Someone to talk to

On the occasion of our 27th wedding anniversary, I salute my dear wife, lover, and friend, Gven Golly.

It was a cold, rainy day in Atlanta the week after Christmas, 1978. Our families and friends had converged from far-flung Detroit, Des Moines, Chicago, Columbus, Stockbridge, and other exotic ports. Gven's childhood minister from Jonesboro had agreed to officiate, although the site was not a church but Open City Theater on Highland Ave. in midtown. We had connections since Gven had taught yoga in the upstairs studio space, so they let us use it free.

The lights worked, but the furnace didn't. As 12:00 noon approached, the little black-box theater began filling up with guests standing around in their coats, shaking off the dampness and waiting for the heat to come on. Finally someone got the pilot to light, the heater - the kind that hangs from the ceiling - roared to life, and everyone took their places.

It was that kind of day and that kind of improvisational event. Once everyone had found a seat, the wedding party marched in to Pachelbel's Canon in D from an LP Gven adored. We stood with Rev. Mike in the center, and on cue our families formed a circle around us. At one point the phone rang, and whoever was closest answered it: no, there's no show today. There were vows, tears, joy all around, and inadequate light for photographs. I think everyone agreed it was one of a kind.

Afterward we all retired to the yoga room (is there an echo in here?) at Dr. Burt's office, where we ate organic food from Sevananda, danced to the live music of a friend of a friend, and drank champagne provided by Papa Golly. Nieces and nephews played drums and tambourines, and I vaguely recall a trumpet. If you've seen Brueghel's Peasant Feast, you get the picture, a pretty loose and casual reception of Southerners and Midwesterners on their best behavior. Miss Manners would have had a cow. But ya know what, she wasn't invited.

The big bash was actually the next night at JoJo's house, where the inner circle congregated for one of the best New Year's Eve parties in memory. We rang in 1979, and soon everyone had gone back to Detroit, Des Moines, Chicago, and Columbus. I recall the sun coming out at some point, and a big group piled in our red Ford Econoline van and walked up Stone Mountain. The rest is a blur.

Gven and I drove that red van down to the Florida Keys for a short camping honeymoon, then up to Ithaca, NY, for a long winter house-sitting a friend's cabin, cutting wood, carrying water, and tapping maple trees. We survived that and a few other tests which I will not enumerate. But it all reminds me of a corny Billy Joel song.

Don't go changing, to try and please me
You never let me down before
I don't imagine you're too familiar
And I don't see you anymore.

I wouldn't leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I'll take the bad times
I'll take you just the way you are.

Don't go trying some new fashion
Don't change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care.

I don't want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.

I said I love you and that's forever
And this I promise from the heart
I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are.

The Zojourn, Day Three

If it's Thursday, this must be the British Museum medieval galleries, followed by lunch somewhere really cool, then on to the National Gallery and Theater. Tomorrow's itinerary includes the National Portrait Gallery.

The next day is the birthday of the trip's sponsor, chief guide, and art historian in charge of 20 college seniors (yikes), Dr. Fred Smith, so the group is planning a night on the town with combined New Year's Eve and birthday parties. What would happen if London ran out of Guinness?

New Year's Day, while folks on this side of the pond are watching floats and football, Helga and friends will be at the Tate Modern and the Wallace Collection. The following day they travel to Paris by train via the chunnel.

The Zojourn, Day Two

Hey, I made it.

When we landed in London, I (in order) got my luggage, smoked a cigarette, went to the information desk, called the hotel and talked to my roommate Victoria, then got on the train to Paddington Station where Fred and Don were waiting for me. They got your message and left me a note telling me that you'd called yesterday too. I think I was asleep when you called. I bought a phone card last night, so I'll try to call. If you do call the hotel, make sure to keep in mind the 5 hours ahead time difference.

We did some sight-seeing last night after everyone got a nap, and had dinner. Today we went to the British Museum and the National Gallery, then walked around a trendy little area with lots of expensive shops like Diesel, Aldo, FCUK, etc. There was drooling. Also Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. Tomorrow we go to Westminster Abbey and back to the National Gallery I think.

I'm in an internet cafe right now and have limited time, so I'll call you guys later.

