Paradoxes, Ironies, and Other Wonders

Ten Memorable Books Read in 2011

2012-01-13T04:56:00.000-06:00

The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb
Willpower, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
How to Live, by Sarah Bakewell
Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner
On Desire, by William B. Irvine
Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson
Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink
The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham
The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
Spingendo la notte più in là, by Mario Calabresi

Mess

2011-11-19T08:27:00.001-06:00

The world is a mess. Always has been. Always will be.

I can't claim this as an original insight. I read it long ago and have enjoyed recalling it whenever politics, economics, the weather, scandals, and outrages combine in a particularly nasty way. I've been thinking about the idea a lot lately.

The Euro is hovering at the edge of a precipice. If it goes, it will take the world's economy with it. The Republicans have assembled quite a circus of potential presidents and are trying them out. A couple of them look like fine people; the rest can only scare anyone with a brain, or, as one of them said in a debate, a heart. The Democratic nominee-apparent, the incumbent, did not prove up to much of the hope placed in him (and evoked deliberately by his most famous campaign poster). He was said to have been reading about fellow-Illinoisan Lincoln in the days leading up to his inauguration in 2009. He's tried Lincoln's ceaseless patience with his political foes, and ended up with some accomplishments to show for it. But he's as reviled as Lincoln at the low moments of the Civil War. He may end up remembered more like another Illinoisan, Ulysses Grant, who squandered his promise and came to be regarded as a horrible president, one of the worst in polls of historians.

Alabama, my home state and birth state, has embarrassed itself badly with an immigration statute designed to reverse the rise in its Hispanic population. Yesterday, a visiting German manager from Mercedes was arrested for not having his papers with him while driving (oh, historical irony, thank you for that good chuckle). The governor's office called nearly instantly to try to fix the problem. I'm betting no Guatemalans will be extended that courtesy.

I could go on and on about the banking system, the world's climate and population explosion, the stagnant American economy, the collection of thieves and ignoramuses elected to the U.S. House and Senate, and the even worse crew in Alabama's government (I speak in a truly bipartisan spirit: Democrats pillaged for decades in Alabama while they were a monopoly and became a machine whose sole purpose was keeping itself in power and skimming money off the top of tax receipts; it's simply the Republicans' turn now).

On an everyday level, it looks much different. This is our salvation, and maybe a lesson about what's truly important. While the world is a mess, many people in it are wonderful. True, they have their quirks, lies, skeletons, and selfish moments. Yet most of them, most of the time, are a pleasure to deal with or can, if we choose, be pitied for what they're suffering rather than hated for how their pain manifests itself as fear and anger toward others.

The "news" is always going to be mostly bad. It's created, commoditized, and distributed in order to make a profit. Bad stories about particular incidents grab far more eyes, and thus money, than good stories about general trends at the micro level. We won't read or view reports about how usually people are going about their lives showing at least a modicum of respect for each other and not deliberately trying to inflict harm in order to please the false gods of money, fame, or power. Maybe that's why the stories about politicians are so fascinating. Their behavior is so aberrant compared to anything we witness, would practice, or could get away with.

That such people rule and do harm from selfishness is not truly "news" -- how could it be when it's not at all new? We just can't predict who exactly will act in such ways while we less assertive sorts are going about our daily business. The "news" is therefore but a freak show skewing rather than uncovering reality. I'll likely continue to read and watch, fascinated as I am by the fixation on destruction exhibited by the allegedly powerful. You might say I have my own fixation, on the blind and predictable choices made by those who can't or won't develop a meaningful and helpful philosophy of life and a long-term view on events. I'll also know they will, as they always have, botch their jobs and push us repeatedly to the brink. I'd like to hope for better, but I haven't seen that humans are capable of it.

That's the way of the world and of people. I don't see the point in being upset about it. Do you?

Is Europe Burning?

2011-11-17T08:57:00.001-06:00

Much of Europe is on fire and can do nothing about it -- long ago they used all their water for swimming pools. Germany has lots because it saved its water for just such a contingency. It's proud of the sacrifices, but resents the implication that it should sacrifice even more by retroactively saving those who could have saved themselves. But will the fire make this moral distinction upon reaching the German border?

Who will buy German goods if all of southern Europe defaults on its loans because the European Central Bank is tied to an anti-inflationary policy at German insistence?

I say, print extra money just this once, kick the offenders out of the Euro, and then give up on the notion of a close political union between peoples with thousands of years of distinct cultural development. Free trade is good; the Schengen agreement on unrestricted travel is important; and a shared labor market helps everyone. Some cross-border issues like the environment require uniform regulation. But we've learned that fiscal policies cannot be harmonized, and thus a single currency cannot work.

Sinite parvulos et nolite eos prohibere ad me venire

2011-11-12T20:28:00.001-06:00

The revelations about Penn State's football program have stunned me as much as anyone. I can't understand how the chief witness, a 28-year-old member of the coaching staff, could have observed the rape of a child, done nothing to help, and then gone home to tell his father first and only then, the next day, speak with his boss/head coach rather than the police. How do you live with yourself for the next decade knowing that you didn't help that boy and that other boys may have subsequently been raped?

That being said...I seriously doubt pedophilia has increased as drastically in the last decades as the media would make it appear. It must have been far more prevalent when it could be hidden in a fog of shame and humiliation that authorities were reluctant to try to penetrate. Yet, as this clip by my favorite comedian, Bill Burr, makes plain, the cost is borne also by children to whom the rest of us may feel we can no longer be nice:

Women don't face this problem. A few years back, I saw what looked like a lost child in the hallway outside our classrooms. He (or she, I can't remember now) was just standing there by the window, a place where young children shouldn't have been loitering unsupervised. I wondered if the child was in trouble. Rather than approach myself, I asked one of my female co-workers to see if help was needed. It wasn't -- the child's parent had irresponsibly left him or her in the hallway while attending a class and had simply told the child to wait there. By then maybe I'd seen this riff by Burr, or perhaps I already knew the score: an unknown man approaching a child was likely to encounter from the child not the truth, but the stunned silence and averted gaze of one ingrained with the fear of stranger danger.

I like to think that I would have rushed into that shower to help that boy. Or called the police. Or both. It's too easy for me to ponder the issue when I didn't face it. Yet I do know for certain that I only rarely speak to children I don't know, and when I do, I usually encounter reflexive defensiveness rather than the curious wonder I think I always projected in my youth. I can't recall being warned often, or at all, about not talking to strangers. Maybe my parents gave me the standard talk about not going away with people I didn't know. If so, it had no impact on my view of adults. I think I was so flattered by their attention and so eager to learn from them that I wouldn't have recoiled if one spoke to me, rubbed my head, or gave me a smile.

I wouldn't want to grow up today.

Laudat venales qui vult extrudere merces

2011-11-11T13:32:00.001-06:00

A good number of years ago I was part of a group making a hiring decision. The choice came down to a few applicants we interviewed in person. One we could scratch because his written application had fooled us; he was clueless in person. But we had a very difficult time choosing from the others. As I believe is bound to happen in these group decisions, each of our intuitions made our decisions for us. Only then the reasonable parts of our mind began to concoct a story to justify our intuitive reaction.

One of the people I liked most was distrusted by another of our group. She said this applicant had too often been vouching for his own integrity and honesty. At the time, this was a new one on me. I couldn't see a problem. All these years later, though, I know I would react just as my colleague did.

Unlike my colleague -- who carried her point in the discussion -- I hadn't been fooled enough yet by people who talked themselves up. The honest person knows how difficult it is to be honest. He or she realizes that dishonor and disgrace, at least in our own minds, are but a single moment's lapse away should we misbehave. Telling someone you're honest is to spout words you may quickly have to eat.

The dishonest person, the one who doesn't actively think about the fine line to be tread between right and wrong, has no problem constructing and narrating a story about his or her honesty. They'll fool people like the me of many years ago who never see through the deception, and they'll fool a lot of dishonest people in the bargain, because they're blind to their own problem. That leaves those of us who try hard, but sometimes fail, to be upright to watch out for themselves and those close to them. If you vouch for your character in front of me, don't be surprised if I put my hand on my wallet and start walking backwards, never taking my eye off you.

Nimium ne crede colori

2011-11-10T07:58:00.000-06:00

I'm no more skilled at avoiding the deception of good looks than anyone else. Yet even as I've beheld thousands of people who appear physically attractive to me, I've come to feel sorry for them if they also seem equally attractive to everyone else. We've all heard how people who are perceived as good-looking get better jobs, faster promotions, more unsolicited offers of assistance, etc. No good-looking woman in search of a drink ever has to pay for it. No good-looking guy has to do more than say "hi" to pique the interest of someone he's interested in.

It's all unearned -- and that's the problem. They learn nothing from alleged successes that have required no work, no sacrifices, and no mistakes along the way. Think of the supermodel who claims that modeling is "hard work." How would she know? How would she fare if her looks vanished for some reason?

Bette Davis explored this dilemma in one of her lesser known films, "Mr. Skeffington." She obtained all she thought she wanted, and got away with mistreating everyone around her, because she was seen as ravishing. She hadn't understood her husband, a man she'd married only for his money, when he'd told her "A woman is beautiful when she's loved, and only then."

An illness destroys her good looks overnight, just as she's entering middle age, and she's abandoned by everyone who had sought her out solely to enjoy the aesthetic pleasure she radiated. I won't spoil the movie any further. I think it should be required viewing in high school: it gives a warning to the good-looking, and hope to the rest.

It's only natural to want to stare at something you perceive as beautiful. There must be a chemical signal in the brain rewarding us intensely, telling us that we want to mate with that (or at least benefit from being close to it). So I've begun to deliberately look away on some occasions, just for practice. I also want to do them a favor in any interaction by being a little more demanding than usual, so that they experience what it's like to have to use reason and empathy to guide their relations with the less aesthetically advantaged.

I know they must be terrified inside to consider what life will be like once the good looks fade and ultimately vanish. By not looking or by being a little brusque and businesslike, I'm giving them a foretaste so that they can realize it won't be all that bad to have to earn, minute by minute and success by success, everything they achieve.

I've seen the future, and it's ugly

2011-11-06T07:46:00.001-06:00

An article in today's New York Times makes plain that Greece should have defaulted on its government debt long ago. Three things kept this from happening. (1) Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, refused to believe that a Euro state could be allowed to default. He was influenced toward his view by the increasing amount of Greek debt the ECB had purchased to stem the growing crisis. (2) Many European and American banks were holders of the debt, and in their still anemic state, might collapse if forced to write off most or all of the loans, leading to worldwide recession/depression. (3) Many of the loans were hedged (insured) using the infamous credit default swaps familiar to us from the mortgage debacle still underway. If Greece goes into a state of default without the permission of its creditors, the swaps are triggered. No one seems to know who all has sold the swaps, and who has bought them, with the result being fear of a panic if they're triggered and the solvency of major financial players is put into doubt. As in 2008, credit would stop, and our system, which depends on credit to continually roll over short-term debt, would collapse.

The only reasonable, if still painful solutions left are these: (1) The Euro states that can afford it buy a lot of the debt. This would be a political and moral disaster. Wealthier and more productive states that took difficult steps to rein in their debt years ago would have to bail out the Greeks, who lied repeatedly in order to keep the loans coming and not face the political consequences of reducing their borrowing. Or (2) the European Central Bank buys the debt by increasing the money supply ("printing money") in order to fund the purchases. It is currently forbidden to do this, so a rule would have to be changed or ignored. The price would be a drop in the Euro, inflation in Europe, and a transfer of wealth from those with assets denominated in Euros to those holding other forms of real wealth (land, real estate, stocks, etc.).

This means either German taxpayers would pay quite openly and would likely rebel, or Europeans in general would pay with a bout of inflation. Such an inflation would also make it more difficult for non-Europeans to sell their goods in Europe, since the Euro would fall relative to other currencies, making European goods cheap elsewhere, and imports more costly.

Welcome to Our New World.

Lenior et melior fis, accedente senecta

2011-11-05T22:13:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago, I reconceived my life so that it no longer had only two ages (young and old), but four. There was to be a prelude, which was my childhood and adolescence. Then Act 1, the first half of adulthood (18-48), the era of striving. Act 2 would be the era of wisdom (48-78). The postlude will be whatever time is left, assuming I make it that far in the first place.

It's hardly a coincidence that this decision came in my 48th year. For some time I'd been feeling better and better about being older and older. Yet I couldn't get my mind around the concept of all the wisdom and serenity being packed into such a tiny portion of my life. At some point I must have realized that I should no longer say that my entire life is well over half gone, but that my adult life has just entered into its second half. This presupposes that I'll live to be as old as my father, who recently died at 80. It's as good a number as any to plan with. That gives Act 1 thirty years, and Act 2 the same. It's as if I'm starting a new life in these very days, and the metaphor pleases me.

For a few years, I'd been realizing I was caring less or not at all about any number of things that used to motivate or interest me (for example: sports, movies, politics, pay raises, what other people thought about me). Books, Italian, writing, and my dog have supplanted them. It took a while, but my divorce transformed me into a profoundly happy man, and these four things make me happiest. I hope to pursue them in an atmosphere of serenity and joy. I'm making a good start, and beginning to feel certain of something I've long haltingly believed: it's not despite my living alone, it's because I live alone.

I had terrible "luck" dating after my divorce. I finally realized it wasn't luck, but my sabotaging the process by looking for the wrong person. This wrong person was very likely any person. It's not that I'm opposed to being around the same woman a lot. It's simply that the odds of her being someone I could stand and who could stand me are so long, and the trouble in finding her immense. It's much more peaceful and joyful to enjoy my freedom as it is rather than look for a way to change it dramatically. If it comes yet, fine. If not, finer.

Then there's also the matter of my bad hearing, which is combining with my introversion in a particularly powerful way to lead me to avoid any gatherings where more than one person speaks at a time. If you're going to do that, then you're going to be by yourself a lot. I went to two weddings last weekend, strained to hear at the receptions, and felt so bad about it that I left as early as I politely could. My specific kind of introversion isn't about shyness. On social occasions it has much more to do with being largely silent while trying with intense concentration to figure out second-by-second the person or people I'm with, a process which absorbs almost all my energy and attention. If I can't hear, it messes everything up. I leave feeling exhausted and defeated, at least until I reach the sanctuary of my car and drive off. Then everything's better, instantly. It's as if the quiet and solitude are themselves a source of energy.

Horace wrote, "You become milder and better as old age advances." While this is true for me, I'd add this: "And milder and better still if you can align your inner and outer lives harmoniously."

I've been very, very fortunate.

Error qui non resistitur approbatur

2011-11-04T16:04:00.002-05:00

Any aspiring professor who could be shown the total mass of written work to be graded in succeeding decades would tremble. Some might turn away and never return. The piles of a single semester's midterms, term papers, and finals are such to make every other routine task (dishes, vacuuming, cleaning out the septic tank, brushing the dog's teeth) an urgent matter requiring immediate attention.

Some disciplines have it easier with grading, but perhaps harder in other ways. Subjects that use almost exclusively multiple-choice exams might, for example, face far more pressure to bring in external funding for research. So I'm not complaining about either how much, or what kind of tests I have to grade. I do get paid to do it, and I knew it was coming because they were the same kinds of tests I'd always had as an undergrad and grad student.

What was most difficult shortly after beginning my career, and then for a long time after, was knowing exactly what kind of issues on written work I wanted to grapple with and bring to the students' attention. Some instances were always clear-cut. I'd be shirking my duties, for instance, if I didn't point out errors of historical fact or the failure to provide enough specific evidence to support an essay's thesis. But every single spelling mistake? Unclear antecedents of pronouns? Run-on or comma-spliced sentences? Repeating the same noun or adjective three times in two sentences?

At first, if I erred, it was on the side of marking anything that I wouldn't have knowingly submitted in my own work. I've never forgotten the reaction of a student in the back of one of my earliest upper-level classes on the day I returned term papers. As he leafed through his paper, he asked a friend, loudly enough for me to hear, "is this an English class?" My not forgetting is a sign that somehow the sarcastic query wounded me. I have to admit I'd never had a class or any kind of instruction on what to mark and what not to bother with on history essays. I must have felt insecure, revealed as a fraud who didn't realize that in all other history classes students looking over their marked essays would never have seen such corrections as "the man ~~that~~ started the First World War" (I always insist on "who" in these cases). If the student got reasonably close to the spelling of Gavrilo Princip, then maybe I was supposed to keep my stylistic advice to myself.

My biggest insecurity, the one that led me to mark every error I perceived, of whatever nature, was being seen as someone who'd allowed a mistake to slip past him. My father, once a self-employed accountant and tax preparer, had hired me to check his work for precisely this reason: I loved catching others' mistakes and being seen as smarter for having found them out. Normally, my father hated it when I did that to him (although I'm certain it's a trait I copied from him). Yet he knew the consequences of making a mistake on a client's taxes were so high that his ego could no longer afford to overrule his good sense. Meanwhile, I'd work for the minimum wage of slightly over $3 an hour and the pleasure of an occasional triumph.

Potentially being viewed as slipshod, ignorant, or the dupe of a student who'd run a mistake right under my nose motivated me to keep my pen ready for action at every instant while I graded an essay. Even if my insecurities were groundless, there was the potential professional malfeasance of condoning a mistake or harmful stylistic quirk by failing to mark it. As the years wear on, it's this reason rather than any other that keeps me marking misspellings, who/whom confusions, sentence fragments, and other distractions from the flow of the paper. I'm now happy to allow students to believe they've put one over on me in many settings (well, usually). But I can't bring myself to approve their writing mistakes by passing them in hurried silence. They deserve to be taken seriously as long as they've put some effort into their writing. Pointing out that their words were read with care and found wanting in places, rather than being seen as officious meddling by a history professor, should actually be taken as a sign that the students were viewed as as a colleague while I was reading the essay, someone to whom I owed my fullest attention.

No, it's not an English class. But we like to understand you all the same.

My Immigration Quandary

2011-10-07T07:28:00.000-05:00

I may be one of the few Alabamians tugged both ways in the debate over my state's new immigration law. The driving influence behind the law is not economic, but cultural. It's a xenophobia born of too little contact with the outside world, and too little empathy. I despise the police-state tactics associated with the law's enforcement.

Yet...what's really happening? The state has volunteered to accept and pay for what's usually a federal responsibility: enforcing immigration laws. There are millions of people residing in the United States in violation of the law. If I were to try to live in another country past my visa deadline, or with no visa at all, I wouldn't feel abused if I were caught and deported. Just unfortunate. It's the way the world works. I'm puzzled why enforcing the nearly universal principle of sovereign control of borders is somehow, on its face, wrong.

I'm still more bothered by having laws that are widely flouted and underenforced, as are our federal immigration laws. If a law's not effective, it should be repealed or its enforcement redoubled, but it can't simply be ignored without risking popular contempt for the rule of law.

One of the unintended consequences of such new state-level immigration laws, should they take hold and spread, will be rising food prices. Weirdly, I regard this as partly a good effect. The assembly line slaughter and butchering of cows and chickens is made possible by cheap immigrant labor fueling the demand for the meat through lower prices in the grocery store. I'm not so happy that fresh fruit and vegetables will be made more expensive, I'll admit. But I've been disconcerted to realize that I've been saving a buck on the back of someone stooped over in a field all day earning far less than a legal worker would.

So, ideally, we'd either legalize the immigrant labor we need in order to produce food at prices we find acceptable, or we'd enforce the existing laws more rigorously, ask more legal residents and citizens to consider working in the fields, and cope with the reduction in our ability to consume non-food items. The status quo ante was unacceptable in its inconsistency, and we shouldn't be surprised that someone would step forward to adjust it, either toward regularizing and legalizing more immigration, or trying to throttle illegal immigration.

A Breakdown: Three Questionable Criminal Acts

2011-10-05T10:08:00.001-05:00

Amanda Knox

My interest in most things Italian and in true crime has led me to contemplate the acquittals of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in comparison to two famous murder defendants in the U.S. about whose guilt many questions have been raised.

	Amanda Knox	Lee H. Oswald	O.J. Simpson
Motive	No	No	Yes
Means	Yes	Yes	Yes
Opportunity	Uncertain	Yes	Yes
Reliable evidence linked to defendant	No	Yes	Yes
Suspicious post-crime behavior	Yes	Yes	Yes
Good police work	No	Yes	No

In Knox's case, the suspicious post-crime behavior (turning cartwheels, a browbeaten and concocted "confession," buying lingerie) is easily explained away. Not so for Oswald (he murdered a policeman) and Simpson (contemplated suicide and fled). If the police work had been better for Simpson, or the motive clearer for Oswald, there would be very little doubt about their guilt by anyone. What lingered for Simpson should have been removed when photos of him wearing Bruno Magli shoes emerged after his criminal trial (rare and expensive shoes identified from the crime scene, but not linked to Simpson until his civil trial). If you're one of the 80 percent of Americans who believe Oswald didn't act alone, then of course I don't expect facts and evidence to matter anyway.

How to Save Euroland (Choose One)

2011-09-25T17:20:00.005-05:00

Solution 1: German and other northern European taxpayers bail out Greece, then Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, perhaps through the mechanism of Eurobonds that will internationalize the bad debt and lower the interest payments (bad for Germans et al and therefore for the future of the European unification process)

Solution 2: European banks and the ECB take the proposed "haircut" on their loans to Greece and eventually loans to other profligate countries (worse, due to the prospects of a systemic banking crisis that leads to another credit freeze worldwide, as banks collapse when their loans to Greece et al have to be written down or off)

Solution 3: Greece defaults in a disorderly process (a worse variant of Solution 2), and then leaves or is tossed out of Euroland. It can then start fresh with the drachma and inflate its way out of any future debt crises (worse still, because Greek banks will collapse when every Euro now on deposit is withdrawn in a panic because Greeks fear their money will be forcibly converted to drachmas).

So, unless I'm missing something, the northwestern Europeans are going to have to foot the bill, and then figure out how to establish a European-wide fiscal policy that is ironclad and will prevent future excessive borrowing by member states. Good luck with that. But remember that it's still a lot cheaper than the wars that recurred every decade or so before 1945.

Two Things I'll Never Say

2011-08-16T12:55:00.004-05:00

You'll never hear me say, or see me write, either of these: "I'm sorry for your loss" to someone whose friend or relative has just died, or "Thank you for your service" to someone in the military. These utterances are anodyne, clichéd, and timid. Every TV homicide detective says "I'm sorry for your loss" to the victim's loved ones before asking them where they were when it happened. Every member of our military hears "Thank you for your service" when they're in uniform in public.

Instead, how about "I was so sorry to hear about your father's death?" or "It must have taken a lot of sacrifices to go to Iraq and Afghanistan?" You know, something specific. Vagueness is recognized immediately for what it is: the fear of giving offense that, paradoxically, does offend because it treats the recipient as a commodity. They are treated as one of the "bereaved" or a "soldier, sailor, or airman" rather than an individual. I'd go so far, at least concerning "sorry for your loss," as to maintain it's better to say nothing at all.

I can't say how a member of the military might feel about "thank you for your service," but I've read that that they hear it so frequently as to be bewildered about how to respond meaningfully. It must feel very good to hear the phrase the first time, just as every beer bought for you in an airport terminal on your way to an assignment must taste good no matter how many times a civilian picks up the tab. In the latter case, though, at least the civilian made a sacrifice. In the former instance, they made themselves feel better at the cost of putting the service member on the spot. I can't know for sure, but I think a smile and a nod might be more welcome.

The Avatar Next Door

2011-07-09T20:21:00.006-05:00

Imagine if Christianity had emerged from the Arian-Athansian dispute of the 4th century with a different winner. Imagine, that is, Jesus was a man and a prophet to Christians and the world -- but no more a God incarnate than any of the rest of us.

One of the big advantages would be the ability to see the avatars among us more clearly. As it is, Western civilization has accustomed itself either to regarding Jesus as part of a Trinity that includes another mysterious sub-division, the Holy Ghost, or it has moved into apathy and atheism. In both cases, we fail to notice those around us, and perhaps even ourselves, when we exhibit the same kind of flashes of insight as Jesus about matters that are today too easily brushed aside. They intrude into the realm of settled theology, or they seem spiritual in a world that would only scoff. Everyone's offended, and no one hears a word.

This article in The Onion nails it: every day, there must be thousands of Jesuses dying all over the world who never knew what they had to offer, or felt constrained to hide and downplay it. One day we'll push past both religion and atheism and find a way to listen to what they have to offer.

Betting on Traffic Lights

2011-06-23T10:30:00.004-05:00

The recent death of my father has brought me into full contact with the world of investing. He had a lot of investments in the stock and bond markets, and I've been the one in my family so far to look into and after them. I've found it so exhilarating that I began to understand why my dad was taken with investing. I began to buy individual stocks myself for the first time, rather than indirectly via mutual funds.

I'm in that dangerous place where I know a little more than nothing. If I were totally ignorant, I'd probably be all right because of the beneficent effects of random chance. Now that I'm aware of enough financial concepts I'll make decisions partly influenced by the crowd psychology of the investment world. Until I can get a better handle on my own financial emotions, I need to be very careful.

I bought several good companies I think I understand and about which I feel optimistic over the long run. For the record, they're Apple, Google, CSX Transportation, and Accenture. I purchased the shares about 7% or more off their recent highs. Yet they mostly have continued to fall. Listening to and reading the daily chatter of the financial press, I've come to realize that the commentators and analysts only rarely say anything of any relevance to a long-term investor like me. It's as if I've embarked on a backroad trip from Key West to Seattle (3,500 miles) with a bus load of people who are betting on the color of every traffic light and location of every stop sign along the way. I just want to make it to Seattle, and I'll enjoy the trip a lot more if I tune them out and get on with appreciating the scenery.

No One Has 217 Friends

2011-06-22T20:38:00.006-05:00

It's done. After steadily increasing unease at the time I was wasting on Facebook, I "deactivated" my account. From what I understand, it's more difficult still to permanently delete one's account. I saved that for later, until a moment when I'm certain I'm finished with them forever: for instance, like everyone who ever had a MySpace page.

At the moment of my departure, I allegedly had 217 friends. And this after culling a few dozen over the past month. Long before, I'd created three tiers and made separate lists for each. One was called "Real Friends," the next was "Second Tier," and the third, just like the 90+ percent of French subjects in the Third Estate prior to the Revolution, was "Everybody Else." If you ever ask me where you were, I will certainly tell you that I'd included you among my "Real Friends," so don't worry. I always read the goings-on of my "Real Friends" first, sometimes moved to "Second Tier," and far less often waded through the confusion of "Everybody Else."

