Wax Banks

Building.

Don't say 'My work is bad,' say 'I need to do this better.' Or better yet just do it. No one cares about 'you' - only about living with you. Which is work.

HOT WIFE!! Here, I'll prove it with photographic digital evidence of online.

HOT WIFE!! [Update: MADDENINGLY SMART WIFE!!] Update: I looked over the blog's stats and referrers the other day, and you fuckers - actually googling 'hot wife' and the like - are just too creepy. So no more picture for you. Sidebar: Grow up!

'College prep' is a crime.

The idea of 'college prep' courses and schools is stupid and unhealthy.

Never mind the social stratification that stems from the cost and availability of such programs and schools, never mind that tutors take pressure off mainstream/public schools to actually teach the expected material; it's the idea of preparing for college itself that rankles. We impose several artificial discontinuities on children already: treating physical activity and restlessness as problems outside of gym class, reducing music and visual arts' stature in schools, treating 'teenagers' as distinct from slightly younger but equally sexually (im)mature creatures, literally locking children up in featureless beige boxes for seven hours a day, etc. The high school/college discontinuity is difficult for parents and often jarring for students in part because we treat it as a border, a finale, rather than a milepost. Moreover, we set expectations for college - which allegedly 'teaches you how to think' - in such a way that high school seems even more trivial and time-wasting than it already, almost inevitably is.

Any skill or practice that prepares students for college prepares them for the rest of their lives, and vice versa.

The real stuff, the deep stuff, clearly differs from what we teach students as 'college prep.' Good advice is always good: Caring about your SAT score is tacky and only gets moreso after you've been admitted to college; wanting to demonstrate your skills is admirable and will get you places in life. Knowing how to seem intelligent in a classroom makes you a skilled deceiver; knowing how to ask clear questions and keep a dialogue going will win you entry into heaven. A good book - or a good time reading - has nothing to do with a good book report. Don't focus on 'study skills' as if studying textbooks were some unique field unto itself; learn how to focus on tasks for long periods of time, how to recharge your batteries, when and how to take a break, how to treat other people with respect and bring out the best in collaborators, how to evaluate your own mental state, how to organize yourself for work. And don't mislead people about your abilities - continue to improve them and take pride in mastery of all kinds. 'Practice' doesn't mean 'warmups,' it means activity. It means doing, living. Good life is good practice; and vice (of course) versa.

We teach children to think of school as something separate from life, and the awesome irresponsibility of the 'typical' college experience would seem to back up this lesson. But most 'rites of passage' are collective fantasies of identity rather than development and continuity - high school graduation, bat mitzvah, job promotion, first confession, and the Hallowed Wonderful Wedding Day should each in theory mark the culmination and consolidation of a period of development and steady growth, but we pretend that they inaugurate brand new chapters in life, as if there were such a thing as a 'chapter' in life, as if we could put away whom we've been. The past isn't dead; it's not even past. If we teach our children disposable skills such as what passes for 'college prep' - collections of trivia and arbitrary numerical measures you're not supposed to cling to and use throughout life but to show off to admissions boards like the coat and mane of a prize horse - we devalue their experiences, their differences, the stuff of their lives. You either do or don't 'become a worthwhile adult' - and what the blazing hell could that possibly mean? 'College prep' is like 'age 12 prep': it impoverishes the present on behalf of a fantasy future. It's irresponsible.

So enough with 'prep school' and 'college prep' and 'study skills.' Enough pretending that doing well in school is (and, grotesquely, should be) different from, unrelated to, growing and living well. These are symptoms of our deeper cultural problem, which is this: high school and college prepare us only incidentally or accidentally for the world when they prepare us at all, partly because we treat them as worlds unto themselves. Which is part of our debilitating collective fantasy that children are something separate from us - which is itself only the flip side of our even more self-serving fantasy, namely that we are a different sort of being from our children, and from the children we once were.

More Redford than Hoffman, wouldn't you say? No? NO?!@#$ BASTARDS

Phil told me I looked like 'either Woodward or Bernstein' in this outfit. I told him it didn't matter which so long as I could keep the jacket. Here's why there is hate in the world: he didn't let me keep the jacket. Palestine, Darfur, all of it - just let me have the goddamn jacket, Phil. You monster.

When the day is nearly done.

Five.

She had native American blood, I realized only much later, which gave her straight black hair and skin the colour of a deep summer suntan. Her head and torso hardly moved when she ran, her legs deeply bent, and her motions were fluid; even suddenly skipping she was never jerky or clumsy. Our grades were similar in high school but I never really saw her as competition - in my arrogance I supposed we were entirely different creatures. We would see movies together, listen to cassettes in the car, joke around backstage at concerts, and I seemed to have a crush on every girl in school but her. For years she loved me. She suffered and not in silence, but I paid no attention. (And what would I have done, had I been able to acknowledge her feelings? What could I possibly have done or said?) Her skin smelled like woodsmoke and earth and she dressed in old clothes, but I never noticed, or never admitted it. When the time came to go our separate ways for college we kissed finally, and more, and after a week together and a couple of months apart we had moved on. I moved on first.

* * *

I can't remember what she looked like crying though I must have seen. Within a week we were in bed and within two I was in love, or supposed so. She had a smattering of Italian and an overbite, a radiant smile and a horse laugh that disarmed me, and had slept with older boys; I let my hair grow long and knew that we were meant for each other. I knew nothing. We spent fifteen months dating and another six breaking up, and she'd leave our escalating fights troubled, and tell me so. I realize now, a decade on, that while she constantly projected happiness and comfort, she had long since lost hope. In us, anyhow. I wished for blindness, to escape responsibility for seeing unhappiness I was causing. She left in early September, but it was February or a year or five years later before I realized how much happier she was without me. I'd like to tell you what she loved, but I don't remember. I know she loved me and then didn't. Which is my blindness rather than her darkness, right?

* * *

I wore silly red pajamas and assumed she'd be impressed, and she was, or played along. Her eyes let me see myself as a man. A year passed and graduation, and we spent the summer reading novels together, crawling in and out of bed, unwinding. It was a good time. We were sexy together and foolish and it was perfect. She was unhappy. She left for grad school, a year of starting over, and I stayed put for a year of more of what I knew. She returned shaken. We moved in together and survived the year - our third - but only just. I moved on first. Her shoulders were pale broad and bony, small breasts set wide apart, and she took long heavy-booted strides and loved joking around. I guessed her hair looked better short, and was right. She said she wanted to wait and I said 'I don't see any reason why.' We both should have known but how can you? And in one way or another each was the love of the other's life 'til then, but that's what love is for: it destroys emotional context. She loved the outdoors and gave it up entirely while we were together, and I was tired of blaming myself and ready to break something long before I kissed someone else, another friend, while rain fell.

* * *

She wanted to be a writer but wouldn't, isn't, and a friend said 'She was ready to be in love with you from the first day' and, who knows, maybe she was. Maybe I wanted. We talked about dead family members, cried, and what I took for narrative one-upmanship she saw as confession and connection. You can make a whole life out of that if you don't mind destroying someone else's. She walked like a rag doll on its way up to claim a gold medal: joyfully, unself-consciously, a little goofily. If we had a relationship I spent a lot of it drunk and all of it unhappy, and passed the latter affliction on to her. We dreamt of growing old reading one another's literary first drafts, and when the time came for her to leave for graduate school we'd wasted a year more on fighting than friendship or anything else. That sin was largely mine; others were shared. You can mistake persistence for strength. She was ready for something desperate and pure but I was empty. We might have been something, my only such, but not then. Nothing then. And not since. I pulled away first - from the start actually - but for a while she was the only one who had moved on.

* * *

I disliked that she was gorgeous and thought of herself as mature - wrongly to my eyes - and she disliked (rightly) that I was not and not. Her grades were much much better than mine but I made some excellent mistakes. She was rail-thin, her spine a shallow sine curve, sandy hair or red or brown as mood dictated, and a hard shell protected whatever was inside, or so I'd learn in time. Half a decade passed and more. Each of us was nearing the other side of something exhausting. She knew what music could do, how sentences sing. She hoped the way I did, it looked like. We became slow friends and fast lovers; the former was irreplaceable and the latter unpalatable. When the friendship blossomed and the need to impress one another passed, the other parts worked themselves out quite nicely. She moved into our house of six before we'd worked out what (or whether) we were as a pair, and for a year it was fine for me and bad for her. We broke up in April or May, something inside me rotated 180 degrees (and warmed another twenty), and a few years later we were married. We weren't broken up long. I laugh aloud at her jokes and admire her work her honesty her effort of every kind, she moves like everything matters, and her smile and scent and savour are to me a lesson in dangerous geography or topology, undiscovered cities at the burnt fringes of a map where seadragons wait. She is my new world.

More life.

Little D Hatching Out of the Egg from Class 1-208 on Vimeo.

30? Rock!

Beau.

How the Mind Works, abridged edition.

Actual headline: 'GOP Sen. Graham Opens Door To Bank Nationalization'

What my wife saw: 'Senator Graham Opens Door for Notorious B.I.G.'

['What does it actually say? ... Oh, so I was pretty close.']

Ecstatic.

I want to talk more about it because it's been needlessly - and tastelessly - shat on by critics, but the short version is: Mamma Mia! isn't just a 'celebration of middle-aged female sexuality' and it isn't nearly as brain-dead as it's been docked credit for. The obvious: yes it's a mass-produced jukebox musical. Live with it. Barring one downright smutty song ('Does Your Mother Know,' joyous) and one bizarrely erotic/ambivalent one ('Mamma Mia,' Streep solo on the roof going crazy, less inexplicable than it first appears), the thing seems to be less about celebrating sexuality in a 'turning up the volume equals empowerment' way than about learning to live with what other people want, in or out of bed - so many big sugary major-key songs talking about such a minor-key subject! Impressive, in a way. Not since Casa de los Babys have I seen a flick about Women of A Certain Age congregating in an atmosphere of similar realization, plus the ladies of Mamma Mia have got a few years on the cast of John Sayles's film.

The structure is ridiculous and the Abba songs are Abba songs, but there's more going on in Mamma Mia! than critics insisted on insisting. Which is a compliment to the journeymen filmmakers and a yet another disappointed wag of the finger to our useless self-involved corps of movie critics. If you couldn't tell.

[Oh, bother. A sharp review here, barring some unnecessary swooning. Boston represent!]

My wife is way way better at Ninja Ropes than I am!!

She's almost certainly way way better than you bitches too.

We did not get along / I thought Wax Banks wrote down one too many blogs

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you're as lucky in your selection of friends and family as I am. Thank them, and if you're the sort to talk to abstract notions, give thanks for them too. And we'll see each other soon, I hope.

Love,
Wally

Late night all right.

At zero hour only passion can save you. (I like to sit and remember is all.)

From here we go sublime.

When you've had an experience that no one else seems to understand - or let's say you're preoccupied with the fact that understanding complexly personal experiences is very difficult for certain people, and you generalize this to everyone - or maybe you've simply been close to what you understand as 'death' that you feel you have to shy away from the daily pleasures and affirmations of mere human coexistence -

No, start over. When you can't reconcile your experiences with your beliefs, something's got to give. You can deny your experiences, or you can alter your beliefs. Neither is easy. One is reasonable.

'Spiritual' and religious beliefs address needs that simply don't square with any of our lived reality (I need meaning). They answer questions that we can't ask except in spiritual terms, not because religions and mystical belief systems offer the best ways to understand 'supernatural' occurrences, but because sophisticated vocabularies of e.g. altered consciousness and metaphysics are inaccessible to the average human. Or else no one's bothering to explain to them, which amounts to the same thing but can at least be remedied in theory.

The language of 'chakras,' for instance, doesn't actually seem to correspond to contemporary medical knowledge (mystical energy flow? Really?). But you don't have any contemporary medical knowledge, so what language is available to you when you become aware of the physicalization and localization of cognition? Or the idea of 'storing' a memory in a body part? What happens when you're sitting quietly and are struck with a total understanding of something - or rather, an experience of totality? The dispassionate observer might say that a switch has flipped in your head granting the experience, however unfounded, of 'totality,' analogous to deja vu. (Deja vu is trivially understood on the far side of a very, very convincing false perception compounded by superstition - no this hasn't happened to you before, that very feeling is incorrect. Can't trust your own head, and who wants to hear that?)

An ad hoc practitioner of meditation - someone who makes a habit of sitting quietly and emptying her head for a while, to aid focus - could go years without finding a description of what she's doing. Now, if she walks into the MIT Press bookstore and sees a copy of Zen and the Brain, and for no reason picks it up, she'll find scientific answers to some of her questions in there, questions that themselves pertain, it turns out, to neuroanatomy and cognition and the very shape of the brain, etc. If, on the other hand, she happens to go for a walk up Mass Ave and ends up in the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center (for whatever reason), she'll find a set of spiritual practices, a set of ethical principles, a long cultural history, and a theory of the universe that is (alas) filled to the brim with reborn souls and enlightened leaders and an emphasis on simplicity, all of which feels good and coherent and complete somehow, the same way The Wire feels like Baltimore to a New Yorker. And if our heroine goes for it, if she decides to embrace Buddhist practice and faith and so forth (and please refrain from quibbling over the use of 'faith' with is descriptive but not meant to imply cosmology, though Jesus, just look at the stuff), and a year later she stumbles upon Zen and the Brain at the bookstore (or, hell, at the GBBCC), she'll instead most likely incorporate this more nuanced understanding of the neuroscience of meditation and altered consciousness into her practice and her spiritual beliefs. 'This,' she might say, 'is the physical analogue to what I know to be the Truth about our shared path,' etc., etc., etc.

