the first door

This past Saturday in Long Island, two days after a full moon and in honor of the Winter Solstice, my friend M.C.--of partial Native American descent herself--took me to my first sweat lodge. The medicine woman had in an email addressed me as "ancestor," and she had instructed me to bring, along with the memory of my grandfathers and grandmothers, a pair of shorts and tobacco.

The house was a typical suburban two-storey with Christmas lights and wood panelling. Through a swinging gate in the chain-link M.C. and I went straight to the backyard, where our ancestors were already gathering. Among them were Y., a kindly, elfin-looking woman of about forty, wearing a vibrant and multicolored skirt and a heavy coat; a muscular man of about the same age, with red hair shaved like a Marine's; and an assortment of others, mostly middle-aged Caucasians--thinning long hair and pot-bellies on most of the men, cigarettes and knitted hats with the women.

When we arrived the day's first lodge was just ending. This was, in part, a memorial service for a young actress who had died suddenly the week prior, and many in the yard were crying. M.C. said her hellos and introduced me around. Then we went into the house.

Inside it was clean and warm. In the kitchen a pot of medicines was simmering on the stove, and on a nearby table was a plain wooden bowl filled with $20 bills. M.C. and I each put in our money, then walked about the floor while we waited. M.C. explained that the lodge involved four "doors," or stages, each of which was associated with a different season, a different direction, and a different phase of life.

"I'm glad you're here," M.C. said. "If you don't go through it with someone else, it's almost like it never happened. And I think it'll be good for you too. This is all about processing loss and life, and getting in touch with the dead."

M.C. took off her sandals. She stepped onto the woven rug where I was already standing, and I looked down at my muddy sneakers.

A few minutes later we were back outside. Men and women were coming out of the lodge, steam rising from them as though their skin was smoking. The mouth of the lodge was open and the space inside it looked simple: blankets on the floor, a heap of stones in the center, wooden support beams here and there. The outside of the lodge equally unimpressive. The structure was a chest-high dome of perhaps 30-feet diameter. Its outer skin was a black-green tarp that looked like a giant garbage bag. Layered beneath this were more tarps and thin but heavy blankets. The lodge's entrance was a flap that could be pulled up or tied down; behind and supporting the lodge was the same chain-link fence M.C. and I had passed through, connected on three sides to the dome with twine.

Out came the medicine woman. Steaming like the others, maybe 50 years old, she was wearing a patterned red dress and her skin was flushed and thick. Her hair was brown and windswept, and she had the lumbering walk of a boxer. "Welcome, ancestors," she said to the newcomers. She made small talk, swigged from a Poland Spring bottle, asked someone, "Is my son in the house?" Then she went back into the lodge.

"It's time," M.C. said to me, so we took off our winter coats and sweats and hung them on the fence. "Your glasses," she said, so I took those off too.

Just before the lodge was a large firepit. Around it was a ring of stones with an opening that faced the lodge's entrance. M.C., I, and the others got in line before the firepit, then took turns throwing pinches of tobacco onto it from four directions. M.C. had told me to say four prayers with this, which I could make up myself, so I threw the tobacco for my family, for my friends, for strangers, and for the earth.

Inside the sweat lodge I found a seat against the wall between two men and behind M.C. More and more people came in, and the medicine woman repeatedly asked how many people were still waiting outside. She had evident difficulty arranging us about the lodge and said, "All that marijuana I smoked as a kid--it's coming back to haunt me."

A woman brought in antlers, which were passed to the medicine woman. A man sat down with a drum. One at a time, ten hot stones from the firepit were placed in the lodge's center. In the meantime the medicine woman said, "I want you to close your eyes and create as much space about you as you can."

Hugging my knees to my chest, I pictured a boy hugging his knees to his chest. But he, unlike me, sat alone on a stone column high above a black ocean. The world was empty around him. Then darkness fell, complete and choking--the tenth rock was inside the lodge, and the flap was closed.

The medicine woman spoke in a language I did not know. Then she said, "Welcome, Grandfather. Welcome, Grandmother. This is the first door. This is the darkest day of winter. It is also a beginning. We pass through this together. We thank our ancestors for strength." With this she poured water onto the hot stones. The lodge, already hot, instantly for me became excruciating. My shorts and shirt soaked through. My breaths came in empty. I thought, "It's okay, just breathe in slowly." But then the medicine woman poured more water onto the stones.

She prayed more, perhaps in English, I could hardly make sense of her. She said something about the antlers. Then the man with the drum hit it and began to sing. Others joined in, while I, thinking of my brother, wondered how the song's rhythm would look in musical notation.

The medicine woman poured more water onto the rocks. The heat now broke me, and, with a shame I cannot convey here, I said: "I think I need to leave."

Humiliating silence.

Then M.C. asked the medicine woman, "Did you hear that?"

"He'll stay a couple more minutes," the medicine woman said, and I hated her because I knew I could.

When the first door ended the medicine woman called for someone to open the flap. Several seconds passed, then someone asked, "Do you think they heard you?" But then the flap opened, and in poured sunlight, and out I ran. Into the air. Straight to my glasses. Cooling, drinking water, filling my lungs with oxygen, I stood by the firepit and watched others leave the lodge lingeringly. They stretched and smiled, they were sleepy-eyed and steaming. A few lay on the grass and rolled, while others threw more tobacco onto the firepit. M.C. came to me glowing. She said she was sorry.

"I told you it was hot," she said, "but I didn't tell you how hard it was." She asked how I was, and what had given me trouble. I said the breathing, and she said, "I think it's also that you're going through some gnarly stuff. If you'd just had a baby, you'd get through this no problem." I said my next door wouldn't be today. She said that was okay.

For the next three doors I waited by the fire. Many thoughts and feelings passed through me, among them a memory of another firepit some fifteen years ago. It was night and I was on a mountain. Maybe twelve people were with me, campers and counselors, among them L., the trip's supervisor. "There are four parts to a person's well-being," L. said: "physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. I want you think about these four parts, and ask yourselves where you are strong and where you are weak." And on that mountain, while I was able to assess with the expected adolescent distortions my physical, intellectual, and emotional parts, I discovered that my spiritual part simply did not exist. Perhaps, I thought both on the mountain and outside the sweat lodge, perhaps I am missing something--a piece of God--a soul, if that is the right word. Was I made without it? Did I lose it along the way? Am I supposed to find it again?

For each of the doors, someone different carried ten new hot stones from the firepit into the lodge. This was an honor, I ascertained, and a challenge. The muscular man I described as a Marine turned out to have a palsied hand. He was clearly embarrassed by how long he was taking, by how the stones shook as he carried them. But from within the lodge came the medicine woman's voice: "Grandfather can wait," she said with a laugh. When the man finished his duty, he returned to the lodge, and the flap was closed behind him.

After the final door everyone left the lodge and made a circle around the firepit. A few people lit cigarettes. A dog named True ran among us. The medicine woman brought out a peace pipe, which she raised high, then turned in several directions, and then prayed over before lighting. She went from person to person with the pipe. We blew smoke over ourselves in four directions. Then she clasped our hands, fingers-up and palm-down, and she said thank you in her language, and then goodbye. On our way to the car M.C. said, "I don't know if you noticed, but she was staring crazy hard at you. She was totally checking out your spirit."

That night I had my first good night's sleep in many weeks. In this morning I thought this:

Perhaps it didn't matter that I hadn't gotten through all four doors on my first try. Perhaps it didn't matter that the sweat lodge had proved yet another Big Moment I had watched rather than experienced, or that my soul was still missing in action. There would be other doors, I supposed, other opportunities for me to dig deep. Until then, Grandfather could wait.

The Classic Whale Channel

In this episode, it's Christmas day, the fourth day of a four day weekend, and I have to choose and then navigate through an activity for the day. Since I received a $10 gift card to any Regal cinema at my work holiday party, I decide I will see a movie (Juno), something I never do due to the outrageous price and Netflix. To see Juno and use my gift card, I need to skip the closest theatre (not a Regal) and go a bit further, but still within a reasonable distance. When I arrive, I realize that I'm actually going to a matinee, whose cost is $7.50, as opposed to the $10 regular price. My choice is to either use my giftcard and be stuck with $2.50 on the card, or to pay my own way and save the giftcard for the next time I go to a full fare show at the Regal, when I can use my gift all in one shot. This dramatic moment has first time viewers of this channel on the edge of their seats, but those familiar with the show have no doubt guessed correctly that I choose option two, leading to the result of my paying for a movie that I had decided to see mostly because I would not have to pay for it. A classic end to a classic episode.
In the closing credits, viewers find out I liked Juno very much, and Ellen Page even more.

pretender to the coat

Near Lathrup Village, about a mile from where Sweatshirt and I used to play two-square, there was a small music store called Off the Record, a mom-and-popper that fed and nurtured my early album collection. It was here I bought a used copy of Whipsmart, which I still listen to every couple months; it was here I sold Girls, Girls, Girls, a decision I now regret.

