Volume and depth

Over the weekend in New Haven I was talking to my old roommate Gus about the most recent crisis of the humanities and the need for artists to get paid and whatnot, and I found myself thinking about the serialization of the novel in the 19th century. Which is to say, the way that novels were published in journals in monthly installments, with the authors getting paid by the word. This is how we come to have such voluminous and numerous novels from the likes of Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and others. These folx were getting paid by the page, so they had strong incentives to crank them out. And with some of these writers (for me, Trollope and Dickens wrote novels that were often too long, and Balzac just cranked out a shitload of them.

Often, particularly with Dostoevsky, who is clearly the most significant writer amongst them, we are tempted to see some sort of tension between the volume and the quality, as if it's some miracle that he was able to delve the depths of the human soul as well as he did while grinding out the pages to book some ducats. But what if the opposite is true, and the need to churn it out in fact drove the process of discovery forward. Think about it, if he coulda just wound it up at 210 pages and still charged $18.95 for the hardcover, would he have needed to create Ivan and Dima and Alyosha and Smerdyakov and Zosima and so on and so forth. What need would he have of the Grand Inquisitor if he could have been over at the Algonquin tinkling ice cubes and trading barbs with Dorothy Parker or, perish the thought, if he had needed to chat up Terry Gross and tour an endless succession of Barnes and Nobles, scribbling in copies while making significant eye contact with adoring readers and subsisting on a steady diet of iced caramel lattes? What then? I for one am glad the guy had a quota, and a bunch of gambling debts he needed to service, bookies to evade.

Happy endings

Graham and I have been watching The Avengers, the animated series.  Lots of gamma radiation, intense battles with aliens and supercriminals, etc. Somehow, despite battling against seemingly insurmountable foes, the Avengers always find a way to win. And if they quarreled in the middle of the show (as they sometimes do), they make up in the end.

Got me thinking about happy endings. Of course kids' stuff always works out well in the end. Thank God for that.  But 98% of the fictional narratives we adults consume also end well, and the 2% that doesn't is usually high-brow in one way or another and hard to make money on.

So we are hard-wired to expect that things will work out in the end.*  And that makes it hard for us to really buy the possibility of things turning out really poorly, as with global warming, the obesity/diabetes epidemic, etc. We just expect a deus ex machina of some sort to swoop in and figure it out.  In fact, that's the conservative argument, if we fuck ourselves badly enough science will be forced to discover a solution. Hey, it always does, right?



*Denis de Rougemont, in his Love in the Western World, makes a pretty good case that we prefer tragic endings in love narratives, from Tristan and Iseult ff, but that's a different story

Know thy neighbor?

In the wake of the discovery of the 3 abducted women in Cleveland, there has been a good deal of head-scratching and soul-searching about a variety of topics. On NPR this morning, there was discussion of the "missing white woman" issue, in which abducted white women get more attention than women of color do.  That is a worthwhile thread.

Yesterday, however, on the drive in I heard discussions of the "how well do you know your neighbor?" theme. That is a potentially bad path to go down. The more people sit around speculating about their neighbors, the more repressive a society you get.  In its most benign form, you get the world of John Cheever and/or Archie Bunker (where we do, to a certain extent, still live), in which repressive heteronormativity abounds. And it's not just amongst the white and affluent.  Think about how communities of color have voted on things like gay marriage in North Carolina and elsewhere. It's not all good.


In the worst case, you get Stalinism or the Cultural Revolution in China, in which people were really attentive to what their neighbors were up to. Right now Putin is trying to push through very restrictive laws about pornography to "protect children", but which will let the state establish infrastructure that will allow it to watch other things. They're already pretty good at it in China, and look what happens to the Falun Gong.  Organ harvesting by the state.

Don't get me wrong, there is a value to neighborhood cohesiveness, but there's also merit in people having autonomy and privacy.

Home alone

With Mary out of town, and the kids off to school, I'm in the rare position of being in the house 100% alone.  It's quiet and very nice outside.

Organizing to get up with Josh and Niklaus, I was reminded of what my dad did when I told him that Sophie had cancer.  He started crying instantaneously.  There was no pause, tears just rolled down his cheeks.  I was heartened by that.

It's difficult at times, hell, all the time, to reconcile my dad's public and private personae. Ellie K--d, our state senator, noted at the end of a recent note she sent out to everybody who's email address she has that dad "spread joy to everyone he met," or something like that.  But he never really listened to people.  He candidly admitted to Leslie that he was going to address some school group, but that he wasn't interested in hearing what the students had to say or even ask them, he wanted to tell them things.  At least he admitted it.