In the United States we suffer from an imprecision when using the word "friend." The best I can tell, we utter it when we are referring to people with whom we're more than casually acquainted, but with whom we are not overtly "enemies." I mean, in what other society could the word "frenemy" emerge? You call each other friends, and you put on a good show, but in reality you seek to undermine the other subtly?

Most of my 217 Facebook friends were current or former students. I like them all. But to say I'm friends in the American sense of the word is to merely assert, banally, that we're not outright enemies. I'd decided long ago to friend anyone on Facebook who requested it and with whom I'd had at least some level of interaction. The volume of idiocy that came from some of their accounts led me to block a few from my news feeds (if you're reading this, then no, I don't mean you). Only in the last few weeks did I begin deleting those who'd friended me years ago whom I'd subsequently blocked. The logic of this move compelled me to reconsider the whole enterprise -- why was I on Facebook at all?

Facebook became mandatory for me when I was a beginning student of Italian in the fall of 2008. Our teacher created a Facebook group for us, and I was quickly seduced by the novelty and especially the reconnections with long-lost acquaintances from college, high school, and graduate school. I began squandering inordinate amounts of time and creative energy. This blog was the first casualty. My posting volume here declined drastically as I discovered whatever I wrote on Facebook was far more likely to provoke at least a "Like" or a brief comment from an identifiable source.

Within the last few weeks, I've both read a story maintaining that Facebook has lost participants in the U.S. and I've purchased shares in Google, one of Facebook's main competitors. Both these moves led me to think seriously about what Facebook offered me versus what it asked of me. It gave me easy connections, along with quick but random feedback from supposed friends to whatever happened to be exciting me at any given moment. It demanded in return my self-control, my attention, my time, my energy, and whatever ideas about friendship I'd developed prior to 2008. The trade only worked when its terms were invisible to me. As I slowly realized how much I'd conceded to Facebook in exchange for the chimera of online friendship, I grew more and more dismayed at what I'd forsaken, and for so little.

Count me out now. If I could sell Facebook's stock short, I would. They have yet to offer shares to the public, however. Rumors are that their initial public offering of stock may come this autumn. I will grant that they are competitor-free and keep hundreds of millions of eyes glued to their screens every day. No one will be able to disrupt their business from outside. My concern as a potential investor would be about internal rot, however: how long before more and more users realize that real friends count for far more than online ones, that every moment spent interacting with cyber-friends is a moment lost with real ones, and that the measure of our worth is not our friend count, but whether we can count on our friends?

Thoughts on the Strauss-Kahn Case

2011-05-23T13:26:00.006-05:00

Although I've tried to restrain myself from watching the news in the past few months, the many weeks spent at my parents' house as my father was dying, and then after his death, led to the shattering of my dome of silence. My parents' house gets a daily newspaper, and the TV is on a lot more. I'll also have to admit that the Osama Bin Laden raid and execution led me to seek stories online regardless of where I was.

So the "DSK" story became known to me as I was reading an Italian newspaper to keep up my fluency. I read stories in other places, since Franco-American relations and cross-cultural stereotypes have interested me for decades. As I await the "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" treatment of the case, I'm also predisposed to believe he's guilty. The only possible scenario for innocence, based on what I've heard, is if the accuser was hired to frame Strauss-Kahn. If he's going to try to argue "consensual relations" to explain away the physical evidence, then we can toss out any chance he's being set up.

His alleged behavior in the hotel was only natural to him. It's connected to a sense of sexual entitlement and need for conquest to which dozens of women have already testified. I realize it may sound like I'm arguing rape is natural. In this limited sense, it is. But as a friend once told me so wisely, we often have to establish our most severe punishments precisely for those behaviors that come so naturally, or else they'd happen a lot more. Just as I would never argue that we should excuse a murder because it happened in a fit of anger, I don't think Strauss-Kahn should get any sympathy either. We can understand without forgiving, despite the epigram so famous in his own language (tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner).

Strauss-Kahn had a long run. He was aided by his power, his influence, and the blurring of lines between interest, flirtation, seduction, and rape in the culture of his country and the micro-cultures of French politics and high finance. His poor impulse control likely led him not only to attempt rape, but to do so in a place where his crimes could not be covered up by powerful friends. I'm very proud to be a citizen of a country where the word of a 32-year-old African immigrant has counted for as much as the denials of one of the (formerly) most powerful men in the world.

Weingarten High Music, 1982-1983

2011-02-20T18:53:00.006-06:00

I spent my junior year at a college in Germany. Because the word "Hochschule" translates literally, but incorrectly, into English as "high school," a friend teased me often about going to "Weingarten High." The college was located in Upper Swabia, very close to where Germany, Austria, and Switzerland all meet.

While I was there, I saw almost no television. My constant companion for many evenings was a clock radio I'd bought upon arrival. My favorite station was SWF 3, the coolest station of its era (and one that no longer exists). It played the pop hits -- a rock purist would have despised it. In between songs, I listened intently. My ability to understand German came from hearing hundreds of hours of DJ banter and the news broadcasters.

I can never hear certain songs without thinking back to SWF 3 and Weingarten. If you have any fondness for the music of 1982-83, or a personal memory of the era, these may be of some entertainment or nostalgia value.

The Hymn, by Ultravox

Don't sell your soul to a good looking guy with a demi-mullet. The minute you turn away, his eyes will glow green.

*****

Overkill, by Men at Work

Re-introduced to succeeding generations by Colin Hay on "Scrubs" several years ago, in an acoustical version.

*****

The Umpire Strikes Back, by The Brat

I bought this as a 45 rpm in a London record shop after hearing it many times in Germany. It eviscerates John McEnroe for a series of famous arguments he started with tennis umpires in the early 1980s. His eruptions included such phrases as "Chalk dust flew!", "You are the pits of the world!" and "I was talking to myself!" (when sanctioned for his attacks). Notice also the way "rap" was portrayed in 1983.

*****

Africa, by Toto

Not much to say about this one. Bland, yet replayed endlessly because it was a catchy tune.

*****

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), by the Eurythmics

I spent much of 1982-83 on trains, and certain lines about travelling made a lot of sense.

*****

Major Tom, by Peter Schilling

A big act in the alleged "German New Wave." There was a video only for the English version of the song, so someone kindly created a new one with the German words and scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The English cover by Shiny Toy Guns may be even better.

*****

Our House, by Madness

A German student came into the common area of our dorm and couldn't help but gush her enthusiasm for this song, "Our House in the Middle of the Road."

*****

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, by Culture Club

Only after I returned to the States did I learn that the lead singer was named "Lloyd George," who in fact turned out to be Boy George.

*****

Come on Eileen, by Dexy's Midnight Runners

The lyrics make no sense. Catchy as hell. Wish I'd known an Eileen. I had to settle for a Colleen.

*****

Flashdance, by Irene Cara

Ah, Jennifer Beals, we hardly knew ye. Yet you're back now with your own series on Fox, looking every bit as lovely.

Premature Forgiveness

2010-12-29T11:34:00.003-06:00

I don't comment on politics very often, because most people seem excessively attached to their opinion and resent you for yours if it differs. And I'd rather not contribute to the number of silly things that divide people. But I'll make an exception for Michael Vick (or "Mike," as the announcers call him). I can see the moral appeal of both extremes regarding Vick, yet I know one of these extremes is my own.

On the field, when he's playing his good game, he's a lot of fun to watch (last night, not so much). Despite my belief in and repeated personal need for second chances, I find it hard to believe that someone who would torture and kill animals for fun and profit can change after only a couple of years. If he'd spent a decade volunteering in animal shelters first, I might consider him reformed. Mr. President, he's not the one you want on the poster for the Second Chance Foundation. He's a great football player who's also a sadist and an idiot about what really matters. I believe it's possible he will change, like anyone changes after they've been caught. I don't think either he or we were helped by his return this soon. I'll continue to watch him play and marvel at his skill on his good days. I'll continue also to wish he were still in prison.

A Decade in Popular Films: The Best, According Only to Me

2010-12-20T15:45:00.002-06:00

Surfing past a site that lists the top 100 U.S. box office draws for each of the last 10 years, I not only realized how many movies I have yet to see, but also decided to choose one film each year as my favorite. I haven't seen any of the top 100 for 2010 yet, and for several years I had a difficult time choosing, hence the "Honorable Mentions" at the bottom. There were also some indie and foreign films that might have appeared here if they'd been in the top 100 (I'm thinking especially of "Waitress" from 2007, "Secretary" from 2002, and "The Lives of Others" from 2006). Obviously I don't care for The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Harry Potter....

2000: Wonder Boys
2001: Amelie
2002: Barbershop
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: Napoleon Dynamite
2005: Brokeback Mountain
2006: Stranger Than Fiction
2007: Juno
2008: Gran Torino
2009: (500) Days of Summer

Honorable Mention:

2001: The Royal Tennenbaums
2002: The Bourne Identity
2006: Little Miss Sunshine

Hell, Updated

2010-11-26T11:31:00.003-06:00

Sorry, Sarte. Hell is actually having Silvio Berlusconi's campaign song stuck on an endless loop in your head. Still, I'm fascinated by this video -- the aesthetics of fascist propaganda, updated for our age, are well on display: happy, healthy, vibrant young Italians lose their individuality while signing in unison an anthem to a savior-leader. He's referred to both formally ("Presidente," or prime minister) and informally ("Silvio" and the familiar pronoun "tu"). Missing from the video are the old like Berlusconi himself, the weak, the infirm, and all other outsiders and non-conformists. Watch only if you're willing to have the catchy tune linger in your brain for days. It sounds good the way that fast food tastes good. It's just as appealing to the senses, and just as unhealthy in the long run: it's the visual and aural equivalent of a mouthful of salt, sugar, and fat.

Coming to Terms with Life: I, Too, Am an Introvert

2010-11-20T10:57:00.002-06:00

Passing midpoint in this earthly existence, I’ve noticed I have a well-established preference for being alone much of the time. It’s not conscious. I don’t ever have to tell myself, “you need to get away from people, and now.” I simply find myself by myself. It’s like shifting in my seat to make myself more comfortable without having to devote any awareness to the act.

For years, a favorite essay explained much of this to me without immediately convincing me that I was a full-blown introvert. Jonathan Rauch’s piece in The Atlantic in 2003 struck the right chord with millions of us. We could see for the first time that nature had to be involved, not only nurture or some odd, aberrational proclivity we’d developed and needed to be freed from. Rauch’s essay introduces the concept of fatigue as the chief driving force behind introversion. While extroverts may go crazy without someone to talk to (or at), introverts like me feel our bodies and eyelids sagging when we’re trapped in many conversations.

This does not stop introverts from trying and often succeeding in careers and professions in which constant interaction is the norm. But they’ll have to conserve their energy. Think of Dick Cheney sitting quietly at a meeting – it’s not only a Machiavellian ploy, it’s also very likely his nature. He’s conserving his energy for more agreeable circumstances. Cheney strikes me as someone who realized early that he could only succeed if he worked with his penchant for not talking, rather than against it. I’ve seen others at all levels who’ve done well, but all it takes is seeing them at a party to realize that they are out of their element in large groups of jabbering people. They might hang close to a spouse or date (often also an introvert, for how else could they be tolerated?). They hesitate before talking, although they know full well that this time, talk they must. They look for an excuse to move along quickly, because they can feel their intellectual and emotional batteries oozing out all their energy.

As Rauch notes, we introverts can often talk in front of large audiences without compromising our true nature. Thus I can meet with classes over and over again, and on occasion stand before huge groups in auditoriums. In such settings, the control and flow of the interaction is never in doubt. It’s not a real conversation of the kind that we find so draining. Either I’m lecturing, or responding to a direct question, or at most directing the Socratic pursuit of some momentarily obscured truth.

There are other introverts who are also shy. I’m not one of them. I don’t mind being on stage, and I like playing the ham. I can get what extroverts seek from their interactions (validation and human contact) without engaging the part of my brain required when one banters and converses at length, whether it be while making small talk at a party, explaining oneself on a first date, or engaging in any of the required group exercises in a large organization like a university. I don’t even mind extroverts in small doses. As a matter of fact, my ideal (brief) conversation partner is an extrovert from a dysfunctional family. I can mostly listen to their tales of woe and their gossip. I need only ask a few questions when I’m particularly interested in one or another aspect. Since I come from a highly functional family of introverts, this other world never ceases to beguile me. Likewise, I can’t get enough of movies about extroverted family members at each other’s throats.

Luckily, I’ve ended up with a nearly perfect life for someone like me. That shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve had enough time to nudge the outward circumstances of my life into conformity with my inner nature. I regard myself as uniquely blessed sometimes when I realize how absolutely quiet it is, how alone I am. I enjoy others without actually feeling I need them. An energetic dog engages what is left of my need for interaction, and on our long walks together through quiet suburban lanes I have more than enough time, and silence, to realize what a charmed existence I’ve been granted.

15 Authors

2010-11-09T13:43:00.002-06:00

While drinking my coffee this morning, I decided to accept the challenge of a Facebook friend who tagged me with a note in which she rapidly listed 15 authors who had influenced her. The resulting list is more of an intellectual history than a statement of current or abiding influence; for instance, I was once wild about Lewis, Hardy, and Buckley, but haven't read anything by any of them in decades. My only criterion was that I have read more than one book by each. Thus one author (Dostoevsky) is omitted who wrote a book very influential for me (The Brothers Karamazov). The absence of academic historians is as obvious to me is at might be to you. Haffner and Tuchman read better, but they weren't always the best informed. Still, being read matters. Maugham is the supreme stylist of the group. Mencken is the funniest, while Twain and Lodge aren't far behind and aren't as emotionally exhausting as dealing with Mencken's rapid-fire satire. Easwaran was my primary spiritual influence for a good decade, recently supplanted by Tolle; Campbell is always a comfort to return to at any moment in this regard. Hardy (and my dictionary) are responsible for the explosion of my vocabulary in my late teens and early 20s. If you wish to play the game, I'd enjoy seeing your list too. Don't spend more than 15 minutes. It's mostly a way of thinking about thinking, and of lightly encouraging others to do the same...

Somerset Maugham
Thomas Hardy
Mark Twain
David Lodge
Sebastian Haffner
Eckhart Tolle
Eknath Easwaran
H.L. Mencken
Nick Hornby
Joseph Campbell
George Orwell
Barbara Tuchman
Bertrand Russell
Ernest Hemingway
William F. Buckley
C.S. Lewis

Why I Don't Vote

2010-09-26T10:24:00.002-05:00

Things happening in that part of the world regarded as "political" interest me more than they do most people. They almost always have. I can name all nine Supreme Court justices, the top Cabinet officials, the leaders from both parties in Congress, and some Congressional committee chairs. I'm not a wonk – I can't tell you who any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are (except the Chairman), I can't handicap legislation or political races, and I don't watch C-SPAN.

Until recently, I accepted without question the tenet of our civic religion that we must all vote, or feel guilty and ashamed for not doing so. Sometimes I would view the results, look at the name of the person I'd voted for, and realize that without my vote he or she would have had one less than appeared on the screen. That's how I calibrated my influence – the difference between what was and one less than what was.

Shortly before the elections of 2008 (in which I did vote), I read an article by an economist that was already four years old by that time. It makes some claims that are a little far-fetched, but overall it provided a mathematical underpinning for the growing unease I was feeling whenever I spent 30 minutes or more on a Tuesday to drive to a church two miles away, fight for a space in their constricted parking lot, make my way past gladhanding electioneers hoping to sway a few votes at the last minute, and then stand in a line to prove I had a right to be there and participate. All I had to show for my efforts was a little sticker they always insist you take ("I Voted") and my personal one-vote influence I could observe when viewing the results later that evening.

Sometime after 2008, I began to feel more and more that the exercise was irrational. As the article referenced above points out, there's no conceivable chance that one vote could make a difference in a presidential election. Another article I read recently noted that in all the races for the U.S. Congress that have ever occurred (thousands upon thousands for over two centuries), only once, in 1910 in Buffalo, was there a race that ended up being decided by one vote.

So you're left with less rational reasons for voting. They no longer made sense to me either. I don't care about feeling part of the community, about wearing that self-flattering "I Voted" sticker as a badge of membership. I don't believe that you lose your right to complain if you don't vote. In fact, our system is far more tilted toward individual rights such as free speech than it is toward insuring a democracy. As a cynical teenager in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist complained: "It's just free speech, that's all we've got. We can say whatever we like, then the government goes on and does exactly what it pleases. You call that democracy? It's like we're on a ship, headed someplace terrible, and somebody else is steering and the passengers can't jump off." And why would I want to spend any time participating in a fraud actually decided by the filthy amounts of ill-gotten money swilling around in campaign coffers and the comically overt bribery and extortion of candidates and incumbents, resulting in broken or ignored campaign promises and the inevitable compromises that are often worse than doing nothing at all would have been?

There may come a time when I vote again. It will be precisely when I'm feeling irrational, however. In fact, it may be when I'm tending toward both the irrational and the revolutionary, since the only true benefit of democracy as we understand that term in the U.S. appears to be the ability to stage a non-violent coup and rid ourselves of a particularly grotesque set of thieves who were elected the previous time. Until then, I'll content myself with glancing at election results as if they were the sports scores, reserving to myself the same right to complain about the elections and our governance that all of us do about what happens on the ball fields and sidelines of our favorite sport although we didn't go to practice or ever even play the game.

Relationships: Proposed Agreement with a Friend

2010-09-07T09:32:00.004-05:00

I found this file on my computer today. I'd written it nearly two years ago when corresponding with a friend on the subject of relationships. I ended up cutting and pasting the text into an IM with the friend, but the file remained on my computer to be rediscovered. Here it is, unedited.

Why do most of us expect a relationship to simultaneously provide companionship, love, and sex? Isn’t that asking way too much of any single individual? At best can’t we expect to find someone who clicks with us in one of the three areas and is willing to do the damned hard work to get better -- but never perfect -- at the other two? Isn’t it most important to look for someone of good will rather than someone who magically fits the bill in all respects from the very beginning? Shouldn’t this good will -- manifested as flexibility, improvisation, humor, adaptability, and modesty -- combined with a compatibility in either companionship, love, or sex, be a good enough place to start?

It’s not that you’d be trying to change someone, which is a stupid thing to imagine you could do. But you like how well you get along in one way, sense that your friend is willing to work with you in the others, and you go from there. (You have to be able to talk honestly, though, and not assume each should know how the other feels). How would that work? And if they resist the effort or you resist it, then do you know it’s time to move on?

It seems to me someone’s likely to be willing and able to get better at sex and companionship, but not at love. They probably need to be able to love from the get go. That is, based on an initial chemistry or “clickiness,” you can see that they care about you, are proud of you, and feel a certain responsibility to you (but not responsibility for you; that is, they want to live up to your good opinion of them, and are happy that you help make them better).

So look for flexibility in someone you click with in one of the important areas. I will too. And dump the ones you don’t click with or who are inflexible, humorless, immodest, and rigid. And I will too.

Oldest Entry of the Athens Edition, Rate My Professor

2010-07-05T12:20:00.003-05:00

Socrates -- Philosophy -- Total Ratings:5 -- Overall Quality: 1.9 -- Easiness: 1.0 -- Hot? (Not)

Professor Socrates doesn't like to lecture. His whole class is discussion and he makes you talk. Keeps us past the bell. Doesn't realize we have lives outside of class.

Cool guy, but maybe a bit too cool if you know what I mean. He made me uncomfortable sometimes. Plays favorites. Avoid.

Dr. Socrates is a joke. I'm only taking him because philosophy is required for my major. You don't learn anything if all you do is talk. I don't care what the other students think, I just want to know what I need for the final. When I told him this, he got all snippy and said "You know nothing but the fact of your own ignorance." Whatever.

He got tenure before they made everyone start publishing. He never writes anything so the other profs tell you he's a lightweight and dead wood. Won't shut up about his wife in class, makes me wonder why he ever got married. Take him only if you're a philosophy major.

Came to the tree on the first day and said all serious-like "The unexamined life is not worth living," but took hemlock before the term was over and didn't refund our tuition. Professor Plato took over his courses, but he's SO different it's not fair. Thinks he's living in a cave and gives me the willies. Shoulda taken PHIL 101 at Athens CC instead of here. Learn from my mistake.

La prossima edizione

2010-05-11T10:11:00.004-05:00

Italy, Bavaria, and Austria beckon. I'm on my way. Photos to follow periodically here and on Facebook.

Europe 2010

On Being Stingy, Miserly, Cheap, and Stupid

2010-05-02T13:38:00.001-05:00

You can look at all manner of things that have become less expensive over the years once inflation is factored in. Usually "efficiencies" will be touted. Mechanization, the Internet, and new managerial strategies supposedly remove waste from the production process. It's all supposed to be a paean to Occam's Razor.

Instead, what these supposed efficiencies amount to is a substitution. We get something that has certain superficial similarities to an existing product or service. But it's provided more cheaply. So we favor it, discounting the minor changes from what we're used to as mere inconveniences. The new way drives the old into oblivion. We're left with a new but inferior product, and we can only rarely get the old one back.

Take the airlines in the United States. Once deregulated in the 1970s, their hallmark became low fares rather than good service (in the old system, the fares were set by the federal government, i.e., the owner of the airspace). The only thing better about the airlines today compared to the regulated era is their safety: we were still climbing a steep learning curve about accidents in the 1970s; all the accidents and lessons learned from them have made those of us fortunate enough to have avoided the tragedies much safer when we fly. Otherwise, flying has been turned into a commodity. Once anything is commoditized, it's much cheaper per unit, but it's also driven relentlessly into conformity with every other unit. The laws of pricing demand it and punish any suppliers who dare stray.

Food is another great example. While we may have a superficial variety in the middle part of the grocery stores, it's really all about how many new and flashy ways we can recombine corn, soybeans, and wheat. Those crops were long ago commoditized and thus became exceptionally cheap because of their very uniformity.The challenge then became figuring out how to use all the commodities. So it started ending up in places we'd never used it before: high-fructose corn syrup supplanting sugar, for instance. And thus, just as our airline experience of being treated like recalcitrant cargo is the new normal, so is corn sweetener. "Food" has changed meanings. You can't fairly say food has become cheaper because you're comparing two entirely different things, just as you can't truly say flying has become cheaper.

A book I happened across nearly twenty years ago contained many lines of advice from a father to his son. One of them was "Demand excellence and be willing to pay for it." We might add: "because if you don't, you will lose the very possibility of ever experiencing excellence." Chasing the lowest price may be human nature, but it's also stupid. The moral of the story to me is: scale back the variety of your experiences (and therefore expenses) so that you can demand excellence in the few that you choose to retain (and pay more for). View spending as a statement of your values and not just as a game where the object is to get the most stuff.

Slow Rising

2010-04-23T22:53:00.005-05:00

When my habits, my upbringing, and the reinforcement of my culture all collude, I can be slow to figure some things out. In this case, decades.

As I was paying $36 for some groceries this evening, I stopped to calculate how much less I could have paid if I'd shopped in a different part of the store. I'd spent my entire visit in the organic aisle, selected some costly tree-hugging stuff, and then found a loaf of bread for $5.49. If I'd been willing to confine my grocery shopping experience to the middle part of the store, I could have bought other items generally regarded as equivalents and exited the store with $10 more in my pocket.

But I was glad I hadn't. The other evening I'd watched the documentary "Food Inc.," which moved me in many ways. One thing I remember especially clearly is a question posed by a farmer who raises his animals and other products in a traditional manner. "Why do you want inexpensive food? Do you want the cheapest car?"

The revolution in American agriculture since World War II has drastically lowered the percentage of income we spend on food. This change occurred not because farmers, shippers, wholesalers, and grocers realized efficiencies in bringing us the same food. Instead, what we were convinced to regard as food changed. The efficiencies all resulted from producing things that had never existed before but which we were persuaded to put in our mouths and stomachs because they were stocked in grocery stores, advertised relentlessly, and sold cheaply.

These items come to us primarily because corn has been made so cheap, and secondarily because fossil fuels have remained a relative bargain (there would be no way to replenish soil exhausted from the overproduction of corn without man-made fertilizers from natural gas or oil). So we get corn shoved at us in thousands of superficially varied ways. Corn sweetens soda and many processed foods, and is the basis of lots of ingredients not directly labeled as corn on the sides of packages. Corn has transformed beef into a staple, but it's not a beef previous generations would have recognized. There's now so much fat marbled right into the animals' muscles from their eating corn in place of the grasses they'd evolved to consume that the gustatory experience for human diners is much different.

So when I bought my hippie groceries this evening, I entered a time machine taking me back to the era of my parents' youth. I was spending freely, but I'd bet it wasn't more (inflation adjusted) than my grandparents paid for their food. In the intervening decades, "bread," "vegetables," and "meat" have been made much less expensive, but at the cost of putting quotation marks around them. The least expensive varieties of each of these in my grocery store have been raised or processed in some way to reduce the costs dramatically while maintaining the facade that they are still "food" (again, quotation marks are obligatory). For instance, if you pick up a package of tortillas from the shelf and try to read the entire list of ingredients, I'm guessing you'll give up from boredom, irritation, or exhaustion long before you come to the end. Seems like they ought to simply have corn (or wheat) and some salt and water in them. Obviously I don't understand "food science." Maybe, though, I'm getting closer to understanding actual food.

That Best Country on Earth

2010-02-21T13:48:00.001-06:00

I've been thinking about the odds. There are 195 countries in the world, so the chance of any single country being the "best" should be around 1 in 195. That's a bad bet even by casino standards. Since being born in any particular country doesn't automatically elevate it to the top, anyone who maintains they live in the "best" country in the world or the one that has the "best" of anything (health care, legal system, etc.) needs not only to explain precisely why theirs is so good, but also to show they've investigated all 194 of the others.

Friendship and Love, in the Right Order

2010-02-12T08:25:00.002-06:00

Thanks to a Facebook friend for putting me on to the beautiful lyrics in German found at the bottom.

There's a line by Robert Browning in "The Last Ride Together" that goes "poet...Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell/What we felt only." The lyrics below crystallize many things I've been thinking for months but had not expressed with any precision. The poet(s) behind these lyrics said them for me.

Many of my thoughts on interpersonal relationships of late have centered around the mistaken priority given to what is called "love" over true friendship. "I'd like us to still be friends," the clichéd break-up palliative, is the perfect expression of this -- as if there were something greater than friendship for which friendship can be the consolation prize.

I don't deny the wonders of what many refer to as love, but the best of love stories to me are actually tales of intensified friendship. The worst are exploitations of others to whom we say "I love you" when we really mean "I love me, and thank you for helping me to feel so good."

Happy Valentine's Day, especially to the Charlie Browns of the world!