One day I visited this store with my then-friend D., and for around a dollar I bought a used tape, The Grateful Dead's Skull & Roses album. I was maybe 13-years-old, and my expectations were high. The album art, the band's name, the T-shirts I'd seen on certain neighborhood punks--all foretold greatness, all pointed to Marlboros and leather and amphetamines. I was ready for heavy metal: I was looking for an older and scarier Guns n' Roses.

My disappointment, then, was severe and enduring. 15 years later the band still disgusts me, and while a few of my grievances may have some basis in legitimacy, most I suspect probably crystallized in that initial, preposterous letdown.

Since college, however, I've carried this dirty secret: for all my tirades, (and despite the trauma of buying and not liking a one-dollar used tape), I've always enjoyed the song "Ripple." It's smooth and sweet and relaxing: it does for me, I suppose, what American Beauty did for Lindsay Weir in the final episode of Freaks and Geeks.

For years my affair with "Ripple" festered. Questions haunted me, and I wept over them in dark rooms and with strange women: how could the Dead have written this song? How could I like it and still respect myself? Was there something wrong with me--should I pop a peyote button and be done with it? Perhaps "Ripple" reminded me of another song, one with strong positive associations, one I liked for reasons extra-musical? Or perhaps--hope upon spite--"Ripple" was composed by someone else, a man or woman of actual talent, someone such as--I don't know--Andrew Lloyd Weber?

You be the judge. Listen to "Ripple," then to "Any Dream Will Do," written at least two years earlier.

Poor, poor Joseph. First they nicked his coat. Then they took his song.

A hypothetical situation

Imagine that you start a group blog. Several months in, your friend Smith (or I guess we should call him Smiths, since that is his real name), joins the blog, and writes a funny introductory post.

Now lets imagine that after reading Smiths' post, you check the nickname that he has chosen for himself, and notice that the name he has selected for himself is also the nickname that people have called YOU for the last ten years or so of your life.

WHY, SMITHS, WHY!?!?

Have an idea do an idea

Today I was twice reminded that some people have ideas and do ideas. There is this guy who has taken his picture every day for years and turned it into an aging movie, and there are these guys featured in the NYT for giving up their high paying jobs to evaluate charities to see which are most effective.
I think it's high time for me to have an idea and do an idea. Something even more ground breaking than trying to maximize how many netflix movies I can watch each month. How do I top that?

Dude, why aren't you drinking?

One of my regrets is that I didn't do more things to regret in my youth. One thing I didn't do, until a vat of jungle juice raced down my throat at an apartment party full of strangers freshman year of college, is get drunk. The complete cause behind such abstinence will not be known until an ambitious nobel-bound doctoral student of psychology decides to use me as the case-study that will catapult him or her into stardom, but the effects are more easily observed.
While it wasn't until afterwards that the pang of regret set in for not having a few pocketfuls of comical teenage tales involving humiliation, escapades, and rudeness, the suffering I knew even then was the steady stream of predictable peer pressure whose defining catch phrase was, "Dude, why aren't you drinking?" And of course there was no answer. To certain people, certain choices and behaviors simply don't process. I'll never understand why given the choice to smoke cigarettes or not, one would choose to smoke them. And others don't really get why, given the choice, someone would choose not to have a drink when one could be had.
Since the jungle juice turning point, my drinking habits, in the language of online dating multiple choice traits, could be described as "moderate" or "socially." And while less frequently than before, there's no shortage of people who don't consider it a party until there's beer, and who look suspiciously on anyone whose reason for not drinking is anything other than being pregnant.
But all this is just the lead-in. Because, as looking back I wish my behavior never would have prompted one to ask "Dude, why aren't you drinking?", so now the internet peer pressure is causing me to change my behavior so that no one will be tempted to ask me, "Dude, why aren't you blogging?"

The Jerky Boys

I've always had an affinity for making prank phone calls. When I was a kid, I can still remember the exact calls I used to make and to whom I was calling. Whether I was calling the "Sexy Sisters" Escorting Service or Dr. Merial Wagner, the jokes never got old. My passion for pranking people has not waned. I've even gotten my wife into the mix.....

Two nights ago I was watching the Ann Arbor Public Access Channel. They pretty much let any old Ghazer do or say whatever they want on that channel. I found this weird dude that hosts a live weekly show about local and world conspiracies. I don't remember the name of the show but the best part was you could call in and talk live on his show about whatever you want. Without any hesitation, I called in immediately and go the guy going. I won't go into the details but when I was finished, I convinced my wife and Ming, an autistic friend of ours, to call in as well. We easily took up 30 minutes of his 45 minute show. I can't wait until next Tuesday to call in again.

parallel irresolutions

Today though I was too ill to work, I was healthy enough to watch the final episode of Freaks and Geeks. My feelings are now most uncomfortably mixed. Part of me is still exhilarated: I have, after all, been following a great adventure. At the same, though, there is loss: my new character friends are forever gone--I will never hear from them again--I will never know what became of them.

There is almost too much to praise in Freaks and Geeks: the writing is excellent, the acting superb; and to my private satisfaction the show evokes both the same 80s suburban Michigan I grew up in, and the same two cliques I mostly then moved with. (To complete the regression, while writing this post I am wearing sweats and consuming my third successive bowl of Corn Chex.)

Most impressive to me is how well, even how ingeniously, the Lindsay and Sam plotlines intertwine. In some episodes the points of contact are subtle and thematic, in others they're brash and literal; but in each the Weir stories contrast, compliment, or unexpectedly complete one another, and often they manage to do all three at the same time.

The combined effect of these interactions is tremendous. Emotions are blended, resolutions few and pointedly unconvincing; and so the series delves increasingly into the feelings between feelings, which to my mind is a mark of great art.

In the final scenes Lindsay says goodbye to her family and boards a bus. She calls out to her mother, as if she has something important to say, but then manages only another goodbye. Sometime later she sneaks off into a hippie wagon, and so we understand that she's lied to her parents, presumably after having taken their money, and will now follow the Grateful Dead for nine days...Part thrilling escape, part conscious betrayal, Lindsay's decision leaves the viewer at once amused and uncomfortable. The emotions are strong and contradictory here, and while part of me wishes that Freaks and Geeks had a thousand more episodes, I couldn't imagine a more suitable ending.

La Conquête du Monde

The board game Risk was a big part of my childhood. Among my friends the competition was fierce and personal, and each family's house had its own peculiar code of honor. In mine the rule was that a broken treaty instantly united all players against the violator. I believed, and sometimes still do, that a person reveals his true character by whether he legally or illegally invades Irkutsk.

My friend L., meanwhile, was an incurable backstabber. At his house treaties were not even conveniences, they were jokes. At the beginning of his turn he would enter into complex negotiations, forging confederacies, hammering out short- and long-term ceasefires, even brokering ententes among the other players. Then he would pick up the dice: "I've changed my mind: Siam to Indonesia!" He justly laughed at our surprise. "I do this every time," he'd say. "And you fall for it--every time! And you are--stupid!" Indeed.

One day I finally got good or lucky enough to beat my father. The victory was bittersweet. After the final roll, when the last of his armies was removed from the board, his face showed hurt and confusion that stripped my triumph of all delight. There was, I can see now, an unspeakable indignity in having been eradicated in Madagascar by his own 12-year-old son. The humiliation would prove so lastingly painful that my father never dared face it again: that was our last game of Risk, and from then on he wreaked his vengeance through Trivial Pursuit.

Yesterday I learned that Risk was invented by Albert Lamorisse, the filmmaker who directed The Red Balloon; I had long suspected, but now I present evidence, that French cinema is but a vehicle for world domination.

overheard in my park

A man to his spaniel: "You've got no privileges, Max."

associations

In theory all hackneyed expressions are by definition abhorrent. In practice, however, not only do some offend me unequally, but a few I even like. As a proud Freudian I attribute everything to associations; examples and discussion arise from the couch:

"IT IS WHAT IT IS."
My friend L. thinks I hate this because it's senseless, it's three words stretched across five, and it's instantly repetitive--repetitive even if you don't repeat it. This may be true. It is also true that I most strongly associate IT IS WHAT IT IS with my former coworker N., who used the saying as an all-purpose excuse for incompetence. Didn't file a court brief on time? "The material was given to me late--the case was doomed from the start--IT IS WHAT IT IS."