Having 'grown up' within this language.

No, start over. It's the ubiquity of tortured metaphysics and fantasy that makes it so difficult to converse about simple things like altering your mode of perception. We do have a fallen version of such a discourse - the language of self-help - but it is on the one hand shot through with dime-store mysticism and the remnants of sickly New Age aesthetics, and on the other hand absolutely geared toward quick fixes and corporate head-cleaning, offering little inducement to alter behaviours in a considered, systemic way, meaning, if you can stand back and look at the whole 'Self-Help' shelf of this awful corporate-cosmic bookstore, that while there are simple ideas aplenty about how to 'fix what's wrong with you,' they offer none of the satisfaction of religious (totalizing) belief.

Like, say, the '9/11 Truth' kids. About whose particular beliefs let's not concern ourselves, same with 'UFOlogists' and so forth, but isn't it nice to hold a belief such that everything around you affirms that belief? Skepticism is hard work because being skeptical means constantly being buffeted by things crying out for investigation and consideration and (odds are) refutation. Whereas if God can do anything, or the government can cover up anything, or (e.g.) all things are somehow connected - and not just by physical coexistence and interdependence but in a kind of cosmic-literary register with all kinds of loopy ethical correlates like 'eat plants but not meat' and so forth, what? - then every possible experience has a slot to slip into, and an explanation readymade, and that's basically the most comfortable position you can possibly be in. Your preacher fucks his male meth dealer, which not only recalls but in fact confirms the doctrine that 'people sin, the elect can be saved through their repentance, if he'd only had an even closer personal relationship with The Man Jesus everything would have been alright,' which is nothing more than the metaphysical correlative to 'the problem with Nixon is that he wasn't conservative enough.'

Which isn't about 'authoritarianism,' it's about being taken care of by your own thoughts, by your head, by an imagined body of laws-makers and belief-limners, in the absence your mother and father. Kids don't need all that jarble because they have actual people there to help them through the world. Which is part of the reason why hyper-religious kids and Nazi kids and four-year-old 'virtuoso' musicians and middle-school-aged Goldwater Girls freak us out so goddamn much: why have these kids been forced to seek solace in systemic belief and practice, in constant affirmation most likely hollow, when they should have with them the constant affirmation and total comfort (in being loved) of, um, just their parents? Which maybe, just maybe, leads us to a Jazz Parenting insight, which might simply be that when the Baby arrives, you have a responsibility to loosen your hold on rigid ideas and plans and preoccupations, because they will stifle your Baby's ability to trust in love. If you show a system other than 'I am here for you and I will help you be safe and happy,' that system comes to stand in (maybe?) for love and fellowship and peaceful coexistence as an operating principle.

Which isn't the sales pitch for the Anarchist Mommy series of guidebooks, quite the opposite. Just asking en passant for a little more improv, a little less certainty. Which lets more experience in - without dictating in advance its meaning. Kids don't need that; they'll find their own way, so long as they have a chance to develop the tools for it. You can't change anyone's feelings, you can only offer them new experiences.

* * *

Not surprisingly, aesthetic/cultural criticism seems to work similarly to religious belief as I've waved at it above. Well you know this I imagine. So long as we have a theory (ahem - a Theory) that's affirmed by all 'experience' (and snarky scare quotes notwithstanding, let's swerve around the the gigantic 'literary theory isn't a real job you sissy nerds'-shaped pothole in the road, who put that there?), we can be happy all the time - only not really. Rather we can be occupied all the time, given a 'purpose' which is comforting but not fulfilling, which is why every day you hear a variation on 'he was always so quiet, I could never imagine him doing something like this.' We're absolutely fucking useless when it comes to distinguishing between forms of happiness, between satisfaction and fulfillment, between sustainable feelings and momentary impulses. Everyone has a kind of punishment he's eager to come back to. Everyone. But, criticism: an apparatus that allows you to analyze all things without fail wouldn't be a Theory at all, it would be The World. Which - asshole! - you already have, or at least have heard of. The desire for a scientific Theory of Everything is the desire to make a grander universe; its literary/cultural analogue is pure unmitigated laziness and fear. (Well laziness is fear, innit.) Guilty as charged!

Certain compulsions discussed.

[The following focuses even more tightly on my navel than usual. If that sort of thing is OK with you, then sure: you'll probably be OK with this sort of thing. From my perspective it needed saying. From yours there's no 'need,' really. Why try to scare you off? I'll feel less guilty if you just don't read the post than if you start doing so and abandon the thing. Ha! Like I'd know. But I will somehow know. That's modern tech, Reader(s). Love it.]

I realized only recently that I'm a compulsive shopper. I've long been aware of my inability to walk into a bookstore and walk out empty-handed, but this summer I began to think of this (ahem) charming disposition as something more sinister. At dinner last night a friend asked how much business I'd given the Harvard Book Store; offhand I quoted a number that seemed comically high to me, but on further reflection it may actually have been low, never mind the over-the-years outlay at Rodney's in Central Square, Davis Square's McIntyre & Moore, or the Coop at MIT and Harvard - where I used to make late-summer trips to pick at the assigned reading lists for classes I wasn't taking, in Literature (sure) but also Physics, Anthropology, Math, Biology...

(Side note on personal 'style': normally there would be an additional, melodramatic 'or' before 'Davis' in the preceding paragraph. An artifact of my staginess; it's for speaking. Deleting it took an effort of will, I tell you. Some compulsions are more benign than others but you find something new on the other side of any one of them.)

My bookshelves are overflowing with unfinished books, which is fine, but also plenty of books I'll likely never begin, which is not fine. e.g. A Barnes & Noble collected edition of Jane Austen's novels, hefty, sloppily designed, purchased on a trip several years ago as a palliative when I realized (via accusation?) that I hadn't read a woman's writing in years.[*] 'Straight to the top!' I vowed. Now it rests alongside an ancient Mark Helprin omnibus edition from the Quality Paperback Club (bought to assuage my guilt over not taking the recommendations of a former paramour), the millionth unfinished copy of Erewhon (reading list, anthropology), an assortment of 'great buys' from the nearby Salvation Army store (including The Lovely Bones and The Closing of the American Mind, both purchased, I suspect, under the auspices of a personal, aspirational Fairness Doctrine - The Lovely Bones being by all accounts the Sarah Palin of recent novels). I mean to read them, vow to read them, but I know I won't. I can go along with a lie knowing it's a lie - which makes me not a fine liar but an ideal gull.

This all extends to downloading. My music-acquisition model is associational and aspirational as well. (Oh it's a 'model' now?) The other day, for instance, I found myself downloading not one but three albums by The Hold Steady. Why? Because one song had rung my bell. In retrospect, after the muted pleasure of acquisition has faded, I realize that the song that excited me wasn't even by The Hold Steady; it's a Dirty Projectors tune, which for some fanciful reason I associate with the other band. And why am I listening to Dirty Projectors?

1) Farhad, my surrogate older brother, insisted that I track them down, and I can't be disloyal to him;

2) They sound like the sort of band I'd like if I were rigorous in my affections (affectations?), at times coming off as an indie rock Phish with splashes of Queen and Peter Gabriel, who by the way let me tell you about Peter Gabriel: I'm happy to praise the man, maintain an affection for him, and can hardly bear to listen to more than a dozen of his songs, like a negative image of Bob Dylan, whom I dislike and indeed deem it important somehow to dislike, even though maybe a dozen of his songs constitute a reasonable argument for the sum and substance of the meaning of pop music. I took two courses at Johns Hopkins over a high school summer, and the last week of the program saw a dance for the high schoolers at which In Your Eyes played, and I stood outside the dance in the warm air with three or four goony fellas while someone smoked a cigarette and we looked at each other and insisted we didn't need to dance with girls to have a good time, but we also didn't leave until the song was over.

Same deal with the day on which I acquired a half-dozen albums by Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Dolly Parton. This is music I should be listening to, good stuff, but it came from the impulse to like the music rather than, y'know, actually listen to it. I was already going through a high-frequency cycle of evaluation and disappointment halfway through the first verse of the first song. The object of my evaluation was my affection. Oh don't tell me this is all about 'the mystery of love' or somesuch nonsense.

Plus: let's not even start on the several burnt DVD's full of scanned comic books, roleplaying game and wargame rules, and concert footage of bands toward whom I feel mostly ambivalence - which are filling up both the study and the living room table.

It is, for whatever reason, not this way with movies. Maybe because they're expensive and a pain to download. And I hate clothes shopping, indeed hate just about every form of shopping that doesn't involve books or company.

So: to what extent, and in what way, does this compulsion to acquire media, more importantly to devour it and make it part of me, play into my self-identification as 'critic' (or just plain 'writer,' or 'storyteller')? Well I couldn't say, but then if I could say, this wouldn't be a blog, it'd be a novel.

* * *

I check my email compulsively too but we'll come back to that another day, because the knotty problem is that I don't actually respond to my email. Hell, I can't even respond to comments here - e.g. when I get what I take to be a sincere compliment, I'm paralyzed by the possibility that there's some ironic or deprecatory register to which I don't have access, that I'm not qualified to talk to the people I desperately want to talk to (or in any case am compelled to feel qualified to talk to, never mind actually building up my qualifications by e.g. doing the reading). And I feel sure that I'll be dismissed if I seek conversation by those I take to be my superiors or in any case elders. You might say 'that's just low self-esteem' but if the experience were anywhere near that simple, if it were one thing to feel like it's one thing to say, again: this would be a novel, not a blog.

You know something? I'm gonna print this out and give it to my therapist. But five'll get you ten I preempt any discussion of the article's substance by a prefatory 'offhand' suggestion that printing my writing for him is really a way of seeking approval from a (presumably!) benign surrogate who's never ever going to criticize its literary merit and is guaranteed to care about the content because he's paid to do so. I want to email him written prefaces to our weekly sessions but don't wish to impose on him, couldn't evaluate the wisdom of such a thing, and can't ask him whether that'd be alright because 'Um, is it OK if I email you this week?' brings back too many memories of instant-messaging girls in the computer clusters at MIT, striking up doomed typed conversations, self-effacing and self-sabotaging.

Thank God for my wife. On the other side of the compulsive need to say 'I love you' is the faith that you are loved. It needn't be a question seeking confirmation. It can be a register of the thing that opens you and opens for you, complete in itself. I am at rest: and when I say 'I love you' I say it restfully. Which only sounds like getting old. You fool.

Don't know why I'd end here but I will. If you didn't follow the asterisk when it appeared, your now-tonally-inappropriate anticlimax follows. Enjoy.

* * *

[*] Possibly not since taking classes on Virginia Woolf and Caryl Churchill, the latter of whom (on the page anyhow) could put you off all literature if you let your guard down. Light Shining on Buckinghamshire made me think I'd been shown a new universe, but by the second act of Top Girls and the (maybe) insufferable Cloud Nine I was ready to give up. (Loved the rhyming-verse 'city comedy' Serious Money though, what a surprise.) That Churchill was paired in a pomo theatre class with Tom Stoppard didn't help her standing in my mind: Stoppard's plays are like crack cocaine to me, even the pure philosophy-noir abstraction of Jumpers, and as he's gotten more sentimental I've found more to like in his writing, not less. The Shakespeare Ensemble kids had their usual orgasms over the game of Questions in R&G, but The Invention of Love is where my heart came to rest. Weirdly, Arcadia didn't arrest me the same way - maybe I'm skeptical about representations of science by decided nonscientists, maybe I resented that it was the play of his that I was mandated to like by fellow-travelers. But since none of this is an argument on merit anyhow, I needn't dig too deep.[**]

[**] Look at that long-ass footnote! Pure defensiveness: a little bit of aww-shucks erudition because I'm embarrassed about the number of unread books I own.

Summer assortment.

Happy 'We survived the end of the world' Day, everyone. This is for The Wife, who chastised, and Mr Roberts, who snarked.

* * *

We have all different kinds of stakes in remembering things certain ways.

[...]

This isn't therapy, this is storytelling.

[...]

Art is every kind of human behaviour that presupposes our unity as transcending our sense of separateness.

--David Milch

When I was a kid in Texas I used to love reading in the bathroom. Upstairs in our house were my parents' big room, a closet, a spacious bathroom all in white (as I remember), then my brother's room and then mine (both of which I remember as weirdly dark or underlit), then my mom's home office, which over time became our computer room and a bit of a storage room. It was a big house, with a central staircase (with a 180-degree turn and a landing) open to both floors, and a long second-floor landing overlooking the tiled entryway. I remember my brother falling down the stairs - both flights! - clutching an enormous teddy bear; it was as big as he was and he didn't have a scratch on him as he clattered to the brown tiles at stair-bottom. Laughing. The living room probably wasn't as big as I remember it but I can't know and so don't wonder. The couch was an off-peach or off-salmon colour, like an ancient painting of skin, with a white flower pattern. Enormous, L-shaped. I'd squeeze into one end between cushion and armrest, my brother into the bend in the center, Mom between us, Dad at the other end. I used to pick at the flowers on the couch while sitting down to watch TV with my parents. Giant Zenith TV, old-fashioned. I wish I had a picture of it.

(We had an old instamatic camera for recording family moments but we almost never used it. I guess my parents couldn't be bothered. In any case my dad was never one for the peculiar American-influenced multiple-photo habit. I've seen a half-dozen pictures of him from when he was young; they may be the only ones ever taken. But everything is cheaper now in all ways.)