EIN FREUND EIN GUTER FREUND -- Comedian Harmonists

Der wahre Freund allein, ist doch das höchste Gut auf Erden.

Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist das Beste, was es gibt auf der Welt.
Ein Freund bleibt immer Freund und wenn die ganze Welt zusammenfällt.
Drum sei auch nie betrübt, wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt.
Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist der größte Schatz, dens gibt.

Sonniger Tag, wonniger Tag! Klopfendes Herz und der Motor ein Schlag!
Lachendes Ziel, lachender Start und eine herrliche Fahrt.
Rom und Madrid nehmen wir mit. So ging das Leben im Taumel zu dritt.
Über das Meer, über das Land haben wir eines erkannt:

Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist das Beste, was es gibt auf der Welt.
Ein Freund bleibt immer Freund und wenn die ganze Welt zusammenfällt.
Drum sei auch nie betrübt, wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt.
Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das ist der größte Schatz, dens gibt.

Sonnige Welt, wonnige Welt! Hast uns für immer zusammengesellt.
Liebe vergeht, Liebe verweht, Freundschaft alleine besteht.
Ja, man vergißt, wen man vergiß, weil auch die Treue längst unmodern ist.
Ja, man [verließ] manche Madam, wir aber halten zusamm`

Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund,
das ist doch das Größte und Beste und Schönste, was es gibt auf der Welt.
Ein Freund bleibt immer dir Freund.
Und wenn auch die ganze, die schlechte, die wacklige,
alberne Welt vor den Augen zusammen dir fällt,
ja dann sei auch nie betrübt, wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt.
Ein Freund, ein wirklicher Freund, das ist doch der größte Schatz, dens gibt.

The Invasion of the Body Scanners

2010-01-01T09:00:00.005-06:00

In one episode of "The Simpsons," Homer is sentenced to an eternity in hell. His particular assignment is to the department of ironic punishment. As one whose primary sin was gluttony, Homer is forced to eat doughnuts in perpetuity. After he's strapped in and forced to eat the pastries by the millions, the demons are confounded that the only word to leave his mouth between forced gulps is "more!"

Someone's apparently made a toy of the scene:

This irony of irony has been on my mind lately. Ever since the underwear bomber attempted to strike on Christmas Day, there's been a lot of discussion about mass deployment of full body scanners. The devices reveal not only items hidden beneath one's clothes, but also a fairly precise image of one's naked body. A natural first response is to recoil at the invasion of privacy. Then I began thinking, though: who would want to sit all day staring at such photos, or, better yet, administering full body pat downs?

It occurred to me that while for the traveler the search is rare and intrusive, for the person performing the search it's routine and dull. What could be a better punishment for sex offenders or even the mildly perverted than a career at the security line looking for explosives in underwear? I don't think there could be a Homer Simpson of voyeurs, someone who could view naked bodies or feel them in pat down searches for 40 hours a week and remain transfixed by human genitalia. In all likelihood, they'd lose interest entirely, and quickly.

So bring on the scanners and pat down searches. Homer may be in hell enjoying his doughnuts, but I don't think we're ever going to give the TSA agent any thrills.

The Girl in the Piazza Navona

2009-12-24T09:17:00.002-06:00

I saw a photographic exhibit in Rome just before I took this candid photo of a girl walking across the Piazza Navona. The photographer whose work was being exhibited took photos of people on the streets of Rome over decades and never once asked for permission. They'd just be posing, he said. And he didn't want to take posed portraits. I decided to try it myself immediately afterward. This is the result.

Viaggio a dicembre

2009-12-24T08:49:00.005-06:00

Italy, December 2009

A photographic account of my trip to Italy, 10-22 December 2009

It's One Way to Quit

2009-12-13T08:21:00.002-06:00

Seven years ago, I re-entered the world of amateurish golfing. I stayed there for about three years before gradually making my exit. By then the investment of time, money, and frayed nerves had added up to more than I was willing to spend. While I played I watched professional golf much more closely than before or since. Both the men’s and women’s tours were of interest, the latter especially because the LPGA holds a tournament here in Mobile every year.

I never really had a favorite golfer. There were a few with whom I sympathized at times or whom I admired. I noticed Fred Funk, for example, stride over to shake Annika Sörenstam’s hand at the practice green when Annika was playing her only tournament with the PGA. I liked Fred for it, and I wasn’t surprised to learn he had two daughters at home.

One golfer I didn’t much care for at the beginning was Tiger Woods. He was in the middle of one of his most dominant periods. Phil Mickelson had yet to win a major, and no one else seemed to have a chance of competing with Woods. It would have been like rooting for the New York Yankees to declare myself a fan of the world’s dominant golfer. And if nothing else, I’m always trying to be at least a little different.

I think what first pulled me in Woods’ direction was when an open mike caught him yelling “God damn it!” after an errant drive. The announcers made a quick apology, but I was roaring with laughter. He wasn’t so different from me after all – playing poorly upset him so much that he had to verbalize it.. Still, it wasn’t until after Mickelson had won a couple of majors and Woods went into a bit of a slump due to a redesigned swing that I began accepting his wins as things that could be celebrated. I became one of those who would only be interested in watching a tournament if he were in contention.

What excited me most about him was not his going for broke on many of his drives, but the way his imagination was activated by getting into difficulty. It seemed to me that good lies and clear approach shots might have bored him a little. He needed a challenge sometimes. I loved to see him mishit a drive not because I wanted him to do poorly, but because I wanted to see a spectacular recovery shot that no one else could pull off.

On the day after Thanksgiving this year, as I was watching a big local football game on TV, I was horrified to learn of the possibility that he might have been seriously hurt or even worse in a car accident. The shock was quickly supplanted by a growing sense of the burlesque. Over a dozen women now claim to have had affairs with him and are revealing things that are both unflattering and truly none of our business.

One of the most disheartening allegations is that he was performing with one of his ladies as he got the news of his father’s death. He supposedly had just visited his father in a hospice, but had returned home for a romp. This same mistress recalls frequent embarrassment at Woods’ cheapness in restaurants. Worth a billion dollars, he frequently expected to receive free meals. He never tipped.

His father once gave an interview in which he predicted with metaphysical certainty that his son was going to accomplish great things beyond golf, world changing things. As if living up to his father’s expectations for golf weren’t enough, Woods would also have to find a way to improve the whole world if he were to satisfy his father’s demands. Instead, he was doing all he could to construct an explosive apparatus that would end his career. He married even though he had to know that his private inclinations would likely still get him in trouble; he compounded that mistake by having children.

I've been tempted to wonder why, if Woods wanted to assert his individuality vis-à-vis his father, he didn’t just play poorly. He could have had his privacy and his uniqueness that way, too. But of course the excellence trap is a tight one. If you’re brought up from infancy, as Woods was, to accept nothing less than conquest as being satisfactory, you can’t just start tanking. I’m not saying Woods’ over-the-top philandering was a cry for help. It was actually far more: it was a way to be himself without having to perform poorly on the course, to get away from golf without having to accept mediocrity at the game now or when forced on him by the ravages of age later.

I don’t know how we’re going to view him. If I were to be at a tournament in which Woods was playing, I would likely stare at him like all those kids who gawked with outrage at Sarah Michelle Geller as she emerged from the chapel at the end of “Cruel Intentions.” It would be a gaze intended to shame the recipient, a look of disbelief that one could show one’s face after selling us an image of wholesomeness, all-around excellence, intelligence, and self-mastery that was a sheer fraud. I hope Woods will retire, I hope his wife has the good sense to divorce him and get on with her life, and I hope we all learn the lesson that we have to be who we are, sooner or later.

50 and Counting

2009-11-25T10:22:00.003-06:00

November 25, 1959
Bessemer, Alabama

Happy 50th anniversary today, Claire and Emmett -- a.k.a. Mom and Dad.

I'm counting on at least 50 more.

Love,
Dan

Adventures in Veganism

2009-11-22T16:35:00.005-06:00

I don't care what you eat. I mean I really don't care. If you admitted a recent dalliance with cannibalism, I'd be unimpressed. So I'm not trying to convert you now, or to put you down, or to say I'm better than you. If you manage to read all of this and you feel I've been motivated by any of these reasons, you're wrong.

I only want to get down in writing some thoughts I've worked my way through over the last year, since I adopted a more or less vegan diet. Strictly speaking, I don't call myself a "vegan" because it sounds so political. And the true vegan believers wouldn't claim me because I don't refuse to eat if the only thing I can reasonably expect to find on my plate would contain animal products (say if I'm travelling in a foreign country or am a guest in someone's home). Nor do I go out of my way to avoid honey (I don't deliberately add honey to anything, but, sorry, bees are just insects to me and the substance itself isn't harmful). I haven't purged my wardrobe of leather and don't think about such things when buying shoes or belts.

That being said, I'm now in a tiny minority of Americans, less than one percent, who don't consume animal protein, whether from meat, fish, eggs, or dairy. About a year ago a friend who's a far more dedicated vegan than I'll ever be served as a good example of what was possible, and I decided to give it a try. Ten years earlier I'd attempted to live as a vegetarian and had made it for a whole year, but gave it up because I came to believe that the foul, fatty dairy substances I was eating solely to avoid meat were destroying my health. Funny, at the time it never occurred to me to go all the way and forsake dairy and eggs as well.

Thus I returned to omnivorism and slowly adjusted my mentality back as well. I knew that all life has to consume life in order to survive and that this painful paradox was at that heart of many religious rituals (communion, anyone?). As Joseph Campbell put it, I was kidding myself to think I could absent myself from the dilemma and the sadness of having people slaughter things I would then eat. It was as much a part of being fully human as other problems we face, such as making enemies, having rebellious children, or making your rebellious children into your enemies.

Middle age arrived somewhere in the ten-year period after I quit being a vegetarian. For those who wish to live healthily if not necessarily longer, there appears to be irrefutable scientific evidence that reducing animal protein from all sources is a good way to go. I was especially troubled by dairy products, and had long unconsciously begun to avoid them. I had been putting soy milk on my cereal, for instance. When I began to really think about what it meant to drink the secretions of another mammal intended for their young, it became very easy not only to give up dairy, but also to slip into the nearly accusatory rhetoric I'm now using.

Most of the world's population is lactose-intolerant precisely because we're not meant to drink the milk of another animal. Those of us with ancestors from areas where drinking cow's milk became common thousands of years ago have the evolutionary advantage, if you want to consider it that, of being able to drink cow's milk without getting diarrhea or flatulence. But we're still downing a potent mix of proteins designed to fuel the growth spurt of calves. Even the calves give it up after a while, but many humans continue with milk their whole lives.

Most relatives, friends, and acquaintances have been understanding or even helpful when they find out about my diet. My mother -- my wonderful mother -- has taken it as a challenge to find and prepare a variety of tasty things for me to eat whenever I visit. And has she ever succeeded. She went so far as to order a book on vegan baking so that she could make me desserts. And she, my father, and my brother eat it all along with me (supplemented by the occasional rotisserie chicken in their case).

Any vegan, and probably vegetarian too, could tell you that the first question out of the mouths of the less understanding is usually: "What do you eat?" Since we've heard the question so often, we've had a long time to prepare what we think are witty comebacks. So if you meet one of us, spare yourself the barb and ask something else. I try to be nice and say something simple like "The same things you do, except without the animal products and maybe in slightly greater quantities." We don't all have a refrigerator dedicated to tofu and other soy products, you know. We do, though, all have our go-to foods. The nearly universal one is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's true for me, but I also keep cans of boiled peanuts on hand at all times.

I've heard lots of vegans claim a new burst of energy upon settling into the diet. I can't say that, but I didn't lose any energy either. I can say that my skin, prone to some irregularities, settled down a lot (except for when I made the horrible mistake of not avoiding dairy when on a trip to Italy last spring, and bumps broke out all over. I just as quickly began avoiding all Italian dairy products). An acquaintance's psoriasis went totally asymptomatic when she became a vegan. And there are legions of other anecdotes, none proving anything at all except that making a major change in their lives can make people feel more in control and therefore better. There's plenty of scientific evidence that our risk for various cancers and circulatory disorders is reduced noticeably, even if it's never going to disappear. And we get a perverse joy out of shocking people with our social deviance, for whatever that's worth.

For the record, yes, I believe people were made (or rather, evolved in a more primitive era) to gain advantages from eating meat, and, in some parts of the world, from drinking the milk of other species. Those advantages, however, are solely pointed at reaching the age of reproduction, securing a mate, and producing offspring. Nature doesn't care whether your arteries are clear in your middle and later years or whether your immune system is battling cow proteins as you hold your grandchildren. Either you've done your part by then and passed along your DNA, or you haven't. It's as if you raced your new car for a few years, took every corner on two wheels, fed it the most potent fuel available, and then found out you weren't going to be able to afford a new car to replace it when it began having problems at age five.

Most importantly of all, I'm having fun living this way, and I have no intention of stopping.

No, You're Not Just Doing Your Job

2009-11-11T19:26:00.004-06:00

I'm beginning to collect a lot of linguistic pet peeves. Fortunately, my ever-declining short-term memory prevents me from recalling them all at once. So at any given moment, like this one, I can only rant about whichever offending idiom is briefly skimming across the surface of my consciousness.

Right now it's "I'm just doing my job" or "He/she is just doing his/her job." It's usually a well-meaning phrase intended to deflect anger away from an employee who is carrying out the odious policy of a larger organization. Take the parking-ticket writers on my campus, for instance. Those who are new to issuing citations and haven't learned to ignore hecklers and complainers probably think "I'm just doing my job" is all that's necessary to defend themselves against the rage of scofflaws who've left class early and found their cars being ticketed.

It's not. Now I love the ticket writers and try to always bid them a good morning when I walk past. If it weren't for them, I'd never have a parking space. But neither they, I, nor anyone else who feels it worth their time to explain to someone else what they're doing should respond with "I'm just doing my job." It's the Nuremberg defense, repackaged and dumbed down. You might as well tell the complaining party you're an android while you're at it.

Using this phrase is an attempt to evade any personal responsibility for job-related actions. And that won't suffice for anyone who thinks accountability is essential for individual and societal health. If you believe in the job, do it in good conscience; if you feel you must, explain the logic behind your work to anyone who resents you. If you don't believe in it, then either quit or be willing to admit that you don't like what you have to do. But to say you're "just doing your job," or to excuse a third party based on the same rationale, is to condone any conduct as long as some higher authority is involved. It's a prescription for disaster. The wise guy, the SS officer, and the Inquisitor were also all "just doing their jobs."

Spare Us

2009-11-10T22:23:00.000-06:00

In the fall of 2002, I was as riveted as anyone outside of the DC area could be by the shooting and murder spree of the "Beltway Sniper." My wife at the time was about to begin a temporary assignment in Washington, and it hardly seemed safe to be contemplating such a move. The odds of encountering the sniper were millions to one, but that never stopped us from worrying.

Tonight, seven years after his capture, one of the two snipers was executed. If anyone ever deserved the death penalty, he did. His guilt was not in question. His crimes were particularly heinous, because they terrorized millions and struck down ten people for no reason any of us could understand. Yet tonight, as happens any time there's a prominent execution (for example, that of Timothy McVeigh), I actually feel worse. Somebody just got killed, somebody else intentionally did the killing, and we all knew it was coming. I would have preferred the murderer spend the rest of his life in prison, if only to spare us all this day when once again we had to relive his crimes and witness yet another planned death.

I've Admired You for So Long

2009-08-04T21:35:00.006-05:00

I was walking into Bruno's grocery store this evening all by myself, as usual. Passing an elderly couple on their way out, I wondered whether they were happy together. My mind probably turned that way because I like thinking I'm happier not being part of a permanent couple. I've also been thinking a lot about such matters since Monday, when I read the following comment on a blog at the Washington Post:

The human species does not naturally mate for life. People in hunter gatherer societies today don't do that. People form loose pair bonds for the period of time it takes a child to be conceived, born, and weaned from its mother's milk. Then the chemical that is produced by the brain that causes people to want to be with one another is no longer produced in response to that person and they split up and form a new pair bond. This increases the genetic diversity in a small tribe where everyone is related to everyone else, and therefore has survival value which was selected for by evolution.

Marriage for life developed after people invented agriculture. Once they owned land, it became economically unfeasible for them to be continually dividing it up every few years. Also, with the invention of the animal drawn plow, a male was needed to work the farm. Males also wanted to be able to pass down their land to their sons and needed to know that the sons were really theirs. Hence marriage for life.

Now that these factors are no longer in play, and now that the social and religious restrictions on divorce have been loosened, people are reverting to their natural behaviors. What you see in Hollywood with celebrities is actually "normal". It's the rest of us that are abnormal, or at least unnatural. (this commenter, I might add, identified himself in a previous posting as a former divorce attorney!)

You have to be careful not only to read things you already agree with, or that serve merely to confirm your ill-informed prejudices. Be that as it may, this made a lot of sense to me. People feel so horrible for "falling out of love" or for seeing their marriages end in divorce within a few years. At least part of what gets us in the mess may be a chemical in our brains that produces feelings we articulate as "love." Nature may have only meant for that chemical dose to last a few years, so that you could then mate with someone else in your tribe and prevent all your families' bad genes from ending up pooled in your and your mate's offspring.

In a society like ours, that means the divorce business is always going to be good. A cultural message reinforced by thousands of years of practice that pushes us to marry collides with a biological imperative crafted by the preceding tens of thousands of years of evolution that drives us to spread our genes more widely. People marry thinking they're in love, fall out of love (i.e., lose the chemical stimulus), and then either decide to stick with it and maybe transform the marriage into something workable but less than they had hoped for, or they get divorced.

With all this in the back of my mind, I passed the couple at the grocery store this evening. I then pictured older people grocery shopping alone, and for reasons unknown to me my mind moved quickly, for the first time in years, to its memory of one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. I've admired her for so long, yet I rarely have a chance to speak of her to others.

It was September 1988. I was 25 and had finished four years of graduate school, with two to go. I was about to spend a year in Germany, France, and England to research my Ph.D. dissertation. I had driven my car, a 1978 Chevrolet Chevette, back to my parents' house in Alabama for the year (and, if you're wondering about the recent collapse of the American auto industry, simply compare the number of Japanese or German cars you still see from that era with the number of Chevettes you've encountered since the early 1990s).

I had to return to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for my flight to Germany. I felt too poor to fly (and I was -- this was the only month in my entire life I was without health insurance). So I took my one and only long-distance bus trip, from Montgomery to Durham. I was excited but a bit apprehensive. Somehow I knew the buses I had seen portrayed in movies were inaccurate, and I would likely experience something different. That it was. It was a little worse in some ways, but far better in others. The worst part was the layover in the downtown Atlanta bus station. The best was meeting the woman I've admired for so long.

She got on the bus in South Carolina somewhere. I want to say it was Greenville. She took the seat next to me, and somehow we started talking. In her mid 60s, she was a single mother who had put many children through college, after which she got a nursing degree herself (a few years earlier, in her late 50s and early 60s). She had already retired and was on the bus all by herself at the start of a journey I couldn't even imagine, but which she had longed for. As a black woman who had been born during the worst of Jim Crow, she had come far just by getting on the bus in her retirement after seeing her children through college. A moment later I would find out how far she really intended to leave the restrictions of her younger years behind.

"Where are you headed?," I must have asked. "Nova Scotia," she replied. After some immense internal astonishment had died down, I brought myself to inquire, "Why Nova Scotia?" She laughed a little and said simply, "Oh, I just always wanted to go there." I had been worried about riding between Alabama and North Carolina. Now she was going to forge ahead for days, change buses, and endure layovers in inner-city bus stations at odd hours, only to arrive by herself in a sparsely-populated, wind-swept maritime province she had only dreamed of. I took my leave at the Durham station in awe of her. My admiration subsided quickly enough in the face of my own upcoming adventures, but it was only lying dormant. It awoke this evening to remind me that no one is a success because of whom she is with, but only for the content of her dreams and her bravery in bringing them to life. I hope one day I grow up to be just like her.

Everybody Tells the Truth

2009-07-23T21:59:00.005-05:00

It's long been one of my favorite TV episodes. It aired originally on March 3, 1973, as part of the series All in the Family. Entitled "Everybody Tells the Truth,"it bears a crucial similarity to the classic Japanese film Rashomon. The audience is presented with very different views of the same event from several eyewitnesses. In the All in the Family episode, the three truth-tellers are Archie, Mike ("The Meathead"), and Edith.

The events center around the visit to the Bunker residence of two refrigerator repairmen, one white and one black. The repairs go awry, words are exchanged, and the repairmen leave before the job is finished. Mike recalls the black repairman as a weak Uncle Tom sort whom Archie mistreats; Archie remembers him as a menacing Black Panther with a switchblade knife; and Edith presents what is meant to be the reality, that the repairman was just a normal guy going about his job.

I was reminded of this episode in the current controversy over the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No one knows what happened except the people who were there. Unfortunately, like any of us would have done, they brought a lot of personal, societal, and cultural baggage along with them into the encounter. The participants themselves may yet unite around a common narrative of events, but for the time being they're presenting contradictory accounts. I think it would behoove us to show restraint in light of the uncertainty and the lack of any good reason for us outsiders to speculate. It may be hard if you've had bad experiences with the police before, or if your house has been burgled. You want to line the events up with a paradigm your mind already has waiting for them.

Both sides are, in one sense each, absolutely right. How you can be arrested in your own house for just speaking some words is beyond my imagination, at least in a free society. On the other hand, we must all reckon with the possibility one day that we will run into the police as they are answering such a burglary call in our neighborhood or looking for a car that matches the description of the one we're driving (I remember all the poor owners of white vans in the D.C. area in the fall of 2002). When I was 16 I was pulled over doing my early morning paper route (about 3:00 a.m.) because the hospital in my hometown had just been robbed by people stealing narcotics. Any car moving at that hour was going to be stopped. It shook me up, but I don't know that I would have done anything differently if I had been a police officer at that moment.

I'm very curious how the truth is going to develop out of the current imbroglio. Until it does I'm going to keep my mouth shut and probably wince every time I hear anyone offering an uninformed opinion. That includes everyone from my Facebook friends to the president of the United States. Move along folks, nothing to see here -- yet.

Ten Things I Learned about Italy

2009-06-17T08:48:00.005-05:00

Observations from my recent journey...

There's a gelato opportunity on every corner.
Italy is a hyper-democracy, and yet the trains run on time well over 95% of the time. They really didn't need Mussolini for that.
The political rhetoric is coarser even than in the U.S., but there's rarely violence associated with it. In Carpi, I saw a stand that had been erected to distribute election materials for the anti-immigrant Northern League. Right next to it, several men of South Asian descent had gathered and were just shooting the breeze. Neither group paid attention to the other. I'm sure it's not this way everywhere, but it seemed to show a tolerance despite harsher anti-immigrant rhetoric than we hear in the US.
The police are very active. I saw many random traffic stops, many patrolling officers, and even was sniffed (along with all the other passengers) by a drug dog as I got off the train in Verona. I think the dog liked the smell of the cherry jam I had spilled on my duffel bag, but he didn't give the drug signal to his handler.
The Italians are as proud of their language as anyone, but they don't expect foreigners to learn it. They're very tolerant of tourists.
Stamp every transportation ticket in the validating machine before boarding the vehicle!
Wi-fi is slow in coming.
Watching simplistic TV dramas with subtitles is the best possible way to improve your Italian quickly.
Macedonia (fruit salad) makes the best desert.
Espresso is the travelling coffee drinker's best friend. If you learn no other Italian, "un espresso, per favore" will always give you a way to stop for a minute, get some caffeine, read a newspaper, and reflect on how the trip is going while standing at the counter.

Italian Journey

2009-05-19T12:19:00.012-05:00

Like Goethe, I'm off now on a meandering journey to reacquaint myself with Italy. The agenda: Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Modena, Ravenna, Rome, Verona, and the Lago di Garda. I'll update my photos from the trip here and on Facebook as I have time. The photo below should change every time there are new pictures to see.

Photos updated as of Friday, June 5, 2009, 10:20 am Central Time

Italy, May-June 2009

How Not to Get Ready for Your High School Reunion

2009-05-12T11:20:00.003-05:00

Nearly ten years ago, I attended the 20th reunion of my high school's graduating class of 1980. During an assembly in the high school auditorium, we were feted by the current students in a ritual that we too had participated in when we were in school. Skits are always presented making light of the school and the world 10, 20, 30, and 40 years earlier -- one skit for each of the four classes holding its reunion that weekend (those graduating 50, 60, or even 70 years earlier are invited to the assembly, but don't get a special skit).

Last time, the classes were seated as I suppose they must always be: the 40th closest to the stage (to help with hearing?), the 30th behind them, followed by the 20th (my class ten years ago), and finally the 10th in the back. As I took my seat I looked down below me at the members of the class of 1970 gathering for their 30th reunion. My response was immediate and lasting: if that's what people look like after 30 years, then I won't be back.

I hadn't attended my 10th reunion because I was a poor graduate student living a thousand miles away. I went to the 20th because I was back in the area and a bit curious. We had barely gotten an email list started at that time, photo attachments to emails were a novelty, and there was no such thing as a blog or Facebook. The reunion could thus fulfill its ancient and enduring purpose: letting us see what everyone else looks like.

It's not just their faces, hair, and weight. It's not just the relative pulchritude of the person on their arms. It's the way they carry themselves: have they accommodated themselves to life's vagaries, or in trying to control life's ups and downs wantonly or foolishly have they begun to wear themselves down prematurely? Are they posing by smiling too much at the wrong moments? Are they interested in other people or only how they stack up against them using some arbitrary measurement of looks or status?

I got a good taste of all this at my 20th reunion. I told myself, "That was interesting, but it was the last one." In the meantime, Facebook emerged among college students, but has found its true calling in reconnecting much older sorts with their high school classmates (I even friended someone from my 4th grade class). I friended some in my graduating class from high school, others friended me, and in the sixth months since I've had Facebook, I've been connected with about a dozen of those who got their diplomas in May 1980. It must scare them or at least shock them when they see my graying hair and other signs of age in my photos. I've been forced on more than one occasion myself to stare at the eyes in their photos before I could recognize them, so much had their other features changed.

More than anything else, this is now why I don't want to go to my 30th reunion. It must inevitably devolve into the world's largest free-range open-casket funeral, where we all walk up to living corpses of what we once were and either admire or criticize the mortician for how the remains are presented. Do I really want to take part? Is there any function of a high school reunion that can't now be fulfilled by Facebook and email?