"WHAT CAN YOU DO?"
Although WHAT CAN YOU DO? is more or less interchangeable with IT IS WHAT IT IS, I don't mind it at all. Perhaps this is because it asks a question. Say WHAT CAN YOU DO?, and who knows?--the listener may have your answer. The expression, paradoxically, is both an acknowledgment of defeat and a final attempt at a solution; and doomed resilience has always resonated for me. But more likely my tolerance for WHAT CAN YOU DO? goes back to Seinfeld. Fifteen years ago the Whale and I saw him do stand-up at the Fox Theater in Detroit. One of his jokes went like this: "Every Thanksgiving my family used to get into the same heated fight. Politics, sports, that time Uncle Joey ran over the dog--it all came up. But just when things started to boil over, my grandfather would stand up and put his hands on his stomach. He'd let out this big sigh and say, 'Well? What can you do?' And that effectively ended all argument."

"DO WHAT YOU GOT TO DO."
L. expected me to hate DO WHAT YOU GOT TO DO for the same reasons she hates IT IS WHAT IS. (Senselessness, repetition...) Instead it makes me smile, especially when it's voiced by someone from Brooklyn. I attribute this to how the expression features in the story my friend W. tells about his son's conception: "I remember the exact moment. I was sick as a dog. I had the flu, and I had just finished throwing up. But then my wife called me into the bedroom. She said the basal temp was right, the stars were aligned. I got in there, did what I had to do, and--" (fist pump) "--knocked her up good."

Its all about the Benjamins

The Whale just informed me that our legions of readers have been waiting with baited breath to find out the fate of my reimbursement check. Well, wait no more. I was reimbursed on Friday, only seven months after my trip. The winner, and still champion!

Speaking of championships, I visited a kaiten zushi (conveyor belt sushi) establishment today. As I was finishing my meal, a group of 15-year-olds dressed in costumes entered the restaurant. One kid, dressed as a panda, indicated to his server that he would be taking the "plate challenge." She read him the rules -- he had 90 minutes, and he had to eat it all, fish and rice, for it to count. As I was leaving, I asked for details. Apparently if you can eat 30 plates in 90 minutes, you get a free tee shirt. And if you become the champion (beat the current record, which stands at 59 plates in 90 minutes), you get one gift certificate per month until you are unseated as champion. I wished the panda luck as we left the restaurant.

musical Janes

A longstanding fear for me as a wannabe writer, and an occasional distraction to me as a pathologically loyal reader, is the Cast of Recurring Characters. Even the very best imaginations at some point run out of new voices: Macbeth's most famous speech ("Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...") could very well have been Hamlet's, while Goneril and Lady Macbeth crib each other's lines. Whole books by Faulkner, meanwhile, are virtually interchangeable: they switch backdrop from swamp to village to horse show, but barring this only Toni Morrison could tell them apart.

A couple months ago I reread Pride & Prejudice. I wanted to lose myself in the story, but was unable see past some recurring types in Austen's books: is Jane Bennett both Jane Fairfax (Emma) and Anne Elliott (Persuasion)? Is Mr. Wickham the same as Mr. Crawford (Mansfield Park), and is Mr. Bingley a nicer and richer Mr. Willoughby (Sense & Sensibility)? One could play this game all day, and it's not just characters who, from book to book, shift between central and supporting roles.

Take, for example, the theme of persuasion. It is the title and central subject of Austen's last novel, but in Pride & Prejudice it appears as light material for a brief and teasing repartee: "To yield readily--easily--to persuasion of a friend," (Ms. Bennett tells Mr. Darcy), "is no merit with you." (Emphasis Austen's; the theme also pertains to Darcy's influence on Bingley, but that is not the subject of this post.) This isn't attention-grabbing wankery like the travesty of Romeo & Juliet slipped into A Midsummer Night's Dream, or like the mocked quotation of The Marriage of Figaro near the end of Don Giovanni. It is, however, enough to knock Austen's obsessive readers out of that elusive, delicate moment; the scene falls away the moment we begin to think.

None of this in any way discredits Austen herself, whose genius lies in what she does with her material, rather than in its flash and variety. (She is, and may she forever remain, my favorite English-language novelist.) Such intertextual connections do, however, make me glad to have held back on certain authors. Melville and Grass are the topical examples: I've read exactly one book by each of them and am afraid to read more. Sometimes you want to learn, and sometimes you want to hold onto the magic.

Fired up...

I had a job interview across the country in March. The interviewers offered to reimburse me for my transportation and lodging (as is the norm in my line of work). They didn't offer me the job, and I still have not been reimbursed. And when I talked to the person responsible today, I realized that I am not capable of speaking to her with the angry tone of voice that she deserves. But I did make myself not say "thank you" at the end of the conversation. Take that!

conversations overheard on my block

A shirtless smoking man, hairy and muscled, talking to his dog: "Brother! Upstairs! Now! Lay down, or I will LAY you down!"

A large woman to her small baby: "Why you crying? I just changed your ass. You clean."

a happy marriage

In the August 20, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik in "Blows Against the Empire" surveys the life, times, critical reception, and fiction of Philip K. Dick. I could not have imagined a better match between writer and subject: Dick couldn't write but was a font of interesting ideas, while Gopnik writes like an angel but has nothing interesting to say. In an ideal world Gopnik would have been Dick's editor.

Ninja Warrior, of course

Another G4 gem. I can't believe my host in Japan never competed in Ninja Warrior. It's a 4 stage obstacle course where everyone gets an equal shot. Postmen, gas station attendants, action stars, and the toughest transexual in Japan (their words, not mine).

Classical Walpurgis Night

A few winters ago in Mammoth, CA, as our lovers and their best friends skied under a gray and leaky sky, Sweatshirt and I stayed cosy with a bottle of wine and a volume of Goethe and a deck of cards, and the result was this game. It's a variant on seven-card stud, and if Matt Damon knew about "Classical Walpurgis Night," he'd undoubtedly call it "the other last pure game in poker."

Here are the rules I can still remember, suspecting that there were many more:

The deal: same as seven-card stud.

The wilds:

• Vampires (Jacks) are wild, unless a Slayer (Queen) is used in the final five cards, in which case the Vampire is staked and becomes a dead card--i.e., it cannot be used in any hand. Slayers are otherwise played normally.
• Angels (Aces) and Demons (Kings) are also wild, unless their opposites are present (displayed face-up in the draw), in which case both retain their face value without being wild; if an Angel or Demon is hidden until the final five cards are shown, it remains wild and can still tear its opposite from power.

Special rule: "magical preschool" - if a player has five cards consisting of any combination of fives, fours, threes, twos, and Angels, then they all become wild, even if a Demon is present.

Raw Dog It!!

I don't know if youtube links are this easy, but try this and you'll see my latest pleasure, Olivia Munn, doing a fly-by wiener eating. In many (but not all) things pop culture it takes someone else's opinion to drive my own. A while back I read in a blog or a paper or something that some guy liked Attack of the Show on G4 network, which is about video games and technology and hosted by a funny guy and girl. The guy said the topics weren't very interesting to him but the hosts were engaging, and that guy was right. So now I watch it whenever I want to waste my time. And usually just so I can see Olivia. The show opens with best of the net, and tonight it was five videos from the net of animals fucking. Mostly crossovers, bunnies and cats, or dogs and cats. You don't see that on the networks. Olivia now rivals Keri Russell for celebrity I'd most like to meet. In fact, I think I'll go put her on my myspace page. I'm so wired. I am the internet. I should have a blog.

Caulk me Amadeus

I've got a bathtub full of chrane, and all the gefilte fish in the world couldn't make it go down easy. The problem is the caulk. Fucking caulk. Well, the problem is deeper than that. When I bought the condo I knew the tub had to be replaced. What I didn't know was that it would cost several thousand dollars, so I have not done it yet. But when the estimator came to estimate the thousands, he clued me in to what I also didn't know, and that was that the caulk was fucked up, proving a more pressing fucking piece of concern than the fucked up tub. Since then I didn't do shit, cause that's what I do, but tonight in my boredom I decided to look up how I might do it myself, and found that it's complicated to recaulk, so I probably wouldn't dare, but that having leaky caulk isn't good for anybody, let alone the person who actually owns the place of fucked caulk. So I'll be up all night worrying that I'm mildewing my place to pieces. If I was renting I wouldn't give a flying fucking shit. But look at big old me, owning my place, and drowning in chrane.

my body is the battleground

Every day for me is a struggle against insignificance, insecurity, and indigestion; this morning at 2:30 a.m., I lost the last of these.

the enemy he hid

"[Negroes] have on their hands a vast work of self-reformation to do, and [...] a little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving would do us more credit and benefit than a thousand Force or Civil Rights bills."