It was this extreme, heavy-handedness didacticism and self-righteousness that hid behind the ambling jokester that we his kids got to see over the years, and was one of the things that made him difficult.

Deaden my soul

It's grey outside, and I'm grinding away at the book on health care plans that is a requirement for my Certified Financial Planner designation.  And you wonder, perhaps, why I haven't been writing? This is death of the soul kind of material, really freaking dreadful. Written by nimrods, for nimrods.

And will it make me one?  Only time will tell.

At least there's the Cream record I checked out of the library waiting for me on my car stereo.

And so

As I said, my dad died. It was, on the one hand, physically rather quick. On the other, I think you could say that socially, or psychically, it happened more slowly. He had lived the last month or so alone, after his second wife left him. She did that because he kept having these attacks of rage.  He would drink, and then get angry and hostile towards her, and break things, and cut up his feet and suchlike.

I think he raged because his dementia was progressing, and he saw his faculties slipping away, and that freaked him the hell out. So he would drink, which made things worse.

So it turned out that his last month or so was spent alone, and his faculties had declined so that he was no longer able to really read, which would have been a consolation to him. He couldn't hold a thread for that long. Which made conversations with him even more disjointed than they had been in prior years.  He'd still have flashes of wit and stories from many years back, he just couldn't remember well what we had been talking about 5 minutes ago. And that drove him ape.

So Leslie and I and Madelyn, the geriatric care manager Leslie had hired to help us manage him some months back, we would call and check on him. And I'd go and see him each week, and other people would check in too, but in the evenings he was alone, and though he tried to put a good face on it, it was hell for him. But nobody would live with him.

And, in the end, he lost the battle with alcohol, though he fought it valiantly in his own way, without ever availing himself of the armor that AA offered him. Something made him unable to simply say "I'm an alcoholic," though he liked to recount to me a book he had read about an alcoholic who fights the battle and in the novel's conclusion stands up and says "I'm X, and I'm an alcoholic." Dad would tear up as he told me that, but he could never really do it himself, try as he might by other means to not drink.

There is so much he never told me. He had always talked about the problems with his knee from a high school football injury. Only on the last day of his life, in talking with his sister, did I learn that the problem was not so much that he had injured it, but that his dad had told him to tough it out and not go to a doctor. So he limped for 6 months, and by the time he did get medical help his miniscus had been royally fucked. Only on his last day did I learn just how much of an alcoholic bastard dad's own dad was. So he got it honest.

So much to process.

Slovak singles network

I was just over on Facebook, and one of its paid ads suggested I join a network for single Slovak-speakers:  "Partnernaurovni" which means something like "Partner on the level" i.e. same level as you, something like that.  How the hell should I know, I don't speak Slovak.  So I'm filling out my profile and I'm only 20% done. I had to tell them what my religion was and how important it was for me to find someone who's of the same faith as me. What a royal pain in the ass. I just want them to let me at them hot Slovak mamas, so I can have me a sugar lady next time I'm in Bratislava.  Yeah baby.

 .... so I continued on, and I got tired of looking at stuff and trying to figure out what it meant (it's not as hard as Polish, at least), so I've just been clicking on shit at random to see what they're algorithms will connect me with. It's gonna be one hot Mashenka, I'll betcha!

Really shouldn't be writing

My back is in pain from sitting at my desk all day really trying to get something done.

I haven't written for a long time.  In the interim, as many of you know, my dad died. On the one hand, this should in principle be a topic for endless reflection -- and, I assure you, it is.  In my mind I am frequently if not constantly running through scenes in my head from his last days, and from my imaginings of what it was like for him in his last month or so. He wasn't having a ton of fun, much of the time, though there were good times mixed in. I could write about it in some detail, and at some point in time, I probably will.

But not tonight.

Over the weekend, after dad's ceremony, I pushed myself through to the end of The Power Broker.  The ending of that is also sad, sad that this towering figure who did so much, and so much of it hugely impactful and wrong wrong wrong, and how he just gets hosed in the end, in much the same way that he so blithely hosed many others to their faces, and basically marred the landscape of both New York and, by example, America and the world. There is much to say there too, and in time I may say it. But, in the end, there is perhaps little to add to Caro, and the right thing to do is just move on to the four-volume series on LBJ.