Helga

Blowin' in the Wind

After all these years, the voices I listened to at 12 or 13 resonate deeply enough to move me. JoJo bought an album called Peter, Paul and Mary in Concert at our neighborhood Sour Records store when she was visiting at Thanksgiving and left it with us because she doesn't have a turntable. When I tried to play it, the stereo kept cutting out, so you'd hear half a line then nothing, very annoying. Gven thought it was a speaker problem but couldn't explain how that would make the tuner cut out (see On Verbocentrism), which made no logical sense to me, but what do I know about audio equipment? Only enough to improvise cables from an old set of computer speakers and the speakers from a 1986 Saab named Olaf, so we could listen to CDs with the volume low. When a new set of real speakers magically appeared under our dying fraser fir, I hooked them up and the stereo worked fine.

First I played the new Dave Brubeck CD that my thoughtful daughter gave me, and what a difference it made to hear it through decent speakers with the woofers to get a warm, solid bass. Then I played a raucous Squirrel Nut Zippers CD with lots of crazy swing tunes loosely strung around a holiday theme. Finally I got around to putting on JoJo's PP&M LP, and by the second track tears were streaming down my face as I was transported back to 1964.

The songs have taken on a life of their own over the years, as they've entered pop culture and been covered by hundreds of other performers. The writer has long since become a folk hero by writing and singing hundreds of other songs that have influenced thousands of other artists. The social changes encapsulated in some of them became part of mainstream culture, as well as my personal history growing up in Middle America in midcentury. Now people look back at the civil rights and antiwar movements as quaint artifacts of something called The Sixties. It's tough getting old.

Those three familiar voices etched in vinyl weren't the first or the last to record Dylan's protest songs, and most people would argue that they're not the definitive version (JoJo would disagree); but Yarrow, Stookey and Travers were the reed-like tenor, baritone drone, and passionate alto who introduced me to those songs, that kind of music, and those changes. Since the records could be played on the radio and bought by church-going, middle-class white kids, they opened up something for people like us at just the right time. In some kind of chronosynclastic infundibulum (to steal Kurt Vonnegut's great phrase) I was born just in time to be ripe for what Peter, Paul and Mary were singing when Bob Dylan was writing epochal songs like "The Times They Are a Changin'."

According to the growth-ring theory of human development, I will always be that 12-year-old boy from the suburbs, even after that growth ring had been outgrown by many other layers of experience, just as the 18-year-old in me still gets into the Carpenters, the Association, and Iron Butterfly. What surprised me is that it's not just the songs, which I knew I liked, but the voices that first brought me the songs. I guess you had to be there.

The Zojourn, Day One

The day started calmly enough. Helga had been hard at work packing her bags, doing laundry, making a list and checking it 18 times to make sure everything was in place for her trip. Gven and I were doing what we could to help, but there wasn't much we could do because by design or by the nature of things she was more or less on her own.

We ate a light breakfast, packed the car, and were on the road by 10:30 with a full tank of gas. Weather mild, no precipitation to speak of, we reached Cleveland Hopkins International Airport around 1:00. By the time I'd parked Olive the white Honda (level 2 row A), Helga was all checked in at Continental with baggage checked and nothing more to do except go through security, convert her dollars into pounds, and proceed to gate 4D.

We had allowed ourselves a couple of hours for long lines, traffic, and changing money, better safe than sorry. While standing around, Helga ran into a couple of other girls in the Northeast Swingstate University group with their parents. Is your flight going through New York or Boston? Arriving at Heathrow or Gatwick? Okay, see you there! We took in the demographic sideshow of Cleveland culture, a more colorful ethnic mix than we are used to in whitebread Columbus.

Like doting old birds Gven and I stood behind the barrier watching the shining red hair of our tall daughter bob and weave through the security inspection gates, put everything back in her bags, and turn left out of our sight. A minute ago we were telling her it was time to go, now I had a desire to send an extra eye or an angel or a surveillance device to hover over her as she found the gate, changed her money, and boarded the plane, changed planes at Kennedy, and found her way in the world, but it doesn't work that way. We got in the car and drove home through light snow, ate lunch, and found things to do until she called from New York.