"We find upon the world's stage today eight distinctly differentiated races [...] There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians [...]"

"We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races--commonly called the Negro Problem--lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which remains as a heritage from slavery."

In all I'd read by and about W.E.B. Du Bois, nothing prepared me for "The Conservation of Races." That as a young man he wrote such a decidedly 19th-century essay should not have shocked me--"Conservation" was, after all, first published in 1897. But coming after his staggering monograph The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, "Conservation" read like a betrayal.

Will, I thought I knew you.

As though anticipating his future reader's discomfort and embarrassment, as though deliberately and cruelly to banish all hope that "Conservation" could be laughed off as a hoax, Du Bois not only stamped it from beginning to end with his inimitable style, but anticipated in it some of the great ideas he later became famous for. Consider these two passages, both worthy of Darkwater or The Souls of Black Folk: (1) "What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? [...] Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?" (2) "We [Negroes] are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy."

As a historical document, then, and as a marker of Du Bois's intellectual maturation, "Conservation" is difficult to place. It has sat uneasily with me for weeks now: on trains, in conversation, and while jogging through Central Park, I've considered and reconsidered how to make sense of this essay.

Over time, two clues have inched me toward an answer.

The first is the essay's obsession with "the purity of black women": "Conservation" asserts that "an alarmingly large percentage of [Negro] men and women are sexually impure," and laments "that vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell"; like most rants against sex, these passages smack of hypocrisy, all the more so as they come--in the words of a recent Du Bois biographer--from a "priapic adulterer."

The impurity Du Bois hates most could very well be his own.

The second clue is the similarity between the passages in "Conservation" I quoted in italics above, and ideas Du Bois would later attribute to Booker T. Washington:

[T]he distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first,
that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of
the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure
to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his
future rise depends primarily on his own efforts.

In Souls Du Bois attacks Washington as a "compromiser" whose "counsels of submission" and "indiscriminate flattery" "practically [accept] the alleged inferiority of the Negro races."

Even with all its skirting and concessions to (always qualified) praise, Du Bois's take on Washington has always struck me as false, his anger as misplaced and disproportionate. I now wonder if the true object of his scorn was the young man who wrote "Conservation"; he did have, as we've seen, a record of projecting his demons onto others.

In fact across Du Bois's life he all but made a habit of antagonizing other black civil rights leaders. His first fight was with Washington; later he would war famously with Marcus Garvey and Walter White.

Did Garvey and White also represent to Du Bois unflattering images of himself? I've got theories, but have yet to think them through.

back with Harry (part 7 [beta])

We are less than a week before the release of The Deathly Hallows, so I may as well commit to and throw in my predictions.

1) Harry won't kill Voldemort.
By the rules of the universe as laid out in The Lord of the Rings, good never defeats evil, it's always evil that defeats itself: Aragorn doesn't break Sauron, Gollum (inadvertantly) does; Gandolf doesn't kill Saruman, it's Wormtongue who knifes him in the back. In The Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore exclaims in this direction: "Voldemort himself created his own worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!"

Of all Voldemort's minions, I think the one most likely to finish him is Peter Pettigrew. Pettigrew is pathetic and sniveling, cutting off his own hand to ressurect the Dark Lord, and being rewarded with insults and Crucio curses. Also, at the end of the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbole says that Harry may one day be glad that he spared Peter's life. And it is worth remembering that Pettigrew's nickname is Wormtail, which is just one body part from Wormtongue. All that said, it would also fit Tolkien's model if Snape, Draco, or Narcissa Malfoy killed Voldemort instead.

2) Ron and Hermoine will hit it.
I've always wanted a love triangle between Harry, Ron, and Hermoine, but it ain't happening. I'll live.

3) Hermoine will return to Hogwarts as a teacher.
Don't know if Rowling will do a "Here's how everyone turned out!" chapter, but it'll somehow be implied that Hermoine is on track to be a Headmaster one day.

4) R.A.B. is Regulus Black.

5) The final Horcrux will be Harry himself, or his scar.
Harry may have to die to destroy this, or at least he will offer his death. I don't have an official prediction on whether Harry will croak.

6) Snape will redeem himself.
After rereading the series, I think it's obvious that Snape is with the good guys. He killed Dumbledore because of the Unbreakable Vow and because Dumbledore asked him to. Dumbledore died to save Draco, and Snape followed his Headmaster's orders. As mentioned above, I wouldn't be surprised if it was Snape who killed Voldemort; I also wouldn't be surprised if Snape somehow died to save Harry.


Note that many of these ideas weren't originally mine. My former coworker M. came up with the Harry-as-Horcrux theory the day after The Half-Blood Prince came out, and the Pettigrew-kills-Voldemort theory came from a random guy I met in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

back with Harry (part 6)

For an aspiring writer, a great workshop lesson from The Half-Blood Prince is that, with many and diverse supporting characters, an author can portray most inner conflicts externally, and can thereby render them more vividly and viscerally.

Harry is, in my opinion, a sophisticated and multi-layered character. At the same time he rarely has to torture out ideas or feelings from solitude. His frustrations surface through Draco, his loyalty through Dumbledore, his warmth and humor through the Weasleys...Luna carries his goofy moods, Hermione his better judgment...And Rowling takes this a step further, splitting even these supporting characters into sub-characters, rendering material those slippery, elusive, and abstract feelings, which lesser authors can describe only with fug.

Example: When Harry proclaims himself "Dumbledore's man through and through," Dumbledore is moved almost to tears, and "Fawkes the phoenix let[s] out a low, soft, musical cry." Here one character (yes, I'm counting the phoenix as a character) stands for and evokes the feelings of another, dramatizing an otherwise action-less scene along the way.

A problem with the novel as an art form is that it is susceptible to mires of rumination, to explanations and re-explanations that obsess over a character's soul or brains, and forget all about her guts. Rowling never does this. One of the thousand reasons to love her: she doesn't belabor thoughts and emotions, because her characters walk and talk them for her.

celebrity crushes

Here are some famous women I spend far too much time thinking about, and how long I've spent thinking about them:

1. Jane Austen (ten years)
2. J.K. Rowling (three years)
3. Curtis Sittenfeld (one year)
4. Liz Phair (thirteen years)
5. Maria Sharapova (one year)

Here's an idea

Could a person survive on kugel alone? If anyone ever hears of an experiment looking for volunteers to test that question, find me. I'm not quite crazy enough to voluntarily eat myself sick with kugel for no good reason, but if I could voluntarily do it for the sake of science, it would be a pleasure. Kugel. It's what's for dinner.

back with Harry (part 5)

How many orphans do you know?

In my childhood I was close with two, and in my adult life I've picked up two more. Undoubtedly the low percentage of orphans among my friends and close acquaintances has much to do with my "position of ignorance and privilege," in the words of one of my future wedding guests. But it could also suggest--and I have no statistics to back this up--that in the modern developed world, notwithstanding times of war, plague, or famine, most people through their childhood tend to have at least one surviving parent.

Why then do orphans so disproportionally people our most beloved stories? (Again I'm working with no statistics here.) A list of famous fictional orphans or veritable orphans is very nearly a list of our best child characters: it includes Huck, Dorothy, Peter Pan, Alice, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and James of the Giant Peach fame; it features countless leading characters from classic and supposedly classic literature, among them Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights's Heathcliffe, War & Peace's Pierre Bezukhov, Moby Dick's Ishmael, and Dickens's Pip, Esther, Oliver, and David; the list also comprises fairytale protagonists like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and (in some versions) Hansel and Gretel, King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot; the list also boasts comic book heroes like Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and all three Robins; and it includes contemporary mythic figures like Frodo Baggins, both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the Baudelaire children, and of course Harry Potter.

This is, as I said, a selected list, but I think it's long enough to raise my question: why are orphans so attractive to storytellers and audiences?

Let's turn now to The Order of the Phoenix. It's my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, and any broad attempt I could make to discuss it would result in an embarrassment of superlatives. (The funniest! The most complex! The rootin'-tootin' bestest!...) So instead I'm going to use this post to propose a tentative answer to the orphan question; Harry will be my case study, and I'm confident that he'll survive my psychobabble.