I chipped my tooth in the bathroom once and got the missing piece replaced, but the dentists did an atrocious job - I could literally pull at it, no smoothness. When I moved to New York the dentist was shocked at the shabbiness of the replacement. My parents never noticed I guess, and I never asked. The dentist in New York fixed the tooth and for the longest time you couldn't tell anything had been done. Now I think the fake part of my tooth - front left upper - is less opaque than the rest of it. You don't play around in the bathroom, it's not that kind of space. A place is for a thing. Maybe that thing is 'making new things' but that's not the bathroom.

I used to go read in there. I'd put down the toilet seat cover and read for what feels now like hours. Was it that long? It couldn't have been. The bathroom was longer than it was wide, with a long mirror and plenty of light. You walked past two sinks and a big space inbetween - where we kept toothpaste and such - and turned a quick corner to get to the toilet, which was hidden. You could curl up on the toilet with a book and be all but invisible. I loved hiding in there. There was a hamper built into the wall(!) where we put our dirty clothes, below a linen cabinet. I just got a memory of soiling myself and tucking my soiled underwear into the hamper in shame. I was young.

* * *

[Noted while sitting on a bed in Jamaica.]

'Rainbow Brush will keep your kids occupied for hours!' We realized that this commercial wasn't for an art product, it was for a parenting aid.

* * *

[While freewriting at Dado Tea.]

I could just drink juice all day. Like actual juice, the squeezlingtons of a real fruit, not the bottled stuff. Or smoothies. How good would that feel, damn.

[...]

Tall tan girl, a mile tall maybe, short jean shorts - walks in, dithers, walks out. Her face in that mask of skepticism you see on good-looking girls: used to being watched, examining people, being cool about it. Or I don't know anything about her. She's the nicest person I'd ever hope to meet, her mom has multiple sclerosis, Dad lost his job last month even though he had a great biannual employee review, she and her brother haven't spoken in a week, she won the science fair, the spelling bee, a beauty contest that she's embarrassed about after all these years even though it's just one more thing, one only, but she thinks of it as something she must now overcome and put behind her, as if beauty is an imposition, and so away at college it's all baggy clothes and she even met this girl in her Feminism and Science class who showed her her first Italian movie and then leaned in for a kiss and it was so strange, she couldn't believe it. She couldn't believe she was kissing her back. Her name was Danielle from Ohio and Danielle knew she was gay the first time she saw her mother's friend changing after swimming in the pool at their apartment complex, that tuft of strange hair and everything S-shaped curves and soft. And now Danielle is sure this is gonna be another straight chick looking for women's studies credit by fooling around and then - fucking always - 'I think I just prefer guys, sorry, oh my god I feel so bad, but it was really nice,' but that's who she falls for and the tall tan girl in the denim shorts tastes like cherry Chap-Stick and every minute she's ever spent on the Stairmaster absolutely shows, and Danielle can't decide whether to fuck her or take care of her, and she's beginning to worry she'll do the one and forget the other. Which is so easy.

* * *

[From an unfinished essay about tango pedagogy.]

One of the central aims of Zen practice is to become aware of the simultaneous continuity and separateness of things: the independent, objective existence of all objects, and their inextricable interrelation. If you keep that line of thought from getting too cosmic, keep it small-scale, you can apply it easily to the tango. Each moment of the dance is pregnant with possibility, and the improvisatory nature of the dance means that leader and follower must aspire to total responsiveness always; at the same time, there's a logic to the dance, and forcing certain unnatural combinations of steps on your partner disrupts the continuity of the dance, closes off its inevitability (which is to say its grace).

Let's make this clearer. When I lead my fiancée in a molinete (circle), the dance takes on a certain momentum of its own, and it's easy enough to let her keep tracing out that addictive cross-foot pattern in her own time. But in order to move from the circle to the next step - to stop the movement of her feet and lead a parada, or sweep her trailing foot in an elegant sacada, or ask her to wrap my leg in hers in a gancho (the most exciting tango movement) - I need to be part of her dance. Each of us has to be responding to the other, so we can't simply dance on autopilot, must take each step mindfully. Which is to say that control of our steps can't sink into the unconscious (sacrificing refinement and wit) but it can't stay fully conscious either (sacrificing fluidity).

It's not hard to float on water, nor to dive straight down. The hard thing is to maintain a fixed depth. Zen and tango - mindful practices both of them - are about maintaining depth. To teach the tango as a series of fixed figures, the obligation to track the beat instead of an invitation to explore it, you teach something else: the job of maintaining speed.

Grownups look at video games and wonder how kids can keep track of so many flashing objects at the same time. Kids look at parents' datebooks and checkbooks and wonder the same thing. The trick is to train the mind to make knowledge available just in time, when needed and at no other time - like letting yourself have a good time at a bar without worrying about whether your fiancée is having fun with her friends, but still remembering to call when you said you would. Maintain depth.

[...]

She grabs your shoulders and simply turns you, slowly - the act is also a request for permission (social apostrophe, the act that asks: gestures a contraction). One of the leader's key jobs in tango is to maintain a frame: arms rigid but responsive, allowing free movement but firmly directing. And I'm not maintaining my frame at all, my hand laughing at my hips, so my fiancée doesn't know whether to begin ochos (forward and backward steps across the body, footsteps in figure eights across the floor). Such a simple thing: she literally puts me right, and by twisting my shoulders she guides my body to its intended destination or orientation, by the appropriate path; arriving at a comfortable position, I already have the memory of how to reenter it. For some reason it takes me fifteen minutes to get my torso to face one way, my hips another; every time I tried and failed I was training myself. The learning context and the eventual social context are the same, like a flight simulator that actually blasts off through the ceiling with you laughing inside, a little surprised but, Christ, flying.

* * *

[From an ongoing writing project called The Bastard's Discourse.]

* She wants you to leave but doesn't know how to make it happen. Under the circumstances your job isn't simply to leave; it's to make her understand what she wants. The moral upshot being, on the one hand, that she confronts her authentic desires; on the other hand, you get to hate her for pushing you out of something 'nice,' which is also comfortable.

* * *

[From an ongoing project, about my wife.]

'That'll do,' he said cheerfully, and with a

PLOOSH

he leapt out of the water and into her open, 3/4-full water bottle. She let out an undignified shriek, then covered her mouth, a little embarrassed. 'That's my drinking water,' she said. Marmalade the talking fish/acrobat looked genuinely contrite - surprisingly so given the relative immobility of his face.

'I can go if you want.'

She looked at the fish, then at the road. Despite only having known him for a minute or two, she felt certain that in her position, Marmalade would have heaved a melodramatic sigh. She didn't wish to give him the satisfaction of objecting to his presence; nor did she like what it suggested about herself that the presence of a legless scaled creature in her drinking water made her somewhat uncomfortable (and secretly glad of the company). Canadian heritage or not, she could enjoy a little conversation on the road, and if worse came to worst, he would make a heart-healthy snack.

She closed the bottle and set it in a side pocket of her bag. 'Are you comfortable?' He nodded, which she couldn't see and which was actually an impressive feat for an animal shaped like a befinned squeeze-tube of frosting with eyes. 'I'm not in any hurry so tell me if you're uncomfortable.'

'Sure thing,' he said. They hardly knew one another and each of them felt that that was alright for the time being. Several miles up the road they would encounter a monkey who would throw their new friendship into some disarray; but that was some time off yet.

* * *

[From an unfinished blog post.]

My wife(!) and I are fond of a game called Carcassonne. It's a tile-laying game with a shallow learning curve; you connect tracts of land by laying matched tiles and score points for features (cities, roads, cloisters) you complete, with a bonus scoring round at game's end. There are two point-scoring timelines: round to round, rewarding quick decisive action and shrewd-but-not-wild tactics; and long-term, with the winner of the game often unknown (though not unknowable) until the last round, when the resource-stockpiling race is completed. Plenty of player interaction, no hidden information (think about what that means), and a good mix of strategy and tactics to balance the essential role of chance. You could teach Carcassonne to four smart friends in ten minutes, and have several hours' fun. This is the game to bring to a wine-and-The Wire party if at first you don't succeed in drinking all the wine.

A much better game, though a good deal more involved, is Settlers of Catan - a trading game, which is to say a betting game. Trading resources with another player involves a two part calculation: (1) Does this trade help me against everyone else more than it helps her against everyone else? (2) Does this help me against her? Three metrics to remember, in other words, and because dice rolls are involved, it's easy to get caught up in the sweepstakes rather than the plodding math. Which is what table gaming is, in general - hiding the math behind the flavour. (Warhammer 40K is basically arts'n'crafts hour with dice-rolling - its 'game' aspect is minimal. See below re: D&D as well.) Because you're trading an in-game resource, you feel connected to the other players - your actions aren't confined to your turn, and you're 'always on' in a sense. That's a great way to keep people involved in a game that doesn't also involve money (think of the downtime in poker, particularly for experienced players). This is the best board game I've ever played.

* * *

Hotel.

When next you hear from me, I'll be a Mrs.!

Wait, that's not right.

Harsh start; truth.

The GF says a 'harsh start' is a beginning to an argument that puts you immediately on the defensive: e.g. 'DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE A SHOPPING LIST?!' She also says:

'There's a claim that women are responsible for most 'harsh starts,' but I believe that's because men are inferior. They need so much direction.'

And that's why I love her.

Hat tip to Ai-ris for bringing this truth into our lives.

Likely lads.

Asks husband's opinions regarding important decisions and purchases: 1 merit point.

Yikes.

I don't mind that the GF 'puts her cold feet on [BF] at night to warm them.' But I confess to an affinity for 'Never goes to bed angry, always makes up first,' which was a policy my mom and dad tried to enforce during my childhood. Huh: I wonder whether that plays into yesterday's post on nail-biting.

[Update: Read the Good Doc's comment. One good thing about blogging - one of few - is that I get to make manic gestures at complex topics, which occasionally prompt other people to speak from places of rather more wisdom and charity than I'm able to muster.]

Nails.

As long as I can remember, I've pulled/picked/bitten my nails. Until recently my style involved picking, then biting - using the pitiful remnants of one nail (generally on a thumb or middle finger) to cut into another, then taking the now-broken sliver of dead nail and biting it off. I recognize that this is a disgusting habit from the biter's perspective as well as the observer's; what's under your fingernails is one of the vilest microbial stews on the body, and to trump nail-biting for pure grossness you'd have to go around licking the eyebrows of lepers, at the very least.

I've never used biting as a primary attack method until last week, because for the last 20 years, with only a single exception, my fingernails have never been long enough to be bitten directly. You need a lot of space to get your teeth in there and I've never allowed more than, say, a quarter-centimeter of white to remain visible at the ends of my nails.

Until last week.

A couple of weeks ago, the GF suggested a moratorium on nervous picking/biting habits. She pulls at her lower lip; I've got the same addiction, but I have an additional addiction to lip balm, apparently, so I'm unlikely to have anything to pick at on my lips. No, it's nails for me. (Note: I've never ever bitten my toenails. I find the idea vile, irrationally so. Only once in my life have I ever bitten at dead skin on my feet. Weirdly, that was last month. Is this a confession? I confess that it is.)

Well, I took her up on it, and here we are: as of this weekend my nails were longer than I can remember them being, ever. This is a big deal, emotionally and practically. I picked up a dime yesterday off a table using my nails, realizing only afterward that I'd been unable to do so for an entire generation; just now I flipped open my cell phone's power-adapter socket cover, and nearly wept: a task that literally used to take me fifteen to thirty seconds now took a fraction of a second, as it should, as it does for the average American. (Perhaps you see where this is going.) Think about that: a reasonably healthy twenty-nine-year-old fumbling at the plastic cover of his cell phone for half a minute.

* * *

One of my greatest fears is mental retardation.

Maybe that's a strange thing to say. Certainly it's a clumsy one. I don't know more polite language. It's not that I'm afraid of people with developmental disabilities; it's that I fear the idea of being trapped in a brain that doesn't fall in a normal ability range. This makes sense if you know me: I was forbidden from playing American football as a kid (a game in which I had only a passing interest, but every able-bodied kid in my middle/high school played it) because, to slightly paraphrase my parents, my brain is the only thing that's going to get me ahead in this world. A direct quote: 'You're sure not going to get by on your looks.' (I actually appreciated hearing that from my Dad, and I don't disagree, though I recognize that it's somewhat callous.) American football posed too great a danger of accident, and I was a pretty delicate kid in grade school, and the naked, simpleminded aggression of football would perhaps have altered my personality in ways my parents (and I?) might have had trouble accepting.

I was also forbidden from going to parties where drinking would go on. After a while, I had no interest in going, and if that shaded on occasion into general misanthropy, the benefits (I read, wrote, drew, sang, and played a lot back then, while gaining a pretty solid cinematic education on the side) hopefully outweighed the costs (I never learned what I had in common with the kids in my high school; I never learned how to balance social life and school). You trade one sort of growth for another - though that's also the theory behind foot-binding, isn't it? But this was nothing close to that.

In any case, I clung and continue to cling to the message that my identity is my intellect. That's maybe why I take so strongly to this medium, but don't actually enjoy commenting on blogs (and why I need/forget to apologise over and over for not responding to comments from Em and Sherv and others). And to an extent, that's why I've resisted ever smoking marijuana: by all appearances it makes people temporarily stupid, relaxed where vigilance is called for. If I get glaucoma I'll be the first to fill a prescription for weed, but in the meantime, my paranoia about limited faculties outweighs my interest in that form of externalization/relaxation. I would rather climb up to the sense that Things Are Beautiful And Everything Is Connected. (Wasn't until age 27 that I relented and took an illegal substance for the first and only time.) That's maybe not a terribly enlightened stance, nor brave, nor inquisitive, but it means standing on principle and that's one thought-shape I can hide behind.