The Power Broker

For some months now, I have been slogging through Robert Caro's 1200-page biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, while taking little breaks in the middle to read mystery novels and the like. It is, without a doubt, magisterial, an incredible picture of the development of New York from the twenties through the sixties and the one machiavellian bastard who rose up to control its destiny.  When I'm done with it, after a suitable pause, I will probably take up the four existing volumes (will he live to produce another) of Caro's bio of LBJ.

That said, I have to take breaks in the middle due to Caro's insatiable appetite for detail.  At times it is wonderful, as figures like Al Smith and other forgotten but honorable figures who were outsmarted by Moses at one point in or the other spring from the page.  At other times, Caro just cannot stop himself from just listing things, the things Moses built.  Something like "and as he stood on that boat, he could see the Belt Parkway, the Verrazano Narrows, the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jones Beach,"  yatta yatta yatta.  And this seems to devolve into overenumeration.

And yet, it is reminiscent of another book I'm in the middle of, which has been sitting on my coffee table for months, something I had never read and picked up for just that reason, a book which lends itself to being picked up and sampled, so rich is its smorgasbord of America, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 

Why! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love--or sleep in the bed at night with any
one I love,
Or sit at the table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds--or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown--or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring;
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best--mechanics, boatmen, farmers,
Or among the savans--or to the _soiree_--or to the opera.
Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,
Or behold children at their sports,
Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman,
Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass;
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring--yet each distinct and in its place.

That is, honestly, just a quote I pulled off the interweb because I am too lazy to go downstairs and grab the book and open it to some random place. The point is, I think, that both Caro and Whitman (and Moses) share in this American revelry in the epic, the grand in scope, the cornucopian.  And why not?

Watching Meatballs again

As part of our energetic total family effort to relieve the Chapel Hill Public Library of the need to truck lots of stuff back to its permanent home, I checked out a lot of movies and also CDs on the last day it was open at the mall. Amongst the flix I brought home was Meatballs.  I thought maybe Natalie would want to join us in watching a Bill Murray classic.

Mary took one look at the picture on the cover and was like "I don't think that's appropriate."  I thought it was just a little bit of harmless T&A to draw them in, but I was wrong.  The whole movie was over the top giggly puerile stuff about "making it" and "getting it on" and stuff. Bill Murray even does a little mock would be date rape dry-hump on another counsellor, which I guess was funny back then.

Mostly, it was not all that funny.  I was surprised at how much Murray was, at this stage in the game, very much a lesser Belushi. Not that some of his physical comedy wasn't kinda funny in its own way. But mostly the movie was just alternately cheap, lurid, and cheesy. Even the good parts I remembered, where Bill Murray acts as a father figure to the depressed kid Rudy, was by no means all that.

And all the teenage sex stuff. It's astonishing how different the discourse around sex is for teenagers these days. Meatballs is totally up front about nervous budding sexuality, all the time, and however silly it is, I think it's probably healthier than the neo-Eisenhouerian repression that's in the air these days, even as pornography drives the internet and ever younger kids are "hooking up" in ways we could only fantasize and masturbate about, but while rarely taking the plunge on actually forming relationships.

Twitches

A couple of weeks back a woman in an Al Anon meeting mentioned that she had suffered from uncontrollable nervous ticks all her life -- 50 years -- until she came into the program, but that she had calmed down over 18 months in and now could sit still.  Today in a meeting there was a woman across from me whose leg -- one leg propped over the other knee -- was working uncontrollably for much of the meeting.

I realized two things

1. Time was, that might have bothered the hell out of me, I might have focused on it and been distracted by it
2. I might have had a pretty active leg myself at times.  In fact, I still might. But not so bad any more, I don't think.