Somebody must be on the verge of organizing our 30th reunion, since it's due to occur this October. If I go, I will have to decide why to ignore the logic of this post. There are some awfully nice people in my class, and we've all learned things that it would be good to share. But I don't want to remember. The sweetness, bitterness, and poignancy of the late 1970s is only exacerbated by the passage of time. Recalling it all at once might lead to an emotional overload. Moreover, I don't have stories of children (or grandchildren) to share, leaving me high and dry during most of the conversations (I noticed this even ten years ago). I think I'd rather just lurk on Facebook, hope that none of my classmates unfriend me if they read this, and do my remembering in much safer, and smaller, doses.

Joseph Nigota, 1940-2009: Three Remembrances

2009-02-22T09:22:00.027-06:00

By Joe Nigota's Colleagues Dan Rogers, Mike Thomason, and Richmond Brown

When you lose someone, it hurts a little more if you realize you can't remember the first time you met him. I know I must have encountered Joe Nigota, who died last Friday at the age of 68, during my job interview at the University of South Alabama in January 1991. But when did I first shake his hand, hear his name, or look him in the eye? It's all lost to me, and I'm saddened at the oblivion created by my faulty memory.

For over forty years Joe taught in our History Department. He arrived in 1966, while he was still a grad student at Emory. His master's thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which he finished in 1973, concerned medieval England. He taught courses on Western civilization, medieval and early modern England, and medieval and Renaissance Europe. From the very first quarter I taught at South Alabama in 1991, I realized the students thought he was special. I struggled to figure out why, because I wanted to be a good teacher too. And I couldn't see it based solely on the Joe I knew outside of his classes.

He was slight of stature and slow of gait. He didn't walk: he ambled. And not only did I never see him run; I can't imagine him running if I try. When not lecturing, he talked in a low deep voice that my poor hearing struggled to understand every single time. He always sat off to the side in our department meetings and said little. When he did speak, of course, I never understood a word. I couldn't figure out how he could transform himself into the great teacher I'd heard about.

I finally decided he must be like an accomplished actor, far more skilled at losing himself in his role than most of us who adopt a different persona when standing in front of a crowd. He truly came alive in ways he never did outside of the classroom. That may well be why he continued to teach into a fifth decade, even though he probably could have retired and made more money from his pensions and Social Security than from remaining as a full-time faculty member. He positively needed to be in character, and the rest of us sometimes made morbid jokes about how they were going to have to drag him out of the classroom one day because he'd never leave willingly or alive. In the end it didn't quite go down like that, but almost.

His teaching relied heavily on slides, and he continued to use them despite the advent of PowerPoint and the unconditional surrender of the academy to its cognitive style. But he had been adapting, slowly and steadily. This semester, his two classes bracketed mine in the same room; i.e., he taught, then left for 90 minutes, then came back; and in between my class took place in the same room. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to discover he was using the computer and projector system before me and I wouldn't have to turn it on from scratch or shut it down each time. I was delighted to see him striving, like any great teacher, to find new ways to reach and seize the attention of students.

He would hate being talked about like this. He would hate even more having his photograph displayed as it is below. He was a perfectionist of the sort that I understand all too well, because I'm one too. Usually "perfectionist" is meant to connote someone who won't rest until something is just right. It's an overt obsession. With Joe and me, it was and is different. We got the idea sometime in our childhood that being good or perfect was essential to our survival. Our lives thereafter would thus always be a struggle to reconcile the mess of the world with the standards fabricated by our earliest caregivers in order to teach us to become healthy and functioning members of our families and societies. We don't constantly adjust things to make them perfect; we tend to just give up in frustration. For us the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. We know it and struggle with it all our lives.

I wish I could talk about his teaching. I never witnessed it. A close friend who has a Ph.D. in history from Oxford and is a renowned scholar in his field once visited me here in Mobile. He asked to sit in on a typical class, and I asked Joe if my friend could do so in one of his classes. My hidden motive was to get a first-hand report on Joe's teaching style. Now, not only was Joe's professional specialty English history, he loved most things about England and was happy to have an English visitor. My friend came out of the class amazed -- he blurted out: "every department should have someone like him!" But I never had the pleasure and honor to see this for myself. Joe's techniques often involved using maps on stands, and he would usually put one in front of the window in the classroom door. I couldn't even spy on him as I walked past his room, much less hear him. He must have wanted it that way, to be the star of a one-man show hidden for 50 or 75 minutes at a time from the outside world.

He loved fiddling with his computers -- perhaps too much. I'm often frustrated that some people who ask me for help won't spend time just exploring programs to see what they can do. Many of the features they want to know about would be obvious if they'd just looked around a bit first. Joe looked around all right, but had a penchant for going a little too far. Basic settings would get changed, and I'd be at a loss to help. His final battle was with Vista. He sent me this e-mail last August:

Dan,

Just a note. Vista has won. I'm so overwhelmed and unnerved by it all that I can't do basic things. Like typing this---or sending it. I typed the address wrong the first time! Thanks for "lending me your ear." I'm trying hard not to go over the edge. Joeeeeee..........

Later he reported the score in his struggle against Vista as if it were a football game. He claimed to be far behind in the first quarter. In the end I think he'd pulled ahead to stay.

For many years he was our liaison with the University Library. He sorted thousands of cards and slips we were sent containing reviews of new books in history. His tedious work of selecting the cards or slips to send to each faculty member meant we would receive only the ones relevant to our fields. He passed along the task to a colleague recently, but for decades I think he knew more about our library, and cared more, than anyone. I can imagine our librarians will mourn him as much as anyone. He was a true standout as a bibliophile among the many bibliophiles in our profession.

If I had any real issue with Joe, it was because of the cigars he used to smoke in his office several doors down from mine. I hate breathing tobacco smoke. I've seen the stuff kill people I've loved and cared about, and it also stinks and annoys me. But he was my senior colleague, and for me, the way I am, it was impossible to say anything to him. He probably sensed it, but he never said anything to me and I never said anything to him. He would only stop with the cigars after bypass surgery several years back.

In 1998, during one of his last summer sojourns in London, my British friend and his wife, along with me and my wife at the time, visited Joe and his wife at their summer flat overlooking the Thames across from what was then called the Millenium Dome, but is now "The O₂." Joe delighted in sharing the history of London with us and anyone else who saw him there. He was no snob: he made it a special point to indicate a church that had recently been used to film an episode of Friends, "The One with Ross's Wedding," that had aired the previous May. He treated all six of us to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on a docked barge at nearby Canary Wharf. That evening meant and means the world to me still.

You don't get to choose whether to be photographed if you're in public (only whether to turn and hide your face if you realize you're being shot), and you don't get to choose how people remember you when you die. They will do what they need to do to begin processing their grief for you. So while Joe could successfully insist his University web page have no photo of him and that there be no public funeral, I feel I have to do things like post photos and reveal details and share observations, all of which would have made him cringe or request silence. One of my final encounters with his shyness and perfectionism came when I tried to nominate him for our college's teaching award. He refused because he believed his teaching had suffered setbacks since his heart attack. There was no way to nominate him without his cooperation, so I demurred. But it was a shame. I and others could see a lifetime of success, but he was concerned with what he saw as a slight recent decline, so concerned he blocked any attempt to honor him.

I took this photo of Joe in 2005. I've cropped out a student with whom I asked him to pose at our department's awards day, since he never would have stood still to be photographed by himself. In mandatory group photos he often hid or mostly obscured himself by standing in the back behind taller people. This is not unusual, I know. I have many family members who feel the same and who scowl silently and briefly when they see me take out my camera. Like so many things, though, the photographs are not for the subject alone, but also for those near to him or her.

An essay like this one would normally have at least a few words to say about Joe's childhood and youth. I know nothing of either. That would indicate we weren't close friends, which is true: his colleagues from the earliest days of the University in the 1960s would have to share such details. It also speaks for his general reticence about the circumstances of his private life. For example I found out only due to an offhand remark that he'd gotten married some years ago.

If in writing these words I've violated that maxim that Joe would have known so well, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of the dead speak only good, it's only because we have differing ideas of the good. To me, at this moment, the good involves showing and sharing more about this amazing, kind, loving man than was possible while he lived. He was a far more interesting and complex person than I and most ever got to experience first hand. Perhaps by sharing some of the more poignant things in my memory -- even and especially things Joe would have wanted to leave unspoken -- I can encourage others to speak or write. And then just maybe we can start to assemble what we all want but never had: a fuller image of this brilliant scholar and teacher, this self-effacing and helpful colleague, the soul of our History Department, the lovably imperfect man who walked among us as Joseph Anthony Nigota.

Dan Rogers
February 22, 2009
===

When Marilyn and I came to Mobile in 1970 we felt very much like fish out of water. One of the History faculty, Joe Nigota, who had been here for several years at that point, took pity on us. I suppose being from New York City and a Medieval history scholar, he knew what it felt like to find yourself in this strange place, Mobile. Now, Joe was not the only member of the faculty to extend him or herself, but he was very kind. One evening he drove us down Dauphin Street and as we went along the street east of Wentzell's he pointed out the new sky scraper, the First National Bank Building. He called it the "Running Building," because as we drove along it seemed to be running. Joe pointed out that no matter how fast it ran, it couldn't escape Mobile! Neither could we as it turned out, thanks to the shortage of jobs in History after the early 70's, so we were here, for better or worse, and here we stayed for the rest of our lives.

Joe took refuge in his teaching and in his trips to London in the summer. Marilyn and I had been there and we returned after coming to Mobile until the arrival of children made it difficult. Joe kept going and introducing colleagues and students to that wonderful place. He did careful research in medieval documents, including the scrolls in the PRO, which very few could read. He did so. Scholars who worked with those documents were my heroes, as I had no idea how anyone could do that. Many years later I read an entry in the English Dictionary of National Biography he had written. Based on such research, the article was just wonderful. He brought his subject to life and wrote about him as if he had known the man personally. Joe had to let me read it as I was on a department promotion and raise committee, and it was in his file which he had to submit. Otherwise he would never have shown it to me. He just refused to accept that he was gifted as a scholar, writer and even as a teacher. He would not allow us to honor him, but he couldn't stop the students. Year after year he was voted as the department's best teacher. And simply put: He was.

Marilyn and I lived in Hillsdale the first four years in Mobile. We had parties from time to time and Joe would come and I think he enjoyed himself. At least once we got him to do an imitation of Milton Cross explaining an opera being broadcast from the Met. Joe had been submerged in opera and classical music as he grew up in midtown Manhattan. He knew the characters and plot lines of most operas and that knowledge allowed him to invent an opera and describe it as Cross would have done, if it had been real. He had us laughing so hard that I cannot remember most of what he said, except for, "And the heroine says, 'For you I do this!' and stabs herself, dying on stage." Thereafter, "For you I do this!" became a catch line for any outrageous action. Joe had a wonderful sense of humor, laced with a fine sense of irony.

I never heard Joe teach. I knew if I did I would feel obliged to kill myself because I was so awful by comparison. As the years went by I think he got better while I got worse. He lived to teach, while I lived despite my teaching ability. I finally became so disillusioned I retired early. Despite serious health issues, Joe just couldn't desert his students. He and I corresponded via email after I left the university. We talked about the university, students and music. I asked him to take the WHIL listener survey, as we both were disappointed in its changed programming. Sadly, I sent that email on the night he died.

There are many things to be said about Joe Nigota. We should have found a way to see him promoted to full professor, but he just wouldn't play that game and it never happened. He probably should have been paid more, and over the years he served the university he got few rewards from the institution. He deserved more, but simply refused to play the game that most of the rest of us embraced. As time went on he taught, read, researched and got books for us for the library but gradually lived apart from most of us. He was a very private person, neither aloof nor unfriendly, just reserved. There was a sadness there too, though he took great strength from his wife Carolynn, and her love meant the world to him.

There is no way I can think of to end this essay. Like Joe's life, which didn't have an especially happy ending, this won't either. Marilyn and I will miss Joe as one of the more remarkable people we have known, as a good friend and an inspiring colleague. All sounds rather grandiose and Joe would dismiss this without a word. But, nonetheless, we will miss you, my friend.

Mike Thomason
February 23, 2009

My dear colleagues Mike Thomason and Dan Rogers (and they will be my colleagues wherever I happen to live and work and whether they claim me or not) speak with enviable eloquence about Joe Nigota, our dear friend and role model, who, as many had predicted, kept teaching right up to the very end. I started at South a year before Dan did and left about two and a half years ago for the University of Florida. I still wrestle with the move and often think (or hope) that I will awake from this dream and be back in Mobile with my friends at USA. I often think of Joe Nigota and Lenny Macaluso, his inseparable friend of more than 40 years, and miss them deeply. I'll be damn sure to tell Lenny that as soon as I can.

Like Dan and Mike, I learned of Joe's amazing teaching mostly vicariously, through the comments of students. His classes were always the first ones to enroll to capacity. Good thing our classrooms were mostly limited to 45 seats, so the rest of us got a few students. The closest I ever came to seeing his gifts firsthand was during a colloquium he once presented on Christopher Columbus as a man of medieval Europe. He held the audience transfixed. I often wished we could videotape his classes for posterity. I'm sure he would never have indulged the idea. Like Dan, I was struck by the personality transformation that Joe seemed to undergo when he entered the classroom. Outside the classroom, he always seemed on the verge of exhaustion, mumbling and shuffling down the hallway, barely seeming to have the energy to make it to his office where, until the campaign against smoking in public buildings finally forced him to do otherwise, he took refuge in his microfilms and his cigars. But then there would be another class.

I wish I had gotten to know Joe better. I never made it to London for the kind of visit Mike and Dan were privileged to experience. It would have been great to see Joe in another place, away from the third floor of the Humanities Building. He was a big sports fan and we shared a common rooting interest in the Braves and Saints, hapless franchises for most of our lifetimes. The 14 consecutive division titles for the Braves seemed somehow an aberration and their losing efforts of the past three years more in the natural order of things. Of course they did only win the ONE World Series, so they could still be the lovable losers our psyches seemed to demand. Lenny can have his Yankees and their 27 championships! Joe and I needed to pull for the underdogs. At least the Saints never let us down.

Like Mike and Dan, I was sometimes frustrated by Joe's seemingly misplaced humility and refusal to be acknowledged. I'm sure that this was an essential part of who he was and governed the way he approached the world, but I wish he had thought better of himself and his amazing talents and I hope that he had some sense of the way his colleagues and students felt about him. His perfectionism and his reluctance to publish perhaps deprived the scholarly world (in part at least) of the vast knowledge he had to offer. But perhaps that knowledge was saved for his kids, his beloved students. I can still see them lining the halls in little Nigotavilles frantically trying to finish their blue book exams because Joe never had the heart to take the test booklets out of their hands and he had to yield the classroom to another instructor.

More than any of my colleagues at USA, Joe was the one that our former students (they always seemed to be working at restaurants and bars around town) would ask about if they knew or learned I was a history prof at South. Students would have majored in Nigota if they could and some of them no doubt tried. I've been pondering Dan's acting analogy. I'm not sure that it was the case that Joe had to stay in character so much as that he poured everything he had into his 50 or 75 minutes in the classroom (and the long nights preparing) and it left him exhausted once he was outside the arena.

In my last few years at South (at least for now!), I became rather involved in the Faculty Senate. Too involved. I don't know what Joe thought of such endeavors--fool's errands perhaps, but I always comforted (or deluded) myself by thinking that whatever I was trying to accomplish in wrestling with the administration on this or that matter, I was trying to figure out how to make USA a better place. My simple guidepost was, "what could we do to make Joe Nigota's work easier, more satisfying, rewarding or recognized?" Because for me, what Joe (and Lenny, and Larry Holmes and others) did in their classrooms was the whole point of the university.

I visit the USA campus as much I can now living 6 hours away and I've tried to make it a point to drop in on Joe and my other old friends. I sensed he was proud of me (he always greeted me warmly as "my friend") and that while he was happy to see me he was also happy that I had escaped USA. I didn't share that sentiment at all (and perhaps I am imagining this). I just know that I became who I am at that place, trying to be like Joe and Lenny and Larry, and that wherever I ended up could not be a better place, or as good a place at that.

I miss Joe deeply but I'm grateful to have been touched by his quiet and unassuming greatness. I'm glad others feel the same.

Richmond Brown

February 23, 2009

Doc in a Box

2009-01-24T19:38:00.004-06:00

Today I had my first experience with an "urgent care" practice on the weekend, and I loved it.

At about 4:00 a.m. when I couldn't sleep due to an incipient illness that was tossing out some pretty unique and worrisome symptoms, I googled "mobile alabama urgent care". The result pointed me to a group of three physicians who treat injuries and illnesses outside of normal office hours for doctors. Instead of having to wait for Monday at 8:00 a.m. and call for an appointment to see my regular doctor whenever he could fit me in, I could have the problem seen to within the next few hours.

I walked in at opening time, was seen within a few minutes, diagnosed, prescribed, and turned loose all within half an hour. The most difficult part turned out to be waiting for my pharmacist to open at 9:00.

I will not look forward to going back there, because that would mean I have a problem. But if I do, this practice will be my first choice for the more routine sorts of questions. Imagine: as I walked out, the staff even told me they hoped I feel better. I have seen the future.

Zuneless, Three Days over Two Years

2009-01-03T12:43:00.008-06:00

Along with hundreds of thousands of others, I hit a snag in my everyday life on New Years' Eve. My Microsoft Zune MP3 player stopped working. The 30 megabyte models produced in 2006 had a simple but profound programming flaw: they couldn't handle the fact that 2008 had been a leap year. The 30 MB Zunes all froze on December 31 when the clock found itself in limbo between 2008, according to one of its calendars, and 2009, which would begin in 24 hours according to another of its calendars.

Unfortunately, I was one of the first to discover this, before Microsoft analyzed the problem and posted a solution, which was to simply wait until after noon Greenwich Mean Time on January 1 and reattach the Zune to the computer. I thought I could reset the Zune myself by opening it up and unplugging the battery for a few seconds. I found unofficial instructions on how to do this online (thus voiding the warranty, but I think it had expired anyway). I took some pride in prying it open for the first time. But unplugging the battery not only failed to fix the problem, it meant Microsoft's easy solution of waiting until after noon GMT on January 1 would no longer work for me.

It was complex and frustrating, but finally, thanks to some instructions posted online by others who had made the same mistake, I regained control of the Zune on January 2. I then had to reinstall the device's firmware and all my music and video files, which was a small price considering the frustration I had endured over the previous three days.

The lessons? Most important was the one they teach medical students early: "Don't just do something, stand there." Once I discovered it was a widespread problem, waiting for Microsoft to tell me what to do would have been a lot smarter than being proactive (i.e., destructive). I'm glad I know what the inside looks like now, but it wasn't worth the trouble.

Second, like the NASA engineers who goofed and crashed a Mars probe because of a conflict between the metric and English systems of measurement, software engineers (and all other humans, myself included) are capable of overlooking the most obvious issues, like February 29ths. Imagine if the same engineers had built this problem into a car's computer. The car wouldn't have worked for a day and might well have stopped in the middle of the road.

Third, buying hardware from Microsoft is now something I'm probably never going to consider. The Zune (a gift, for which I remain very grateful) works very well when it works, but I'm not going to be able to purge my memory of these three days if I'm ever in the market for anything Microsoft makes for which they have a viable competitor. They've promised to fix the Zune's leap year problem by 2012, but if mine's still working then, I'm going to give it New Years Eve off.

The Year of Hearing Dangerously

2008-12-20T11:24:00.004-06:00

I've written more this year than in any of the previous two years of this blog, although the pace has slowed over the last months as my life stayed very busy and made writing here less compelling.

To close out the year, here are some things I experienced or learned in 2008 that I can share without revealing events better left in my or someone else's private life.

Hearing aids have a five-year life span. They require increasing attention and repair thereafter, and if you use two, you'll be half deaf for much of the time while waiting for one of them to be repaired. Once this year, both of my nearly ten-year old hearing aids became defective at once, making me functionally deaf and seriously impeding my ability to do my job. New ones had to await the start of 2009 because of substantial tax advantages, but help is now on the way (including Bluetooth capability!). And I'll know to budget for replacements in 2014.

Assuming that "fate" has intervened to place you into contact with someone is dangerous. Even if it's true, fate's purpose might just as easily be to force you to learn from your disagreements and your falling out with them as from your commonalities and companionship. Fate's role is best determined decades later.

True friends are timeless. Absence from them or not hearing from them have no effect on your feelings for them. If you're antsy because you haven't heard from someone, they're not your friend, but someone you're using to keep yourself emotionally occupied. They're a crutch. Make them your friend by letting them come and go – or to slightly rework the line from "Hey Jude": "let 'em out and let 'em in."

If someone involves you in a decision in which you have a stake, but not the final say, then keep your emotions out of it. If you give advice, expect it to be ignored or rejected so that you don't get your feelings hurt. Your main function is to serve as a sounding board, not a participant.

The single security line at the Denver airport is the most grotesque abomination in the history of air travel. At this monster airport, everyone goes through the same line. Any natural anxiety about travel is compounded by the sight of thousands of people ahead of you in line. When you reach the metal detectors and x-ray machines, they don't even take you on a first come, first served basis, but force you to choose between 6-8 lines, meaning you may well see people who were behind you get ahead if they choose more wisely.

If I were charged with a crime of which I was innocent, I would want a jury composed of people like those I met when called for jury duty last summer. No one wanted to be there, and everyone griped about the way we got herded around and left in the dark for long stretches. But when the time came and we almost got put on a jury, everyone was extremely conscientious and highly respectful of the court and the law.

Taking first-year Italian helped me see a lot of things from the students' perspective for the first time in twenty years. I never realized how hard it was to ignore your phone till I was sitting in class with one in my pocket. Book prices and academic bureaucracy were other experiences to which I was reintroduced. Our students are a tolerant bunch – I can't imagine professors routinely putting up with it all. And I've never been more grateful for a helpful, hardworking, and tolerant teacher: thanks Roberta!

Biggest regret: Even when you hear the words being spoken to you, there is great peril in assuming that you assign the same meaning to them as the speaker. On more than one occasion this year, I've heard stories and interpreted them in the light of similar experiences I've had. In the end it emerged that the similarities were deceptive; the other person and I were talking past each other without realizing it. We got thumped, and thumped others in the process. This is my biggest regret of the year, and if I could apologize to those others in person, I would do so.

Most grateful for: I'm happiest this year that people emerged or reappeared to challenge me to move out of the same old patterns and habits, or at least to question them. The patterns and habits were there for a reason, of course. They represented my approach to life, one I had grown comfortable with and had succeeded with. Tennyson's line, "Though much is taken, much abides," was never more apt. That I've been able to add to my comfort by selectively challenging its very premises has been the one thing I've been most grateful for this year.

Merry Christmas. Happy 2009.

Creative Self-Destruction

2008-11-29T12:43:00.007-06:00

If we're lucky, we experience periods when we bring all that has been certain and reassuring into question. Many things that have remained beyond our comfort zone suddenly seem like real possibilities. The simplest name for this openness to change is "growth." You don't get it for free, though.

One of the greatest costs will come in your relationships with those around you. They had a vested interest in you as you were. Unless they're the catalyst for your growth and are experiencing it with you, they're likely to be puzzled, offended, or even repulsed by the changes. They don't want to have to reimagine you. You're leaving them behind. It may even appear that you've come unhinged. As far as they're concerned, you might just as well show up with a Mohawk one morning as change any of the basic patterns of your life.

I think we all have aspects of ourselves that we'd be better off without. Outside intervention alone could never destroy them. There has to be an intense inner desire to become a fuller person. In essence, we decide to take on the task of destroying ourselves, not as an act of suicide but of preparing for a renaissance. As long as the behavioral changes are not physically harmful to oneself (drugs or booze, for example) or others (abuse, criminal behavior, etc.), then those of us seeing our friend move through the process would do well to stand aside, watch, and offer to help if it gets too hard to handle.

For our friend is going through an act of creative self-destruction, to play off the economic concept of Joseph Schumpeter and others. It takes a certain courage, even if born of desperation, to begin this journey. Success is highly uncertain. But when remaining stagnant is no longer an option, when either a slow fade-out or a quick flame-out is all that awaits, you've got to grab the wrecking ball when it appears and let it have a go. As Forrest's mom said, you don't know what you're going to get -- other than a chance to learn from pushing past boundaries and making mistakes, and to be more fully alive.

The cinema's greatest recent example of
creative self-destruction: Kip Dynamite

The Election: My Only Comment

2008-11-06T08:59:00.001-06:00

Hoisted

2008-10-26T22:39:00.003-05:00

A year or two ago, I borrowed a published idea from a professor who required anyone (herself included) whose cell phone rang in her class to bring a high-quality cookie for the rest of the class at the next meeting. This was a substitute for my previous draconian policy of often asking those whose phones rang to leave the class immediately, not to return until the next class. Faced with an epidemic of ringing cell phones five years ago, I had adopted the harsh policy to try to restore the quiet that had been one of my most effective tools.

In my syllabi I've included myself among those who might have to bring a cookie for the class, because I realized the way my habits had changed that one day I might well forget to turn my phone off. In the last couple of years I've recoiled in horror a few times when I discovered after a class that my phone was in my pocket and had been on for the entire period.

The other day it finally happened. I reddened, but didn't have to panic and turn off the phone quickly because it was just the text message alert and only sounded once. I shut the phone off and let the students all know they'd be getting a cookie from me. They seemed to be laughing, but I don't know for sure because I couldn't quite bring myself to look up at them, such was my embarrassment.

My conundrum was all the more profound when I recalled a student I asked to leave class five years ago when her text message alert went off. I felt bad at the time, worse in the intervening years, and downright horrible after it happened to me. If I were ever in one of those programs where you get to Step 9, I'd have to hunt her down and apologize. I had no empathy five years ago because I had no cell phone. Even when I had a cell phone I at first got so few calls on it that I still didn't understand how easy it was to make the simple mistake of assuming your phone is turned off.

My experience may demonstrate again that we're either in a place where we can empathize with those around us, or we're headed there.

The Illusory Void

2008-10-05T12:31:00.004-05:00

We often hear it described as the quest for the meaning of life. But I think we're more familiar with it as a sense of being incomplete, bored, restless, depressed, aimless, or lost, or of not knowing who we really are. Whatever we call it, we're not who we feel like we should be.

The solutions range from palliatives like ceaseless activity or conversation, surfing the Internet, watching TV, reading, exercising, or drinking a little too much, to searching for a new religion, hoping or assuming another person (usually a new or lost partner) will end all disquiet, and ultimately various forms of suicide, either slow (like drugs) or immediate.

