgia Boy.  So by the time Georgia Boy takes a slug to the neck and is spurting out blood I was basically in tears, wondering if the kid is gonna make it (I won't spoil it for you).

I've seen a bunch of WWII movies, including Saving Private Ryan, but this book drove home much better than them the raw nastiness of the war, and the depth of the bonds formed there.  Those of us who haven't had to fight wars don't get it, can't possibly get it.

And one other thing.  The Common Core is really pushing kids to read nonfiction as opposed to fiction, on the premise that so much of their life will be dealing with nonfiction texts. At a certain level, I think that's a pretty spurious idea:  just let kids read, be happy they're reading whatever.  But if there are a lot of books of this quality for kids to read, I'm all for it.  I dunno if it's supposed to be a kids book, but Natalie had surely read it before, and knew it well.

Taking one for the team

Mary made some soup this week, splitpea with saffron and almond slivers. It was, by consensus, not the best of her many adventurous soups -- though I did just have my fourth meal of it and, bolstered by a Mexican green hot sauce, it was just fine.

In any case, last night when Natalie and I got home from her ultimate game and we were discussing what was on the dinner menu, I suggested the soup, which she deflected, on account of having had it for lunch. I said I'd have it for dinner, and Natalie said:  "way to go, taking one for the team."

God, how we love em.

Comfort in the weeds

At the dinner for dads of kids on the spectrum last night, partly to suck oxygen away from the brash new dad who was dominating discussion, I asked the group's facilitator (whom we really want to hear more of anyway, as he's been in the field for decades and is a font of wisdom) if he could bucket up the 3 to 5 categories of things that motivate kids/people on the spectrum.  The was after he had interjected that guys at the table were projecting their own neurotypical ways of thinking about motivation onto their kids, for whom these mindsets weren't applicable at all.  I just wanted to keep the mike in his hand.

So he listed them out, and they were categories I was used to, but I hadn't thought of them as motivators as much as preferences or just attributes.  For instance, structure and routine, visual cues, and facts and detail.

And that last one got me to thinking.  I too have shown a marked preference for facts and detail throughout my life.  From reading encyclopedias and memorizing sports stats (including the baseball cards of pretty obscure people) to knowing dates in history, which gave it structure. Later in life, in the for-profit realm, I've done well as the detail guy on projects, but at times was accused of "majoring in the minors," which was the owners of the consulting firm where I worked way of saying that I wasn't rising up to the big picture, putting myself in the client's shoes, and thinking more strategically.  And I think that was a fair criticism, which I worked to get past.

The fact is, there is comfort in the details for me.  Things that can be memorized can be mastered.  So, right now, studying for the CFP also offers some of that, a discrete, testable set of material with lots of details.

Last night I wanted to ask the group leader if he thought that people on the spectrum preferred facts because it offered them the possibility of mastery, or even of dominance, but I didn't want to be too pushy with the flow of conversation.  And then the guy with the big mouth got wound up again.

Ahh well.  My seafood pasta was delicious.

Where credit is due

Early in my career in consulting, back in 2000, I was called on to do some mock-ups of some screens we were building for a client. I had experience in HTML and with Dreamweaver, so this was no problem for me.  Actually, I must have been fairly new with Dreamweaver, because I remember getting excited about all the nifty things I could do with tables.  And I figured that the generous thing to do was to give the client options from which they could choose.  So I made up a bunch of different screens with really different looks and feels.  Some of them looked like Kandinsky, or Mondrian, or Malevich, you know what I mean.  I was very proud.

So we called in the whole project team, us and the client, and walked through the screens. I don't think they had ever seen anything like it.  They were very polite to me, I think.  They may have shared other opinions with my project managers, Webb and Dinesh.

So, that Friday, back at our firm's home office, me and somebody else got sat down for a lecture on basic application screen design by the firm's founder, Steve.  "Fellas," he explained, more or less, "Here's how it works. You've got a master menu in a frame across the top, these are your nouns" (and, 13 years later, I look at the screen to my right and I see tabs for "Projects," "Users," "Upgrade", "Support," and "About").  "Then, along the left hand side of the screen, you put your drill-down menus, which typically consist of verbs." (Again, glancing at my other screen, I see more or less the script being followed).  "This is how it works."  Part of me felt constrained by this heavy hand of normativity, but I had to admit it worked.

And then he went on. "The browser is going to more or less evolve into a replacement for the operating system...."  Now, I didn't know much about computers, but that sounded kinda loonie to me.  I knew that an operating system was in fact software, something like the software equivalent of a large office building.  Back in 2000, the browser was, by analogy, a broom closet.

Today, we took delivery of a Chromebook.  Now, I know that Chrome the operating system and Chrome the browser aren't exactly the same, but the OS is really just an extension or expansion of the the browser, and I fully get how a URL really just designates the location of a file, and.... In any case, hats off to Steve, in this case.  He really got it pretty early.

The aging of satire

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is one of those books I had occasionally looked at and thought about, and kinda thought I should have read, but I hadn't.  So when I saw a copy close to hand and grabbed it, figuring I'd read it.