9 am, North Roxboro Road, Durham, NC

I had to go to a lab for some bloodwork, and since I'm on an individually-purchased, high-deductible plan (as opposed to an employer-provided one where my employer reimbursed me for the entire high deductible -- and yes, I've had that crazy sounding thing), I decided to shop for a lab outside of UNC Memorial, where I had been going. So I ended up in a lab inside pediatrician/GP on Roxboro Road. And, while there, I found I was the only white person in the room, a pretty rare but instructive experience. The woman who took my blood had a cutout of a woman with a meat cleaver dripping with blood affixed to her lapel. Above the woman it said "I'm in time out." She explained to me that she was always in time out within the unit, which was funny. She, in fact, was very funny. Anyway, they had a little rap music on and the woman who was handling the blood samples and putting them in the cyclotron or whatever you call it was dancing a little, whatever. I suppose I have an instinct to try to look for differences in an African-American dominant place, but the fact was it was just people doing their boring jobs, happy it was Friday. More importantly, there were lots of interesting taquerias up there, as well as carnicerias, panederias, peluquerias, and even a clothing store for "el y ella". What's surprising in the hispanic market is how mom and pops it all is, how little consolidation there is. As the soft tortilla/meat/onion/cilantro/lime paradigm of taco increasingly displaces the hard tortilla/meat/lettuce/tomato/cheddar paradigm, I can't help but to think that there should be substantial economies of scale available to someone who wants to create a taqueria chain. I'm sure, in fact, that somewhere in Florida, Texas, or California, this is happening now....

On rules

Listening yesterday to Betsy Andreu talk about Lance Armstrong, his doping, and that of her husband, I couldn't help but think back to the culture of the last decade and change and its insistence on achievement at all costs, including the sacrifice of principle. And I have in mind baseball sluggers, financiers, bikers, a whole bunch of folx. It's been all about winning. I"m sure I've blogged on this topic before.

And then I thought about how I model rules-abiding behavior for my kids. Mary is more precise about it. I break little laws and rules easily, like driving the wrong way out of the Estes Hills parking lot at night after I pick up Natalie and friends at dances at Phillips.

And so last night, after pondering this stuff, Graham and I were tossing the basketball back and forth in the rec room, and he asks me:  "So is your dad good at accelerating into yellow lights like David is?"  And I had to stop for a second, and explain that that's something one has to be very careful about, that you really don't want to drive too fast into an intersection. It's apparent that he associated this kind of behavior with a certain bold maleness.  It's a tricky topic, this.

Listening to Steel Pulse

I bought a copy of a '97 Steel Pulse CD the other day. There's a cover of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" on it that breaks new ground, but is pleasant and nice. I found myself tapping my food and singing along. This is the kind of easy pleasure I would have utterly disdained 20 years ago, when I thought that it was the duty of anybody doing a cover to fundamentally reinterpret a song and make it their own, but am now totally at peace with.

This is a clear sign of age. Soon, I'll be one of those guys in a knit tie shaking my bootie to cover bands at weddings.

Later in the record, they cover "Ku Klux Klan."  Upon reflection, I realized it was their own song they were covering. I'm cool with that too.

Sad day at Nice Price

I stopped into the Nice Price Books in Carrboro to try to relieve them of some inventory before they pack up for good.  I did my best.

A couple of things jumped out at me. First off, the "classic" literature section had a really depressing quantity of CliffsNotes. It was visually, if not physically dominated by the skinny yellow plague. The "philosophy" section was all of 3 skimpy shelves, and I could not find the copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations that I was looking for.

UNC is said to be a "public ivy", and it comes in the top 25 of many rankings of US universities altogether. The shabbiness of these categories in a good solid used book store in a town that has historically had good book stores is sad.  I'd like to think that these sections had been picked over as hardcore book vultures swarmed over Nice Price prior to its closing.  (Let the record show that I am not one of them. I've got a solid backlog of books at home. I really went up there for music, to help them get some revenue in the door before moving, and relieve them of the need to pack up and unpack inventory at their other locations). I certainly don't think the books weren't there because the store owners didn't buy this type of book, though I could be wrong.  I think that this part of the book ecosystem is dying back, and that's a shame.

I think that the lack of truly old books at Nice Shows the downside of the Entrepreneurial University that everybody's been all excited about of late, that universities have become too focused on pragmatic outcomes over the course of the rattling of our practical age.

As the humanities wither, the door is left open to the purveyors of new age quackery on the one hand and bulk discount Christianity on the other. I think it is probably true that a generation of theoretical enthusiasm within the humanities interposed a layer of crap people have had to wade through to get back to the texture of history itself which is offered by old books.

Oakleaf Restaurant, Pittsboro

This restaurant had gotten a lot of good press, so we went. And it was, indeed a beautiful room and an excellent place to go, and we'll happily go back.

And the food was good. And yet, it wasn't all that, and this is a problem we keep having.  We spent $130 on dinner, but couldn't help walking away feeling that more of our dining dollar had been spent on adjectives, less on nouns, and even with the adjectives they fell down a little.