Throughout history all searching for a cure outside the stillness of one's own mind or consciousness has proven fruitless. Those who have found a sure sense of purpose in their religious faith first learned to be utterly content with precisely who they were inside. Their religion was a bonus, not a cure. It wouldn't be of the slightest use if they weren't ready to receive its comforts. On the contrary, it would merely disguise their lurking horror at the presumed abyss within and postpone their reckoning.

Most of us will never proceed directly to the desired point. Instead we have to try and fail at all alternatives because we can't believe the answer would be as simple as looking inside ourselves and realizing that we're already perfectly complete. There is no void, but we are conditioned by everything else in our experience to feel, behave, and believe otherwise. It requires the painful corrective of seeking solace in worthless and harmful alternatives before the fortunate and brave can return home to the perfection that has always been there, but so artfully hidden.

Suicide by Court

2008-10-04T16:54:00.003-05:00

It wasn't one of my better predictions -- at least for a long time.

About thirteen years ago, on the very day Hurricane Opal blew past us here on the Gulf Coast, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of two murders in downtown Los Angeles. It mattered little that he would be found responsible for those same murders in a civil proceeding in a suburban L.A. courtroom two years later. He could roam the world free, living well on pensions and investments that couldn't be touched.

I predicted that he wouldn't live too long. I thought he would have some kind of "accident" like driving his car off a road into a tree. I pictured a man who must have been secretly overwhelmed by his own guilt and by the disparity between his public persona and his private self-image. Surely (I reasoned) he would start living wrecklessly and aimlessly, leading to some kind of early death.

He turned out to be a hardier psychopath than I had imagined. He never had the "accident" I had foreseen, but he did have repeated legal difficulties. His chosen path to self-destruction would not be speed or drugs, but the system that had failed by allowing him to escape punishment for what he had done. He continued to offer it chances to bring his private and public selves into line. Today it obliged in Las Vegas by finding him guilty of kidnapping and robbery. It's said he may receive the equivalent of a life sentence for his latest crimes.

He still has appeals and he may yet find a way to walk out of this one. If not, it looks to me that Simpson at last has discovered his route to self-destruction. Instead of feeling any pity for a 61-year-old man being led away in handcuffs perhaps never to emerge from prison again, we might realize that in a way he's getting what he wanted but lacked the physical courage to engineer. He couldn't bring himself to actively work toward his own demise, but he never minded involving as many others as it required. That is the true measure of the menace he represented, and of the relief now offered him by a life's imprisonment.

Show Me How It Would Have Been, Clarence

2008-09-22T07:15:00.001-05:00

I've been wondering how the last few years would have gone down if much greater care had been exercised in lending money and if mortgage debt had not been repackaged as a new form of investment that would be used and re-used many times as collateral in further specious transactions. Where might we be today, versus where we actually are?

Some people who timed their exits from stocks, mortgage backed securities, etc., would be far worse off. But more importantly, the economy would have experienced slower, steadier growth over the last few years because an artificial and unsustainable run-up in home prices would not have encouraged such free consumer spending and acquisition of further debt. The stock market would be a little higher than it is today, but it never would have reached the stratosphere and caused so many who bought in at the top to lose so much. There would be millions of people who never would have moved from rental to owned housing. Their credit ratings would be better and their jobs would be more secure because the economy wouldn't have oscillated so wildly between boom and bust.

This entire imaginary scenario would have been the reverse of the scene from It's a Wonderful Life: instead of Clarence the angel revealing the horrors of an alternate present, we would witness the results of a steady if unexciting period of slow growth and widespread but incremental increases in wealth.

The problem is all that would have been so boring. Without the huge risk, there never would have been the huge gains that produced so much instant gratification. When "house flipping" enters the mainstream vocabulary, you might realize everyone's gone a little giddy or mad. It gets me back to one of my favorite quotations about the source of human unhappiness, from Blaise Pascal in the 17th century: "all human troubles stem from a single cause -- the inability to sit still in a room." The slightest excitement can create what is probably at least a brief chemical dependency on such a state and then withdrawal symptoms unless more and greater excitement is immediately forthcoming.

In contrast to how Clarence's vision ended, we wouldn't return from such a divinely-enabled reverie to the beauty of the actual present, but rather to a mad dash to socialize the financial services sector (or at least the risky portion of their business), calls to trust the executive branch with nearly a trillion dollars without the slightest accountability, and no idea how to rework our system so this doesn't happen again. It's as if George Bailey really did run off with the bank's money, his friends came by with more money to help after the bank examiners discovered the loss, and he kept all the donations anyway. Then he expects to return to the bank the same as always. Wouldn't it be time to think about switching banks, or at least asking George to find another job?

Stand and Deliver

2008-09-21T17:37:00.006-05:00

If the rest of the country -- and maybe the world -- is anything like me, they're moving from a stunned silence to a more overt anger as they realize what's about to happen over the next few days.

From an American system avowedly hostile to anything it considers socialism is coming a plan to nationalize nearly a trillion dollars worth of assets, in effect transferring wealth from all of us to a smaller number of us who made catastrophic, bizarre, and easily foreseen investment blunders. In the great mortgage crisis, money was lent hundreds of thousands of times to people who didn't have the ability to pay it back unless the real estate market continued to climb to outrageous heights. In effect, everyone's money was put on the same roulette number, and it didn't come up. You'd think you could have seen that one coming.

I can believe that if something isn't done, credit will all but evaporate and the economy we have come to know will collapse. I can also believe that these mortgages must be nationalized. What I can't believe is that once again we're going to borrow money (i.e., add to the federal debt and postpone indefinitely a final reckoning) in order to evade paying for our own mistakes with our own taxes, and that we're not going to require anything substantial in exchange for saving all these companies. At the very least, for a trillion dollars we should be able to get more oversight of the "financial services sector" or an equity stake in these firms in exchange for cleansing their balance sheets of all their bad debts.

I'm not one of those who think every single person who got into a bad mortgage needs to be helped out. If there's no risk, there's no reason to be careful. Many who agreed to these mortgages never stopped to think that they were gambling their future on a spin of the roulette wheel, betting on the increasingly unlikely idea that home prices would rise indefinitely.

Others are being trounced more or less innocently, since they had no intention of gambling on the real estate market, but just wanted a place to live, got a conventional mortgage, and followed all the rules. Now if they have to move because of a job transfer, they may have to sell their house at a loss and come up with cash to get out of the mortgage. Or maybe they want to borrow in order to tap the down payment they originally put into the house, but they can't because the house isn't worth as much as the mortgage on it. These are the people who should feel angriest of all. Not only will they have to share in the increased national debt along with the rest of us in order to take all the bad mortgages off the books of financial firms, they will also bear a huge personal cost for having bought a house at the worst possible time even though procedurally they did everything right.

In a different century and in a smaller community, we'd be gathering the pitchforks and torches and heading out together to enact a crude but efficient justice on the few who have betrayed the rest of us so badly. In our own time and complex economy, instead we borrow more money and hand it over immediately to these same people. But frustration's going to have to find an outlet, and that right soon.

If only...

What We Bought Yesterday

2008-09-18T06:47:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I became a part owner of AIG. From what I understand, it's a large insurance conglomerate, but I have to admit no one gave me many details before they included me among the new owners. For without consulting us, yesterday the Federal Reserve bought most of AIG while acting on behalf of me and everyone else in the United States. AIG was on the verge of collapsing and taking large segments of the world financial services market with it.

It seems to me that if we're going to be required to step in and buy failing businesses whose collapse would lead to financial chaos and depression, we have the right to expect far closer scrutiny of any such businesses in order to make sure they don't fail in the first place. This scrutiny comes in the form of regulations that companies resist because they cut profits. Over the past thirty years deregulation has come for some industries all at once, and for others in bits and pieces as lobbyists pushed for incremental changes that allowed for expansion and increased risk taking.

The cumulative result is the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe. Millions were suckered into homes they couldn't afford to finance. They not only bought unserviceable debt; they also bought into the American Dream of home ownership as a wealth-generating machine. Imagine if someone had were fooled into thinking that another of their basic needs, such as food, would be better met if they owned and operated a restaurant. We'd all laugh. But we don't laugh now because our culture has elevated home ownership to a place in our values beyond all reason.

It's cheaper to own a car than rent or lease one, so I buy it. And for many necessities there's no real rental market, so I have to buy (e.g., clothing outside of formal wear and costumes). As for housing, it may be cheaper to buy shelter than to rent it under a few limited circumstances (and if you have large reserves of assets), but more often it's not. A substantial rental market exists to fill this gap, but it's not as large or cheap as it might be because our culture and its marketing tell us we're incomplete if we don't own a house. The mania for home ownership led millions of renters to desire a deed to a piece of property, and the lack of regulation allowed financiers to offer these renters loans that could never be paid back. Like in a classic pyramid scheme, those who got out first walked away with the profits from the transactions, and the rest of us -- the taxpayers and investors like myself who watched passively -- now have to step in and buy up the losers who are deemed too big to fail.

The results lie before us. Stock markets have retreated and will require years to reach their previous highs. Credit will get even tighter, leading to problems throughout an economy that requires credit like an engine needs oil. Re-regulation will be on the agenda, as the new owners of giants like AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac (i.e., us) ponder how to sell the things and avoid having ever to buy them again.

In a way, it's exciting to live through such times and experience first hand the wildly oscillating emotions. If it gets much worse, it may become like re-living the fall of 1929. What historian wouldn't value the chance to witness great things close up? But the price for such a view will be hideous, and I'd rather pass. I don't know if the world is going to let me though.

Charming

2008-09-07T11:05:00.008-05:00

Unless you're coulrophobic. (If you are, better not watch...)

The singer is Ingrid Michaelson. The song is "The Way I Am."

(Click here if the embedded video player above says the video is no longer available.)

Goethiness

2008-08-31T11:42:00.006-05:00

In the film "Almost Famous," the character played by Frances McDormand quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as follows: "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." I liked it, because it's the kind of thing that can inspire one to take chances necessary to improve or start fresh. Searching for the quotation in the original German proved fruitless, since I couldn't find any quotations from Goethe using my translations for the individual words. I ultimately began looking for it in English, hoping that the name of the work in which it appeared would be cited. Then I would renew my search in German.

Mighty forces brought him here

I quickly discovered not only that Goethe had not written it, but that it was probably a derivation from something by a far lesser known Canadian author. Why did the words lose some of their power for me then? I think it's because if Goethe had uttered and believed them (as a man who had clearly lived according to the maxim), they would have been eternally true and universally applicable. But if he didn't say them, doubt would seep in, and doubt is absolutely antithetical to the spirit of the quotation. You might just as well not have heard it to begin with or have read and internalized one that said "Take no chances. They never pay off. Don't try to be anything better than average."

Since the quotation can be applied to Goethe's life, perhaps there's a way of salvaging it after all. In the last 300 years there probably hasn't been a human being (we know of) who's lived more fully than Goethe did. He risked his life, health, and reputation many times over in order to experience the world as he believed best or most advantageous. We all have to decide for ourselves if leaving behind literature and science as he did means that such a life was more worthwhile than anyone else's. But it's impossible to read him, even just little snippets or quotations, without realizing he mastered life better than anyone. And could that have possibly have happened if he hadn't broken with his father's dreams for him, his own expectations for his life when he was young, and the demands of the world around him? That is, if he hadn't trusted implicitly that after acting in a way true to himself mighty forces would provide material, philosophical, or spiritual support?

The Ten Latest

2008-08-31T10:53:00.005-05:00

Ten more things I think I've learned by now:

True enough, things sometimes end up being different from what they seemed. Often this is because people unintentionally misrepresent themselves. Then new information, or new weight given to old information, appears to make such people change and shifts your relationship with them. It pays to be tolerant of this constantly recurring human foible and not to mistake it for malice or treachery.
Installing beta programs on your computer isn't a good idea. There's a reason the designer wants you to serve as a guinea pig: to see how loudly poorly tested features and tweaks will make you squeal. Wait until the others have squealed and it's been properly fixed.
People are rarely interested in the totality of another human being. Something, or some things, might at first interest, fascinate, absorb, or attract. Almost always hidden aspects will later counterbalance the first features that were observed and admired. Most relationships and friendships must and should therefore remain superficial. Rarely will one emerge that can survive the plunge into both parties' depths.
If you have a mustache, or a beard with a mustache component, it will smell like butter for hours after you've eaten corn on the cob unless you wash it with soapy water.
If you learn how to keep the muscles of your lower back fully relaxed at all times (especially when sitting, lifting, or bending over), you'll avoid a lot of down time from excruciating spasms.
Many people won't benefit from a second chance for the same reason they didn't benefit from the first one. Giving second chances is a necessary part of living with others, but expect nothing and be pleasantly surprised if the outcome differs from the first time. Be wary of third chances. Don't give fourth chances.
Always look backward every few seconds when moving down an unfamiliar path. The reverse perspective may well prove invaluable sooner than you think.
Very little in politics is to be taken seriously. The part that is actually important is dangerous to ignore. Learn the difference and live accordingly.
Tipping outrageously high feels great.
Never assume you know what another human being is thinking or what is motivating him or her. Just don't.

Torn

2008-08-22T16:37:00.013-05:00

I've always liked Boeing. For years I've derived a strange pleasure from its victories over Airbus, agreed with Boeing that its new 787 "Dreamliner" was a much better bet on the future than the behemoth Airbus A380, and cringed when I heard that one or another airline placed an order for the A380. Honestly, who would want to queue up, board, and fly on a plane with 500 other people? And didn't Europe need to learn a lesson about the folly of subsidizing, designing, and producing an airplane by international agreement among Airbus's host nations rather than relying on marketing necessities, engineering dictates, and passenger preferences?

Thanks...but no thanks.
I think I'll wait for a smaller one.

Now I find myself in an odd spot. Boeing is competing with a consortium led by Northrup Grumman and EADS (the parent company of Airbus) for a contract to build airborne refueling planes. If the Northrup Grumman-EADS group wins, they will assemble the tankers in my hometown of Mobile. More important than the over 1,000 new jobs involved would be the change in mentality that might emerge in (and about) Mobile.

To be sure, they also need the work in Everett, Washington (and Wichita, Kansas, and elsewhere). But these places' reputations in aviation are already made, and their workforces are diverse and well-educated. For us, it would not just be more work, but a leg up into a different world. And many more people locally would begin to view their lives as connected to the entire globe and not merely to whatever's passing in front of their noses at any moment.

For me personally it might be more advantageous if the tanker weren't to be built here. I've chosen to rent my housing rather than to purchase it in cooperation with a bank. My financial interests should dictate that I favor nothing that might increase competition for rental units and thereby drive up my housing costs. A vast aircraft assembly complex would likely do just that. Already there are construction engineers for the enormous new ThyssenKrupp steel mill living in my apartment complex. If ThyseenKrupp had chosen Louisiana over Alabama for their steel mill, these apartments might be empty and the upward pressure on my rent lessened.

No matter. I'd still much rather see the aircraft assembled here. On some recent flights in and out of Mobile I could already tell that the new steel mill and the Northrup Grumman-EADS partnership were bringing in many new passengers -- which will mean more direct flight opportunities and an increased international presence here. Furthermore, working at a tax-supported institution leads me to see great benefits in anything that will improve our local and state economies, whose upswings lead directly to increased appropriations for our schools and universities. And I'd also like to see more of our students have the opportunity to work for international companies at home upon graduation.

The Northrup Grumman KC-45A
Would It Make a Small Southern City?

Still, I do like Boeing. Sure, it's triumphed over (destroyed) all domestic competition in building large commercial airliners. And it's doing all right in many ventures unrelated to building aircraft. But because of a long history of rooting for their success, it pains me to see them lose a contract, any contract, even the one for the tanker. If it works out that way, I hope it's only because the competing aircraft is much better. Given Boeing's long history supplying the Air Force and its immense political clout, I can imagine it losing only if a competitor offered a truly outstanding product. While we all await the outcome of the endless tanker procurement process, perhaps uniquely among everyone watching closely I'm going to be pleased no matter what, but also sad no matter what.

The Boeing KC-767
To those who have, shall more be given?

Rain with a Name

2008-08-20T18:25:00.011-05:00

Look out, everyone. Fay may be in the area over the weekend! Our local newspaper knew it could sell more copies today by shouting as much near the top of its front page:

If if has a name,
it must be coming after you

Right now it's known as Tropical Storm Fay and deserves a little respect -- if you're in Florida. By the time it gets close to us in Alabama -- if the current prediction is even correct -- it will be what is normally called a "low pressure system," i.e., a lot of rain. But because it has a name, or had a name, it will generate more interest -- and fear.

I've often wondered how much more calm and composed we might be during hurricane watches and warnings if we gave every low pressure system a name. In Europe the weather services actually do give names to most low (and high) pressure systems. If "Erika" or "Thomas" are said to be on the march in your direction, it's hard to get too excited when that usually means a little rain and wind.

Killer cold front passing through:
hold on in Kiev

The fear generated by new named storms is mostly a residue of the post-traumatic stress disorder experienced following previous hurricanes. Dealing with Frederic, Ivan, or Katrina has led us all to be wary of anything with a name. But not everything with a name is dangerous, and not every newspaper telling us about approaching rain merits our attention.

Postscript (Post-Fay):

A kind reader sent the photo below under the title "first picture of wind damage by Fay in Mobile." I can't vouch for the photo's authenticity, but I got a big laugh.

The Fallacy of Sharing

2008-08-14T07:10:00.006-05:00

Sharing with others is a fundamental human need. It goes beyond offering our money or our time. Sometimes you also have to share secrets and feelings. The need is well illustrated by the prevalence of criminal confessions: the justice system would collapse immediately if many suspects didn't volunteer their culpability to officers eager to record every word while posing as sympathetic and interested comrades in a joint search for truth and peace of mind.

In more routine encounters, especially with those with whom a future romantic relationship cannot totally be excluded, there's also a lurking trap in sharing. If we reveal deep thoughts, past blunders, foibles, secrets, fears, and feelings, the illusion of a long-term or continuing connection may quickly be created for one or both of the parties. The illusion builds hopes and expectations that, if dashed, can leave one feeling worse than ever.

Encounters in which we open up often come unexpectedly. We may begin talking with someone and risking progressively more daring disclosures precisely because our partner is new to us and we expect him or her to disappear shortly. It's the "strangers on a train" phenomenon. You can disclose just about anything to random new friends since they don't know you, they don't know others who know you, and therefore they can't hurt you by blabbing.

The depth of communication with such a new partner is sudden, surprising, and intoxicating, because it provides the unfamiliar feeling that we're totally known and understood. We've been momentarily expanded into something better than we usually are. It's then easy to want or assume the connection will continue and perhaps become more profound. Because it feels so good, we're easily tempted into thinking it must last.

I've recently seen a couple of good cinematic explorations of this fallacy. In "Once," a struggling musician meets a woman on the streets of Dublin who appreciates his music, tells him so in a forward way, and then begins talking about other things with him. Later they're alone and sharing more about their lives with each other. As the woman gets up to return to her life's chores, the musician can't stand the thought of the connection's being broken. He suggests she spend the night. She's shocked and a little angry, brusquely refuses, and leaves immediately. She hadn't needed the connection as much as he had and never assumed it would move beyond talk. Crestfallen, the musician must spend the rest of the film re-establishing the original level of trust between them and adjusting to having her as a collaborator and friend only.

In an early scene of "Dan in Real Life" (I love that title), the main character is browsing in a place that reflects his tastes: an independent book store. He can safely assume that most people who enter the store share his values. In walks a charming, slightly scatterbrained woman with a French accent, and he does what it takes to begin talking to her. They move to a nearby place to sit down, and they continue to talk. Dan opens up to her about the loss of his wife and other aspects of his life he hasn't been able to share with anyone. Naturally, he's floored a few minutes later when he finds she's already in a relationship and is reluctant to continue the sharing of such details beyond the initial encounter.

At different times, I've found myself at both ends and in the middle of this fallacy. That is, I've been the one who desperately wanted to continue building the connection, the one one wanted it to go no further, and one who joined with the partner in hoping that it could endure despite substantial practical barriers. And it's decidedly unpleasant no matter what.

While such emotional intimacy is necessary for a strong and lasting relationship, it isn't sufficient by itself. Many disappointing romantic relationships and marriages must have been built on the illusory foundation of a brief period of intense sharing. Sooner or later the secrets and the feelings are exhausted, and there you are again. If you don't have a lot more in common than a history of mutual self-disclosure, what basis is there for a shared approach to the rest of your lives?

If I had any answers to the fallacy of sharing, I'd write a book about them. I can only suggest that we move through such encounters in greater awareness of their power. It may be better to always purposely hold something back, to leave yourself wanting to say more and the other sensing that there is more to be shared. That way we get most of what we wanted from the openness (that sense of being known and understood) without creating for ourselves or the other the mistaken appearance that our lives have been fundamentally altered, for the better and forever.

Is It Always What You Don't Have?

2008-08-12T14:17:00.010-05:00

While winding along the back roads of the Southeast yesterday on my way home to Mobile, I stopped in Warm Springs, Georgia. For years I'd driven by signs on I-85 pointing to the Little White House of Franklin Roosevelt, but didn't want to take the time to stop. I was glad I finally did. There's a small but well-done museum with hundreds of interesting artifacts both of FDR's presidency and of his struggle with polio.

You're told that the cabin is in the same shape as the day he died (April 12, 1945). If so, the simplicity is affecting. For example, this wealthy and powerful man had the smallest and simplest of bedrooms and bathrooms. I could only think that he must have needed a place to get away from the trappings of wealth and power. If he'd been poor, his vacations might have been to a fancier place whose bathrooms gleamed with porcelain and gold fixtures. Instead he sought functionality alone.

The Presidential bathroom at Warm Springs,
just off the bedroom with its single twin-sized bed

Are we all this way? Do we automatically tire of what we have and unthinkingly seek what we don't possess, even if it means (temporary) renunciation of large parts of our lives?

Successive Approximations and Irreversibility

2008-08-07T07:19:00.004-05:00

Each year in my eye doctor's office, there always comes a stressful moment. He tells me to look through a huge contraption with interchangeable lenses. He flips the lenses rapidly and asks me which of the last two lenses offers the clearest view of the letters on the wall. There are always a few comparisons that offer a false choice: both are kind of bad, but in different ways. I can't easily choose. It feels like I'm failing the test, and I can get frustrated. The optometrist is used to this, however, and tells me it's all right to just choose one.

That the optometrical profession should have settled on such a method makes sense. Many times we end up proceeding down a path toward a single destination by successively comparing two alternatives at a time. We may struggle in deciding which of two is better, but if we make a choice and move ahead, we get closer to where we believe we need to be. Ideally, each decision would be irreversible, for as research into human choice has demonstrated, when we have the option to take back decisions, we're often unhappy with our choices. We'll never stop the comparison until we have to.

The key to happiness with decisions may therefore not only be to feel one has chosen the best option given all the available information, but to also craft a set of circumstances in which the decision can never be revisited. Like the commanders of Viking raiding parties who supposedly burned their boats upon arrival, we can only move forward in our minds and hearts once the way back is impossible.

The Power in Forgetting

2008-08-02T10:26:00.007-05:00

Historians earn a living by helping others not to forget their past. We're motivated by the belief that we must all be aware of how the past has shaped our present and might guide us into the future. In short, studying history can provide more meaning and a sense that we're leading richer lives. And whatever else it might also be, the meaning of life is in part about never stopping the search for the meaning of life.

There's a paradox, though. Immersing oneself in the past can often be self-defeating -- if it's obsessive and involuntary. Meaning is destroyed rather than created. For instance, if you have to carry on a feud or hatred that's been inherited, or if your conduct in the present is guided by a belief that you must live up to the expectations of yourself or anyone else in the past, you're not free. You're pretty much guaranteed to be miserable.

As individuals, historians -- like everyone else -- must be ready to forget huge parts of our past or at least to compartmentalize them as experiences removed from our present lives. You can't live a very free or happy life if you're shackled within a private Groundhog Day, endlessly replaying things you'd be better off simply letting go of.

To remember is human, to forget divine?

Navigating

2008-07-31T10:01:00.009-05:00

It wouldn't surprise anyone who knew me well that things often interest me as guides or metaphors for the largest issues of life. Yesterday as I had my first experience navigating cross country entirely on back roads, the comparisons became more obvious between what I was seeing and feeling as I made my way forward and an approach to life in general.

I decided some days ago to conduct as much of my trip as possible while avoiding Interstates. It requires some doing, because GPS navigation devices are prejudiced toward the fastest route. My particular device also offers the option of the "shortest" route, but shortest can sometimes mean bizarre, nonsensical, or dangerous. It may be shorter to proceed through alleys and shopping centers, but it makes little sense.

The beginning of a long trip, with U-turns expected...

Thus I had to scope out my precise route in advance and tell the GPS exactly how I wanted to do it. The result was one of the most pleasant driving days of my life. I left my previous destination in North Carolina early in the morning, headed toward Maryland. For much of the way I was on roads I could have navigated using traditional maps. But to avoid the Richmond metropolitan area, I had to use the most interesting, but also narrowest and windiest country lanes in Virginia. They took me through the edge of the horse farm country. Without the GPS (and even if someone had been in the seat beside me trying to read a map), the route would have been nearly impossible. Too many times I was told to take a road that had no signs on it at all. Because the GPS map clearly indicated it was the correct road, I always obeyed with confidence. Instead of feeling exhausted by the travel as happens on Interstate highways, I was energized. I knew something new and interesting was likely to appear at every moment. I can't ever imagine traveling mostly on Interstates again. Since the route was shorter and the speeds slower, my gas mileage was noticeably better. And all it cost was about 20% more time.

The comparison to facing larger issues of life came from certain moments when what I saw outside did not quite match up with what the GPS device displayed or told me verbally. I had to choose quickly between two or three options. There were no hard and fast rules, and I had to trust my intuition. Most of the time it worked, but sometimes I had to make a U-turn.

Whatever guide or philosophy of life we normally employ works most of the time, or else wouldn't employ it. But it can't take into account the infinite variety of experiences, people, and especially perspectives that we're likely to encounter. In these situations we have to respond similarly to the driver whose GPS isn't matching well with what he or she sees. We act, we trust our intuition, and if we're wrong, we adjust or make a U-turn.

We can only hope that the need for the U-turn becomes obvious soon enough, so that we don't find ourselves struggling to return to a place it's no longer so easy to find. This isn't likely to be the case navigating on actual roads, but in the rest of our lives we can never quite return to the same place after we discover we've misnavigated. We can only hope -- but never predict -- that the way forward after finishing the U-turn will be as peaceful, enlightening, and meaningful as it would have been had we never been detoured.