Only around the 70-80 page mark, I began to encounter some resistance. That's about where I have to decide whether to push on through a book, or let it go.  I'm inclined towards the latter with this one.

Here's the deal.  Toole definitely has a keen eye and a way with the words, some very humorous stuff here, some fine satire. Reminiscent of Gogol or, even more so, Ilf and Petrov (The Twelve Chairs, The Golden Calf), the great chroniclers of the foibles of the New Economic Period of the 1920s in Russia. The problem is, it's satire from a different historical era, and if it's not top rate, aged satire it often suffers from the reader's distance from what's being made fun of.*  And, although Toole won a Pulitzer... well, they give those every year, and it's kind of a beauty contest. I don't think the book rises up to transcend its era. In fact, it's kind of hard to figure out what he wanted to do with the novel.

There's one other fundamental problem. The satirical author/narrator has to consider him/herself better than what he's satirizing.  And that wears on the reader, and it's really characteristic of white guys in their 20s (Toole killed himself when he was 32).  I know.  I used to be one of them.

"Realistic" fiction, at least at a some basic level, seeks to subordinate itself to what it describes. Endless ink has been spilled on its inability to do so, but at least it tries. And even as it ages, I tend to appreciate the humility of its aim.

Anyhow, I won't hang the novel up altogether, I'll put it on the stack next to my bedside table and see how it does.




* Satirical movies age better, because, for one, they're shorter, and they also have the additional element of typically being filled with gifted physical comics with goofy faces and finely honed timing

Cryptic Silence

Returning to the long-neglected "things the kids say" category, we turn now to the phrase "cryptic silence."  This is a category Natalie often invokes when she has asked permission to do or eat something, and we have failed -- either by virtue of spacing out or (just as often) -- because I am deferring to Mary, the household chief nutritionist and imposer of dietary discipline.  Typically Natalie will be asking if she can have a banana for her fruit serving, because it is the easiest thing to get and eat.  I often will let her.  Mary, however, considers that to be slacking, when I should really be encouraging her to eat a fresh pear or a mango or something.  So I pause, to let Mary pass judgment on the question.  Mary, for her part, is often either not focused on the question or (I suspect) wants to hear what I say to see if I am being a fruit slacker once again.

Into this space Natalie slides with her catchphrase:  "I'll take your cryptic silence as a yes," at which point she grabs a banana and rips the top off before we can stop her, making it a fait accompli.

This evening, while Natalie was perusing the offerings for Duke's TIP Program for this summer, her eye alighted upon a course listing for something to do with courtroom stuff, mock law for smart kids, something like that.  All of a sudden, I imagined her in the courtroom, cross-examining a witness for murder:  "So, were you at home on the evening of the 7th?", and I could see the witness freezing in the box, at which point Natalie pounces on her:  "I'll take your cryptic silence for a yes!"  Case closed.

North Pelham, Lincoln Ave, and other wanderings

Over vacation I had to get from Larchmont to the Cross-County a couple of times, so I took Lincoln Ave through what I always thought was the Bronx, but I guess is Pelham, NY, now that I dig into it, just across the border from Mount Vernon.  Just before you get to where you get on the Hutch to to Cross-County, right about 5th Ave, there is now a Verizon Wireless store and a TD Bank on a corner that had previously been small, locally-owned businesses.  And then, in the low building where there used to be a beat-up convenience store that gave way a couple of years ago to a Dunkin Donuts, there is also a Hot Yoga studio.  Gentrification, it seems, is creeping north.

I would once have decried the loss of local character, and certainly there is some of that.  But, generally, money and services are being infused into a neighborhood that was a little bit hurting before. Admittedly, the jobs created may not be that great, but the residents should be able to do more on foot than they used to, as services are better. Maybe the TD branch took out a local bank, can't remember. As always in life, pluses and minuses.

Also went into Yonkers to meet a friend and went to a Thai restaurant (Accent Thai, on MacLean), which had a perfectly serviceable Pad-See Ew.  There was a sushi place across the place reputed to be just fine.

Starting the fresh

A couple of stories of interest on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today.  One on alternative lenders who are cropping up to loan to small businesses that are underserved in the risk-averse, post Dodd-Frank, ZIRP world of a shrinking ecosystem of traditional lenders.  Of note in this article are alternative underwriting and payment techniques used by the lenders, as well as the higher annual interest rates they charge.  Down in the right hand corner, there's another about some guy pseudonamed Russell Blake in a Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses who writes and self-publishes a novel every 5 weeks or so on Amazon's platform.  Sounds like he's working his butt off, but making good money and creating a whole new business model.  I may have to sample a book, just to see.

I love this stuff, am continually amazed by entrepreneurial creativity.  Of course, this kind of thing was highly valued in my household when we were growing up, what with mom being a leader in women's small business circles and dad's general disdain for large organizations and groupthink of any sort.

So you'd think I might be more inclined to wanna be starting something,  got to be starting something.  And, indeed, I have business ideas flash through my mind occasionally, but I typically don't follow up on them, or do so only half-assedly.  Probably that's because of my continued experience of hearing my dad talk up this crazy idea or that, and never seeing anything coming to fruition.  Being a sole breadwinner is probably part of it too.