Turns out the packed little plane departed on time but was delayed en route to New York, and by the time Helga got to the correct gate at Kennedy, Virgin Atlantic 2727 for London had completed boarding, sorry. Inexperienced travellers beware, getting to the gate at 7:15 for a 7:30 flight doesn't get you on the plane. Go back to the ticketing desk and change your ticket for the next flight an hour later. Do not pass GO, give them more money, and proceed to worry about meeting the rest of the group at the appointed time in London.

At home in Methodistville, father bird is sitting by the fire with a cat on his lap reading a book about the biopsychology of depression, in particular the chapter about heritable "personality" traits (temperament) and learned "personality" traits (character). It's interesting how the neurological wiring you're born with appears to change during maturation in response to either stressors or pharmaceuticals. People born "at risk" for anxiety in all its forms increase their risk of depression, inhibition, isolation, and other problems when hit by life events such as loss or abuse. Rational person that I am, I take none of this personally. Uh-huh.

About that time Helga called from her upgraded business-class seat on the later flight to London, asking us to leave a message at the hotel informing Prof. Smith that she would arrive at Heathrow an hour late. I was reading Dr. Kramer's description of how people who inherit an irritable temperament are more "reactive" when blind-sided by stress. Bingo. Guilty as charged. And my lucky children, too. No Prozac for me, I decide to self-medicate with a second rum and tonic while mother bird calmly talks to the helpful hotel clerk at Sussex Gardens, London W2.

As of this morning, she was checked into the hotel and we assume all is well. Nothing's ever easy, and I'm still pissed at the airline for not letting her board the right plane, or at myself for not preparing her for that contingency.

Enjoy Your Symptom!

I can't take credit for the title, I just wish I'd thought of it first. It's one of Slavoj Zizek's books (1992), my first attempt at reading his work, and it is work to try to read for any kind of understanding. It's the kind of writing that you either love or hate (show of hands? I thought so), that either grabs you by the chakras or leaves you running in the opposite direction. I mean who has time for this stuff, right? (Answer: graduate students.) Even if I've read the other writers he cites, and he cites a lot of people in a lot of disciplines, I read a sentence over and over and still don't "get it" in the usual sense. So I just read along recognizing a few signposts until something arresting makes me freeze-frame a slice of text. Some samples:

In this sense, we may say that Hitchcock's Rope is an inherently Hegelian film....he gets back from the other his own message in its inverted, true form, i.e., when the true dimension of his own "letter" (teaching) reaches its proper addressee, namely himself - he is shaken and shrinks back from the consequence of his words, unprepared to recognize in them his own truth. Lacan defines "hero" as the subject who (unlike Caddell and like Oedipus, for example) fully assumes the consequences of his act, that is to say, who does not step aside when the arrow that he shot makes its full circle and flies back at him - unlike the rest of us who endeavor to realize our desire without paying the price for it... (pp. 13-14)

So I only read a few pages at a time, and only when I'm in the mood for some serious entertainment, then I have to take a break and return to the ordinary, concrete reality of a weekend at home, because my critical, discursive mind is worn out. So I look up from my book and the full moon is rising in the northeastern sky, right between the fence and the tree and the garage. The cat and the dog are both napping, and the fire is going strong. The women of the house are at a cookie exchange with other women of other houses. It's a perfect night to walk the dog, cold and bright and quiet in half-empty, school-out-on-break Methodistville.

The shift of perspective at work here can be exemplified by means of the dialectic of law and violence: first, law appears as opposed to particular acts of violence that subvert it, the subject is torn between "pathological" impulses to transgress law and between the ethical injunction to obey it; then, the ground is suddenly swept from under his feet when he experiences how the reign of law itself is founded upon violence, i.e., how the imposition of the reign of law consists in the universalization of a violence which thereby becomes "legal." ...As soon as some political force threatens too much the circulation of capital - even if it is, for example, a benign ecological protest against woodcutting - it is instantly labeled "terrorist," "irrational," etc. Perhaps, our very survival depends on our capacity to perform the above-described reversal and to locate the true source of madness in the allegedly neutral measure of "normalcy" which enables us to perceive all opposition to it as "irrational." ...on Hegel's dictum that the true source of evil is the very neutral gaze which perceives Evil all around. (pp. 82-83)

Back in autobiographical mode, I sat at the dining room table and tried to address and stamp the remainder of the holiday letters to send to family and friends, as we have every year since - I can't remember when that ritual started - probably when the kids were little and we felt the need to chronicle each year's passage. I cranked out the first twenty brief personal notes with just the mixture of levity and gravity appropriate to the occasion and the recipient, I hope, and if not, they'll know that I've finally lost it after all, if they hadn't already drawn that conclusion. The second twenty didn't flow as easily, having run out of different ways to say the same thing without quoting Mel Torme, "although it's been said many times many ways..." It helped that the same generic letter is printed on three different colors of paper, a bold visual innovation over years past.