Movies and books about the 'mentally challenged' (what a strange phrase) drive me insane with grief and fear. But it's not just disability that scares me, it's difference that I perceive (perhaps wrongly) as damaging limitation: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was a harrowing horror story to me, its charm outweighed by its desperate sadness; Forrest Gump's final scenes ('Is he...like me?') scarred me; Albert's final scene in The Corrections (as he succumbs to Parkinson's Disease) frightened and saddened me so much that I tear up just remembering it. I can't watch Rain Man again; all I can remember of it is the scene with the smoke alarm going off. It hurt me as much as it hurt the autistic character onscreen.

Part of the problem here is that a narcissistic solipsist - i.e. one who sees the inside of his skull as the scope of the world, and is convinced of his own grandness - tends to see the world as constantly crushing in on him. How could it not? If only my skull were big enough for my mind, that sort of thing. (When I was a child I read Harlan Ellison's short story 'The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,' from which came a line I was fond of quoting to friends and strangers up through high school: 'I am an unlimited man sadly living in a limited world.' The story ran in OMNI magazine, to which I got a subscription as a gift in elementary school. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve reading weird sci-fi in those pages.) Gives you a mix of self-pity and self-hatred to go with your self-love. As a smart guy not: 'not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations.'

But part of the problem is that I'm often short of sympathy but I seem to be afflicted with paralyzing empathy, in short bursts perhaps but inescapable nonetheless. (I'm not trying to pay myself unearned compliments here; I know that I prize 'empathy' as an aesthetic characteristic over 'sympathy,' but that isn't meant to bear on this.) Empathy - particularly for those who are prisoner to their feelings, which seem enormous, and unable to articulate them in ways that Everybody Else will understand. That's not just the 'I'm a sucker for children' evolutionary mechanism either; for whatever reason, I watch or read stories about people with Down's Syndrome or Parkinson's Disease or Alzheimer's or (Christ almighty) quadriplegia, and I die slowly inside. I don't know why I'd know that feeling, but I vibrate to it. It tears at me.

* * *

I went twice to the National Spelling Bee in middle school - 7th and 8th grade. It's a very arbitrary thing and I take no great pride in it, but it wasn't nothing - I felt so free in Washington, even under the ridiculous pressure of the competition, and I loved being around nerdy kids. (The next thing that reminded me of it was a trip to Johns Hopkins for the summer after sophomore year in high school.) I thought of it because of my fingernails: my younger brother got angry, back then, because my mom excused my nail-pulling to my dad as 'nerves because of the Spelling Bee.' For weeks I skated by on that. Otherwise my dad would have been on my back about it; he found it an 'untidy' habit. He's always been attuned to small matters of personal grooming and presentation - but then one would expect a poor kid from the north of England, having worked in high-class service jobs for a long time before making a living (back then) cleaning the homes of nouveau riche suburban boors, to be status-conscious to a fault. And it may well have been. A fault, I mean. Maybe not just that though.

I'm pulling them now, you know. Not like I used to; it's new and scary. Too much skin, too much white at the tips, it'll break, I don't want it to break. Just a tiiiiny bit, just off the top. Just to smooth the edges. Just to even them out. Just to correct for pulling too much from one side before. Just a tiny bit more. I can get away with a tiny bit more.

* * *

My dad was so proud of my fingernails when we met in Chicago this weekend. He said so. 'That's wonderful, son. It's a hard thing to do, you know,' he said. I didn't expect him to put it in those terms and I was glad to have made him happy. I wonder if perhaps he never cared one way or the other about my nails themselves - if, maybe, he had wanted me to achieve victory over some aspect of myself. Maybe he never knew how to teach me not to damage my own body in that way; such a small thing but I can see why it would hurt him (more than me). Maybe he never figured out a way to let me know what it meant to him - never had a language in which to speak to his son about something so small.

I remember him saying to my brother and me that if he ever ended up in the hospital on life support, reliant on machines to live, that we should unplug him immediately and not dawdle or dwell. Just thinking of him in that state - trapped, mind and body unable to find one another - scares and saddens me. But if you took so much as a step toward the machine without me there I'd kill you barehanded and no mistake.

I write those words and it isn't until after I've picked at my right middle fingernail that I realize what I'm doing. I think about it in emotional shorthand, of course, rather than actual words, but what passes through my head comes down to something like this: There's plenty of nail left. A little pull won't hurt. It's not like it won't grow back.

I think of how disappointed she'd be, how proud he was. It seems not worth it to keep picking my nails, so I stop, for the moment. I'm amazed at my capacity for self-pity and hopeful about my other capacities. And scared as I am of empathy, I desperately wish to find more of it. I've unplugged the phone and plugged it back in four or five times today; that's maybe two minutes of my life I've gotten back. So simple a thing.

In two minutes I could demolish these nails. You have no idea how good it would feel. I can not even begin to communicate to you how much I would enjoy it, the depth of the disgust I would feel.

I think of all this, and write it, and every once in a while catch myself picking at a tough thumbnail, or the too-thick pinky nail, or the irritatingly rough middle nail on my right hand, which is visibly shorter now than it was when I began writing. For whatever reason my right thumbnail grows much more slowly than my left, and the difference infuriates me. I walk around with that feeling rattling inside my head. My hands always hurt. I clench my jaw, waking and sleeping. Crack my neck compulsively, my knuckles. Nostrils flared.

I am so, so very lucky to be as free as I am. Maybe I'll walk upstairs and find the nail clippers and trim them. I can't remember ever doing so. I write those sentences, look up at the window. My right hand goes to my left pinky fingernail, and I remember to stop, no harm done. As someone once said: My mind's got a mind of its own. But I'm here too, and she called a moratorium, which might in the end be enough, or at least the beginning of enough.

So I stop, for the moment.

Wish you well, Reader(s).

'Counting douchebags!'

[Update: It's spelled 'Kourt,' as it turns out. And the lads seem to have webpages. Can't find Scott though. Still: some days you just can't help smiling.]

Back in the day - in Texas, before we moved up to NYS - I used to play the classic Avalon Hill game Civilization at my friend Scott's house. We had house rules to keep things moving (it's a twelve-hour game if you don't) and whatnot and it was the closest I ever came to the scene in E.T. where Elliott's brother plays Dungeons and Dragons with his friends.

Anyhow Scott's brother Sean would invite us to play with him and his friends, which made us feel all grownup (to give you a sense of what we might have grown into, he also lent us his copy of Talisman the one(!) time I got to play that wonderful game). One of the fellas was named Gerry Toll - yes, really, and yes he lived with the obvious nickname - and there was this other guy, with a name something like Kourt DeHaas, a magnificent name. (I think my brother and I have excellent names, but please: Kourt DeHaas!! Like he should be funding expeditions to the Congo or something.) Anyhow, during the 'Census' portion of each turn Kourt would bellow, 'Counting douchebags!' I had no idea what a 'douchebag' was; I confess that I still don't know what the 'bag' portion of the word refers to, though I can guess easily enough, and I feel no need to inquire. In any case Kourt was of German or Dutch extraction I think, and I heard 'douchebags' as something like 'deutschebängs,' which I took to be some fanciful German word for 'servants of the empire' or 'soldiers of the king' or even 'proud fruit of the Thracian homeland.' If you want an easy, early start you play as Crete or Thrace, and I was more the tactician then, less inclined to take risks on the initially-landlocked civilizations.

The meat of the story is my misunderstanding. The coda, the filigree, is the day I yelled 'Counting deutschebängs!!' while Scott's mom was in the kitchen, and Gerry chastised me for something I didn't understand, maybe even swatted me on the arm. At that moment more than any previous I felt like I was part of something just above my usual age range, could maybe fit into the group, find a way to a new language or just friendship. But I think that was the last time Sean invited us to play Civilization.

Or me, anyway.

Letting go.

We say things like, “Mommy is dead now and so we are sad.” But mostly, we talk about vacuums.

This is a simple, beautiful piece of writing. Brava, Sarah.

Spencer said, “You. Understand. Ethan.”

I find over and over that the things I 'know' I only feel - or perhaps only want. Hell, maybe I'm only becoming aware now that there's a distinction to be made. I read the other day that Zen practice is the effort to abandon not the Self, really (because there's no such thing), but rather the categories of selfhood, 'I-Me-Mine.' To think beyond subject, not by not thinking, but by becoming aware-beyond-subjectivity; in other words, Zen is the pursuit of objective experience.

“You’re a good boy, Spencer,” Ethan said. “You’re a good boy.”

Maybe there's nothing more perverse than seeing death - objective experience in common if such a thing ever is or was available to laypeople - as about survivors, or survival. But that's me in a nutshell: if you're gone, what matters is that I'm here. Indeed it matters more than ever. That might be who I am and I don't know whether that's alright. Well it's alright for now; time to play frisbee in the park. What difference does it make to a stone.

But Christ, what a lovely piece of writing.

Hillary Clinton and the possibility of misogyny - and me, not a little bit.

I'd like to consider the possibility that my visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton is basically straight-up misogyny wedded to political opportunity.

I'm prompted to do so by this dimwitted post at The Plank, calling out Andrew Sullivan as a misogynist. I say 'dimwitted' for two reasons: one, there's no logic to it; two, if you're going to make the argument that Sullivan hates women, you definitely don't need that loopy post, as his enormous body of writing online is shot through with contempt for all kinds of women, particularly those who want power who aren't Margaret Thatcher.

But the word you're looking for to describe Sullivan isn't 'misogynist,' it's bitch, and his relationships to women in print are bitchy rather than hateful and denigrating. Look, this is a man whose sexual identity is built from, among other things, an emphasis on hyper-masculine co-opted almost-but-not-quite-ironic good-ol'-boy aesthetics [bear culture], a longstanding affection for the histrionics of disco and Euro dancefloor queens [e.g. the magnificently overwrought Pet Shop Boys], his Thatcherite/Catholic delight in quiet suffering, and - no disrespect intended here - even his testosterone shots, treatments for HIV that have no doubt played into his laughable butcher-than-thou breast-beating politics. He hates the Boomers but loathes the Clintons. What do you expect a gay Oedipus to do once he's killed Daddy? He's sure as hell not gonna fuck Mommy. Which is to say there's self-loathing in there too, in no small amount, plus a dose of embarrassment over how apocalyptically wrong he's been on almost all the defining issues in American political culture these last few years, which he works out by viciously attacking proxies (other 'conservative' pundits, other socially-liberal hawks, etc.). Atop which Obama offers him a chance to get past his nasty association with plain ol' racism on the Right, and he doesn't want anyone interfering with his 'post-racial' absolution.

Do I think too much about Andrew Sullivan? I suspect I do. He's the main reason I started blogging in 2002; that kind of association gets complex over time.

But to hell with that (but speaking of which), let's talk about my putative misogyny.

* * *

Hillary Clinton inspires loathing in plenty of people, always has, and for a host of reasons. Some are emotional: she's married to an adulterous cad, a serial abuser of power and women, yet there isn't a hint of sexual energy or charm to her; she's part of a notoriously tacky 'power couple' that happily rode the coattails of generational transformation and disdain into the White House, but she energetically threw herself into a fairly traditional First Lady role when it became politically expedient to do so, never more than when she Stood By Her Man during the GOP witch hunt and his embarrassing, self-destructive perjury trial; she comes from awesome privilege and appears contemptuous - guiltily sympathetic, in other words - toward those less fortunate. And the Clintons' appeals to meritocracy ring hollow given the pure nepotism that surrounds them and their political cohort.

Some are analytical: she's acquired a reputation for hyperintelligence and far-flung competence over the years, and is probably a smart woman, but her signal legislative achievement in the 90's shitcanned universal health care for more than a decade, and her signal political achievement in the 21st century (after her 'non-authorization' authorization of the use of force by Bush et al.) has been a staggeringly inept campaign that not incidentally has descended into mere racism, rules-lawyering, and cynical fearmongering in its waning months - a reputation/achievement disparity explained by the network of partisan loyalist hacks in which she's moved for nearly 20 years. Her place in the long history of high-achieving American women is complicated and (yes) reduced by the fact that she's been the Machine Candidate for president, the presumptive successor to her husband among Democrats, for years now, sitting on an enormous war chest full of money and favours, yet she's losing the popular vote and delegates race (and the fundraising competition, by a huge margin) to a man who pledged at the outset of his campaign to take no lobbyist money at all. She's shown herself willing to lie outright about remarkably small things - gunfire at a landing strip in the Balkans, most recently/pitifully - and has been involved in scandals that suggest both the intoxication of executive privilege and a loyalist's vindictiveness, which is to say she's something of a hack herself, the myth of her independence and daring notwithstanding: she is the establishment, and has embraced it wholeheartedly. The thinness of her legislative record, her lack of executive experience - these are only facts, statistics even, but they become hateful when contrasted with her awesome claims of experience and authority, the entitlement (eerily similar to the forces that swept the imbecilic George W. Bush into office) that has been one of the main rhetorical features of her presidential campaign.