My tentative answer: Little orphan Harry is the anomaly that represents the norm.

Aspects of my tentative answer:

1) Loneliness: Although most people I know aren't orphans, everyone at some point feels like one. This goes back to our oldest, most primal experiences, and continues even as we're tossed into our solitary graves. I remember visiting my friends the Bs a couple of years ago; when, at bedtime, baby M was put into his crib--his bedroom lights were turned off, his door was gently shut--he screamed as though he had been left in a ditch to die. He continued screaming for a full half hour, and I was startled to hear in his cry a portion of my own emotional makeup. M's feeling, though grotesquely distilled, to me was unmistakable: Come back, don't leave me...Harry Potter's lonely-orphan bit works the same way. It's an exaggeration, but through exaggeration we can recognize it as our own.

2) Family Romance: I first came upon this theory in Maynard Solomon's biography of Beethoven. Dig this: when rumors circulated that Beethoven was the illegitimate son of the king of Prussia, Beethoven didn't rush to refute them. This was because, Solomon argues, Beethoven himself partly wanted it to be true. His actual father was a "wastrel, second-rate musician, toady, possible police agent, drunkard, and hapless extortionist"; understandably, Beethoven thought he and his mother deserved better, and enjoyed the fantasy that he was some kind of fallen prince.

The gist of the Family Romance theory is that at some point in a child's life, he becomes disillusioned with his parents, and dreams that he came from someone worthier : "[T]he child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from [his parents] and of replacing them by others, occupying, as a rule, a higher social station." (For an abridgment of Freud's essay, look here.)

A child may pretend, as Beethoven did, that he is a prince; a child may also half-convince himself, as I did when I was seventeen, that he is the long-lost great-grandchild of James Joyce; or a child can imagine that his true parents are not the fat, stuffy, foolish, shamelessly pedestrian Dursley people raising him, but once-powerful, now-dead wizards. This last fantasy is Harry's life. It's not ours, of course, but it's one we feel we're living.

unnatural selection

After a couple of biology classes and a visit last year to the American Museum of Natural History, my understanding of Darwin was roughly this: that he traveled on the Beagle around the world; that he quietly developed his "theory of evolution by natural selection" for decades; that he rushed to publish his ideas upon hearing that Alfred Russel Wallace was coming out with something similar; and that The Origin of Species changed the world.

This week I've learned that the theory everyone calls Darwin's was largely the result of a group effort. My source is Darwin himself: in the "Historical Sketch" that accompanies my edition of The Origin of Species, he cites 34 other naturalists and philosophers (among them Aristotle, Goethe, and his own father) who either had discussed evolution before him, or were thinking along these lines at the same time he was. In this same edition's foreword, Patricia G. Horan notes that "[w]hen The Origin of Species was written, the theory of evolution [...] was already old [...] 'Natural selection' had been in the air, waiting to be born."

My realization this week that Darwin did not invent evolutionary theory reminds me of my "discovery" last year that that Freud did not invent psychoanalysis. Popular history has propped up certain men and women as Founders and Great Thinkers, but they themselves often point to broader dialogues. I think the history of ideas shouldn't be taught as a succession of solo performances; it's much more like a singalong.

déjà whale

On April 19, 2004, someone blogged: "Yesterday I got spam from myself. Very depressing." Three years later the Whale wrote: "Yesterday I sent a message to myself as a reminder, and it was marked as spam. [...] At times like this, you just gotta say What the fuck."

Let's pretend for a second that these two authors are the same person; now we have an ingenius time loop, not to mention an elegant and symmetrical paradox. The author did and did not spam himself, which his email account did not and did allow; he spammed himself when he did not spam himself, but failed to spam himself when he spammed himself; he is unhappy because he did, but equally unhappy because he could not, spam himself; picture a Möbius strip bent like a smile.

A semantic observation: the hypothetical unified author begins both posts with "Yesterday." When will he live for Now?

Stale Spam

Most days I'm semi grateful for the spam filter on my yahoo email account. Instead of having to deal with the spam daily, I can deal with it periodically, making sure nothing real got stuck in the filter.
Yesterday I sent a message to myself as a reminder, and it was marked as spam. It was from the same email account that received it. Maybe it thought someone was trying to pass as me. At times like this, you just gotta say What the fuck.

God bless you, Meathead

Among the reigning generation of film critics, there seems to be some agreement that great American movies from the classical or golden age (1920s-1940s), movies like Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, were technically groundbreaking in their day but are only quaint and rarely affecting to the modern audience; that great American movies from "new Hollywood" or silver or "post-classical" age (1960s-1970s), movies like Taxi Driver, The Graduate, and The Godfather, represent the best the art has to offer; and that, with the rise of the blockbuster (usually critics point to Jaws as the turning point), film in this country took a nosedive, and great American movies come only from independent studios, if ever.

While the predominance of this idea may have some connection to a real decline in the art, I suspect that it owes much to three effects of timing: first, most of the reigning film critics I'm referring to came of age during the 1960s-1970s, and it's natural that they would favor movies from those decades; second, the 1980s saw the rise of the home video, which may have demystified subsequent films; and third, "new Hollywood" roughly coincides with the movement of film theory into academia, where taste becomes canon, where thought goes to die. (For the record: I am talking about literary academia, not Sweatshirt's.)

Small wonder, then, that directors from the 1980s get shortchanged. Look at Rob Reiner. He never gets mentioned when people talk about great filmmakers, but in just four years he directed Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally. Never mind his abysmal recent projects: he produced three touchstones for my generation, and I think he deserves our love.

Hydration

After a lot of searching, a month ago at Target I found and bought a nice plastic water bottle. It has a one liter capacity, a wide mouth, and a top with a small closeable hole in it. I bought it to use at work, because I think I need to drink more water, and not having water close by in a convenient container has been preventing this needed hydration. And in superb followup, I have actually been drinking more water out of this nicely designed water bottle. And today for the first time I noticed the unwanted side effect that I am now needing the urinal many more times per day. Today I have gone a lot. I usually go a lot, but this was a lot even for me. I won't tell you how much, because I don't want you to be jealous. But it was not a little. It was a lot. Can I keep up the hydration momentum? Will I regress to my dry old self? These and many other burning questions will all be answered in time.

Vernors

Someone suggested to me today that I take a bike ride to Mt. Vernon. I joked that I'd rather go to Mt. Vernors. They didn't get the joke.

Take an interest and smoke it

Oh, I have interests, to be sure. I have interests aplenty. Like creating places on the internet where I can say self important things. I’m interested in many, many things, and that is the proof that I have none. I have joined every club, taken every class, tried every activity. My attachment to some is deeper and lasts longer than to others, but none takes on the dominating role of INTEREST. That thing that consumes, that drives, that leads someone to enjoy and need to do everything related to that thing. But fuck it, right?

My interest in whales...

I have a few observations regarding The Whale's controversial and hotly debated claim that "Part of being interesting is being interested" (by the way, we all agree that his name should be written "The Whale," rather than "the Whale," right? It's not just me?).

First of all, I don't understand why The Whale doesn't think that he has interests. I have spoken with him at length since I have known him -- when we got into a fight at Camp Michigania as 12-year-olds -- and he has always seemed to have things that he is interested in, although he has also generally been drawn to suggestions that he does not have any interests. What is up with that? Care to comment, The Whale?

Second, in the last few months, I have had the opportunity to hang out with a few people who I could imagine becoming my close friends, and in doing so, I got the feeling that I was flexing muscles--friend making muscles--that I had not flexed since probably my junior year of college. What is up with that? I am not really sure, actually. I think that a part of the problem is that I am kind of a snob about people, and particularly friends. There aren't a lot of people that I find truly interesting. But more importantly, I have very high standards for friends. I was extremely lucky to grow up with a pretty amazing group of guys, and I don't find myself able or willing to settle for less in my friends -- I want people with bizarre and hilarious senses of humor, who are extremely smart and interesting, and who I believe that I can absolutely count on to be there for me. There aren't alot of people like that in the world.

back with Harry (part 4)

If The Prisoner of Azkaban is a portrayal of grief, The Goblet of Fire is a book about togetherness. How groups of people overlap, how they can enchant or frighten one another, and how they can fall into conflict--variations on the theme of community is the understructure for the fourth and most adventuresome Harry Potter book.

The opening chapters repeatedly show the wizard and Muggle worlds colliding. An old gardener stumbles into Voldemort's lair, where Wormtail promptly kills him; the Weasley and Dursely families have a very awkward, and very British, visit when Harry gets picked up; and at the Quidditch World Cup, the Muggles are by turns imitated, mocked, brainwashed, and tortured.