Reminders of Summer

2008-07-27T09:36:00.012-05:00

My only real vacation all summer has commenced. I've uploaded a few photos now; there will be more when I can as I move up the road.

The photos will stay here in this spot even if adding more content to the blog pushes this entry down the screen. I'll try to change the image in the window each time I update.

Reminders of Summer 2008

Last update: Monday, August 11, 2008, 10:40 pm CDT

Bewildered

2008-07-25T19:35:00.007-05:00

If anyone can provide a compelling explanation for either or both of the videos below, I'll treat you to lunch or (if you're too far away) to a prize of equal value.

Both are among my favorites. I've long admired "The Lucky One" for its ability to cheer me up. It's the first song I turn to if I want to feel a little better. The lyrics portray a man who understands that life is taken far more seriously than it was intended to be. As for "Street Spirit," it's one of many I like just because of the sound. The lyrics are allegedly chilling and soul-destroying, but I don't pay them too much attention. "Street Spirit" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, as long as I don't listen too closely.

In the video for "The Lucky One," is the guy actually there or is he some kind of memory or spirit? Or is it Alison who's not really there? Is the guy fascinated by love while being above it all? Do he and Alison actually see each other, or is it meant to be some kind of allegory?

When I watch "Street Spirit" I can't decide if they're getting too cute with the super slow motion, or if they didn't really land on something profound. The women who dance in ballet-like movements are exquisite: I could watch them for hours. When the band members jump or run, however, it looks like it's solely to give them some screen time. The dog, the horse, and the bleeding man all merit some kind of explanation -- or is it simply more random stuff from the mid 90s designed to jar viewers and express a fuzzy alienation?

Please post anonymously or e-mail if you're reluctant to share your opinion openly. There aren't any wrong answers, because there may not be any real answers at all.

Alison Krauss and Union Station, "The Lucky One"

Radiohead, "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"

Sensible Impudence

2008-07-23T06:35:00.004-05:00

Jane Austen's Emma decided that "silly things cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way." Martin Luther put it slightly differently when he advised a colleague to "be a sinner and sin boldly." Life has a way of rearranging itself to suit those who have decided to behave unconventionally, provided they do so with confidence and have not spent their lives flouting every single norm thrust upon them.

There's nothing new -- absolutely nothing -- to be learned from following rules. There may be safety and comfort, but the world won't get to anyplace it hasn't already been. Rules are there only to prevent deviance and experimentation; they're either for the good of a group and its current leaders or they're designed to preserve or enhance physical safety. To create new knowledge, someone must not only move away from the rules, but do so with the appearance of calm composure, of utter belief in himself or herself and in disdain of any conceivable consequences.

Both Austen and Luther sinned boldly against some of the conventions of their eras. They had realized, through experience or intuition, the value in smirking as one moved away in a self-chosen direction. Their success serves as both an inspiration and a challenge.

Mi chiamo Daniele

2008-07-22T06:58:00.007-05:00

My students would be amused to learn that I've begun to see a few things from their perspective. And I don't just mean through an act of empathy or imagination. A few weeks ago I filled out an application to be admitted to the University of South Alabama, my employer and scholarly home for the past seventeen years.

The application itself wasn't especially onerous. Because the University had already asked for all my transcripts when they hired me, they were willing to do without new ones. I paid the $35 application fee and waited to see what would happen. A few days later my interface to the University records system (known as PAWS) changed: someone had added a section that only students normally see in addition to the section for faculty I already had. My faculty ID number had become my student number. I was in.

I began receiving official mail and promotional flyers. I know it will never stop now, and it was something I thought about before applying: how much advertising am I going to be sifting through for years because of this? The formal letter of admission contained not only congratulations that I was now an "unclassified" undergraduate (meaning not seeking a degree), but also the news that I had been given yet another University email account. I may find that one hard to check: I know many of my students have the same problem.

My purpose is to enroll in our new Italian class. Twice in the last decade I put in many, many hours trying to teach myself the language, primarily because I wanted to return to Italy and be more functional than I was 25 years ago on my sole trip there. Italian may also one day have a research significance for me. Each time I tried to self-teach, I amassed a vocabulary of many hundreds of words and began to master the rudiments of the grammar, but then stopped because I needed more structure and, I must admit, tests.

I always said I would enroll in Italian if it were ever offered, and now our Foreign Languages and Literatures Department has included Italian in its somewhat misnamed self-instructional program (there's actually a native speaker to guide the class through drills, and a professor from another university administers the final exam). The program also includes Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, modern Greek, and Arabic. It would be far better for me and all the other students if the languages could be taught by faculty in a more normal classroom setting, as is done for classical Greek, French, German, Latin, Russian, and Spanish. We'd learn better. But if the University needs to offer a specific language for which we don't have faculty members, the self-instructional program seems an excellent compromise.

The textbook purchases were a bit of shock, although not a surprise. I knew how much many modern textbooks cost, but since I had never faced the checkout counter myself, it had all been so abstract. The Foreign Languages Department isn't deliberately choosing expensive books and would prefer less costly ones. They don't have the advantage we in the discipline of history have of being able to assign a lot of books that are not designed solely for the academic market and are therefore far cheaper. Anyway, they're very nice Italian textbooks, and I was happy to pay for them if it will help me learn Italian more quickly.

The real test will come during the fall semester itself. Like so many of my students with day jobs, I will have to discipline myself to study and practice even when I'd rather not or when I feel the weight of other obligations. It might make me more sympathetic to our students' plights, but it could also toughen me up so much that I begin to say "if I can do it, so can you." I'm looking forward to finding out which. And to my student ID and student discounts at nearby establishments....

The Upside of Bitterness

2008-07-20T06:58:00.008-05:00

Well, no, there's not actually a direct advantage to being bitter. Still I sometimes think there's a huge indirect payoff if you can banish bitterness quickly and properly. Dispensing with an incipient grudge offers a real chance for a deeper sense of personal peace and new or more meaningful relationships. Since you have to have a grudge first before you can get rid of it, we may really be in the debt of many of those who do us wrong.

Of course there are plenty of truly unforgivable things, actions usually punished by criminal law. Short of those, we all have what we think are legitimate reasons to hold grudges or nurse grievances. But if we stop to ponder the true first cause of the wrong done to us, maybe we can begin to see a way past the grudge. For acting from a mix of fears, neuroses, and anxieties (at the least), we hardly know ourselves, much less how to present a true and kind version of our personality to others. The deception involved will have to come out sooner or later. When it does, there are going to be big problems and resentments with people we'd asked to trust us.

These false faces have been well explained by Don Miguel Ruiz in The Mastery of Love. As children we respond to parental admonishments in fear and bewilderment, and we thereby learn how to be false to our true selves in order to please adults. That means we then have two personalities, a public false one and a hidden true one (often hidden from ourselves, too). Later, when we meet someone new, that person forms an image of us that he or she needs in order to feel good about knowing us. That means there are now three versions of us. Since the other person also has three, there are a total of six personalities interacting anytime two people are trying to communicate, relate, share, cooperate, or love. Heartache has to come.

When it does, there will be the initial bitterness. It probably shouldn't be repressed, because it's what you're actually feeling. Part of the problem all along has been not knowing or avoiding who you really are. But then if you begin to think about it, you realize how corrupting that bitterness is. It's a response to the falseness of another, much of which that person had no awareness of. If you obsess about being wronged, fantasize revenge, or imagine the person suffering for his or her misdeeds toward you, you're putting not just your recovery on hold, but your whole life. Once you reach a certain age, you know how little of that you really have. You can more easily resolve that you won't waste a minute more hating anyone, because such sulking removes you from an awareness of what's happening around you as you remain stuck in the version of the past constantly replaying in your mind.

It's not very complicated to move on, just difficult. It involves silently but expressly wishing the other person the best and imagining him or her actively benefiting in a meaningful and long-term way from the interactions that were the source of the bitterness. You don't do this in order to help the other person, but solely in your self-interest. You do have to really mean it, though, and it may take a lot of repetition before it sinks in.

Then come the benefits. The inertia by which life is normally ruled has been derailed. You're forced to look at everyone and everything in a new way, at least for a while. You believe you understand the frailty at the core of our upbringing and existence, and you move closer to others. As you draw nearer, you have a chance to establish new and more meaningful relationships. Soon you may even be thankful for the problem that led to the bitterness and wouldn't trade it for anything.

Taking this approach has nothing to do with what could be called instrumentalizing the perpetrator. You don't "forgive and forget" so that you can remain close to the person who wronged you or so that you can get close again. You may never see them again, and that may be best for all parties. If you do meet again or even live with them, resolving not to bear a grudge may make it possible to relate to the person properly and may pay off, but that would be a feeble reason for working so hard to overcome a grudge. If it's the only reason, then you've done nothing more than act from fear and weakness, thinking you can't live without that person in his or her old, fearful, anxiety-ridden manifestation.

So, if I force myself I can see people I've been tempted to hate laughing, having fun, and enjoying a life that was made better because I was part of it. The first time I try it's an excruciating exercise, but it gets easier with each repetition. Soon I don't have to do it anymore. I'm too busy with all the other things and people that have appeared before me like magic because I became ready to notice them.

A Hierarchy of Treasures

2008-07-18T17:26:00.011-05:00

Primo Levi spoke of a hierarchy of problems that can obscure all our lesser woes behind the one we currently consider our sole oppressive sorrow. I think there's a helpful analogy to his idea: a hierarchy of treasures, each one of which we would elect to keep over anything below it if we were forced to make a choice between the two.

This thought experiment can be taken to ghoulish extremes, as in William Styron's Sophie's Choice, which presents a choice that cannot reasonably be made without destroying the chooser. I would stop well short of asking myself which relatives I would trade for the other.

Nonetheless I've found it comforting in a time of troubles induced by a loss to ask myself: what would you give up that you still have in order to have back what you've lost? If I would trade mere money, I can move on up the ladder. Then if I find I wouldn't trade, say, the recognition and status that have come from years of work, I can stop at that point and ask myself if what I thought I wanted but couldn't have was in reality more about a desire to be validated outwardly than anything else. Once you've found the precise spot where you will no longer trade, you're learning something profound. Comparing the qualities of that which has been lost and that which one still has (but wouldn't trade) can pierce the thick mental fog created by our innate desire never to lose anything.

This experiment may yield far from all you need to know, but it's given a powerful jump start to a brain which had refused to budge.

Comfort, Not Guide

2008-07-15T05:43:00.016-05:00

We often pitch history and literature to our students as ways to inform, prescribe, and warn about human conduct. Yet insights one might gain from studying the past mean little if the student isn't able to keep its perspectives in mind at all times. Life does not appear to allow us to be sufficiently cautious, though.

I've been struggling with the most bizarre experience of treachery and deceit of my entire life. The details aren't relevant to the point I want to work out here, so no one need either look for the particulars or fear they will ever appear here. My material losses were nil -- instead it's all about the psychological and emotional cost of having trusted someone's word only to be suddenly and brutally deceived.

Here's where history and literature (and film) come in. In all my studies of twentieth-century Europe I've read about people lying, stealing, cheating, hurting, maiming, murdering, dismembering, and plundering. In my classes on World War II and the Holocaust this term, along with the students I've read about and seen the most horrendous acts of physical cruelty and desecration. And in both history and literature I've encountered people being false, mercurial, indecisive, panicky, weak, and fiendish. But when the time came to be sure that I had applied the lessons of the academy to a real-life situation, I was still blindsided.

I'm wondering: maybe history and literature offer us less a guide for our future conduct than a bit of comfort after the fact. We can't live without trusting others; it's a precondition for our essential nature as social creatures. Most of the time we're right to trust. But when it doesn't work out, the trauma is so immediate, confusing, and absorbing that we all too quickly overlook the thousands of times our trust has actually been repaid. So, despite having absorbed hundreds of historical and literary examples, I and anyone else who count on the past as a guide are going to face disappointment or worse occasionally if we choose to participate fully in our lives by including others who may let us down, trick us, or take advantage of us. At such times we can retreat mentally to the world of books and films, seek solace in portrayals of those who fail others, and try to find hints to the moment we ourselves went wrong in the (perhaps vain) hope that we won't allow something so painful to happen again.

Right now, I feel like Rhett at the end of that movie. I tried and tried and put myself all out there, and got a boot in the face. There's nothing to do but walk away into a fog I hope will soon appear, obscuring my departure as I wander off into a new life I didn't think I was ever going to have to create. My greatest challenge, with which history and literature may once again help, is to visualize myself being fully able to be open again to someone who may vanish from one moment to the next. To this end I'll be on the lookout for appropriate books and movies and will scrutinize them perhaps more than their creators intended for clues about my mistakes. I know I will recover since I've done it before. And while I've found that age and experience alone are never the shield against misfortune that you hope, they can be of great help in allowing oneself to believe life will be right again.

Off I go.

Pontificating

2008-07-12T09:05:00.008-05:00

"Embarrassing pontifications" was the verdict once rendered by the reader of an article I had submitted for publication. I later came to learn who the reviewer was, and he turned out to be a lot friendlier than the harsh words of criticism in his anonymous review. He had a point about what I was writing. As a text proposed for a specialized journal, my article didn't need to be making grand statements in the opening paragraph about the course of 20th-century history. My desire to do so reflected a basic need on my part, I think, to share insights that have recently come to my attention, even though everyone else may have known about these insights forever.

This blog, if it's good for nothing else, is a way to allow me to pontificate on what many might consider painfully obvious. But if I just learned something, or discovered how to articulate it for the first time, then repeating it here is a way to help me reinforce the lesson. Besides, I think anyone who would regard such statements as embarrassing is likely to see blogging itself as the ultimate act of self-degradation....

It seems to me that once primary needs for safety, water, food, shelter, and clothing have been addressed, one of the first new needs to emerge is overcoming our default state of loneliness. This loneliness stems from the richness of our sense experiences and our brain's capacity to extract meaning from them. We desire to fully share what we are experiencing on all levels: intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical, and psychological.

We can only share with another person or persons. We will eagerly await their responses to our experiences and impressions. Sharing requires that we truly listen when the other parties relate their experiences to us in return. This exchange is best called intimacy, a term that shouldn't be cheapened by using it solely to refer to physical gestures of affection and desire.

Such intimacy is nearly impossible for most of us, most of the time. It requires finding someone who will listen not only to our routine, funny, or insightful remarks. They must also listen, from time to time, to the worst we have to offer, and we have to be sure they won't run away when they hear it. The human tendency to extrapolate rashly and instantly would, for instance, lead most of us who heard a friend admit to kleptomania to put our hands on our wallets and find the closest exit. We're afraid we'll be the next victim, even if the odds are low that someone who's admitting a difficulty to us would perpetrate it on us.

If you can't share your good side and ennobling experiences along with most of your bad side, too, you're always going to feel alone. Even -- and especially -- if there are others around. Sartre said "Hell is other people," and however else he might have meant the phrase, it has an important application to the question of loneliness and lack of intimacy. When you have something you simply must share, there's nothing worse than being trapped with other people with whom you cannot share it. That's why there are many, many lonely married people: just as many, I would wager, as there are lonely single people. At first physical togetherness can mask any failure to communicate profoundly, but then it begins to prevent one from finding others with whom one can truly communicate. The fortunate have been careful enough to find a partner with whom they can communicate richly and constantly, and hell for them would be to be alone again. Others among the coupled, however -- those who need what they have not yet found -- are trapped and stymied in their search to meet their most fundamental non-physical need, not to live a life unexamined and unshared.

They would be better off alone, since their loneliness would not be deadened or anesthetized by the social whirl and obligations that accompany family life. Unmasked, the need would be more obvious, the cause of the pain more easily localized, the solution more apparent. Life's greatest challenge (and hence its greatest potential reward) may lie in transforming oneself into a person capable of truly communicating with others, and anything getting in the way will be a source of sorrow.

Rupert's Life, 1997(?)-2008

2008-06-26T07:08:00.006-05:00

A few minutes ago I learned that a friend of the last decade died sometime during the night. I hadn't seen him much lately because he stayed behind as I moved away several years ago. He never forgot me though, and just two weeks ago as I pulled up in front of his house he came sauntering up like always after recognizing my car.

We called him Rupert, named for a similar looking cat from my childhood. We thought he was a stray and began feeding him, until one day I noticed him inside the next-door neighbor's house. Rupert had been working us like an expert, feigning starvation to see if there was an easy meal in it for him even though he was already doing very well. The neighbors sold their house and moved away, but due to some unusual circumstances Rupert stayed behind with us. He got two squares a day, a porch to relax on, and a secure home turf at the end of a cul-de-sac. That's a good life.

He was the terror of smaller creatures who happened by, so his death brings him in contact personally with a phenomenon well known and often caused by him. Since he lived in an older part of town, he frequently did combat with rats and always won. He insisted that his triumphs be registered, whether they be rats, squirrels, birds, or whatever, and one or another of us got quite used to sighing and getting a shovel to remove his trophies of war from the doormat.

Just over five years ago, during the very days the Iraq war began, Rupert was injured in a fight with another cat and required a vet's attention. After awakening from the anesthesia in the supposedly sealed laundry hamper in which we had brought him, he escaped and spent three glorious days on the loose, unfindable in the vet's office. Only his "leavings" provided any evidence he might still be around. For a while we thought we had lost him and had begun to grieve, so we were filled with joy when we learned he had bolted from a previously closed cabinet after someone in the vet's office opened it to fetch a towel. He tried to escape up the vet's chimney, but they pulled him down, drugged him, and called us with the good news.

Rupert was a hybrid: he was as comfortable inside as outside, and he spared us the trouble of keeping a litter box that way. He showed up at the front door expecting to be fed every morning and evening, and liked lounging around inside for part or much of the night, depending on the weather outside. As much time as he spent outside, the fear always lingered that some malady or accident would claim him as it now appears to have done. But he wouldn't have wanted to live any other way, and his life was about as full as a cat could want it.

He was a dependable part of life's daily rhythms, not so much for me anymore but for those closest to him, and he will be badly missed. He was a friend, and my life is less without him.

Rupert
October 2007

Tap Dancing

2008-06-22T19:19:00.009-05:00

Not long ago I was asked if I was interested in joining a small group dancing in front of a very large group listening to a band. At first I misunderstood and hesitated: I thought I was being asked to dance by this new found friend. That was an idea I liked in principle, but the suggestion came out of the blue and I didn't quite know how to take it. I soon discovered that I was merely being goaded to wander onto the floor by myself and have at it next to the two couples who were already being watched by hundreds. I demurred.

It's not that I don't like the idea of dancing. Over a decade ago I took lessons in a community ed course with a friend, and we had, um, a ball. I've forgotten all the steps, but I do remember a vague feeling of competence cascading over me. I would never be able to choose my partner for the Virginia Reel or sashay around the grand room of an English manner like the gentry in any film based on a Jane Austen novel. Yet I came to understood my role as the leading partner and took great satisfaction in accomplishing a new and moderately difficult physical task.

When my friend asked me recently, my poor hearing (or perhaps my expectations) led me to interpret the half-audible remark as a request to dance instead of what it actually was, a suggestion to bolt onto the floor like John Travolta. I was taken aback by my hesitations. Why didn't I just say yes and reach out for a hand? I would have been teased a bit more than I was already being teased, since I would have been agreeing to perform a solo. After I thought it over, I realized I must have been held back by the lingering, eternal fear that if I ever danced in public again, I would look like this (from Seinfeld, season 8):

Sweet fancy Moses indeed. The moment's hesitation that led me to decline to dance was not just about the fear of how to react in extremely close quarters to a new friend, but also about the near total lack of public dancing in my life's experience. At that moment my lack of practice led me to expect not a sudden recall of the steps from my dance lessons fifteen years ago, but only the silent ridicule of the crowd at spastic lunges intended to be creative expressions.

And we must be honest: some of us aren't meant to dance, at least in certain ways. At the 1:45 mark of the following video, you'll see what I mean. An otherwise interesting song (though done much better, I would argue, by the Red Paintings) is made risible by the early 80s "dancing" that must have inspired Elaine in the first video clip above. Why does he keep at it (with only a brief interruption) for more than a full agonizing minute?

So I didn't dance the other night. We watched in silence as two couples twisted and spun in front of us. If I had it to do over, I'd insist that we go out there together, even though I doubt I would have had a willing partner. It's always said that life's major regrets are about not doing things rather than risking and failing at something. I thought I knew that already. Obviously not.

Hypermiling and Peace

2008-06-10T06:32:00.005-05:00

Last week I returned from Germany, where gas prices recently hit about €1,55 per liter, or over $9 per gallon. A small part of the huge disparity between German and American prices is due to the anemic dollar, but most stems from much higher taxes. I didn't notice anyone altering their driving habits, but then again many may have opted for other means of transport. There are plenty of alternatives available for those who find gas too much to bear any more: safe bicycle lanes, buses, and trains to name a few. And in most places the population density is greater, leaving many able to walk where they need to go.

Here, I don't have any of these options. Bicycling would be my preferred alternative, especially since I had the time of my life cycling right through downtown Munich last week. But there are neither bike lanes, sidewalks, nor a driving culture tolerant and respectful of cyclists. It would be an act of near suicidal self-assertion to ride a bike across Mobile's Airport Boulevard to reach the University from where I live, for example.

That leaves either mental adjustment to higher gas prices or hypermiling as my only alternatives. Hypermiling, as I've discovered in the press lately, is a movement to squeeze every last mile per gallon out of one's car through tactics that made little sense in the era of cheap fuel and carbon ignorance. My car has a gauge that provides real-time feedback on miles per gallon, allowing me to judge the benefits of various new tactics.

One is to shut the car down altogether at long traffic lights, weather permitting. Weather doesn't permit anymore unless it's early morning or after sunset -- the A/C has already become essential. Shifting into neutral to coast when going downhill or when approaching red lights is another real winner, made all the easier by my car's manual transmission. Never pushing the RPMs over 2,000 when accelerating from a dead stop avoids wasting fuel on a rapid start that won't bring me to my destination quicker anyway. And yesterday I decided to drive for about 90 miles on the interstate at about 63 mph, instead of the 70 or more allowed by the speed limit or the flow of traffic. I was able to boost my car's mileage from the normal 33 or 34 mpg for such trips to slightly over 40 mpg.

Admittedly, the financial savings from slower driving on the interstate may not be worth it. I figured the current payout to me to be about $11 per extra hour spent on the road. That's more than minimum wage, but not so much as to make dramatically slower driving worth it if I really need to be somewhere soon. On a 2,000-mile round trip I have planned for later this year it would mean about four extra hours on the road and a savings of just over $40. If gas prices continue to climb, though, the benefits will increase correspondingly.

The real benefit from slower highway driving, however, came in the spirit of calm that washed over me like the peace that descending dove is supposed to bring. I passed a total of one car in that 90-mile stretch, and was in turn passed by hundreds. I could listen to the radio and enjoy the scenery. I only had to keep the car in the right lane. It was a serenity that then suffused the rest of my day after the trip had concluded. I drove more calmly even in local traffic, walked a bit more deliberately, stopped a bit longer to talk to people, and enjoyed my day a little more. I recommend giving it a try next time you go on a long trip and don't absolutely have to arrive at your destination in the minimum conceivable amount of time. If life really is a journey rather than a destination, driving five to ten miles per hour under the speed limit may be the best way to experience more of what life has to offer.

Civilized, Functional, and Happy

2008-05-07T18:16:00.007-05:00

There's a sure way to earn the respect and gratitude of others. If you receive a mass e-mail from them that either gives you anything of value or asks you a direct question, simply respond.

Most mass e-mailings don't fall into this category, and you shouldn't give a moment's thought to replying. If your friends send along jokes or screwball videos, there's usually no need to react unless you want. If a complete stranger sends you mail, you don't always have to write back. But if a friend or acquaintance asks you a question, answer. If he or she sends you information, photos, or tips that are useful, thank him or her. Your answer may be as simple as "I don't know, sorry." Or "I don't have time to think about it right now, but I wish I did." Or maybe just "Yes," "No," or "Thanks." If you answer at all, however, and especially if you use any measure of politeness, you're going to be in the minority and appreciated for your uniqueness.

I never thought about this conundrum until a friend lamented that of a couple dozen co-workers to whom she sent a request for input about a possible party, not a single one responded. "They could have just told me to get lost, I didn't care. But to ignore the message altogether was rude and depressing," she moaned. She left that job soon thereafter and was glad to be gone.

Before I heard her story, I was among those who didn't answer every such e-mail. Ever since I've tried to do much better, although I'm still not perfect. And there may be a few times when a response is truly more harmful than silence. But most often I'll reply. I've also begun to treasure those who reply when I have to send out mass mailings with questions or just unsolicited information designed to help the recipients. I consider those who write me back, however tersely, as among the most highly civilized, functional, and happy of people. And I want to be just like them.

Ain't Gonna Be No Remake

2008-04-19T10:17:00.004-05:00

Apollo Creed: Ain't gonna be no rematch.
Rocky Balboa: Don't want one.

Not only was there a rematch, but the original Rocky led to other increasingly ludicrous and implausible sequels, five in all. While the first "Rocky" had some merit as a tale of redemption and as a validation of the American belief in triumph due to hard work, the sequels declined precipitously in quality and tolerability. "Rocky" became a parody of itself, ruined by the need to become more garish and outlandish with each successive re-telling. The aura of the original was diminished by the sequels, to the extent that a presidential candidate could recently compare herself to Rocky, apparently forgetting that he lost the fight in the first film.

Remakes have some of the same problems as sequels, but present different dilemmas as well. While you can honestly attempt to follow on any artistic expression with something similar, re-doing the original altogether after the passage of a decent interval is only permissible with movies, songs, and stage performances: precisely those genres where the performers are believed to be decisive in the reception of the work of art.

Until yesterday I thought that there were certain films and songs that were safe from being remade. How could "Gone with the Wind," be remade, for example? Its brutal length and the iconization in our culture of its characters, dialogue, and scenes preclude any remake. Could you really imagine yourself wanting to see, I don't know, Brad Pitt as Rhett Butler or Julia Roberts as Scarlett O'Hara? Your attention would be on the differences with the original and not on the plot or characters. The entire film would be a warm-up act for the final line. "How will Brad say it?" and "Will he use the same words?" are not the thoughts you want running through an audience's mind.

I had long believed the same to be true of Don McLean's song "American Pie" (1971). At nearly nine minutes, it prevented its own duplication by the sheer implausibility of radio stations granting so much air time to a risky remake. Plus there was something so unique and special about when McLean released his paean to Buddy Holly and American culture in the 1950s and 1960s that any remake would do nothing more than bewilder new audiences into boredom. The song's themes and symbols are not timeless; they are references to a specific era and set of persons and are accessible only to those with a good sense of the past or those who were alive and culturally aware at the time.