And then there's the inbetween stuff, the problems that stem from the undignified psychodrama of the Clinton Era, the ones that underline the noxiousness of the slogan 'The personal is political': no matter Hillary Clinton's successes as a lawyer, she married into power and has suffered great indignities to hold onto it, and has subjected those around her to similar indignities through her complicity in a political system her late-1960's fellow travelers should find abhorrent (but of course don't, for the most part, because they benefit enormously from it); she was a viable Senatorial candidate in part - maybe primarily - because her husband was the capo di tutti capi in the Democratic Party. By dint of the cynical entry of her husband into her campaign, and more importantly her attacks on the women who accused her husband of sexual harrassment, abuse, and more, she's at the very least damaged the relationships between several generations of feminists and progressive women, whose woulda-been avatar looks more and more like an old-fashioned Opportunistic Wife; at worst she's played into fears of women in power and been a truly awful role model for young girls all over the country, whose best hope yet for a female president has comported herself in as debased a fashion as her opponents - and who has happily played on mere race-hatred while campaigning for the role of Dynastic Successor. And how then do you evaluate her run for Senate in 2000? Was she running under her own steam or the DLC's? Does it matter that she 'did her homework,' grew deeply invested in the problems particular to her adopted New York State, or was the leading term in her success the fact that she was Bubba's wife? How much credit must we give to license ourselves to state the obvious, namely that the Clintons simply were the Democratic Party for several years?

Maybe I'm not doing a great job with this brief, but it's there, and adult observers - even those who mediajaculated all over the airwaves and newspaper presses in celebration of the Smart Sexy Young Clintons in the 90's - are entitled to invoke all of it.

But I can't. I'm 29 years old, meaning I was 13 when Bill Clinton ran for the position of Leader of the Free World.

And I hated him back then.

And I despised his wife.

Why?

* * *

Back then I was a Rush Limbaugh viewer, because he was easy to understand: people suffer because they're stupid, liberals want to throw out everything we enjoy in life because they hate good things, etc. I was young and impressionable and so forth, and I didn't know a damn thing about girls, so when Rush said Hillary wasn't really a woman, wasn't a wife, didn't respect the way America works...well, who was I to argue? And Chelsea was ungainly and had braces, and Bill sounded like the idiots I'd gone to school with in Texas, and so it went.

And so it went. But I also had a Mom and Dad and a little brother, and there things got complicated. I need to put asterisks between this paragraph and the next ones, because of what writing them means to me.

* * *

My mom was a powerful woman, intimidatingly intelligent, cold when she was angry, overflowing with infectious good cheer when she was happy, a spiritual woman who was also a tough-as-nails primary wage-earner. Born in Long Island but raised in Puerto Rico, pale and delicate but stout, she was totally old-fashioned about some things (she never let anyone else in the family wash a dish, often wouldn't even sit down to eat with the family because she was doing things around the house, led the choir in church, taught middle and high school English having fallen into it early on, etc.) and weirdly authoritarian-progressive about others, a steely Thatcherite manager who embraced meritocracy as a counterweight to what she saw as feminist overreach, demanding from every institution in which she moved only the deference due a hard worker of quick intelligence and wide-ranging competence. To the week of her death she worked tirelessly, never for herself, never complaining of her lot in life (but making her aches and pains clear in the operatic language of her Puerto Rican mother, from whom I inherited the tendency to say '¡ay!' instead of 'ow!' when I hurt myself - or think I'm going to hurt myself...).

My dad was - is - a deeply tanned, muscular man from the north of England, a snappy soccer player, a smooth talker who never lets him be seen without a handkerchief and clean fingernails, an old ladies' man who readily confesses to having married money; (perhaps) paradoxically he's also a spiritual man who prays daily and at length, unfailingly kind, quick to anger when he's confused, physically imposing and even scary when he's angry, but utterly opposed to violence; a man with a GED and almost no formal knowledge, whose skill at simply getting with people has stood him in good stead for more than seventy years, who lived through the Blitz and lost family and friends during WWII and loves America for saving his childhood from the Nazis, but who never sought citizenship. 'I'm English,' he'd say, and that would be that; yet he won't leave America, feels distant from his homeland, will return only for funerals and reunions and other forms of goodbye. He danced through the 1960's, but to Motown, to funk. 'Best music we have, son.' This from a man who would use the word 'mentality' to talk about the differences between black and white people when I was a kid - a framing I would come to see not as derision but as despair or disconnection, like not knowing how to type. He forgets my birthday but can name every player Manchester United has fielded this decade - and where each one is from. And whether or not he's a 'footballer,' my father's highest honor.

My mom and dad shared with their sons their distaste at the increasing visibility of gay culture and relationships, but spoke with such affection of their large number of gay friends - and late in life, both came to understandings about homosexuality that mingled with my own changing attitudes toward sex and sexuality in college. They both believed and taught (not least through the example of my mom's own life) that a woman's place was whatever goddamn ground she was willing to fight for, same as any man's - yet neither had time for identity politics, found 'equality' a natural principle while pushing back against the fetishization of 'difference.' They were wholly uncynical about such things. My mom was a died-in-the-wool Republican, my dad a closet Labour voter, but we didn't talk politics in our house; 'the personal is political' was the furthest thing from our minds. We went weekly to our dour Catholic church and my father would swell with pride to hear his wife sing, but would say nothing. And when she died he told us we needn't cry, that there was work to do, that she was at peace and in no pain when her lungs stopped working - but he held us when we did cry, toasted her with a glass of wine: an elegant acknowledgment of elegance.

* * *

In other words, my father is as far from Bill Clinton as you can possibly be, a man who volunteered for the British Army in the waning days of the Korean War, who stood by his wife through lean times and otherwise, who praises hearts instead of minds but never ever failed to give bookish types their due when they'd earned it, shrewd but utterly without cynicism; my mother was Hillary Clinton as she might conceivably have been, even down to the all-girls' college, a traditionalist mirror image of Clinton (one year older than the Senator) steeped in a monied NYC culture of privilege and refinement and a Latin culture of demonstrative passion and celebration, skeptical but utterly without cynicism.

And maybe you see where this is going.

I have never doubted the seriousness of the Clintons' commitment to their paths in life. But as anyone who's taught in a classroom knows, kids have a keen sense of adults' good faith (or lack of it), can separate fantasy and reality far more ably than grownups give them credit for, can smell cynicism and inauthenticity a mile off. Credulity overwhelms this capacity at times, of course, but when kids are looking for it, they can tell when someone's trying to snow 'em under.

There's a difference between 'childish' and 'childlike,' you know.

Which is to say, I dislike the machine of which Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is a part, I dislike much of the politics she represents, and I am angered by some of the choices she's made as a legislator. I believe she is not the best choice for president, and I believe that she and her vile campaign managers have damaged the Democratic Party (which wasn't doing too well to begin with) by their pandering and race-baiting and corporate-centrist entitlement. I'm not a Democrat but we need them for the time being, and I dislike that her negativity may end up costing the Democrats the White House.

But I hate her cynicism. I hate that she combines an authoritarianism with which I'm intimately familiar and a purely political obsession that I was taught to find abhorrent. I hate that her campaign's main symbolic narrative is that of the First Female President, yet there's no emotional narrative to go with it, no outreach, no uplift, only gender-as-talking-point. I hate that when I was a teenager and just beginning to develop the usual complicated teenage relationship to authority, she and her husband allowed the U.S. Presidency - one of the most important symbols in the country, a combination cultural barometer and traditional figurehead and scarily important decision-making and policy-shaping office - to become enmired in the ongoing tale of Baby Boomer entitlement and narcissism (the bastard child of the 'Greatest Generation' story, indeed that generation's actual children), and that her present campaign for the presidency continues to be about those things, only now turning against that young fella Barack Obama, that uppity young man, articulate but unqualified, an affront to our way of life - that man who will not wait his turn. ('Go slow' is the phrase.) I hate that she would mother this country in bad faith.

Do you see? I can't separate my dislike of this woman as a politician from my hatred of her apparent way of being. And while this is all bound up in my own complex relationship to women, and women in power, and the changing roles of men and women during my own nearly-30-year lifetime, none of this dislike, none of this hatred, is simply 'because she's a woman.'

My response to Hillary Clinton isn't a specific instance of a general problem with women as a class of being; but were she not a woman I would have a very different response to her. I readily admit that she is in part an object, a surface onto which I project my own anxieties; everyone knows that everyone does that to everyone, or we should know by now. But she does what she does, and that means something to Hillary Clinton and to me, and I can no more escape those meanings than I can disown my entire past (or she hers). We can't throw out the experiential baby with the ideological bathwater - is that a conservative thing to say? Imagine that.

Which is all windup, and/so here comes the pitch: there is something principled in my rejection of Hillary Clinton's candidacy, and there is something unreflective and visceral and no more to be admired or imagined away than any other accident of birth; these things are not the same nor entirely separable, and the one doesn't cancel or invalidate or legitimize the other. They simply are, as am I, as is she, and if this post is half-assed or ham-fisted then please believe me when I tell you that it's taken it out of me, that this is maybe as close to the bone as we've gotten, Reader(s), whether it seems that way or not. I'd like the same thing for me-about-Hillary as for Hillary-about-everyone-else: please let's do justice to one another.

Take care, you.

Dad said to marry well.

I may yet.

How the grownups kick it when baby is around.

This is what parties are like at our place: My Poor Green Babychild, in Glorious Quicktime.

If you're entranced by the video adventures of Green Babychild - and I know I am - then take heart: there's more to come.

[If the video won't display in your browser, then download it to your desktop; it should play fine in the Quicktime Player.]

Happy Christmas. ('War is over!')

Had a lovely Christmas vacation with family, missed you Reader(s), and now it's time to talk briefly about science-fiction films. Specifically The Matrix: Revolutions. Specifically one of its commentary tracks.

The Wachowskis had a clause in their original Matrix contract that they didn't have to do publicity for the film; this cultivated an air of mystery and kept fans guessing as to what it all meant, so it worked out well for all involved. For the big 10-disc DVD box set, the brothers Wachowski pulled a neat trick: they scored two commentary tracks per rereleased film, one by academics who're fans of the films (e.g. Cornel West, who shouldn't bite this particular feeding hand - he's in both sequels), the other by three disappointed critics, who loved the first film and loathed the second and third. They aren't alone in this opinion; quite the contrary, theirs is precisely the mainstream opinion, and they don't much go beyond the popular narrative in their criticisms. This disappoints me in turn: the most elegant criticisms come from David Thomson (of Biographical Dictionary of Film fame), who sounds like Christopher Hitchens but thinks like my old mentor David Thorburn - which I mean as a compliment to both Thomson and Thorburn.

The problem with their commentary track - which is worth a listen - is that they appear to have entirely missed the purpose of the sequels. OK let's not dick around here: the main reason the sequels exist is to make piles of money for a small group of people. But their artistic/philosophical purpose is to tell a big Gnostic spiritual war story, to run with the Big Neat Ideas of the first film until they get complicated and weird and somehow simultaneously uplifting and uncomfortable. Thomson and his fellow travelers have nothing to say about the meaning(s) of the films; they're obsessed with film history, which for them may as well be History in general (it seems), and so they ridicule the trilogy for trading in cinematic cliché instead of asking, Why in God's name does a summer-blockbuster action flick, already bloated with ages and ages of repetitive CGI combat, begin with several minutes of faintly creepy spiritual back-and-forth between Neo and three beings named Kamala, Ramachandra, and Sati? The critics mention the oddity of the sequence, of course; Thomson says it's a much more interesting opening sequence than the start of Reloaded. But this is what's irksome: these 'critics' (God what a debased word) aren't interested in unpacking or interpreting the scene, not even if it sets the stage for all the philosophical blahblahblah that follows it; they just want to decide whether it's Totally Rad Awesome or not, and if not, they want to let you know that there are other Much Much More Awesome Rad Totally movies that you should be watching instead. They've seen them, seen it all: you won't, probably, which is why they still have jobs.

Hell: they don't even catch the Symbolism 101 'Mobil'/'Limbo' anagram. With critics like these, who needs advocates?

(I've linked to this several times before: a fan essay walking through the third film's careful construction and thematic continuity. Notably, it's not an apology for Revolutions's excesses and missteps, which are not few in number; it's a bloated and overwrought film and everyone knows it. But it's a serious and thoughtful piece of writing, and I salute its bright, windy fanboy nattering.)

Pity, really. I like Thomson's writing, and the Biographical Dictionary is one of the most amazing reference books I've ever thumbed through, a real treasure trove. Really a lifetime of studied opinions, distilled. He's not the worst by any stretch: the annoying, glib Todd McCarthy (of Variety - surprise surprise) cracks wise and makes the same comments over and over, making John Powers of (ahem) Vogue sound mature and thoughtful by comparison - which makes Thomson seem like Winston fucking Churchill. The film deserves better but I'm unsure where to look.

So why is the track worth listening to? Well, no one should have to feel alone, not even the haters, but more importantly, it's good to know more, even more trivia. The more you see the more you live. (OK I prefer Bret Easton Ellis's version: 'The better you look, the more you see.' But this balding hairy blogger resents that too, Reader(s).) And the critics do illuminate some common complaints about the trilogy while making wide-ranging reference to the history of cinema; that has value for film fans as well as Matrix fans.

And now, since I was rereading Dune a little while visiting the fam, I'm going to read about the Butlerian Jihad at Wikipedia, and wonder how Frank Herbert's man/machine vision squares up with the Wachowskis'. Peace be upon you, kid(s).

Home for the holidays.

We went caroling the other night and had a blast - even made a possible new friend - but it's time to go see the blood relatives again. If I don't have a chance to post from the boondocks, have a lovely holiday, Reader(s). See you soon.

Spider on the speaker by the window in the sun / Come on come on come on everyone!

Here is a picture of a beautiful green plastic baby on our stovetop in Cambridge. My people and I found the baby on the side of a road in New Hampshire. Now it will never be without a home.

For my father on his 30th anniversary.

First one from two, and won't you and I do,
And why don't we and yes and once again,
Two pairs of I called Us, or even We -
Against, sometimes, and sometimes alongside,
And sometimes no or even nevermore.
As two from two, the one that came from four.