Rowling explores the frictions and interdependencies among wizard communities in still greater detail. The Quidditch World Cup is naturally an international event. At Hogwarts, characters from all four houses are prominently featured for the first time in the series--besides Harry & co. from Griffindor, and Draco et al. from Slytherin, we now have Cedric from Hufflepuff and Cho from Ravenclaw. The Goblet of Fire also introduces racism/speciesism, or the sub-theme of prejudice among communities, both through Hagrid's shame of being half-giant, and through Hermoine's efforts to free the house elves.

Communities may clash, but they also unite in unexpected ways. For the Yule Ball numerous couples cross house and school lines. In the Triwizard Tournament, more significantly, the representatives of different schools at first compete mercilessly, and then begin to help one another. This culminates after the third task, when Harry and Cedric both refuse to take the winner's cup individually, but agree to grab it together.

The symbolism here is not subtle, but Dumbledore spells it out all the same: "Differences of habit and language are nothing [...] if our aims are identical and our hearts are open." I don't fault Rowling here for announcing her message so loudly. Clarity is one of her great strengths, and besides--if you don't think the world needs to be reminded of the dangers of animosity between and intolerance within communities, open a newspaper.

a maxim from the Whale

"Part of being interesting is being interested."

back with Harry (part 1.1)

Last week I came across a line in Adorno which I think speaks to my first post on the Harry Potter series: "[T]he whole retroactively invigorates the elements that brought it about."

The shame is that it took Adorno many pages to come up with something so pithy.

The Simple Farewell

This is not a post about ending a five month relationship, because I don't care much about that. The interesting part about that goodbye was what do you say at the end of the conversation? "See you later" is usually not entirely true but at least plausible, but in this case not even. Good luck seems a little business like. But I've always been a believer that the actual words matter little. When you understand the situation and the feelings, just get on with it. Which is why I don't do long goodbyes. You can't capture everything in a few words at the very end, no matter how profound those words are. It's been a while now that I've noticed that people linger on their goodbyes, even on the phone. You've always got to have a reason to go other than the fact that you have nothing left to say or are simply tired of talking, and goodbye is never enough but has to be preceded by a healthy bout of well wishing. Even if it's good luck grocery shopping! or have fun waxing your ass! it's always "OK. I'm gonna go stare at the wall now. Hope your laundry comes out well. See ya."
I think if I could back off from my opposition to many conversational conventions I would somehow be more satisfied with social interactions. Even I've fallen prey to the well wishing bug. But while I'll bend, I'll never break. I'm done writing for now. Have fun doing other stuff.

Subtext

Good news: Ion network is showing the Wonder Years.

Comment: in tonight's episode, Paul also has a love interest, and it is Carla, who has glasses, and is like the girl version of Paul. It occurred to me that in Rudy, the nerdy tutor also ends up with a nerdy woman with glasses. Two of my favorite productions, and both promoting some dating class system. Stay within your own. What a load of hokum.

When I Grow Up

This week I moved into my first condo. At work, I’m somebody’s boss. I have chronic lower back pain and when I’m sitting down my belly droops slightly over my belt. I pay my own bills. When I was young and talked about growing up, I’m sure I had no idea what I was talking about. Growing up was a way to talk about the time when I would no longer be the same. When I had moved out of the phase I was in. I may have talked about “when I grow up” but rarely about “when I’m old.” I’ve moved out of whatever phase that was, but I feel old much more than I feel grown up. Since I’ve lost youth, I suppose I must BE grown up, but I don’t think I’m A grown-up. This topic doesn’t seem to be working out well. Maybe I’ll try the Jewish theme and see if that gets me anywhere.
The most interesting thing about the previous post is that the author places himself on the side of the Jews. No matter how detached from any certain identity we might be, an attack on that piece really brings it back. Especially when it’s convenient and full of comic value. I haven’t really been Jewish for years, but if someone told me that my piece of trash plastic bag yarmulke fell off, well, fuck him and the nazi horse he rode in on. Nope, this one’s not working either. Let’s try another.
I need a hobby. I believe that both of my colleagues on this highly rated blog have one or more things that really drive them, that consume their free time and are fulfilling and productive. I don’t have that. What must it feel like to have something like that?
This is so sad, because I've had so many fantastic thoughts this last week, and now I'm just drizzling.

The Man Who Knew No Kafka

Earlier this week, as I stood on a street corner in Kew Gardens, a man said to me: "Hey, I think your yarmulke blew away." He pointed at a black plastic bag--a piece of trash.

It took me a full minute to accept what he'd said. Then, after imagining all the insults I could have hurled at him, I consoled myself by pitying the man. Prejudice hurts the prejudiced, I thought. Think of all he's missing out on. Think how sad it is that this man takes no pleasure from Kafka.

Then I thought, is there any pleasure in Kafka? He's one of my favorite authors--I've been reading him for over a decade and continue to value his insights and parables--but does he make me happy? I thought: Liking Kafka may require certain pathologies. Perhaps the anti-Semites are better off.

In pity, doubt, and confusion, my brain spun and half-strangled itself. A typically Jewish phenomenon, according to certain stereotypes. It was almost enough to make me tear this plastic bag off my head.

Whaling and Whining

I was talking to The Whale the other day, and there was a suggestion that we should choose a theme and try to each address that theme, to give the blog a more coherent feel. I don't have anything to say about Harry Potter, Hitler, or scanners, so perhaps I will start a new theme, and see how that goes.

We are each in our late 20s, or in my case, 30. Despite being the oldest of the bunch, I still find myself regularly thinking about my life in terms of how things will be "when I grow up." I don't yet feel fully an adult, and I think I probably won't until I either have a tenure track job (and hence know the city where I will be living for much of my adult life) or I decide to give up on academia and manage to find some other job that feels "serious" to me.

What about you two? Do you feel grown up? If not, is there something that you expect will make you feel that way?

Blog as Prayer

Perhaps God can read blogs, not minds. Maybe karma is now working the blog circuit. Just a month after I lamented the speed of scanning here, the world brought to my attention the answer. A coworker's coworker showed her, who showed me, a copy machine we have at the office that is connected to our hard drive system, so you can scan something straight from the copier into a special folder on my computer. It takes only as long as it would take to run the pages through the copier. Amazing. My life is so much improved now. I have to think of some other wishes to blog about, because I know the world is listening and yearning to fulfill them. Do I feel bad about wishing for scanning success in a blog, when there is war and poverty and hunger that needs blogging about? Yes, I do. How do I deal with that guilt? I don't. Just for the kibbitz, man.

The Big Bad

There comes a time in every man's life when he must despair of ever learning anything new about Adolf Hitler.

I thought I had reached that point a few years ago, but just this week I unearthed this gem: "[H]e liked whistling [...], especially the Walt Disney song 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.' "

One of Hitler's nicknames for himself was Wolf--coincidence?

A powerful reminder that one's education is always a work-in-progress.

Laurie Berkner: The Devil Inside

"She's like the Beatles," my friend E. says. "Only better."

He's joking, of course, but he's also confessing: Laurie Berkner is the one "children's musician" he enjoys even when his two-year-old son is not around. Other parents I've spoken to have expressed similar sentiments; among fertile young Americans, Berkner seems to be a widespread guilty pleasure.

Having listened carefully and repeatedly to her albums over the last couple weeks myself (may my fiancee forgive me), I've come to understand both the parents' love of Berkner, and the discomfort that makes them joke about her.

On the one hand, she sings beautifully, her songs are catchy, and her lyrics often have a special meaning for adults. ("Doodlebugs," for example, is in part a shout-out to Seinfeld.)

On the other, she's singing about dinosaurs--she sings the alphabet song--can grownups listen to this stuff and maintain their dignity?

A possible solution to this conundrum struck me when I discovered, through the song "Telephone," that while Berkner may have a song in her tummy, she also has demons in her heart. Among her recurring themes are death, shame, alienation, and above all loneliness; and Berkner's countless imaginary/animal friends can't always dull the pain.

One song is pointedly titled "I Had a Friend": while two of these friends are obviously dead (Janis, Jimi), a third "dances alone" and the last "waves goodbye." "What Falls in the Fall" is a Kindertotenlied for the twenty-first century (although it was written in the twentieth). In "I'm a Little Snowflake" Berkner quietly "melt[s] away," and in "I'm Going to Catch You" death drives her from gluttony to hypochondria to a whole week's worth of failed escapes.