...discourse itself is in its fundamental structure "authoritarian" .... Out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, a consistent field of meaning emerges through the intervention of a Master Signifier - Why? ...the symbolic order in which the subject is embedded is simultaneously "finite"...and "infinite".... Because of this inherent tension, every language contains a paradoxical element which, within its field, stands in for what eludes it.... This signifier is the Master Signifier: the "empty" signifier which totalizes ("quilts") the dispersed field... (pp. 102-103)

It was the kind of Saturday that lends itself to small tasks like sweeping the kitchen and den, bringing in firewood, cleaning and oiling boots, shoveling the walk, doing a load of laundry, staying out of the way while Gven and Helga make batch after batch of biscotti to share with the neighborhood ladies. It's their yearly ritual, and they put a lot of energy into the effort, which connects them with their mothers and grandmothers, and now to their daughters, so be it.

Brecht's "learning plays" were motivated by his encounter with the universe of Noh plays - what we encroach upon thereby is the relationship of the West with Japan qua fantasy object. That is to say, the history of the so-called cultural exchange between Europe and Japan is a long story of missed encounters.... In Europe, Japan functions as a kind of fantasy screen onto which one projects one's "repressed." The fantasy image of Japan is ramified into two main branches: the "fanatic" Japan (kamikaze, samurai, the code of honor - Japan as the ethics of unconditional obedience) and the "semiotic" Japan (from Eisenstein to Barthes: kabuki, the Japanese art of painting - Japan as an empire of signs delivered from Western logocentrism). The first fantasy is usually appropriated by the political right and the second by the Left... (p. 174)

Independently of all this, as far as I can tell from inside my own skin, I checked out Listening to Prozac from the library the other day. No, I don't take the stuff, and I'm not clinically depressed, just Scandinavian. It had been on my list for a while, based on a quote I saw somewhere, and it felt like the right time to get into it. By the way, today's Merriam-Webster Word of the day is seasonal affective disorder \SEE-zun-ul-a-FEK-tiv-dis-OR-der\ noun: "depression that tends to recur as the days grow shorter during the fall and winter." No kidding, you can't plan these things. So I'm a chapter into it, and the writing is slow and monotonous, you know, best-selling expert writes patronizingly for the general audience, but he has a point to make about the obvious appeal of miracle drugs that appear to make people happy, and I'm receptive to the analogies with cosmetic surgery in the kind of personality change he claims antidepressants effect.

And then, while writing this, something happened. I got an email from a friend from graduate school, one of the two or three closest in a group of us who helped each other survive, aided by copious amounts of coffee, Buckeye Donuts, beer, and half-baked ideas. He and his wife, also a grad student in the same department at the time, have split up. I just mailed my holiday letter to their old address; I hope it gets forwarded to one of them. I will soon receive his card in the mail, and then I'll know more of the background. Now I am depressed.

The party of the first part

I wanted to send some sort of holiday greeting to my friends, but it is so difficult in today's world to know exactly what to say without offending someone. So I met with my attorney yesterday, and on his or her advice I wish to make the following plagiarized* statement:

Please accept with no obligation, either implied or implicit, my best wishes for a culturally respectful, environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, nonaddictive, age-inclusive, and gender-neutral celebration of the winter holiday of your choice, observed and/or practiced within the most enjoyable customs or traditions, religious persuasion, or secular practices of your choice with due respect for the religious, ethnic, social, or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, including their choice not to observe or practice said religious, ethnic, social, or secular persuasions and/or traditions at all.