Then house to home, as four to family,
And north to here, and here to home and more,
These many fours and threes and You and I,
Each They and Them becoming Us and Ours.
That was to be the tale of now and next,
Of live-so-long and latter-days and more,
A song of always-four and more-to-see.
But cannot-be will always have his say.
Five years of days have followed on that day:
She smiled, and slept, and then She stole away.

Now far-flung three from close-together four
See three suns rise each day to light what's left.
Home is still home but is at once away,
While each away becomes another home,
And there to here, as three to three-of-one -
But We from I and I is not undone
Nor Us from You and We is not undone
Nor Ours from Now and Yes is not undone
For might-have-been is bride of yet-to-come.
Three visions of the morning, but one sun.

So here's to sons and father, You and We,
And thirty years since won't you and I do,
And here's to why don't we and once again,
And can-we-go and will-we-next and more,
And here's to home and here's to may-as-well:
There's evermore to sing and tales to tell.
So We from I and I and I profess:
To Each and Ours, and Now and Next, and Yes.

--Wally Holland Jr.

Nothing better.

The Holland lads, mid-80's style.

News of the inner world.

Learn something new every day (or week anyhow):

Fiancé - The groom or husband-to-be between the engagement and the wedding engaged to be married.

Fiancée - An engaged woman.

Embarrassingly, I had forgotten the difference in spelling. How parochial of me: been going around all week pinning that extra 'e' to myself like some kind of fool.

So yeah, engaged - to the GF, obviously, who's now just the 'F' I suppose. Marriage. Well damn. Probably there'll be more to say at a later date. (Speaking of which: early August 2008, here in Boston/Cambridge). Oh and sidebar: the new Radiohead album is beautiful!

Goodnight to you, Reader(s), more a part of my words than I have words for --

-- I hope you're half as happy as I am, about anydamnthing really --

-- wa.

I should like to say, I should like to sing.

It's going to get better I think. In your absence other lights have flared. They cast across lake shores and tree stands and searched for the sound and shape of you. Finding nothing it seemed - but nothing found they burned, and sought, and pushed on. The country beyond was dark but new fires snap to and begin where we step, side by side, and I think it's going to get better.

I think you would have laughed at us. We waited for you on dry land and began to shrink little by little, and forget (I should like to say) to fall toward open arms and the next day. Falling instead backward and downward. It never occurred to me to join you, only to scold. I never doubted the forward-turning wheel of this day into that, but I wondered whether it was going to get better, and you (I should like to say) would have laughed: at falling, and scolding, and wondering.

There is so much to come. I came awake it seems a moment ago to write, to you though I know you hear nothing and to myself though I barely recognise words returning to me. The afternoon seems telescoped and strange, back and foreground flattened into something like honest continuity. I see four o'clock and reading, five o'clock and opening my hand to pass these words on hopeful, six o'clock and Her name on my lips and Her voice a strange light flaring behind evening eyes. I see sunset and shared glances and homemade meal made new, and I see ways of knowing what I am and have: I see a way in. I think you would laugh at that too. I think you would see what I see, and (I should like to sing) there is so much to come. You would love it so fucking much.

Yes. Fuck. Yes, of course.

"It would be a good life that I lived if I spent it bragging about my friends."

--E.G.

Why quiet now, why quiet next.

Two and a half weeks ago I went on a camping trip with about twenty friends; one dear friend went missing, did not return, and is presumed (with near certainty) drowned at the site. It's not a rescue, they said to us, it's a recovery operation. (In melodramatic rain and thunder we walked around the lake looking for him at midnight, single-file calling out his name angrily and then resignedly, soaked to the skin, and as night turned to early morning curled together weeping on the floor of a lean-to for warmth and uncertain comfort. Closer it seemed than ever before in some ways. We heard him splashing in the lake, you see, and calling for help. Someone said he sounded calm and matter-of-fact. I'd been making drinks and singing, the firelight and storytelling in retrospect a cliché.) My love returned home from a journey abroad several days later, knowing nothing of what had happened, and together we went back to where our friend had gone missing, staying with his family and several friends (old and new) for a night in vigil. The rest of the week we were essentially incapacitated by grief and contemplation; a friend had a prayer service and by way of offering we read aloud from plays and poems. People's grief seemed their own only.

Last week we began to fight our way back to routine; though I remained largely unable to work, we began to see the patterns of 'normal' life returning. Over the weekend I went back to my hometown for my 10-year high school reunion, a curious thing. Any other week I might have been excited to write about it.

Two days ago the GF - Christ, has that moniker ever seemed so inappropriate? - headed West to visit family, and tomorrow at an unseemly hour I join her. I travel this week laden with work, because my hard drive reported fatal errors and gave up the ghost the day she left. Unconnected, I'm sure. I'll return home to find out how much of my writing and work I've lost.

I bought a watch so as to know where and when I stand, and in the morning when I get on the plane heading West it will read something like 8:00. (I think I'll leave it on Boston time while I'm out West.) Meanwhile there's packing to be done, and too little sleep, and a creeping feeling of impossibility, back-of-envelope emotional calculus indicating at This velocity and That acceleration and That delta-a I'm simply never going to catch up or take off again. I've had nothing I could say to you, of late.

It would be nice to be less experienced at mourning friends and schoolmates.

I'll talk to you in early August; drop an email if you'd like to get in touch before then. I hope that you're well and that you're making extraordinary things.

--w.

Mothers.

There was another I never did meet - Dad's mom. To Kathleen, Ena, and Mary, and the extraordinary women who share their work.

Elizabeth Edwards is a goddamn badass.

From a Newsweek interview:

Having lost a child, I promise you that making certain that I do not have regrets when we finally say goodbye is really important to me. I think the hardest question—and this, I think, we haven't adequately explained to people—is the children. I think we've pretty much settled on what it is we're going to do. I think the children will finish out the school year and then, in the fall, they'll travel with us. We will home-school them. We'll employ a tutor to travel with us to help teach them. I hope it will be an extraordinary experience for them.

If you go to doctors and they say, "Look, there's this drug that's in clinical trials right now. It's no guarantees. We have no long-term data on it. It is going to make you sick, your hair is going to fall out," are you going to do it?

Yes. I'm going to do it. I have an obligation to try to live as long as I can for my family. So if I campaign less or if I campaign with a wig, then I'll do those things.

Brava.

I remember when everyone was going to live forever.

Some may yet.

'The guy playing Edgar is the current Doctor Who.' 'Who now?' 'I'll cut you.'

Here's a change of pace: instead of screening a Buffy or firing up one of the recent video rentals or doing some tandem Internet-browsing, for tonight's media nightcap we busted out the first half-hour of the Arkangel King Lear - part of the ambitious recent series that included all of Shakespeare's plays in fine new recordings. Nice atmosphere: turn off the lights, curl up under some blankets downstairs (we have a spare bed in the living room), and listen to a cast of Genu-Wine Actors(tm) take on this tempestuous play. I read Lear for the first time only a year or so ago, never having read it for a class and indeed not having read Shakespeare in a damned long time. Well you feel a bit out of practice, out of sorts.

Of course it destroyed me; not since reading Godot and Endgame one midnight-black week the summer after junior year of college has a play so utterly crushed all hope in my heart. (I bounced back comparatively quickly from No Exit that same summer - painful and frankly pointless experience.) I loved and love it, and return to it occasionally. Anyhow, a number of Arkangel performances turned up online in trusty mp3 format, and as I'm rediscovering the joy of radio drama (good lord those Hitchhiker's Guide serials are so good), it seemed like a thing to do.

I suppose I'm writing just to recommend this approach to skeptics; for all Shakespeare's ingenious stagecraft, the spatial suggestiveness of his writing, the action of a familiar play is easy to follow (a proper copy of the Arkangel set includes quite detailed synopses for first-time listeners). Even at speed the experience of following the dialogue is a contemplative one; you're not 'distracted' by the physical fact of the players, and can focus on the dialogic rhythms, the tonal colours of a line or speech, 'restaging' the action in your imagination, at your leisure. And of course there's the rewind button if things get hairy. As for the performances, Julia Ford makes a remarkable Cordelia, but we're not far enough in to say how Trevor Peacock handles Lear's descent into senility and madness. I can say this: the opening scene, with Lear lashing out at his loved ones out of feelings of wounded pride and confusion, hit me harder than it ever has. I heard the aging king's words in my father's voice - 'Come not between the dragon and his wrath,' as if reassuring himself, fighting off self-pity - and am reminded why we come to great artworks in the first place. To meet ourselves, in part. Or our own loved ones here and gone.

And yes, David Tennant plays Edgar. When next we hit the play button he'll walk onstage and into Edmund's trap. 'If you do stir abroad, go armed.' 'Armed, brother!' My own brother was a member of the College Republicans. Funny what you think of sometimes. I'm just saying.

Debutante balls.

Over the last week the following things have occurred, among others.

• IKEA
• Stabbing of self in left palm with Philips screwdriver while assembing IKEA furniture
• Some amount of swearing, flailing, gallows humour
• A tetanus shot in the right deltoid, which is huge because of...
• ...working out almost daily, which has led to...
• ...the loss of several pounds of fat, mitigated only by the likely catabolism of a little muscle on a couple deep calorie-deficit days, though I'm below 209 for the first time in months and just relieved in a way you maybe don't understand
• I have a hole in my palm in the shape of a cross, gnarly
• The reservation of a rental car for Saturday
• (But don't think I've forgotten how we made the wrong turn onto the Mass Pike in the U-Haul van, at $0.59/mile plus gas, and ended up passing goddamn Natick before I realized what'd happened and we turned around, oh you have no idea how embarrassing that kind of thing is for someone who loves driving as much as I do, talks about it, boasts even about his proficiency behind the wheel and attentiveness and unquantifiable style, for shame...
• Ahem.
• Several episodes of Buffy and Angel viewed and re-viewed
• And the latest Lost, which miraculously wasn't the low point of the week, was quite good in fact
• The brother called me from some trivia nite in Chicago, apparently drunk, asking questions about the history of the PGA Tour and then just hanging up on me, but in the heat of the moment can you blame him? Can you blame a guy for that shit, honestly?
• Friendly, thoughtful exchanges with smart people in the comments sections of various weblogs
• Some spur-of-the-moment freelance magic that pulled in a couple days' wages in a short evening
• Joining the writing staff of a new web magazine and committing to writing a regular column for which I must this weekend pitch an armful of ideas (about which more soon, I promise)
• No seriously do you realize how important that is to a little wannabe like me?
• The eventual completed assembly of all the IKEA goodies, including a genuine dining room set that makes the apartment look all, like, lived in and stuff
• Plus we have a goddamn kitchen cart!
• Do you have a kitchen cart? Then quit snickering you pig

And to top it all off, I just lay in our ridiculous king-sized bed for an hour reading comic books (Powers, volumes 4 and 5) while the GF - who features prominently in all of the above items that don't involve sitting in front of a computer, though she didn't so much administer the tetanus shot as sit around while I suffered, quietly, in a nearby hospital room - read Powers while my extraordinary GF took a red pen to a printed copy of the nearly-complete first draft of her doctoral dissertation, inducing such pride you have can't imagine, can't even begin to imagine. And I was totally just sitting there in a Star Wars shirt and briefs reading a comic book like some kind of dire hopeless geek, begging to be put out of my misery, and frankly I don't know whether I've ever been so happy. The briefs are black, not white, for God's sake. I wear 'em to the gym. For health.

You're welcome, Reader(s). Stay strong.

Honest Abe Foxman; denying the past its place of rest.

There was an interesting profile of ADL head Abe Foxman in the Sunday New York Times; Matt Yglesias has a helpful clarification. Here's the detail that stuck with me, from the Times profile:

Foxman was born in Poland in 1940 as his parents fled before the Nazi advance. The following year, when the Nazis reached Lithuania, Foxman was placed with his Polish Catholic nanny, who pretended to be his mother and raised him — as a Catholic and, Foxman has written, as a Jew-hater. Both his parents, miraculously, survived the war and then reclaimed him, though not without a bitter fight. Foxman escaped the worst of the Holocaust, but it has deeply shaped his sense of the world and is presumably responsible for his feeling that nothing short of supreme and unflinching vigilance will ward off the next cataclysm. Perhaps his childhood also accounts for his air of brazen self-assertion. "Then he had to hide his identity," as Jonathan Jacoby, the founder of the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal advocacy group, told me. "Now he’s the most out Jew in the world."

It never occurred to me to wonder about Foxman's childhood, but his biography makes a kind of dramatic sense: he survived the Holocaust, yes, but has no memory of it. It exists for him, in other words, as an aspect of his biography that is important because of its ramifications and its absence - its status as nearly-grasped memory - rather than its historical facticity. My relationship with my birthplace, Puerto Rico, is complicated, because I have no memory of it, yet it was always present throughout my childhood as a source and setting of my parents' stories; when I return there (I've done so three times in recent memory, for weddings and funerals mostly) I feel as if I'm relating inauthentically to it. Yet the cousins and aunties and great-uncles are always glad to see me and my dad and brother, always happy to welcome us as family. They don't share my sense of my own fraudulence, which is to say they have a very different idea of what constitutes a family connection than I do. I love being in Puerto Rico, and when I come back to Boston I think of that island as home for a time, but that feeling fades rapidly - not least because there is a shared faith (in the Church, in family, in copresence and history and geography) that I'm just not a part of.

Foxman, of course, has that shared faith in spades:

Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust. He spends a month or so each winter in Palm Beach, moving in the company of elderly folk, many of them Holocaust survivors, who revere him. He seems to understand the survivor mentality far better than he does the lighthearted and lightheaded culture of disposable, custom-made ethnic identity.