I purchased and downloaded "American Pie" yesterday, and just to be sure, checked to see if I was right that no one else had summoned the imagination and courage to remake it. I was not right. It's a complex story: Madonna released a much shorter version and video in 2000. I'm not surprised I missed it, since 2000 did not fall among my very musical years. I was appalled, but I think even Madonna may have realized that she was doing something bizarre since she didn't release the song as a single in the U.S. market.

Part of the beauty of any work of art is an abiding mystery in the artist's intentions and thoughts he or she created it. Stanley Kubrick famously refused to explain "the meaning" of "2001: A Space Odyssey." The apparent reference to Friedrich Nietzsche (via Richard Strauss) when "Also sprach Zarathustra" is played is suggestive of ideas of higher men being born, but it is not prescriptive. Imagine if Kubrick had given an interview and explained what he was thinking with the "star child" at the end. The mystery and magic of his film would vanish, as would much of the interest in it. His challenge (which many believe he did not surmount) was to avoid making his film so mysterious and idiosyncratic as to prevent the audience from summoning the interest and engagement to impress their own interpretations on the scenes. If you go overboard with your use of symbols, most will proclaim boredom due to their rapid mental exhaustion, word of mouth will kill the box office receipts, and your work falls into oblivion every bit as much as if you had explained your precise intention behind each shot.

McLean's "American Pie" has some lines that just about everyone can identify with ("I know that you're in love with him"), but they're followed by others that are catchy yet inscrutable ("The courtroom was adjourned; No verdict was returned."). Madonna herself couldn't figure out how to sing the whole song and vocalize phrases she didn't fully understand, so she only included a few of the verses. The same challenge would await anyone seeking to remake "2001," "Star Wars," or "Gone with the Wind," which is precisely why we've had sequels to all, but not remakes. I only wish this artistic limit with "American Pie" had been more obvious to Madonna and others. The music died for me a little the day I found out somebody had even tried.

Soap

2008-04-12T11:45:00.003-05:00

On the relatively rare occasions when I've been in Germany with a TV at my full disposal, I often find myself watching German soap operas. They have the same superficial appeal as any soap opera at home (e.g., plots that pull you along without any thought on your part, nasty but petty bickering among supposed friends or family members, and weird twists in stories that were beginning to get stale). I've never watched them at home -- at least the daytime variety. I must concede, though, that "House," one of my current favorite shows, has significant elements in common with daytime soap operas. House himself can often be found avoiding his rounds in the hospital by watching a soap opera in a coma patient's room.

In Germany, though, I find the soap operas to be an easily accessible window into common patterns of speech about everyday issues. The characters react to each other conversationally and with apparent spontaneity. If I watch consistently, I might be able to internalize what I've heard and utter the same words without thinking the next time I'm in a similar situation. What do you exclaim when you drop and break something, for example? How do you tell someone brusquely to leave you alone? What do you say when you're in a store and need help finding a certain kind of item? It's all going to be there in the soap opera, sooner rather than later.

Some months ago I made a futile search for German soaps online. Then two days ago, a visiting scholar of the German language recounted how she used the online version of the German soap "Lindenstrasse" with her classes. She told me how to access it on the web, and I did so for the first time yesterday. I was giddy in my own quiet way as the first episode loaded. It didn't matter that I was entering the story in media res. The writers were careful enough to make sure the plot was simple enough for anyone to follow at any time. So there I was watching a mother worry about her son who's impulsively volunteered for service in Afghanistan, a divorced couple argue over how to treat their son, a Turkish immigrant deal with presumed racism (which turned out to be routine, everyday thoughtlessness and arrogance rather than racism), and an older woman deal with wearing a hearing aid for the first time (my favorite, because as a wearer of hearing aids I got some highly useful extra vocabulary).

I could feel my German getting better by the second.

Comic books serve a similar purpose, but have the added advantage of allowing you to go at your own pace and see how words are spelled. Once on a bus of professors and grad students touring Belgium, I was reading a French version of "Peanuts" for just this reason. The academic tour leader was so amused she commented on it in front of the entire bus -- as if I were reading comics as my main intellectual occupation in those days. I don't know how she had learned her French, but it must have been harder than the way I was learning it with "Peanuts." I like to buy German comics every time I return to Germany, but not the more highbrow sort. Again, "Peanuts" is pretty meaningful in its own right and doesn't require an attention span longer than twenty seconds at a shot. It's perfect travel reading, in other words.

I suspect I may soon know as much about the current state of life on Munich's Lindenstrasse as I do about my own home town. It's knowledge that will come in very handy the next time I want to use German to argue, make friends with someone, chat amiably in a mom-and-pop grocery, or try to keep a German friend from volunteering for Afghanistan to get over the girl friend who just dumped him.

Wormhole

2008-04-05T12:21:00.008-05:00

As a child, I watched far more television than most would now consider healthy. Contrary to all right thinking today, years spent a few feet from a cathode ray tube didn't seem to hurt me much. I still read lots of books and learned to write complete sentences and whole paragraphs, while also allowing TV to pique my curiosity about things I would then explore in encyclopedias, almanacs, or whatever reference work was handy. This all took place without any particular parental encouragement, except for the fact that cleverness and conversational oneupsmanship were features of family meals and other gatherings. I had unknowingly gotten in the habit of preparing to look smart by not only watching TV, but also by allowing it to guide my reading and learning elsewhere.

Police shows were my favorites: Hawaii Five-O, Adam 12, Dragnet, The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, and SWAT guided me through the subtleties of the Miranda warning, the fourth amendment, and criminal procedure in the courts. Like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show," I was living in a pseudo-reality created by television. If these shows ever all got the same thing wrong, I believed it without question. For example, I grew up thinking police officers routinely dealt with fascinating mysteries and battled worthy intellectual opponents in the form of the criminal masterminds who taunted them. Only later, after I was an adult, would "Cops" demonstrate to me that 99% of those arrested are either not wearing a shirt at all or at best a soiled and torn t-shirt. They're also intoxicated or worse. It's become apparent that if you want to stay out of jail, all you have to do is wear a shirt with a collar -- as if you were headed out to play golf on a course with a dress code -- and keep your intoxication off the streets and out of the calls to 911.

During my cop show fixation, some other things began to interest me even though they had no immediate use. The history of World War II and the German language were such subjects. Both could conveniently be experienced in a sit-com that achieved widespread afternoon syndication in the early and mid 1970s: "Hogan's Heroes." Like "All in the Family" from roughly the same time, "Hogan" was a series it would be impossible to make anymore. Both these programs made fun of things that have become either taboo subjects altogether or are reserved for staid academic analysis destined never to reach the public. In the case of "All in the Family," it was the mechanics of lower-middle class white racism; as for "Hogan," it was the operation of the Nazi machinery of oppression and mass murder.

From "Hogan" I got much more than laughs, however. There were German words tossed in a few times each episode. Sergeant Schultz would count the prisoners in German before resuming his buffoonery in English, for example. Signs in the background were often in German. And the place names sounded exotic and alluring to a boy in small-town southern Alabama in the 1970s. So I began to watch movies and other shows dealing with World War II. I joined the Military Book Club after seeing an ad in Parade magazine one Sunday offering four books for 98 cents. My parents noticed this odd predilection for German, and to their eternal credit, rather than remark on its strangeness they bought me a paperback book entitled See It and Say It in German.

Back then self-teaching a language quickly ran into nearly impossible limits. There was no way to hear all the words I was reading, for instance. Nor could I read about current events in German news stories that would be more comprehensible because I was also reading about the events in English-language newspapers. While I used See It and Say It to learn a few phrases and the numbers up to about twenty, I progressed no further. In my teens my interest in language was confined exclusively to this halting encounter with German, because to my everlasting regret I passed up opportunities to take French and Latin in high school (I would later correct the mistake with French, but never with Latin).

Then an extraordinary opportunity came to me before my first semester as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. This time I didn't pass it by. The German department offered the first two years of college German in just a single year. They had designed an accelerated beginning and intermediate sequence requiring the students to meet five days a week for an hour with a professor for grammar, vocabulary, and an introduction to German culture, and four days a week for an hour with a student assistant who would lead students through verbal drills. That made nine hours a week in all. They could have made it twelve, fifteen, or twenty. I loved every second, every new word, every new twist on life in Germany explained to me. Taking the tests was like doing a puzzle in the newspaper rather than any kind of chore.

Our textbook was designed to be used all over the world by adults learning German. Thus it was entirely in German. We had to figure out the language by internalizing the patterns in the textbook, looking them up in a dictionary, or asking our professors in class. The text also introduced many aspects of contemporary German life as it simultaneously explored grammar and vocabulary. We learned about television, train travel, cars, geography, food, social interaction, clothing, etc. I was being transported mentally to this new and inviting place for many hours each week. The language was acting like what physics would later popularize as a wormhole, a passage allowing the normal boundaries of time and space to be flaunted.

My first German textbook: Deutsch aktiv

A typical page from Deutsch aktiv: "What do Germans do on weekends?" My grammatical and vocabulary notes in the margins indicate the professor used the items on the page to cover key points (click to enlarge). Nowadays there would have to be a line reading "Ins Internet gehen."

Later the figurative wormhole became more like a real one. I did so well in my first two years of German that I was asked to go on our exchange program to Germany. While it required a DC-10 headed for Brussels to get me to Europe rather than a theoretical shortcut through space and time, learning the language and reading the textbook had in fact already moved my mind the requisite distance. The physical act of travelling more or less followed naturally. I would urge the same process on anyone, young or older: learn the language and explore the culture, and you'll be surprised how soon you'll end up standing in the midst of that object of your attention and affection.

The Humiliation of Survival

2008-03-23T10:53:00.005-05:00

If you're like me, you'd like to think that airing your past embarrassments in a forum like this one would allow you to exorcise them once and for all. Such intellectual and emotional streaking would make one vulnerable to teasing, but would simultaneously rob that teasing of most of its power. The down side is that the further you dig into your sack of past calamities and the more of them you toss out, the less "you" there is left. For these moments of shame are the most unique of the traits and experiences defining us. Choosing to reveal them to only one or a few others creates a conspiracy of shame that can bind us together, helping to fortify us against the vicissitudes of our daily existence. If you let everybody in on your worst secrets, you're free of their power over you, but you've also deprived yourself of a way of getting very close to someone else.

Nonetheless as a teacher I've sometimes chosen to use such moments to make a point in class. I hope that the laughter will bond the broader historical concept at stake to the students' active memory, and they will have readier access to the principle whenever they need it again. They might even remember it beyond the final exam. So, for instance, when discussing Sigmund Freud in Western Civilization classes I frequently offer examples of my own most embarrassing Freudian slips. Or just last week, I decided shortly before another class that an experience in which someone had saved my life would be a good tool to explain how a once-proud France might have been predisposed to a certain resentment of America after World War II.

It's not necessarily easy having someone else prolong your existence -- it's an admission and proof of your ultimate impotence versus the universe's treachery and indifference. Americans liberating France in 1944 got a moment's greeting as heroes, but when they remained after the war they were bound to make things a little difficult, regardless of any pre-existing French beliefs about the benefits or drawbacks of American culture.

As for me, I was saved once in a what is probably a routine mistake in a gym. When changing methods of bench pressing, I foolishly used far too much weight and couldn't lift the barbell again once having lowered it to my chest. Someone nearby came quickly and helped me lift the bar back to the top. I must have been grateful and uttered my thanks. If that man had hung around after he had saved me, he would have been a continuing reminder of my earlier weakness. But he didn't, or maybe I just wrapped it up for the day and left quickly. He or I, or both of us, must have realized that the best thing you can do after you help someone survive -- or survive yourself -- is to quietly move away.

The other time my life was saved also taught me a lot about self-worth and dignity. Eleven years old, I was trying to give my eight-year-old brother the courage to use the diving board in a hotel pool. The plan was that he would dive and then swim to the side by himself. I told him I'd tread water in the middle of the deep end and be ready to help him in case he had problems, but I knew he swam well enough that he wouldn't need me. He jumped, and a moment later grabbed hold of me and pushed me under. Either I had overestimated his swimming abilities, or he had misunderstood and thought he was supposed to just hold on to me in eight feet of water. I can remember swallowing water and surfacing a couple of times for half a second trying to scream "Let go!," but only emitted some gargling noises. He wouldn't have let go anyway. I was drowning, and for all I know my brother would have too once I was done.

There were just three of us at the hotel pool that August morning. The third was a woman in a swimsuit who had been sunning herself. She saw what was happening, jumped in, grabbed my brother as she was surging forward, and pushed him ahead of her to the side of the pool. I didn't see this because I had been underwater the entire time. All I knew was that suddenly I wasn't drowning anymore, and I quickly made it to the side, coughing.

I was far too young to realize the full magnitude of what the woman had done. She may well have saved two young lives. As a child, you get used to adults' performing great kindnesses for you, and you even come to expect it. I took the being saved in stride, while the nearly dying upset me greatly. As an adult decades later in the gym, it was the other way around: being saved was more upsetting than almost dying, because it undercut my unspoken claim to maturity, responsibility, and autonomy. It was a humiliation, in short.

Since I can't remember anything except the gender of the people who once saved me, that must mean they both had the modesty to move quickly away and allow me to regain my dignity. I've never saved anyone's life in such a direct fashion, but if I do I hope I have the same good sense to disappear as fast as possible. The rescued's only thought should be the one formerly reserved for the Lone Ranger: I didn't even get a chance to thank him.

Memento mori

2008-03-16T20:32:00.004-05:00

I need a new rule. This one will state: "No reading articles about the ultimate fate of the Earth the first thing in the morning." Today I noticed such an article in a newspaper, and despite previous bad experiences with this kind of story, I plunged ahead -- astronomy is simply too interesting to me. The gist of the piece was that the Earth has at most another billion or so years of habitability before the Sun expands and boils off the oceans. Eventually, they tell us, the Sun will expand so much that its gravity will pull the Earth into the Sun itself.

How's that for a cheerful way to start the day? By the afternoon I'd forgotten all about it, but the feeling was moderately oppressive while it lasted. What's the use of any human endeavor if it's all to end in flames? I don't know the answer any better than I did this morning, but I can say that I ended up grateful for mundane everyday tasks that presented themselves and distracted me from a big picture I had no business pondering. Like this columnist, if you're going to think about it at all, you'd better do so with a humor and self-deprecation that forces you to ask yourself the best question of all -- had you really planned to change the Earth forever anyway?

Warfighters

2008-03-05T06:30:00.003-06:00

My hometown recently took a 1 in 20 shot at a huge payout, and it won. The U.S. Air Force decided to purchase its next set of airborne refueling tankers from a consortium led by Northrop-Grumman that will assemble the aircraft in Mobile. The other party, Boeing, left the competition with nothing. It was the second largest military spending order in history behind the one for the Joint Strike Fighter, which Boeing also lost.

The recent competition and especially its final days have been instructive not only about the minutiae of Air Force procurement, mid-air refueling, and the political machine behind Boeing. Because words mattered so much in persuading the Air Force to buy one or another tanker, the contest also was a case study in how politics shapes and perverts language. Right after World War II George Orwell wrote all we ever really needed to know about this, but it always helps to see new examples.

As the competition closed and local politicians nervously awaited what most believed would be bad news, they often spoke of the advantages to the "warfighter" of the Northrop-Grumman variant. Huh? "Warfighter?" It sounded like an action figure or cartoon hero. Perhaps the word had been in circulation for many years, but since I don't read many Pentagon press releases, I'd never heard it.

I concluded that the use of "warfighter" must represent a kind of military-industrial political correctness that also permits a substantial economy of expression. Instead of saying something like "airmen and airwomen, soldiers, sailors, and Marines," you can fit everyone neatly into "warfighter" without regard to their gender, rank, or branch of service. But what you give up by accepting the new short term is both obvious and depressing: the idea that these servicemen and servicewomen perform most of their duties while preventing wars, not waging them.

The terminology would have been unacceptable in an earlier era. Now that we've been instructed repeatedly that we're in a war without end, the new usage offers a way to merge two power words into a presumably even more robust new word while chopping off about a dozen syllables to boot. By accepting the neologism, we're condemning ourselves forever to view the armed services as a 24/7/365 war fighting machine, rather than as a defense apparatus we reluctantly unleash when we're left with no other option. While we're at it, we might as well return to the nomenclature from the first 150 years of American history and rename the Department of Defense the War Department.

Another fascinating aspect of the tanker brawl was the reminder it offered of how we construct and tell stories about things that are important to us. It's been a great example of how people with different backgrounds, viewpoints, and goals can fashion complex and competing narratives from the exact same set of facts. If you're a Boeing supporter, the 767's smaller size makes it ideal for a wider variety of runways and airports, while also providing greater fuel economy. If you're behind the A330, its larger size adds increased fuel, cargo, and passenger capacity. If you like Boeing, you trumpet the advantages of supposedly buying American. If you prefer Northrop-Grumman and its Airbus-based product, you chide those who refuse to acknowledge the triumph of globalization. And on and on.

It takes the rarest among us, those without preconceptions or biases, to refuse to adopt one of two opposed narratives and to admit that both may be true and false at the same time. In other words: free people who embrace rather than shun complexity. They will learn much in their solitary acceptance of both stories, but they will be oh so lonely.

Hier ist kein warum

2008-02-27T07:00:00.002-06:00

Because I study and teach about the Holocaust, I repeatedly encounter new psychological insights from the recorded experiences of the victims, perpetrators, and others who witnessed it. It may seem crass, disrespectful, or bizarrely paradoxical to use mass murder to learn something about being alive, but it's impossible for me to ignore that life in extremis can teach things that centuries of peaceful life could not.

I assign Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz to my class on the Holocaust every time because it's a literate memoir by a sensitive and articulate eyewitness and survivor. I also regard the book as one of the core works of twentieth-century world literature, a subject about which I am admittedly less than expert. It's a twofer for the students: they learn about the Holocaust, Italy, Auschwitz, and survival while also seeing what Levi learned about human nature.

Early in the book Levi is dying of thirst and breaks off an icicle from above a window. A guard grabs the icicle from him immediately. He didn't know it, but he was actually lucky, since the guard might just as well have killed him without any obvious reason. Levi is new to Auschwitz and reacts like a man from beyond the univers concentrationnaire. Using the lingua franca of the camp, he blurts out the single German word "warum": "Why?" The guard is neither angered nor amused by the question, but deigns to respond in what ultimately amounts to a helpful act of teaching: "Hier ist kein warum," he scoffs as he pushes Levi inside his barracks. "There's no why here."

The sooner Levi learned to separate actions from agency, that is, to draw a distinction between unpleasantries he had to endure and their causes, the sooner he would be prepared to focus on the truly important task: survival. Survival almost always either looks forward or requires a hyperawareness of the present moment. The young Italian intellectual who was deported to Auschwitz was, by temperament and training, always supposed to ask "why" about any relevant phenomenon. In so doing, he diverted his mind from the present, which could quickly prove fatal at Auschwitz.

The lesson can be extended beyond the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and well past the outer wire of a death camp. Asking why, and especially trying to assign credit or blame, is one of the most cultivated of intellectual tasks, particularly among those who have resided in the academic world. Courses and research on the Holocaust, for example, are often justified exclusively by the search for the reasons behind it.

I'm beginning to think that, out in the world of constant interaction with others, asking why is often going to be counterproductive. Usually we want someone to blame for our misfortune, and we well up in anger when the guilty party is identified. It can be as mundane an offense as being forced to slow down or change direction in traffic because someone has pulled out in front of us in apparent violation of our right of way. Because it's a human being who has forced us to react by offending us, we want to ask "why?" Since we can't ask why, we may grow angry.

By contrast, if a cat had crossed the road in front of me, I would have happily braked and waited for it to make its way safely across. I wouldn't ask why. Cats just do that, and I know I have to watch out and react if I see one. The sooner we realize that people and cats have a lot in common in this regard, the more at peace we will be.

Please, Dr., Can You Help?

2008-02-22T07:02:00.002-06:00

"The curse and the blessing, they're one in the same" is one of my favorite lines from a prolific pair of singers. Anything that upsets our equilibrium, even if it's in a way we at first deem good, is likely to have other consequences we deem bad. We can't think about or foresee everything in advance. It's why true political conservatism counsels pessimism about quick or radical change.

The development of e-mail over the last fifteen years is such a mixed blessing. Receiving a set of six nearly identical e-mails a couple of days ago has led me to think about how e-mail has changed my life for good or ill, or better yet, what e-mail has revealed to me about myself. The e-mails were from students at a high school far away who were assigned a report on Hitler. They wanted me to explain how Hitler came to power using manipulation.

I've received such queries before, beginning almost as soon as the first effective Internet search engines were developed in the mid-to-late 1990s. A few times a year, I'll get another one. Long ago I answered them and tried to help, because I was charmed by the request and by the ability of the Internet to join strangers at such distance in a momentary common search.

Then I began to realize, rather slowly I must admit, that I was probably being played. The students' first attempts to research their report or paper topic had likely not resulted in success, and they landed a web page with my e-mail address during their subsequent searches. Usually it was one of my course syllabi, often the one for Hitler & Nazi Germany. Obviously a lot of schools assign reports on Hitler. The students were asking me to write some or all of their paper for them. Sometimes I still answered. But then something else bothered me that led me to almost always leave such mail unanswered.

If I did answer, sometimes with an elaborate mini-essay, I almost never heard back again. Although I hadn't realized it at first, I expected a statement of gratitude as a reward for my time and effort. When none was forthcoming, I decided there wasn't enough in such exchanges for me. I stopped responding. And I never got a second request for help after failing to answer (e.g., "Did you get my e-mail from last week?"), indicating that most likely the report had been due very shortly after they first wrote me; turning to me had been an act of desperation to counter their procrastination. Once the deadline had passed, they forgot all about my forgetting them.

It's tough for someone trained to speak when spoken to, shake a hand when it's proffered, and answer all correspondence to simply ignore an e-mail asking for assistance. I can't know for certain, but most likely my reply would be used to bypass frustrating -- and rewarding -- research. The students might even cut and paste my reply directly into their reports. It's possible, therefore, for me to characterize my silence as an act of tough love.

Yet it's not the lazy approach to research that upset me. It was the consistent failure to say "thanks" afterward that ended my help. My attitude violates the normal expectations of society for charity, that it be divorced from any expectation of gain on the part of the benefactor. I'm learning to live with myself anyway.

In the spirit of offering gratitude to those who have helped, let me thank those who never thanked me. They've saved me all the time involved in answering dozens of future queries, and all the worry that I was depriving them of the joy of conducting their own research. I still feel a little bad about it. But now only a little.

The Late Bloomer's Revolution

2008-02-15T07:13:00.004-06:00

For me, commenting on contemporary literature is like asking a bullfighter to expound upon animal husbandry, a baseball player to explain the physics behind a curve ball, or a young finger painter to develop a theory of color. They all simply want to do what they instinctively enjoy. They don't want to spoil their experience by feeling forced to demonstrate eloquence, pith, mirth, insight, or sparkle as they justify their taste to others.

We who enjoy an activity or experience are more likely to grunt our approval or seek refuge in platitudes of praise than to explain or analyze why we like it. We understand intuitively what Duke Ellington meant when he said "If it sounds good, it is good." To go beyond vague praise is a threatening assignment -- you may discover that your tastes are based on factors so individualized that they run precisely counter to contemporary standards of excellence. And since we're not emperors, if we're intellectually clothesless someone's going to tell us right away.

For many, then, the indispensable critical virtue is neither technical skill nor imagination, but courage. Saying "I like this" and elaborating is always going to be harder than saying "I don't like this." That which pleases us often does so because it forms a likable whole; to dissect that whole in order to probe our approval is to destroy one of its chief aesthetic advantages. What we dislike, by contrast, is often the lack of unity in the object of our attention. Pulling it even further apart in order to explain ourselves is easier. Moreover, scorn and invective enliven our prose and make the act of writing and speaking more fun.

That's all by way of saying why I have such a difficult time starting this entry. I've been asked to write about why I liked a book I read recently. I sensed a great resistance to beginning to write about it, so I tried to figure out why. The book made me feel good: that much I know. To analyze further, even if my purpose is to praise, seems dangerous. Analysis adds a worrying complexity to what had seemed a simple act of reading and appreciating.

The book in question is Amy Cohen's The Late Bloomer's Revolution. I liked it so much I e-mailed the author to tell her. I haven't heard back, but that's ok. It's only been a couple of weeks, and besides, it must be tough to deal with so many strangers who now think they know you intimately based solely on a book in which you carefully selected exactly those scenes that would present yourself in a meaningful and comic light. What I have to say below is adapted from what I wrote to the author.

Several weeks ago while browsing the new book section at the public library, I was struck immediately by the book's title. Even at my age, I regard myself as something of a late bloomer -- as should we all. Until very recently I was still telling people I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up, for instance. The book's title was all it took for me to reach for it and read the flap. I laughed a couple of times and quickly tucked it under my arm. It was a great concept and leitmotif. Whether it's finally learning to ride a bike, cook, date with aplomb, decide to get married or remain single, travel alone, or something else, we all have fears or ghosts we have to face down. The best way, it seems to me after reading this book, is to simply push forward, expect to fall and get up again, share your stories honestly with others, and laugh -- a lot.

Late Bloomer's Revolution is a memoir of a woman in her mid-to-late 30s who's coming to terms with the mortality of her parents, her inability or lack of desire to find someone suitable to marry, and her life as a writer (sometimes for television sit-coms, sometimes for print journalism). You get the sense, though it's never stated overtly, that she's writing the book during a pause between paid, full-time commitments to other writing jobs.

Cohen frequently takes what's normally considered a psychological maladaptation -- projection -- and uses it to create the kind of self-deprecating hilarity just about any of us could appreciate. Consider this scene from the waiting room at her dermatologist's office, where she's gone because a huge stress-induced rash has erupted on her face:

As I waited on the couch, I sat across from a woman who chatted in Yiddish on her cell phone while constantly scratching her cinnamon-colored wig. She looked at me, making a face as if she were smelling something awful. I knew this look, as I'd been guilty of it myself a few times. It was the look that said, "If he's such a good doctor, why do you look like that?"

As a man who grew up in the small-town South of the 1970s, I was a little shocked when, nearly finished with the book, I discovered one of the categories under which it's listed on Amazon.com is "chick lit." You mean I'd been liking and reading chick lit and didn't even know it? I had read the book as the story of a person discovering herself through unrelenting, honest self-examination, not as a treatise on the dilemmas of today's woman. While Cohen's gender obviously mattered a great deal to how the book developed, its messages aren't exclusively or even predominantly for women. What carried me through, page by page and chapter by chapter, was the knowledge that a belly laugh or two was likely on most pages, and that the laughs would often concern problems, challenges, quirks, annoyances, or relationships I could imagine in my own life.