Then there's "Telephone," which I've already mentioned. She calls someone (a friend? an ex-husband? a dead relative?), but no one answers. She visits, but "nobody's there." The person shows up only in her dream, and here comes the tragic twist: instantly Berkner can't wait to be rid of this person. "Telephone" is an authentic loner's lament; when a connection with another person is finally established, it proves to be illusory or dissatisfying.

For me her saddest song is "Magic Box." Here she purports to celebrate her imagination as an effective defense against the wicked world, but the affirmation comes off as obviously, and perhaps deliberately, unconvincing. She declares "I can fly higher than everything," but I always hear "I can't fly higher than everything": singing one line but conveying its opposite, Berkner manages a uniquely Jewish expression of sadness.

Hailing her now as the Isaac Babel of children's songs, I can wear my Laurie Berkner T-shirt with my manhood intact.

(My friend S. suggested that "Pig on Her Head" reveals a bipolar personality, or perhaps a severe case of seasonal affective disorder [SAD]; I was sorry to learn that S. was not being serious.)

A Whale of a Home...

Mazel Tov to the Whale on his purchase. As a piece of advice, my wife, who prefers to be called "yoga pants," suggested that you never allow Mr. Howl and cream cheeze into the same room if you are concerned with preventing major structural damage.

I own my home

Yesterday I closed on my first home purchase. After several months navigating the twists and gullies of the buying process- warming to the idea of using all my money, and of commiting myself to a hefty monthly payment for the next thirty years, dealing with home repairs myself, dealing with realtors, having nightmares about what a good price is, or a good interest rate, or a good location, prioritizing needs (washer/dryer) and wants (central air) - in a stroke of good fortune I found everything I was looking for right where I was looking for it at the highest price I could afford, and my offer was accepted and yesterday I was handed the keys.
Clearly there has been time for the idea to sink in and for the excitement to build, but the feeling I had when it was finally mine surprised me. I've always moved rather unemotionally from one place to another. When I left the group house I lived in for four years, I was not sad at all, and never think back on that house with any particular emotion. I don't see to get attached in that way.
But now I own something that will be mine for as long as I want it. Any painting I do, any hooks I install, any improvements or repairs or additions I make, are totally up to me. I can make those decisions without wondering how it affects my security deposit or what will happen when I move. Of course there are plenty of potential worries that come with the purchase as well.
Nonetheless, the good feeling that came over me was a pleasant surprise.
I'll be packing up and moving over the next several weeks, and then buying furniture and decorating. And then all will be welcome to visit me in my own home.

More Matzah Please

Not the greatest jibjab, but a few nice lines, some pleasant moshing hassids, and the most matzah references to date.
http://www.jibjab.com/originals/originals/jibjab/movieid/71

Hills like lambs

Finally, some common ground. Pesach. The pascal lamb. Slaying of the first born. My favorite things about passover:

1. You don't have to go to services. It's sort of a compromise, since you can't eat until you do the seder, but you don't have to sit through the amidah, so it's a fair trade.

2. The food is fantastic. Hillel did make a mean sandwich. Gefilte are the best fish on earth. Matzah balls are so good delis serve them all year. And the rest of the week you can rock the fried matzah, and the matzah meal pancakes. Not that I keep passover.

3. Matzah matzah that's our cry, matzah matzah til we die.

4. Tonight we dip twice, when usually we don't dip at all.

5. It really shows the fortitude and survival instinct of our people. There's nothing that will stop us when we put our minds to something, stick together, and never give up. It's so inspiring. Just remember not to try it without having on your side an omniscient being who doesn't mind plaguing your enemies and producing miracles.

The best things about seders

As I prepare to attend a seder at Howl's brother's house (and as Howl may prepare to eat a pork-fried-pork sandwich on a Kaiser roll), I have prepared a list of my favorite aspects of passover:

1. Rabbi Hillel's sandwich

2. Chrain+Gefilte (pronounced "Gail-fight")

3. I like how people have their annual jokes that they save for the seder.

4. Matza's dramatic introduction into the Seder:
"This is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need, come and celebrate Passover.
Today, we are here. Next year, in the land of Israel.
Today, we are slaves. Next year, we will be free."

5. The fantastic conclusion of the whole thing: "Next year in Jerusalem! Next year may all be free!"

back with Harry (part 3)

As my most loyal and attentive readers have already figured out, one of my goals in following Rowling's development as a writer is to raise broader questions about art, to nibble at the great "messy topics" that Sweatshirt, the Whale, and I enjoy discussing so much. (Usually these discussions go on past midnight; usually they occur while we munch through boxes of Men's Pocky.)

The question of the week is this: how does an artist outgrow mere entertainment, and learn to awaken profound feelings in her audience?

The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first emotionally resonant book in the Harry Potter series; it's the leap Woody Allen made from Love and Death to Annie Hall--how did Rowling accomplish it?

Necessary preconditions include a compelling plot (albeit far squeakier than that of The Chamber of Secrets), a likable cast of characters, healthy doses of sarcasm and slapstick, consistently dazzling wizardry, and then that same "unfailingly accessible" prose I commented on in my previous post. These qualities alone would have made for a worthy if boilerplate addition to the series; they don't create the book's emotional resonance, but they do facilitate it.

To the point, the emotional power of The Prisoner of Azkaban flows not from tricks or mysteries, but from the book's creative but recognizable portrait of grief.

From the second chapter, in which Harry inflates Aunt Marge after she insults his dead parents, to the final pages, when Harry shoots from his wand an animal representing his lost father, The Prisoner of Azkaban chronicles Harry's first serious attempt to understand and live with the death of his parents. Across the book a reader can follow Harry through all of Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: the scene with Aunt Marge shows anger, the dementors are of course depression, Harry's in denial when he believes that he's seen his father, bargaining is partly the reason Harry lets Peter Pettigrew live, and acceptance finally comes when Harry recognizes his Patronus as a stag and, the next day, when Dumbledore explains: "You father is alive in you... [I]n a way, you did see your father last night. ... You found him inside yourself."

This acceptance will prove fleeting, sadly, and in The Prisoner of Azkaban Rowling is already dropping hints that Harry's progression will not be wholly progressive. But to anyone who has mourned, the fragility of Harry's recovery cannot come as a shock. Kübler-Ross warns us that "stages" of grief are, in fact, indistinct and overlapping; most perniciously, as I have had to learn myself, they tend to recur long after you're supposed to have moved on.

An update

Things are a little less dark in Sweatshirt world. My department came through for me and found me a job as a teaching assistant at the last possible minute. I am really grateful.

It's amazing how much things can change in a day

After Monday I've gone from thinking that something would work out for next year to thinking that I'll join the vast ranks of unemployed PhDs desperate for work. I was rejected by around 18 jobs this year, and a postdoc -- I was rejected from job #18 and the postdoc on Monday. And as a free preview of next year, I was also laid off of my adjunct gig on the first day of classes Monday, with no warning, and after being assured by them that they needed me when I was offered other work. They actually couldn't be bothered to contact me, so instead they waited until I rode the bus almost one hour to tell me that they no longer needed me.

Scan that shit, but faster

Love the scan, but why can't it be faster. Try doing the multipage scan. Even with the autofeeder it goes slow as balls. What's the holdup? We have fax machines and copiers that scoot all that paper through, and all that information has got to be stored in that machine at some point. If you can gather the information that quick to make copy or fax, why not use the info to put it all in a little file. Where's the R&D? Where's the money pouring into faster scanning? Get with it, people. This is what people want. This is what I want. Forget your graphics and your audio cards, give me the fast scan. Get with it. GeezUS.

Mark? I'm not Mark

A guy named Alfonso at work responded today to an email I sent a week or two ago. His opening called me "Mark." I was tempted to respond, "Thanks, Alonso." I didn't. What disrespect. What outrage. No offense to Marks, but would any of them want to be called Matt?

Always make the first move

In high school there was a girl (well, many, but let’s keep it simple) who was out of my league. Good looking, lots of friends, lots of boyfriends, I stared at her a lot, I barely knew her. Just before graduation, I called her up and we became friends. 10 years later she tells me she really liked me in high school but thought I was out of her league. Thought that my lonerness was me being smart and seeing our high school class for the wankers they were (it was actually me being a wanker myself). The deepest kind of regret is seeing how clearly I deceived myself in circles on top of circles until I could talk myself out of anything, be scared of everything, and end up with nothing. I’ll never again have the same kind of chances to have reckless teen romance or to learn the hard and fun way things that I’ve now learned slowly and adultly. Always make the first move, never look back.