[...]

Foxman invited me to hear him speak in December at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Conn. The temple has 700 members, mostly younger families, but the crowd at the event, and especially at the $250-a-person reception beforehand, was an Abe Foxman crowd — older, richer, more conservative. Foxman gamely grinned and hugged and mugged for the camera; the bodyguard straightened his collar. One by one, the congregants approached to consult him on matters Jewish and Middle Eastern; Foxman fielded the questions with due solemnity. A woman who introduced herself as the daughter of Holocaust survivors said that Jimmy Carter was just as bad as Ahmadinejad — another Israel-denier. Foxman demurred on the comparison but said he planned to write to Tim Russert, the NBC interviewer, asking why he had treated Carter with "kid gloves." A short, bearded man who said that he was a member of Aipac asked, "What do you think of John Bolton?" The American ambassador to the United Nations had just tendered his resignation. Both agreed that it was a shame. The A.D.L. had taken out a full-page ad applauding Bolton as a staunch defender of Israel. More hugs, more pictures.

I skip happily over quotes from Foxman in articles about the Middle East and America's Israel/Palestine policy; he has nothing to add to debates about Israel, in my mind. Indeed, his connection to the Jewish nation is precisely that he's not a part of it, that he can't be: the tribes of (oft-discussed literary character and dimly-remembered historical figure) Israel were sundered by the Holocaust, and the Jewish diaspora is connected to its worldwide faith community through the lens of that event (which was, after all, a religious event, part of the depressing march of preordained time). When Foxman 'dwells imaginatively in the Holocaust' he's not reliving history, after all, he's dreaming it; his homeland was always gone. Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favourite authors as a kid) once said, 'It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity,' by which I take her to mean that in the absence of serious sustained introspection about one's beliefs, about their historical truth, it's (anti-intellectually) comforting to believe in a myth, in a dream, in a set of images connected dramatically rather than merely historically.

This isn't to call Foxman an anti-intellectual, though I think his constant invocation of 'old anti-semitic canards' has a distasteful anti-intellectual aspect to it; rather it's to say that his biography clarifies, for me, his unflagging stridency relative to the seemingly minor slights he's constantly calling out. The image of him standing at the front of Temple Sholom, giving out $250 handshakes, listening patiently to a procession of old conservatives asking their fellow Survivor to ratify their resentments - that's what sticks with me. If you can't know, believe.

* * *

The previous paragraph of this post was meant to finish with the following sentence: 'Less a Jew, more Jewish.' Writing it I couldn't help feeling that (a) it'd read more nastily than intended, and (b) it's one thing to criticize someone's habit of invoking the Holocaust as the primary historical analogue for seemingly every incident of racial disharmony but I have no right to imply that Foxman is inauthentic in his relationship to his faith - and I should avoid even that unintentional implication. There's a problem posed for the secularist liberal here: how can I communicate briefly in prose that while I find the Jewish myth-history (the Covenant, a litany of tests and trials by God, the reunion to come in the Promised Land, and miracles aplenty where mere history might suffice) no more credible than the Resurrection or the dictation of the Koran to Mohammed by an angel, I nonetheless wish to preserve as a virtue an authentic (introspective, scholarly, skeptical) connection to one's moral and religious history, even when its counterfactual nature is acknowledged? And also, since people are skittish and sensitive: as a non-Jew, how should I go about criticizing the particulars of an individual Jew's imaginative link to his shared history (e.g. the Holocaust) when, at day's end, the Holocaust really is that big an even, really is one of the central elements of humankind's most titanic bloodletting, the long war of the 20th century's first half, and guy does have a direct connection to it? Especially when I'm happy to make excuses for (e.g.) my own father's issues with trust, authority, and so forth, on the basis of his experience of the Blitz and evacuation?

The weak answer is, my dad hasn't made a living out of accusing people of hating Englishmen. OK fair enough, but let's not go down that slope. The stronger answer, one that I worry is a step beyond my level of intellectual seriousness, is that it is possible to criticize Foxman's apparent imaginative stance toward the history of his tribesmen as it manifests in his public actions and evident private statements, and that it is good to do so, even absent a judgment as to whether the bigger risk to the culture is Foxman or the forces he criticizes.

[Journalist and former A.D.L. muckety-muck David] Lehrer says that when he raised his view that the A.D.L. had to learn to speak to this new, confident but less affiliated generation of Jews, Foxman dismissed it out of hand. The generational question does not interest him. "It's not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not," Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. "I do feel. And I've got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this."

It's clear from this quote that, however honorable his conscious intentions - and the article does advance the claim by Foxman's allies that he's not cynical as so many of his critics might suspect - however total his belief in a world of anti-semites out to get him and his, the effect of his belief is to reproduce and relive his own essential trauma. He desires, in other words, to pass on his scars, and by equating the 'maturing process' for young Jews with being beleaguered, with a feeling of 'insecurity,' Foxman is perpetuating a canard that transcends cultural and national borders but which has a particular centrality in Jewish myth-history: suffering is ennobling, and no one has suffered more than Us, which is as it should be. It's not unreasonable, I think, to identify that tendency - whether rhetorical or deeper-down - as perverse, especially since his disposition toward suffering is linked to cultural myths no more valid than claims of Jesus's divinity.

No more valid, we might add, than yours or mine.

Four years ago we buried my mother in a family tomb in San Juan, in a cemetery by the sea (every headstone it seemed was gleaming white, and the fortress above us dark stones) surrounded by generations of Puerto Ricans and alongside family members - Mejías - going back centuries. I was in a dark suit too warm for the weather, same as my brother and dad. The aunties sang a hymn in Spanish, and I could've sworn I knew the tune, though I understood hardly a word. Afterward my brother and I stood alone by the family tomb and I thought, if only for a moment, that I was part of this line, that a way of belonging had passed from Mejía to Gorlin to Holland despite miles and years. But they closed the tomb up, and we flew our separate ways, and a couple of days later I remembered that I would not be buried there myself. Indeed, that I feel no desire to do so. Nothing is owed in either direction, I think, and they're only dust - as I'm sure I will be someday, and an end to it there.

All I could think about was the song, how familiar it seemed, how much I wanted to hear it again. I dreamed about it.

But I should've been thinking about the suit, and how even a fool remembers how to dress for a 'homecoming.' I should've seen myself in the present: the air was clear and tasted of the ocean, we were watching over the dead in dark woolen clothes from another country, but no one was watching us. It was ever so. Haven't you heard.

Since Shervindale says we're Uglo-Americans...

...more majesty courtesy of the digital-photography era.

My town.

From the 2000 census, according to Wikipedia, the makeup of my (adopted, as of fifth grade) town:

The racial makeup of the town was 98.16% White, 0.17% Black or African American, 0.69% Native American, 0.35% Asian, 0.23% from other races, and 0.40% from two or more races.

When I lived there I don't recall encountering a single black or Asian or Jewish resident. Not one.

Now I should point out: our house isn't actually in that town. It's a couple hundred yards over the border with another town entirely. The larger of the two has roughly 1,700 residents; ours has about 800.

Fun fact: the per capita income for our county seat in 2000 was $14,458.

Sunday warning warmup/rave-up: rather a downbeat recollection masquerading as self-aggrandizement of the most passive-aggressive sort.

No idea where this is going.

Of course the purpose of the last few morning entries has been to get ready for the day's writing work; it makes sense to systematize this approach to readiness, and the tempo has been more or less the same from day to day once I've made a certain commitment. The idea: you're better off writing a guaranteed 80-90%, with the focus and discipline to revise (however long it takes) up to 100%, than taking shots at 100% and occasionally getting, y'know, nothing. If the output is to be sustained then that's the minimum requirement. I was better off with a day-to-day schedule, as the time pressure did some of the work of the warmup. Amazing what time-comprehension does for human beings, how the invention of the clock - of discretized 'time' - has prodded humans toward uncontemplative creativity. As a kid I tended to lose my sense of time's passage when I was working on something I really loved, writing or drawing or a game - not least because from my old Apple IIgs you couldn't see a clock, and by the time we got a Windows machine I was accustomed to living without time...

...but it occurs to me that we did have a high-wavelength measure of time, the sitcoms, 30-minute chunks of useful time. You turn down the volume and occasionally look at the TV and can say, 'Oh, A Different World is on, it must be between 8:30 and 9:00.' That might be the ideal. Indeed the 80's sitcoms marked the end of two-act standard sitcom structure, as I recall, so you got two long periods of programming with relatively brief commercial interruptions.

All I'm doing is seeing a thing and pointing at it. Not describing. See?! I worry sometimes I have no knack at all for that kind of description. Or no affinity for it anyhow, little enough desire to undertake the project of 'This is how this thing looks.' In 9th grade I took Mr McCord's 11th grade English class; we were required to hand in a journal with daily assignments. I never, ever did them. (Ha! The students called Mr McCord 'Goober' or 'Goob' for short; he wore an ineffective toupee and almost never lost his temper. Only once - and I remember it being scary. There's a picture somewhere of two students in that class holding me upside down; damn, I even remember their names, Clem and Chad. I don't often revisit those times, it's a strange feeling. I liked those guys exactly as much as they liked me - with the added bonus that Clem is the one who introduced me to Phish. When I got my first Phish shirt, a bootleg 'Vermont's Phinest' that was just like one he had, he was irritated that I was 'copying' him. And I was. It was also the best shirt the store had. You do what you have to. I wore it to an Academic Challenge competition that we won handily.) Naturally I did the first two weeks' worth of work in a night - each day was supposed to be a page, so this was ten handwritten pages, no sweat. You knock that off in a short afternoon of blogging! Monday was description of a thing, Tuesday depiction of an event, and so forth. Friday was What You Will.

I liked Fridays best.

I neglected the assignment for the remainder of the school year - perhaps you see where this is going - and when the work came due in May I had done nothing at all beyond the initial two weeks. The school year is 180 days long; I was responsible for roughly 130 pages of material, to be written in a single night.

I type a great deal faster, on average, than I used to - back in my full-time Zorking days I could hunt-and-peck at 60wpm or so, and touch-typing has nearly doubled that. But 9th grade was a real youth's-full-flower kind of time, and I had yet to encounter my first in-school failures then (i.e. first semester of college. First exam, actually). I started before dinner - which never happened if I could help it, such a lazy kid - and typed at a demonic pace until somewhere in the vicinity of midnight. Maybe later. For me this was unprecedented in a number of ways, not least that I never stayed up past midnight for any reason back then, not even New Year's Eve...

Well let's not dally here. I came into school with a gargantuan stack of paper and handed it in, eventually receiving an A for the assignment. I hadn't finished all the work but had made a real go of it. The equivalent of nearly 100 handwritten pages. Perhaps half that, in single-space type, perhaps a bit more or less? And lemme say, writing two semesters' worth of descriptive passages - meant to come from direct observation - sitting at your desk keeping your brother awake with the keys smashing, such an awful keyboard, awful, made by Acer, I mean no wonder I came out of high school with tendonitis - I'm just saying, that's no bullshit. McCord told me that in the 15 or 20 years he'd been teaching it was the best work any student had handed in. At a small rural public school - I graduated with something like 53 or 54 other students - that's not a huge thing but not a small one. But even then I loved hearing it and at the same time it didn't mean that much. (It meant something that he said it and felt it. But not really that it was true.) Of course it's the best, I figured. Even at that age I had figured out that growth and learning would require a rather different metric for evaluation. I was and am an egotist, yes. But I wasn't wrong. About other things sure but not about that. I feel almost guilty telling you this but it is what it is. And being the best little high school freshman isn't such a damn big deal.

Anita Desai, for instance, never said anything like that in response to the stories I wrote for her fiction seminar at MIT. No sir.

A handwritten page is, what, 200-300 words? Give or take. (For comparison, the story currently stands at 7,500 words or so, and comes out to 20 pages with little formatting-jostling.) Let's say 250 for the sake of argument. Meaning I seem to have written somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25,000 words in a single night of freshman year of high school. Hell, let's kick that down to 20,000...15,000 even. Currently I'm struggling to put together 2,000 in a day. They're better words but what's lacking is...a childlike eye. I seem to have such difficulty getting back to that un-self-critical state.

This is roughly 1,200 words, just over. It's killing me. I want so badly to give you something worthwhile but a recap is in order. My pleasure is not your pleasure. The story as I experience it, in the writing, is not the story you experience in the reading. And the story is meant to be read. Can you see it? Can you imagine what that felt like to hear, 'the best' this or that, from the story above? I don't know. Maybe some memory is triggered of receiving praise yourself, but my proclivities wind away from the kind of evocative description that novels require. In another time, if I hated everyone, I'd've been a wannabe William Gaddis. The formalism appeals to me. Or in any case it used to. What appeals to me now is something I can't fucking do and don't know how to fucking learn and it's time to calm down I think and write this story. It wants to be written. Today the first chapter wants to finish, I think. With an explosion and a display. First we have a requirement or two to meet. I think I can rise from this mock-supplicatory posture and meet them. Which is to say enough for the blog for the moment for you for us. Reader(s), I need you. 1,400+ and I need you more than at the start.

The Feast of Gone Before.

This feeling of aloneness as occasionally, not lonely so much as disconnected. As if (look) there is a long high wall between me and some other space, desired (you might say desire), and though I know there's nothing behind it I find myself assuming I'm missing something. Let's cheapen the notion: as if on a Friday you become convinced that every one of your friends but you is out having fun. All together. And that you can't ask. What you fear is knowing. You believe, keep an ending at bay.