Take, for instance, my entree.  I got bass with potatoes cooked in duck fat.  You know I was psyched for those spuds. However, while it was apparent they had been cooked in some kind of fat, it wasn't all that special. They weren't particularly crispy or anything, and they needed a fair amount of salt. And the fish was, indeed, a nice and handsome piece of fish, but it had essentially no sauce.  I had to ask for lemon to spruce it up.  I don't know if the sous chef in charge of modifiers just got tired on this one, but why not a little garlic with some berries and some oil or something to spruce it up? It's a $23 dish, you can spare em.

Don't get me wrong, we may go back, so charming a jernt it was, but it won't be tomorrow. Restaurants like this, more and more, seem calculated to assuage the diner and convey to him membership in the ruling class, more than to deliver really great eating experiences.

Ramseur St, Durham, 12:30 pm, Sunday

There are a couple of blocks off of Fayetteville St on Ramseur St near my office which have loading dock/warehousing space, some of which have been converted into offices.  A few weeks back I drove along the blocks to see what else they had been converted into.  The answer?  Churches.  1 or 2 appeared to be African-American congregations, the other were hispanic ("Casa de Dios, etc.").

During the week the area was kinda empty. But what, I wondered, would it look like on Sunday, around worship time.  This weekend, though the day is lovely, I found myself headed back to the office for a few hours, so on the way there I stopped over and had a look.

The answer?  It was packed.  Not a place to park anywhere. In fact, a couple of churches had parking attendants.One would imagine that when the weather's even warmer then today's 57 degrees, they could roll up the grates and have open air worship, but not yet.

But at one of the black churches there was a guy standing at the door craning his neck in, apparently unable to fit in there. And there were a couple of brightly dressed hispanic girls in a parking lot jumping rope.

A couple of blocks away, a group of teen boys sat around on a picnic table doing nothing, like a scene out of The Wire.

 

CHHS, 8:15 am

It was cold and rainy out in front of the high school, but there were still maybe 200-250 people waiting (including parents) to get kids in to take the SATs.  Hell, probably more.  Lots of idiot high school boys wearing shorts, whatever the hell that's about.

I had forgotten an umbrella (I always do) and Natalie of course has no raincoat (she lost hers and refuses to buy another), but we took shelter under the umbrella of the mother of a friend of hers, a nice Chinese girl.

I had been nervous about Natalie feeling wierd in there with a bunch of high schoolers, and a little bit guilty about pushing her to take the SATs in the first part, her being only twelve and all, so I was really happy not only to see lots of her peers there, but to see that they had segregated a whole hallway just for the middle school kids who were applying to the TIP program, like her. That was awesome.

And then there was the matter of being back at CHHS.

And while I was there, I ran into the daughter of a friend of mine. Her sister is going through chemo now.  And the ex-wife of another friend, who's gone through a pretty acrimonious divorce and about whom I hear pretty crazy stories. But I was at her wedding back in '94. And then I ran into a woman I used to sit next to in Latin back in that very building some 30 years ago, and we would flirt a little and make fun of this asshole, who is himself now a very rich Republican guy.  And this woman's husband was killed some years back in a pretty violent way, so she's now a single parent and a doctor to boot.

In short, life, memories, emotions.  And now there's snow.

Hogan's Heros

Somehow I was reminded of Hogan's Heros not long ago, so Graham and I have been watching episodes on YouTube. It was really funny at first, but it has started to wear on me a little.  Graham has maintained his level of excitement, so I'm trying to stay on it.

It confuses him a little, and I must say that I understand why.  The big joke is, continually, that one thing or another threatens to move the prisoners or Colonel Klink away from Stalag 13, which would be the worst thing possible, because life is so easy for the prisoners there, and so good for the allies!  So Hogan is always alternately trying to make Klink look good, or bad, depending on which way the wind is blowing. There's a lot of subterfuge that washes over the aspie 9-year old. But it amuses him to no end.

I had never quite realized that the show basically only ever shows 3 Germans as regular characters:  Klink, Schultzy, and the lovely Helga, with whom Hogan is always making out (thank God she didn't take up with Bob Crane in his later, porno-master days). That's how they kept the budget low. Only about real actors needed to be paid regularly, 3 Krauts, and 4 allied soldiers (Hogan, Lebeau, the Richard Dawson character, and the goofy American who builds bombs).

Silence of the lambskin

I was at the dentist the other day for a filling, and before putting on her gloves and getting started the dental assistant asked me:  "are you allergic to latex?"  So I said, "what would you use if I was?  Lambskin?" It was funny.