I also, being of sound mind and of my own will and accord, wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally though not universally accepted calendar year 2006, but not without due respect for and acknowledgement of the equally valid calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great - not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only geographical or national entity called 'America' in the western hemisphere - without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, please be advised that you are accepting the following terms: This greeting is subject to clarification, modification, or withdrawal at any time without prior notice; is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting; implies no promise by the wisher or wisher's heirs or agents to actually implement any of said wishes for her/himself or others; is void where prohibited by law; and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual and customary application of comparable good tidings for a period of one year from date of receipt or until the issuance of a
subsequent holiday or seasonal greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Disclaimer: no trees or other plant organisms were harmed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

*origin unknown; I take full responsibility for editorial alterations and any factual or other inaccuracies. Thanks to JoJo.

The night before solstice

(with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

Twas the night before solstice and all through Om Shanty
The dog and the cat and the humans were ranting,
There's too much to do, between cooking and cleaning,
Shopping and decorating, primping and preaning.

The parking lot lights on the snow are reflected,
Reminding me of the shoveling I've neglected.
With a fire in the hearth and a drink on the table,
I'll survive til tomorrow, and that's all I'm able

To do in this season of high expectation,
Let's pack up the car and take a vacation
From cookies and cards and bad advertising
That wears on my soul, so it isn't surprising

That folks get short-tempered, angry and stressed
As the days become shorter and dark and depressed.
In the outward display we all get obsessed,
With wrapping and lighting and being well-dressed.

Then something happens right out of the blues,
Reminding me that I've got nothing to lose
But my worldly attachment to what's on my list,
To the things that I want and the things that I've missed.

And then for a minute or twenty it's clear
That what everyone wants is to be with those dear
To them, parents with kids and kids with each other,
Uncles and aunts with their sisters and brothers.

Some of us have to make do with a letter,
A card, or a package we wish was a better
Representation of the whole family history
That grows year by year, and there is the mystery

That makes it imperative, regardless of weather,
To make those connections that keep us together.
So suck it up, folks, it won't be much longer,
And what doesn't kill you will just make you stronger.

On panarchy

n. 1. What there would be if everybody had power; what there is when everybody has power. 2. A system in which power is held broadly by all members of society, in contrast to monarchy (power held by one), oligarchy (power held by few), or anarchy (power held by none). Compare monotheism (one deity), polytheism (many deities), pantheism (a universe full of deities).

Where was I the other day when these ideas came bouncing into my brain? Was I walking down the trail toward Alumni Creek Lake, catching the first glimpse of the choppy water cut by wind and finding its own level? Or was I doing a taiji form in the cavernous space at the Yoga Factory listening to Bobby McFerrin's "Medicine Man"? Maybe it was while reading Zizek's postmodern critiques of pop culture, or was it while filling in text boxes in the performance management process, where goals morph into competencies, which morph into developmental plans, and words turn back on themselves in self-reflexive speech acts? Maybe not. It might have been on the way home from my men's group meeting where we talked about Christmas. Or it could have come out of the drum circle last week when a dozen people sat and banged away for an hour and cooked, then walked out to their cars. I don't remember exactly, maybe it was the combination of all those things - and others.

There's something very appealing about panarchy and its theological cousin pantheism. But are we talking metaphysically, about what is the nature of the universe, or are we talking ideologically/morally about what the social situation should be - are we talking descriptively or prescriptively? And are those really different? Isn't the metaphysical description just a disguised ideological prescription? Aarrgh. I didn't set out to write a paper, but my training is taking over.

When in doubt, quote others. Rev. Susan was talking about the role of imagination in making a holiday happen. One of her examples was the three "wise men" (kings, shamans, sorcerers, traders in metals, incense, and aromatic gum resin) choosing to go in the direction of the extraordinary star they saw, not knowing why or toward what they were traveling. There was much more to her story, and of course I've forgotten most of it. Since the magi (pl. of magus, n. 1. member of priestly class of ancient Medes and Persians, 2. magician) walked the walk, they didn't necessarily have to "believe" or even have a theory, just be open to possibilities and go looking. But I digress.

The other example that stuck with me was the pagan practice of lighting bonfires on the longest, darkest night of the year to encourage the sun to come back. Maybe it's my nordic blood, but I can relate to that. One of the drum circle regulars later told me that she's bringing candles a week from Tuesday to add a bit of light along with our drumming in the solstice.