I closed the book for the final time with deep regret. I will miss Cohen's expansive and natural honesty, her courage (despite her deprecation of such acts as eating alone as courage, I know better), her desire to experience so many new things combined with her need to rest from them at times by putting on her pajamas at 7:00 p.m., and her wisdom in being able to admit to herself that her mother probably had it right all along: people who want to be married are married. She achieved a surer sense of herself, and gained the peace that comes with reconciling one's outer and inner lives.

Late Bloomer's Revolution reinforces a commonplace that's all too easy for perfectionists to forget or overlook: we are liked because we make mistakes and we laugh as we admit and share them. We're not liked either because we're perfect or we don't discuss our flaws. Amy Cohen's book is about as perfect an exposition of the joy of being imperfect as you'll ever find.

Visions of a Fullback

2008-02-12T18:29:00.004-06:00

Of all the indignities we must face, none may be more cruel than this: we can never control how someone else remembers us. When we percolate into someone else's consciousness, it may be for something so minor that we long ago forgot it or never actually assimilated it into our self-concept. Or it may be because we committed an act or said some words that someone else believes precisely defined us, something we on the other hand regard as an anomaly. Whatever the case may be, we don't get to choose ourselves how we appear in the memories of others.

I'm pondering this irony because my recent thoughts on a young woman who killed herself led me to recall others I knew who died young. Among the first to come to mind was Todd -- a boy, or young man, who was the senior fullback on my high school football team while I was a junior. I don't recall much about his appearance and bearing except the frizzy wild hair typical of the late 1970s and his quiet demeanor. But I will never forget one particular incident that brought him and me together. I know I'm the only human being who remembers this moment, and I'm the only one for whom it ever had any meaning.

In a practice session during football season, my usual assignment as a non-starter was to imitate that week's opponents. To help our starters prepare for the game, I always had to act as one the opponents' defensive linemen while our offense practiced running their plays. I've forgotten virtually all of probably hundreds or thousands of such plays from scrimmage. Of the very few that abide in my thoughts, one involving Todd is among the strongest. Late one fall afternoon I unexpectedly penetrated the offensive line immediately and found myself lunging toward Todd, who had just been handed the ball by the quarterback. My momentum drove me forward just as he was slightly off balance. I was able to pick him up, drive him back, and slam him to the ground. It was one of the only moments where the entire team united in audible admiration of something I had done. Todd must have been embarrassed, but it wasn't his fault: his offensive line had let him down by missing me.

Four years later, I returned home between the fall and spring semesters of my senior year in college. The papers were filled with stories about the United States' involvement in Lebanon. Earlier that year, over 200 Marines had died in the first major truck bombing to strike Americans anywhere, and Marines were still stationed in and around Beirut in an effort to separate warring factions. Todd was now one of them. Back home, we were growing mystified and angered by the steady loss of life for a cause we didn't understand. Take this cartoon reprinted, several months before I returned home for the holidays, in the newspaper of the town where Todd and I had lived:

That December, I was shocked to read the following stories and see an obituary in the same local newspaper:

Click on image to enlarge

The governor of Alabama had ordered official flags flown at half-staff to honor three Marines killed in Beirut. Among them was Todd (here called by his first name, Jeffery). Front-page space being scarce, we were also reminded at the same time that we had only 12 days to shop for Christmas, and that another truck bomb had been targeted at American installations, this time in Kuwait. Hidden deep in the same issue of the newspaper was Todd's actual obituary:

I don't know why he joined the Marines. I never knew he had gotten married or moved to Birmingham. And suddenly I was discovering that he had died because an artillery round fired by a faction in Lebanon who viewed him as inconvenient landed too close to him. It was very saddening, and it began to upset me to think that while I had a strong memory of him, it was mainly because he had been the vehicle by which I had achieved a moment of recognition in an arena where normally I had toiled in obscurity. I wished I could remember other things about him. I wished I had seen him in his Marine uniform just once. I felt awful knowing that for the rest of my life I was going to remember him mainly for being the victim of my one indisputably perfect tackle in an otherwise lamentable football career.

Had the shell landed elsewhere, had Todd never joined the Marines, had the death occurred at some time other than just before Christmas when I would be home to read about it, I might have forgotten I had ever known or tackled him. A bizarre series of events conspired to insure that I would always remember him, not solely for his courage in going to Beirut, but also for his bad luck in once having stumbled straight into my arms.

Some years later, a Lebanese-American friend unusually gifted in languages was teaching me to speak French with a better accent. As we paused between my recitations, I asked him to explain to me the problems of Lebanon. He tried. I mentioned Todd, not by name, but as an acquaintance from my hometown who had died there. My friend was visibly moved, and told me how grateful he was that Todd had tried to help. That same Lebanese-American friend left a prestigious academic post in the United States in the 1990s to return to Lebanon to help to rebuild it by teaching at a Lebanese university. I'd like to think that my mention of Todd's sacrifice lingered somewhere in my friend's subconscious, and that as a result the students of his Lebanese university now have a first-rate professor empowered in part by the gift of a former fullback from Alabama.

Atlantic Mirror

2008-02-10T11:23:00.001-06:00

Like feuding relatives whose blood ties will not permit a permanent estrangement, France and the United States have known all the extremes of a dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship for over 240 years. Our relationship has again sprung to mind because I'm at that point in my Western civilization class where we discuss the French Revolution. I always like to compare the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, both in spirit and content. In the last few years this moment in the class has provided the opportunity to say a few words about the complex and shifting relationship between our two countries since the time in the eighteenth century when both experienced something they called a revolution. But I'm finding it harder to get a response every semester.

It only takes a few years before the most widely discussed controversies of their day become utterly unknown to the rising generation. The run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 is such an event. Not many of today's students appear to have heard of the epithet "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," taken from The Simpsons and hurled at the French with such -- shall we say -- élan by the war's most ardent supporters. Today's students have probably forgotten, if they ever knew, that for a season French fries were known in some American restaurants as "liberty fries" or "freedom fries." That's a shame, because it was great fun. I took pleasure the two times I ate at a restaurant advertising "freedom fries." I ordered my sandwiches with French fries instead, and was disappointed both times when the server neither winced nor corrected me. The third time I was there, the fries were French again. By then, things weren't going so well in Iraq, and I think the chef had probably moved on.

When the renaming frenzy hit its peak, many Americans, regardless of their stance on the prospect of a war against Iraq, wished the French government would have at least stayed quietly neutral rather than assume the leadership of the world's opposition. By contrast, bitterness was mostly absent toward the German government, which had joined the French. It was easy to overlook or forgive German opposition, because Germany had been our enemy rather than our friend in two World Wars. Their eternal pacifism had once been a national goal, and their hostility toward us taken for granted. Besides, German pacifism in 2003 was so refreshingly at odds with our usually harsh cultural stereotypes of jackbooted automatons invading neighbors on command. The French, on the other hand, were bizarrely portrayed as owing us gratitude and support.

Americans' attitudes toward France were shaped mostly by memories of the liberation of France from Nazi tyranny in World War II. A few of the more historically minded tossed in the contribution of the American Expeditionary Force to Allied victory in World War I. The United States entered both wars either after France was on the edge of defeat or had already been defeated. In neither case was the liberation of France itself a goal. U.S. and French policies coincided momentarily, so we became temporary battlefield allies. Our policies after both wars began to diverge. After the first war, the United States retreated as France wished to enlist our help in a muscular response against the perceived enemies of the existing order. After the second war, ultimately, it was France that moved away from American claims to be saving the world.

Someone -- I wish I knew who -- made the remark that the French and Americans are so often at odds because they've both believed they have a mission to spread their values throughout the world. A shared devotion to the abstract, if ill-defined, ideal of liberty has sometimes brought us together, but just as often separated us because we define liberty differently at any given moment.

If there was one thing I wish I could do to bridge this gap, it would be to destroy the idea so prevalent among Americans that most Frenchmen and Frenchwomen arrogantly assume themselves to be superior. The most humorous demonstration of this American perception to date is this scene from "European Vacation" (1985). The Griswold family from suburban Chicago eats at a sidewalk café in Paris as the father, Clark (Chevy Chase), struggles to order while using an electronic translating device:

In stark contrast, my experiences with people in France have been, without a single exception, positive. The first in my memory came on a cold but sunny day in March 1983. Walking down a boulevard in Paris with a can of Planters peanuts, I sliced open my index finger while pulling off the old style metallic lid. In despair, I looked up and noticed the bright green neon cross representing a pharmacist.

This was before I had studied any French. I hurried inside and uttered the sole phrase I had memorized in French from my Berlitz book: "Pouvez-vous m'aider?"(can you help me?) Hearing those four words and glancing at my finger launched the woman in the white coat into a frenzy of pity and empathetic care. She muttered something like "pauvre enfant!" and proceeded to wash, sterilize, and dress my wound. I pulled out some money to pay her, but she waved me off with an absolute, but smiling refusal. It would be a year or two more before the danger from AIDS would make everyone, including probably even her, far more reluctant to help a bleeding stranger from off the street. Still, if she had lived up to the stereotype many Americans have of the French, she would have yelled "This isn't a hospital!" and pointed at me to leave. She may have never known how she launched this one American into a lifetime of liking people from France. Ever since I encountered her, I've always expected the very best from French people. It's amazing how that attitude will, in turn, often bring out people's best.

Perhaps that one French phrase made all the difference with the pharmacist. I try to always tell monolingual students going to France to begin every conversation in French with "Bonjour, Madame" (or Monsieur) before saying anything in English. It's human nature to want to help someone who shows you a little respect first. You have been ennobled by the gesture, and your social role is now to condescend to assist. It costs the requester nothing, but brings so much. And I think it's exactly what we would expect if the roles were reversed.

I may overgeneralize about the kind and helpful French every bit as much as many Americans do about the supposedly arrogant and smugly superior ones. But I doubt it. I've met many more than just the pharmacist, both here and in France. If the language barrier is removed just for that first instant, especially if the party initiating contact speaks a phrase in the language of the other, then the barrier usually stays down.

France hasn't had it easy since World War II. As has been observed, while Germany and Italy only had to get over defeats, the French had to invent a victory. This need to compensate for the collapse to Germany in 1940 and for the humiliation of being liberated by Americans and Britons drove French governments to colossal folly after the war. They tried, and failed, to re-establish or consolidate their colonial empires in places like Indochina and Algeria. They were driven, with a notable lack of grace, from both. While the British example of usually peaceful disengagement from empire may be more worthy of imitating, it is the French experience that may be more instructive and important to keep in mind for superpowers growing weary of eternal worldwide commitments.

A Rilke State of Mind

2008-02-08T00:06:00.000-06:00

Wie sollten wir jener alten Mythen vergessen können, die am Anfange aller Völker stehen, der Mythen von den Drachen, die sich im äußersten Augenblick in Prinzessinnen verwandeln; vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen.

[How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us just once beautiful and brave.

-- From Rainer Maria Rilke's letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, 12 August 1904]

Wer du auch seist: Am Abend tritt hinaus aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt; als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus: Wer du auch seist.

[Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know each bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.

-- From Rilke's poem "Eingang" (Initiation)]

I have a complicated relationship with poetry, especially in German. Poetry was yet another element of literature I just didn't get until after math, history, and even science had made sense. By my senior year in high school, I felt comfortable enough to enter a typically maudlin, self-pitying adolescent poem entitled "The Ordeals of the Idealist" in a statewide poetry competition. It won some kind of honorable mention, a distinction that carried no cash prize but did help insure I would respect the art form as I continued my education at the university.

For over three decades, anyone who went to my high school was made to memorize and recite large sections of famous poems in their senior British literature class. I can't speak for any of my schoolmates, but I know that the memorizing strengthened my feel for the rhythms of English and gave me an expanded sense of what was possible when you arranged words so as to sound powerful and create vivid images. There was probably also a certain swagger and bounce in my step during two visits to Canterbury cathedral because I knew I could still get a few lines into the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" in middle English. Likewise, attending "Macbeth" is like hearing your family's myths and legends retold at a holiday gathering.

Although I minored in German in my university years, I was able to do so with little exposure to poetry. It's a shame. My way of thinking in that language owes more to the style of radio newscasts and history monographs than to the best that German literature has to offer. Rilke's work is a good example. I usually encounter his words first in translated snippets of distilled genius and longing such as those above. When I've tried to read longer passages in the original, the part of my mind normally only accessed when looking at instructions for complex new electronic gadgets feels itself being engaged. Any guy can tell you, that means your first instinct is to drop the text and try to figure the thing out visually and manually. It's a tall and usually insurmountable barrier. Unless there's a grade on the line, the poem's probably going to go unread and unappreciated.

I wonder if I'm experiencing in German what leads so many to abandon poetry in English as soon as their school or university curriculum allows them. Maybe it's a psychological inertia privileging known ways of thinking and perceiving over tapping areas of the brain reserved for visual or emotive experiences. Using words to see or feel may just not make sense until you're really used to it.

Thanks to required classes in English and American literature, I can return with pleasure to lines by Shakespeare, Browning, Wordsworth, Eliot, and many others that I once memorized or explicated. When it comes to Rilke, Goethe, or any of hundreds of other German poets, though, I stand alone, alternating my gaze between their rich and complex maps to life and what I can see with my own eyes without straining. Sadly but predictably, I resist adopting their way of thinking in German because it doesn't sound like the news or a history book. As I hope you can tell from the lines at the top, it's my loss.

Twenty Years Late

2008-02-07T07:09:00.000-06:00

"Are you on a formal flight?" my friend joked as I climbed into his car for the ride to the airport. I was wearing a blue blazer and tie for my trip between Raleigh, North Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama. As a grad student in history, I probably hadn't worn a tie in months or years, and my friend knew it instinctively. Something didn't make sense to him. As for me, on the other hand, it didn't seem right to wear anything else.

Most of my experiences with airlines before then had been vicarious, via TV and the movies. My last previous flight had been to Europe four years earlier, during which I had also worn my jacket and tie. Growing up in front of the television had pre-conditioned me to a lot of bizarre beliefs about how people should behave, and not simply on airplanes. The films and TV series I watched most often portrayed air travel as an exceptional, glamorous act. So you dressed up, as images like these from the 1960s taught me:

My friend, however, had flown a lot more than I had and knew that the experience had been commoditized. I looked pretty ridiculous, I must now admit. My lame reply to him was that wearing a jacket and tie would get me better service, but I never found that to be the case. He shrugged and smirked, and I had it coming.

There had been a very high price to pay for the glamor. A colleague recently told me that he paid $500 for his first economy class ticket to Europe in 1966. Sounds great until you plug it into an inflation calculator: in 2007 dollars, that would be $3,254. My first ticket to Europe in 1982, four years after airline deregulation began in the United States, cost $575, or $1,295 in today's money. I think you can see why the coats and ties were giving way to jeans and flip flops. But it took me a long time to realize it, because I so desperately wanted to experience the glory of 1960s commercial aviation at 1980s prices.

Now I've joined the masses who've never known anything other than boarding, flying, and exiting like herded animals. My shirts still have collars, but that's my only concession to style. My favorite footwear, season permitting, is sandals. They're lousy for running to catch a connecting flight, but they're great at the security station and allow me to go barefoot in my seat during the flight. Wiggling my toes, I cast a pitying eye at the well dressed, wondering how constricting all those fashion accoutrements must be. Where do you think you are, the 1960s or something?

The Story That Never Came

2008-02-05T18:32:00.000-06:00

Susanne, me, and Hedwig

The photo was staged, and it worked. During one or another dorm party during my junior year abroad in Germany, I brought my camera to the common area. One of my friends took this photo of me and two of my female acquaintances from the dorm: Susanne from down the hall, and Hedwig from another floor. I knew our playacting had had the desired effect when one of my grandmothers wrote back with an admonishment not to have too much fun. I had wanted to create an utterly false image of myself as a high-living, partying undergrad, and at least I had been able to fool my grandmother. Susanne, Hedwig, and I all knew we were teasing when we posed. That's obviously just Coke in their glasses anyway.

In the following months I had the chance to go on some excursions with groups from the dorm including Susanne and Hedwig -- mostly with Susanne, since she was more of a true neighbor. But Hedwig was a frequent presence in the living room our floor shared. She's one of those people who becomes an honorary member of your group, and after a while you stop thinking it's at all unusual she's there. When we broke up for the evening, as the rest of us went down the hall, she went up the stairs. Otherwise she was one of us.

Then one day as I entered the common area, there was a large group seated, still and far too silent. I asked them cheerily what was up. I can hear their reply now as clearly as I must have then: Die Hedwig hat sich umgebracht. Hedwig killed herself. I never found out how, and the why was mostly lost on me because the discussions flew around in that Swabian dialect of German whose quaintness and charm is surpassed only by its impenetrability to foreigners. The most I was able to gather was something about a love affair gone bad, but maybe that was just speculation. Whatever the proximate cause, she couldn't see living any more. At that one particular moment she needed a convincing story about her future. And it didn't come.

Had she been a close friend, I would not only know more, but I would have been affected far more by her loss. As it is, I would wager that years have gone by without my thinking about her. I recently found this photograph and liked the staged conviviality so much that I put it on display in my living room. It forces me to think about Hedwig every so often. I wonder about the poverty of imagination that depression can induce, and how bad it must have been if she willingly renounced the intervening 25 years. Hedwig, I swear....

Clip Show

2008-02-04T23:21:00.000-06:00

Among the great joys of sometimes keeping a diary is rediscovering bits of it after a long absence.

May 26, 2005. Koblenz, Germany.
[Eating dinner outdoors, alone, at a café in the Gemüsegasse, a cobblestoned alley]

A kissing young couple in the alley a moment ago -- if I'd only had my camera and a slightly better angle, I'd have had a photo as famous as "The Kiss" in front of the Paris Hôtel de Ville....

The one that got away:
My missed photo could have been this memorable

[After a while]. Two nearly identical ca. 9-year-old rail thin red-headed girls and their fat brother or male neighbor playing with a toy gun in the alley. Two retire upstairs with the gun and shoot at the one below who is kicking a ball around as if she's playing soccer. She is oblivious to passers by, is apparently about to violate their right of way, but then kicks the ball away or somehow moves at the very last second, all the while maintaining the illusion that other people are invisible to her.

Later, as the three play [soccer] together, I am struck by the genderless innocence with which the they joyously play, and how that will be destroyed by puberty and the demands of same-sex friends. The boy is stronger, but the girls are better.

Success That Matters

2008-02-04T06:50:00.002-06:00

How do you recognize someone worth respecting and admiring? If they're generally regarded as "successful," it's hard to tell many times. That category is usually defined for us by gross revenues, celebrity, and the allegedly successful person's conformity to society's expectations at the moment. Any and all of these by-products of success can destroy the underlying creative spirit rather than empower it for further accomplishment.

But if you think a successful person achieved the status in the manner described by this most self-effacing and eloquent musician, then there's no need to withhold either respect or admiration, or to fear for their creative future:

I've been lucky, you know? I take my own path and I turn around and I look behind me and there are people that are following me and I think that I get a kick out of that.

--Tom Waits

My musical ignorance is boundless. I hadn't heard of Waits before he appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in November 2006, when he spoke the words above to a fawning host. They were so softly forceful I'd forgotten neither their gist nor the setting in which they had been spoken. Yet I could no longer remember when I'd heard them. It seemed like just a few months ago. When I went to find them, I was surprised but pleased to discover it had been nearly 15 months: the words had lingered that powerfully. Judge for yourself.

The relevant section begins at 3:08.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Tom Waits

www.thedailyshow.com

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November 28, 2006

Resisting the Trance

2008-02-03T11:36:00.000-06:00

A couple of years ago, I went on a mini-spree of taking classes (just like one of my new literary heroes, Alan from Love Creeps). For me, the "spree" amounted to all of two courses. The first covered the basics of cooking; the second, drawing. The chef and the artist who served as my teachers were kind, empathetic instructors. And I was very happy to see the classroom from the other side for the first time in many years. Afterward it was far easier to incorporate the lessons from the kitchen into my daily routine than those from the art studio. I've realized, though, that the art class had much more to teach me about how I think and feel.

Our text was Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It emphasized drawing as the activation of mental processes many of us rarely access. I found her approach to be correct (since I drew much better), but also very unsettling. There's nothing more threatening to my momentary sense of well-being than perceiving that I'm being pulled into a strange mental landscape (I wrote about this quirk of mine below). When you're in the thick of drawing, or writing for that matter, your sense of time and place is destroyed. Like a cold swimming pool, it's great once you've embraced the new environment, but the shock of beginning is severe. It can prevent me from even starting. I wonder if I'm unique?

Everybody has different reasons to resist writing or other creative acts. Sometimes it has to do with perfectionism in its various guises. It may be worthwhile to consider also that at least for a few of us, resistance may be based on something more. Maintaining one's psychological equilibrium can become a powerful motivator, and therefore an equally powerful barrier to the trance of creativity.

Watch That Basket

2008-02-02T11:35:00.000-06:00

Worse even than imagining the disappearance of my laptop computer would be knowing that my Zune was being browsed by anybody. I marvel the ease and passion with which others describe their musical interests and tastes. They then use their iPods or Zunes or whatever to amass the boldest of statements about what they like. I, on the other hand, just collect random stuff that sounds good to me. That's a problem.

There are plenty of songs on my Zune I'd be proud for anyone to know I like. There are also a lot that, if taken as indicative of my tastes, would reveal a middlebrow or worse level of musical sophistication. These songs remind me of a happy time, they pep me up if I listen to them first thing in the morning, or they allow me to indulge in self-pity when that particular mood strikes. They once sold by the millions, enriching a series of performers who are now either retired or on perpetual reunion tours.

Anyone who's seen "High Fidelity" knows what could happen if you revealed poor taste to someone who views himself as a guardian of all that's good and decent in music. The store clerk played by Jack Black nearly assaults a poor guy who's entered a hip record store looking for a copy of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" (for the record: "Overjoyed" is the only Stevie Wonder song on my Zune).

Just as the Internet has allowed fortunes to be made anonymously servicing the wildest of human proclivities, it now allows me to buy, one at a time and secretly, all the songs I think sound good, even if the cognoscenti would disapprove or laugh. One I remember hearing while grocery shopping with my mother when I was five. Several are by a pop star of the early 70s whose voice and style allow me to escape the present and revel in the dream of an ideal past. None of them is there to make a personal statement about the best sort of music.

To admit I listened to some of these things -- well, it would be like showing up at a Super Bowl party and asking who the starting quarterbacks are. Mouths would open in disbelief, smirks would overwhelm faces flecked with nacho crumbs, and you'd be answered either in that unctuously sympathetic tone with which one speaks to foreigners, children, or the simple, or the caustic one used by insecure know-it-alls who've taken your ignorance as a challenge to their core identity.

The beauty of the iPod or Zune is that it makes one's entire collection totally portable. That's also it's greatest danger, at least for somebody like me. It reminds me of Mark Twain's dictum from Pudd'nhead Wilson: "Behold, the fool saith, 'Put not all thine eggs in the one basket' — which is but a manner of saying, 'Scatter your money and your attention,' but the wise man saith, 'Put all your eggs in the one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.' " I may not know where my car keys are at any given moment, but I'll always be able to tell you where my Zune is.

Vaporized

2008-01-29T19:19:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago a reader of this blog previously unknown to me introduced me to the works of Amanda Filipacchi. This kind stranger recommended Filipacchi's Love Creeps as a way of helping me continue my literary exploration of companionship, aloneness, love, estrangement, and related themes.

I read Love Creeps within a few days of beginning it. It proved to be an astounding and hilarious examination of what Augustine called being "in love with love." I just wish I knew if "Love Creeps" was meant to be a two-word complete sentence or an adjective followed by a noun. I tend to go with the complete sentence idea, thereby justifying my sympathetic understanding of most of the novel's characters. They're so well developed that they're believable (and likable) even when caught in outrageous situations -- as when one of them descends from his apartment during a fire alarm covered only in chocolate syrup and carrying a rat.

Love Creeps is Filipacchi's most recent work. Intrigued and beguiled by her talents, I ordered both her earlier novels. The second of these, Vapor, arrived first. It quickly forced me to confront what must have been a very ancient fear. I discovered I'm initially uncomfortable with magical, supernatural, or metaphysical elements in fiction. As I thought about it some more (and corresponded a bit with my anonymous blog reader), it occurred to me that I had never read much science fiction, magical fiction, or horror. I could watch movie adaptations of some such works without too much unease: for instance, the first Lord of the Rings, the first Harry Potter, or a Stephen King story or two (but not The Wizard of Oz!). Although I could sometimes watch a movie, suspending my disbelief for a couple of hours, I had never wanted to read the books on which they are based. What's the difference, I began to wonder, between reading such a story and seeing it represented on film? Why did one provoke some anxiety, and the other not?

I think it gets back to a primal fear for all of us -- being lost and abandoned, in a place we don't know around people we don't understand. In my case, as any story moves from its first obvious departure from reality (easily overlooked or forgiven) to the second, I'm normally shocked right out of the story. It's as if I'm telling myself "Hey, you're about to get lost in someone else's world. There may be no familiar signposts. Pull out now, go back to your reality while you still can." In a movie, you know you'll be out again in a couple of hours, tops. When you're hundreds of pages from the end of a novel, however, it's tougher for someone like me to persevere. It's the same reason I don't like going out on long trips on someone else's boat. All your options are gone.

But these fears never materialized when I was reading Vapor. Now, this book has some magical elements. The title hints at one of them: the generation of small clouds with physical qualities science would not recognize. And there are a few others. Rather than interfere with the story, they advance it. I was able to let go and enjoy because I soon realized that the brief magical interludes or fanciful elements (like translucent clothing) were tugging me further along into a story I wanted and needed.

For at heart Vapor is about what most stories I like are about. People are either discovering who they are or coming to terms with who they are. The magical and near-magical elements in Vapor make the story work, enabling trenchant and humorous observations about human nature and bringing people together who in the normal course of affairs would have no business knowing each other. These elements ultimately permit a conclusion at once heartrending, optimistic, and puzzling (but thanks to Internet-based anagram generators and Amazon.com's "Search Inside" feature, the puzzle is solvable -- at least I like to think so).

A famous Buddhist proverb tells us that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I was ready to learn more about being alone, being together, and living with and without the ability to realize one's ambition. Vapor appeared through the magic of this blog and the Internet, and I'm happy about that.