Followup Worries

Why does the microwave make everything soggy?
How do I know if economic theories are real or just a pack of lies? With things like inflation, fluctuating currency exchange rates, mutual funds, and airfare prices, how the hell would i know the difference?

Worries about wasted time

A budding little philosophical concern: among the things one loves to do, is there a difference between the things that are the foundation of a life, and the things that are done in absence of a real life.
For example, my dad loves all things horses, and horse related activity, such as riding his horse or making horse accessories, give him real happiness and seem to be building blocks of his life. For me, a few things I do give me genuine joy, likeplaying basketball, but they are more pastime than passion. What if most of my so called interests are things that I do to escape life, because I don’t have the passions to fill a life?
Books and movies are easy to see in this light.Whether or not I remember them or even think about them, reading books and watching movies are activities that simply take time, without much real participation on my part. To say I love books and movies is to say I love to spend a lot of time alone, devouring someone else's perspective on the world. And yet people seem to accept books as a serious and almost admirable interest. Same goes for travel, which is the more worrisome piece.
Travel is something that sounds exciting and passionate, but that's the danger of it. If I go to another country and just sit onthe stoop for a week, I’ve barely participated, but itstill counts as travel.
Clearly the idea needs some refining. Is it gross overanalysis to second guess whether the things I do are true interests or simply escapes?
And where in that spectrum does blogging fall?

back with Harry (part 2)

[Editor's note: Following the wild success of Howl's first post on this topic, he has generously agreed to take us deep into The Chamber of Secrets. Enjoy!]

When I started reading the Harry Potter books about five years ago, I had expected and even wanted to dismiss them. As an aspiring writer I generally prefer my idols to be dead: buried and rotted, the competition is far less threatening.

But while The Sorcerer's Stone seemed to justify some of my prejudices, The Chamber of Secrets stunned me into respect. This book is, in my opinion, a miracle of pace and plotting. It is the novel I most often recommend to other would-be novelists, and it is the single book in the Harry Potter series that I am likely to read a third time. (The only other full-length novels I've read three times are Anna Karenina and Emma.)

Beneath its action and humor, The Chamber of Secrets has the narrative skeleton of a mystery novel: nearly every chapter solves one riddle while introducing another, and most revelations manage at once to be surprising and logical. This book, I've argued, can serve writers as a compendium of effective storytelling techniques; and it was by these technical accomplishments that Rowling won me over, seducing me despite her own pulse.

But if The Chamber of Secrets is technically Rowling's most successful work, it still doesn't hint at the emotional power that will make her later books so formidable. This introduces a messy topic, though, one that will have to wait for later posts.

A question I will raise here, however, is how much the dominance of one art form, specifically film or television, can influence the creation and reception of works in another, specifically books.

For a while now I've toyed with the idea that many books, including some that I've written, are thinly-disguised novelizations of unmade movies or TV serials. I don't think this of the Harry Potter series, but I do suspect that its popularity owes something to how well Rowling's style, which is highly visual and unfailingly accessible, suits the sensibility of an audience weaned on film and television.

The Chamber of Secrets has plenty of cinematic moments, but the best one for this discussion occurs after Hermione has been Petrified, when Ron works up the nerve to sneak into the Forbidden Forest: he "looked sideways at the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to stiffen his resolve, and he nodded." In Rowling, as in film and television, inner conflict usually plays out briefly and externally; in Bellow and Dostoevsky, by contrast, such moments of decision can last fifty pages, whole chapters in which characters rarely bother to move about the room.

It is worth remembering, though, that Dickens sticks to the tangible world as much as Rowling does. Film and television had no influence his writing, obviously, but the sensibility that they've fostered may partly dispose us to keeping him in print.

Also on the topic of art

I was recently privileged to be able to see the Whale's ratings of movies on Netflix, and I learned two lessons:

1. There is a movie called "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand"

2. This is not one of the Whale's favorite movies.

back with Harry (part 1)

In preparation for the release of the final volume of the Harry Potter series, I'm rereading the first six books sequentially and bracing myself for the sad and imminent goodbye.

Over the years the Whale, Sweatshirt, and I have repeatedly discussed whether art can be considered "good" or "bad," or whether it's a subjective mess--a question of taste--a debate in which the only truth you have is "I like this" or "I don't like that." I'm not going to extend that conversation here, except to acknowledge that the dialog is ongoing, and that people far smarter than us have also failed to resolve the matter convincingly.

That said, for me the Harry Potter books are among the most important to have been published in my lifetime; and I suspect that this is true for many others as well, especially for readers whose growing up has more or less coincided with Harry's. For us the seventh book has a lot to live up to: Rowling's characters have become our friends, and her imagined world serves varyingly (and sometimes simultaneously) as an escape from, a revelation into, and a critique of our real one.

The first Harry Potter installment, however, shows little of Rowling's achievement. It is a clever and breezy book, sometimes funny but never affecting. The six puzzles that Harry & co. solve to get the Sorcerer's Stone could have come from any Dungeonmaster's manual; the surprise unmasking in "The Man with Two Faces" is pure Scooby Doo.

The one scene that created a feeling other than amusement in me took place on the train to Hogwarts, when Harry and Ron become acquainted over Chocolate Frogs. This moment made me tear up: having read the other five Harry Potter books, I recognized it as the beginning of a friendship that will develop and strengthen over many hundreds of pages. My own loves, platonic or not, all started just this simply: from games and chatter came forces that would shape my life.

It is worth clarifying, though, that this scene meant something to me only as a prelude to better ones. I believe that, while charming by itself, The Sorcerer's Stone owes most of its significance to the other books Rowling has written; a mystic might say that this story has been retroactively improved.

Examples of this phenomenon abound, but I'll limit myself to these: The Hobbit steals weight from The Lord of the Rings, Hamburg-era Beatles are quaint only after hearing Rubber Soul, etc., Picasso's early, realistic paintings fascinate us largely in relation to his later, experimental work, and the "famous first lines," all of which are remembered because the books that followed them were worthy.

Comparison

The Book Thief is a lighter Tin Drum. I recommend both.

A compliment to The Tin Drum: a book with hardly a fraction of its genius is still a triumph.

Working Dreams

It's been a long time since my first working dream, a dream where a puzzle or problem has to be solved or worked out, causing some restlessness. The earliest versions were dreams about playing minesweeper and tetris, certainly caused by overdoses on both games. More recently, my working dreams are actually about work. I dream of work, or at least a work-like setting where work-like tasks are set before me, and my dream requires me to resolve the issue and complete the task. Last night, most of my dream had to do with a someone who had submitted a budget that was totally unreasonable, and trying to explain to them how to fix it. Granted, I'm at the tail end (I hope) of a week long cold, which itself contributes to restless sleep, but these dreams are sure signs that work's grip on me is too tight. Work and netflix are 80% of my time. How did this happen? Time to plan a vacation.

This Side Up

It's so nice to have a place to share and relive the most miserable and awkward moments of our lives. And to see how differently our misery unfolded. I spent a lot of adolescence believing if women could only see who I really was, they would love me. It turns out that was all backwards. Once I realized that my jokes alone were worth far more than the rest of me, my life changed forever. Instead of a trying to just be me, now I just try to be funny. The moral of this entry is: lose the ego, lose the shame, lose embarrassment, and remember that when you look back on your life all you will care about is the size of your conquests.

Weezer

I'm sorry to break with the poop motif already, but I have something much more serious to talk about: high school, when me, Howl, and the Whale used to sit around, feel bad for ourselves for not having girlfriends, and develop elaborate bowling-themed plans to get girlfriends (plans that were never instituted due to the reluctance of Howl).

I am grading papers in a coffee shop right now, and the Weezer song "No one else," including the lyric "I want a girl who will laugh for no one else," just came on the radio. I remember thinking that it really spoke to me in a profound way when I was in high school. I think that it had something to do with my belief that if I ever did find a girlfriend, it would be my jokes, rather than my confidence and smoothness, that would convince her to date me. And I also remember feeling bad that, despite my ability to make the girls laugh, none of them seemed to want to date me. It is clear in retrospect that I was going after the wrong kinds of girls in the wrong kinds of ways, but at the time it was extremely frustrating.

Now, as a 30 year old married man, I not really able to recapture that feeling again when I hear that song, and I am also not convinced that is a bad thing.

P.S. I encourage you to ask The Whale about his love interest that we nicknamed "a case of smallpox."

habits

On weekdays I do my pooping at the office.

This serves two purposes:

1. I save on toilet paper.
2. I have something important to do during my workday.