I have seen the idea bandied about that Obamacare, far from being a dead hand on the business community, will actually in time facilitate a more robust startup culture, insofar as it decouples individuals' healthcare from dependency on employers.  By sometime around 2017-18, we should see how this is panning out.  If individuals can insure themselves (and self-insure themselves by living and dying smarter) affordably, it should work.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Just made my way through this little 1984 tomelet from John McPhee, which can only be termed a bagatelle.  It's all about the Swiss Army, in which all males of a certain age are supposed to serve, and how it is everywhere, and how the Swiss are at once intensely serious and, in their own way, not so serious about it at all.  How prepared Swiss soldiers are for whatever may come their way, but how they enjoy themselves immensely with wine and schnappes and bread and cheese and beer and lovely meadows and snow in their preparedness.

It is significant that McPhee gave the book a title in French, for the book is sprinkled throughout with snippets of conversation in French like so many lardons, which McPhee declines to translate for the reader, as it is assumed, quaintly, that the sophisticated American reader will read French. My French is good enough to know that I didn't miss anything in whatever I didn't understand.

The key point is that the book hearkens back to a time in American history, during the reign of Volcker at the beginning of the most recent major market cycle, when there was still something of an old money East Coast aristocracy within which reading the New Yorker and speaking French were still kind of assumed.  And McPhee's voice was one of the greatest of that time, the William Shawn era, when articles were long and narrators reigned supremely and ironically over their subject matter, thereby domesticating it and making it safe to be contained within the coffee and side tables of Manhattan and the places that emulated it.

It's a nice little book, probably not McPhee at his best, but I'll take a little break from him for now.

To be absolutely clear. Happy Holidays!

And so, here it is, the New Year is upon us and still no seasonal letter, no card, the least I can do is blog.

All in all, it's been a good year, but not without its up and downs. The early part of the year kind of had the oxygen sucked out of it by the declining health and the death of my father.  This is, as you all well know, a big event. My father and I were not all that close, as he was a challenging guy to be close to, but still he was my father, and it took a lot out of me.  On the last day of his life, I learned a fair amount about his childhood, and that was both saddening and enlightening, and brought an odd closure.

As the year wore on, we had to watch a close friend lose a child to cancer, which was.... ( insert words here), but put everything in perspective. Where we strive to keep it, that everything.

The highlight of the year was without a doubt our trip to northern California.  Until this year, our kids had been virtual prisoners of the East Coast, venturing as far as various parts of our northern neighbor Canadia, but easterly nonetheless.  So we took them out west, to San Francisco (where we were hosted and vehicled by a good friend and constant grousereader through the years), and as far south as Big Sur.  Of this highlight trip, the absolute pinnacle came from a day when we drove south from Monterrey to Big Sur. As we were walking back from one of the several astoundingly beautiful beaches we sampled, Natalie turned to me and said "Thank you so much for bringing us out here" As those of you with teenagers and those who were once teenagers may recall, they don't say this kind of thing every day, so that was special.  Then a couple of days later she scared the crap out of us when she almost got killed crossing the Pacific Coast Highway at another spot.

(click on the picture to see it bigger and get a better idea of how lovely my family is!)

Natalie extended her time out west with a week in the desert with my mom, who took her to the Grand and other canyons, as well as the Hoover Dam and whatever else they could drive to.  Natalie also did her last summer as a camper at Gwynn Valley, which was a little sad, because it's a special place for both of us. Back at home, it was a big year for Natalie as she tried out team sports, both ultimate frisbee and field hockey, and enjoyed the team part, if not always the sports part. She is doing so well academically that it would appear vain and boastful to provide any detail at all. She has basically read all the books that are written for kids her age, so any suggestions for further readings are appreciated.

As for Graham, he continues to astound us with his drive to command incredible levels of detail around military history and technology, which he shares with his uncle George in conversations of prodigious length.  He has sucked up a wide range of random other erudition while watching the Military Channel and H2 and while reading whatever he can get his hands on. And he's expanded his taste for foods tremendously, and moved forward in his martial arts classes, all while maintaining incredible cuteness.

Me and Mary, we're fine.  We've settled into the renovation, the garden is mostly filled out, thanks entirely to Mary's yeoperson efforts.  Mary has gotten more and more involved in the local autism and special needs education community, while I have spent the year transitioning into the investment advisory profession, and am happy to have moved from serving corporations to working with individuals. Due to Mary's consistent efforts, we're eating less meat, especially during the week, and I am increasingly getting to a place where I am not only at peace with this seeming deprivation, but appreciate it, because as time goes by we come to better grasp the concept, long espoused by people of a certain age, of being thankful for our health.


In closing, let me thank all of yall who continue to take the time to stop by and read my blog. I am always astounded and delighted when, in this context or that, somebody tells me they read it.  There is no end of text in the world, so much to read, so the fact that you make the time to read mine is a great honor and privilege.