Us, once:

The Holland family will never forget the letters & cards, especially the 'pretty one' as Kathleen would have said it, from the children in her Spanish class. To the children, we could never thank you enough, and we will never forget.

Sincerely,
The Hollands -
Wally Sr., Wally Jr., and Phillippe

Choking and sore all afternoon from the dust raised by cleaning, by searching. Dust is what you find, lying over everything you've ever made, open to air, and yet you have to look for it. The words seem clumsy; I wonder whether I wrote them, my brother, my father. My dad's answering machine message these days is jaunty: 'Leave a message, I'll call you back.' As if: 'Sure, why not?' None of the baroque formality of his old messages - he always insisted on recording them himself - it sounds off-the-cuff now. His voice younger. We don't sign things together anymore. I last visited so long ago. The piece of newsprint was in an unopened piece of mail from a while back. There should be information, it seems, lying over everything, pointing us to what's new. A fine layer of memory just to keep old things alive. It says: 'It's not been a year since my wife passed away...'

It's been, what, four years. As of last week. (Another anniversary I forgot to celebrate.) I wonder whether I decide to talk about death, or simply find myself in the middle of remembering. Wanting something to write, wanting in other words to need to write. Which is enough, you know: you find something to say. Something always comes, because you don't know you that well. As well as you think you do. Well you won't admit it anyhow. And I'd like to know what's on the other side of that wall. The colour of all around seems bleached away in look this here: all those stories we treasured and trusted we now know are only stories. And we can't trust them. 'Knowing is always better' I've said so many times. A wall, in a field, and on the other side more field. Same grass same light. She just isn't anymore. Was and but is not. I'd like to believe the end of the world is on the other side. How awful that it doesn't end.

The dust doesn't settle. You breathe it out and silently in, and better not to know - a lot of things become part of the air, in time. Like us. Knowing but not knowing better, only more.

'Romantic living'? 'Living-in/with-love'? 'Shacking up'? 'Magical thinking'?

In precisely 24 hours the movers will be here and a long wonderful part of my life will quite possibly be over - namely the communal-living part.

Hopefully some bourbon will be employed between now and then to mark the occasion.

After, if not.

Here's to many good years of learning several things the hard way...

...and to the next thing, the 24-hours-from-now thing, the scary and maybe perfect thing, the longest step across the widest chasm reaching deepest down your eyes upturned and nervous, muttering a prayer - here's to that thing, whatever in the flocculent* name of hell we decide to call it.

* ...which doesn't mean anything bad, it's just a near-synonym for 'scabrous' that looked so extraordinary there in the thesaurus, and sounds so complicated - fucking flocculent! - that I had to use it.

Brother visit.

My brother is a complicated person, and one of my favourites; we've lived apart full-time for nine years, but our interactions are still effortless, and more importantly, they've changed and opened up over time. My Dad and I have undergone something of that same transformation, but less easily - much of which is to do with his advanced age and (from his perspective) my own laziness and inscrutability, which have made it harder to capitalize on the empathy that's become possible as I've passed through my mid-20's and into the ridiculous working world. But Phillippe (two years my junior) and I have recovered some (not all) of the day-to-day understanding of one another that time apart can threaten to strip away entirely. We don't necessarily approve of one another's every choice, but that's unnecessary in any case - it bothers only people who can't make the shift from relating to family as an incarnation of some ideal Family type, to simply getting along as adults.

Yesterday at lunch he effused about Spengler and cultural teleology; I came back with Seldes's Seven Lively Arts; we spoofed on Baby Camille for a while; the Bolocco burritos were excellent but I prefer their BBQ to the 'Cajun' style. I could sense his and my blood pressure lowering over the last few weeks. The previous night there was talk of his past and future relationships, and we've both reached a level of sanguinity about one another's romantic prospects heretofore unthinkable for this particular pair of brothers. You have to understand: these all seem like small things but they sum to a sea change in our relationship. We watched Moon Over Parador - an underrated, sometimes brilliant late-80's comedy that clearly inspired the insipid Dave and which is a loving riff on the nature of acting - and if we spent the time flashing back to our shared childhood, we were able nonetheless to treat it as a Guys Hanging Out kind of evening, a kind of interaction that's always been somewhat foreign to us, between our symbiotic childhood and recent comparative distance.

I wish he'd try more different foods, and he wishes I'd have better posture. Both of us make these wishes clear. ('Poise!' he yells now when he wants to embarrass me a bit, in the style of Cosmo Kramer.) We argue loudly and not terribly infrequently. It's great. He'll be at law school this fall and for three years thereafter, if all goes well. (It will go well.) Irritatingly, he and his former housemates have written a screenplay that's gut-busting funny for most of its length. Luckily for my self-esteem, it's totally unstructured and all-but-plotless. Pride and resentment in equal quantities: the hallmark of any great blogger. Phil and my housemates seemed to get along well enough, which is pleasing (and no small change from past interactions - he was notoriously bitchy to several XGF's, for instance).

Not sure the point of this post, other than to share a bit of enthusiasm about the broheem, and lightly memorialize his visit to Boston. I do love the little bastard. Next stop: play-by-email wargames, particularly Thunder at the Crossroads, a brigade-level Gettysburg simulation that we've never been able to really bust out due to its scale and length. General Longstreet polishes his epaulettes in anticipation of trying once more to take Little Round Top.

[Though that raises a point: if the Confederates are able, say, to take and hold LRT early in the battle, why would the Union leaders consent to continuing the confrontation at Gettysburg? The desire for a big apocalyptic fight is all General Lee's; does the Army of the Potomac have to do anything other than hold position, inflict some losses, and respond to ANV pressure while biding its time? Or the flip side: assuming a historical 2 July 1863, with the Union line holding on the left, what's preventing a refreshed Union left from wheeling into the south end of Seminary Ridge and taking the offensive to the ANV? That's the interesting thing about gaming Gettysburg, to my mind - not recreating the battle as it happened, but rather getting to 3 July 1863 with two weakened armies and facing a wildly divergent set of opportunities, freed of the burden of recreating Pickett's charge or a defensive Union strategy. Then again I'm talking more or less entirely out of my ass here.]

The bringing-up-to-date of you, Reader(s), for whom I care so deeply.

[Warning: this is not interesting text, just a personal update. Though the last sentences of the Galactica paragraph might be of interest.]

A couple of weeks ago there was a trip to NYC for a homegirl's birthday celebration, and before we go any further: 'homegirl'? Why yes. From my actual (grade-school-adopted) hometown in WNY. I have actual homegirls - not many, mind you. And fewer homeboys. We laughed, we drank, we made fun of unquestionably the most poseur hipster bar I've ever been to, in the Village. The birthday gift? (What, my presence isn't enough?) The wholesale jettisoning of copyright laws in the name of exchanging very high quality live music. The moral dubiousness of the whole thing was worth it for the sheer joy on her face.

Meanwhile my brother has been in town - all told, for more than a week, perhaps 9 days or so, though broken up around his own trip to New York, for some kind of reunion-cum-bacchanal in Harlem. I don't spend nearly enough time in that nearby city. Oh well.

Films and television have been watched as well. I saw the Battlestar Galactica miniseries when it first aired a couple of years ago; it seemed excellent but I never got around to watching the continuing series. Now I've seen a few slices of the first (half-)season and nearly all the two-part finale. It's quite good, surprisingly so; the final images of Season One are striking, and the central metaphorical conundrum - 'Any one of us could be one of them' - is both tried-and-true and given an exciting new workout. (The scene in which Galactica-Sharon confronts a room full of Sharons before being 'called up' to assassin duty might have played more delicately, but with a scene that strong one can't complain.) I'll definitely try the second season. Still, I continue to be stunned by the vast difference in line-to-line quality between the cadre of better-than-average shows (Galactica and House spring to mind, and Lost can probably be thrown in there) and the Great Contemporary TV (Milch, Whedon, Chase - they say David Simon's The Wire should be counted among the best as well). The weird tension between the deftness of TV-drama structure and the pro forma quality of so many individual utterances is the difference between the committee-written craftwork of Hollywood TV production and a creative force, an individual aesthetic insight/identity, that merely finds comfortable expression in television but could as easily serve film or prose. This is to say: there is a clarity and honesty of moral vision to be found in great art, and it's noticeably absent from most of what is considered the best TV. Still: Galactica more or less kicks ass, and I'm glad to finally be seeing it.

Run Lola Run got screened at Chez Justice last night; I hadn't seen it in a while, and had all but forgotten how thrilling it is. The video game metaphor/structure is more thoroughgoing than I'd realized, even down to the keypad-pressing bit in each iteration of the story. (Flashback to Doom or Quake's find-the-key sequences, anyone?) There's a paper to be written on related subjects - I took a clumsy first pass at it as a college senior, but I could get it right these days. Aah well.

We have a new roommate. That is good. (We are at full strength again, at last!) And that is all for the moment.

Mass.

The last time I was in a church was for a wedding; the time before that, at a memorial service. We filed out and buried my mother. That was years ago. At the time I was feeling rather vitriolically anti-church, atop which it was a memorial service for my mother conducted partly in Spanish, and in any case I came away feeling that church and I had more or less run our course, and that if forced I'd come back for weddings (even mine) or funerals (even mine) but probably nothing else. The wedding was nice; my brother and I drank enough to enjoy ourselves, and we saw family, and the three of us (me bro dad) wore tuxedos and looked dashing, which is all you can ask. But I didn't pray very hard, and resented it anyhow.

Well, hell. Today I decided to head out to the grand celebratory Easter Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, which is down Dartmouth St in the South End, a few blocks beyond Tremont.

As expected, it was beautiful. The priest's sermon was long-winded and uninspiring; I invariably come away from Mass thinking that most priests stand to gain from just letting me write their damn sermons, provide a little narrative arc, a little crescendo, &c. &c. &c. On the other hand the church itself is magical: high vaulted ceilings, magnificent (recently restored) stained glass, an intricate carved altar. In the introduction or afterword to Riddley Walker's anniversary edition Russell Hoban talks about his trip to Canterbury Cathedral and feeling 'the action of the place.' I know what he means, and what Christopher Hitchens means by humans' ability to share horror at the desecration of the sacred. Churches are places set aside for a kind of reflection not traditionally valued (or even possible) in our daily lives. Kneeling before the altar isn't about supplication, it's about recognition and humility in the face of the unknowable. We kneel too when we ask the open-ended question 'Will you marry me?' which underneath is another question: will you always love me? (The answer might even be yes. To one of those questions if not always both.) There are other temples as well: gymnasia and school buildings. There is a temple in New York called the Village Vanguard; on Mass Ave in Boston a temple (I was thrilled to discover) shares my first name. Places of worship enhance our ability to recognize and appreciate the 'sacred' in one another and in ourselves.

The sermon today dealt in an odd way with an aspect of the day's gospel reading: Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus's tomb, finds it empty, then runs to fetch the others in Jesus's circle. The priest exhorted the congregation to make a 'journey like that of Mary,' which is hoary rhetoric but in this case refers to something unexpected. In his formulation, the importance of that event - which is basically just a discovery scene and not really a character scene, with Mary M. serving as a conduit for info to move the plot ahead - is that Mary wandered to the gravesite to confront something unknowable (not his exact words but this is what came out of the sermon). She was committed not just to the visceral experience of involvement in the growing Cult of Jesus, but to a confrontation with the seeming contradiction of a blessed prophet who died a most inglorious death. If he were a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, what was he doing in the ground? Luckily for Mary M. (and billions of Christians) he actually wasn't in the ground at the time, or so the story goes. But she is a figure worth of praise because of her willingness to pursue an inquiry into her personal faith, unto the grave - her own, or that of her beliefs (embodied in Jesus).

Images of Jesus fill a Catholic Church (those angry Protestant sons of bitches accuse us of idolatrous Marian worship, which OK yes but whatever, but there really are many many representations of the Christ in an old church, which is something maybe you don't think about) but I think you can take an important lesson from Christian teaching if you distinguish between venerating authority and strength and entitlement (Christ as powered-up Son of God with an extra life to spare), on the one hand, and on the other hand giving into to humility and wonder embodied in a mystery (Christ as spiritual leader involved in a philosophical journey). It makes little enough difference whether the story of the Resurrection is literally true. It isn't the central historical fact of Christianity, it is its central mystery, and was so from the moment its narrative was first related, in speech or written text. We should demand of our theological interpreters the same thing we demand of our best textual critics (of any stripe): generosity, flexibility, an eye for social facts, morality that is not simply censoriousness. We misunderstand the nature of churches to criticize their myths against fact. Of course we should also demand that myth give way to fact when embracing the former breeds ignorance, e.g. teaching creationism as an explanation of the origins of life, thereby crippling children's ability to learn good science...

Churches that privilege reductive, vicious answers at the expense of intellection are dangerous to all of us. The Catholic Church has a long scholastic tradition of which it has a right to be proud; there's a flip side to that coin, of course, but the order of being in Catholicism is only partially authoritarian. It is a civic-minded religion, a social movement, and that is its great power. And in the U.S. today its political identity is less odious than it might be, than it used to be. I'm not exactly running back to the Church, but I felt something of its attraction today. The questions. I want more questions. More life.

The pipe organ was the size of a small house, and seemed to shake the entire building. I missed my mother terribly; she'd have been glad to know that I'd gone to Mass. But I didn't do it for her or her memory, or indeed for anyone but myself. And what do you know? I came away happier than I'd been, walking out of a church, in ages. And next time I leave a donation in the box at Wally's and turn eyes and ears to the ecstatic service being performed on that tiny altar, horns strings and drums clamoring as voices, maybe I'll know a little better what it is I'm experiencing. To think you can actually learn something in church.