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure, and the more I write, the more my left brain takes over and I lose the thread that my right brain had found. Here's a clue from the wordy UUs: "The origin of the word 'worship' is in the Old English weorthscippen, meaning to ascribe worth to something... (or) give form or shape to that which we have already found to be of worth."

Panarchists of the world, unite!

Isabel in mourning

Now that she doesn't have her brother, playmate, soul-mate, companion, nemesis, foil, bathing partner, sidekick to push around anymore, the female cat of the house is having to make some adjustments. She takes naps by herself now. She eats alone. She requires more petting, stroking, scratching, rubbing, especially around the ears. That place on the side of her face, just below the ear, that she likes to rub against things is especially desirous of contact, friction, resistance. She is more vocal than ever, and she expresses her irritation directly to the nearest human.

Is her color changing, or is it my imagination? She still has the charcoal-orange-gray (tortoiseshell?) mixture that has always made her long hair so elegant, but I'm seeing more reddish orange up on her back than before. Maybe it's the change of seasons, like the bleached effect of summer is fading to a darker hue as her winter coat comes in. Or the orange tabby spirit of Gus has infiltrated Isabel's body and altered her coloring.

Isabel always did like to sit in my lap, but now she does it more. There's less foreplay involved, the way she used to circle around, make a few passes, and wave her tail while making up her mind before finally settling in. Now she hops right up on the chair and reclines across my thighs. She will do this with other people, but I seem to be her chosen human, and for that favor I am grateful.

She also vents in my direction. She comes into the room, faces me, and lets fly with a string of angry meows. Of course I can't discern the cat-content of her cat-statement, but I know a complaint when I hear one, and this is one displeased feline.

But it's better than the plaintive roaming from room to room. Sometimes Izzy walks around the house from bedroom to office to dining room to kitchen to den, meowing over and over without stopping. It's a different sound from the demand for food, water, or strokes. This morning she was roaming around the house calling out like that, so I followed her up the stairs to Helga's room. Isabel jumped up on the bed, so I sat down beside her, and for maybe half an hour she rubbed up against my hand, and my hand reciprocated, mostly around the ears and the top of her head, but also down her neck and shoulders.

Helga's room was the place where Gus hung out the most, so it's not a huge deduction to say that Izzy wasn't getting the contact she's used to, so she went there to get it. She's a smart cat, but she's having a hard time.

Sven’s Excellent Performance Management Adventure

Further evidence that, like, the process rocks.

If the following (heavily edited) excerpts do not show the kind of helpful commonsense wisdom that deserves to be enshrined as holy writ, I don't know what does. (Insert snarky epithet here.) I see Little Blue Books of "sayings" selling like hotcakes in the chain bookstores of America. I see group meetings in church basements across this great land, as people seek to deepen their understanding of the process and help each other save draft, send forward, and submit for approval.

In this age of dominance through fairness - or was it fairness through dominance, I can never remember - the language of success and achievement IS the language of openness, benevolence, and inclusiveness.

To wit, a good, i.e. successful, person:

Demonstrates honesty...Shares thoughts...Treats people with dignity...Listens to others...delivers important information and checks for understanding...Uses vocabulary appropriate to the audience...Uses appropriate influence strategies...Actively seeks, clarifies and listens to ideas from others...Presents facts, ideas, and concepts clearly and effectively...supports organizational decisions and values...fosters collaboration...actively seeks learning experiences...Maintains perspective and remains calm in stressful situations...assumes accountability for successes.

In short, be excellent to each other!
I like it. If it had a beat, I would dance to it.

Lennon

Mother, you had me, but I never had you.
I wanted you, but you didn't want me.
So I just want to tell you good bye - good bye.

Father, you left me, but I never left you.
I needed you, but you didn't need me.
So I just want to tell you good bye - good bye.

Children, don't you do what I have done.
I couldn't walk, but I tried to run.
So I just want to tell you good bye - good bye.

(Words, to the best of my recollection, from Plastic Ono Band, c. 1970. I used to listen to this record A LOT.)

Winter Storm Warning

Hear those beautiful words. Winter - cold air hitting skin, quickening steps, necessitating wool socks, hat and gloves, a fire in the hearth. Storm - snow tumbling down from the sky in thick flakes to cover everything and muffle all sound. Warning - anticipating something big and ominous that will bring a change to the hum-drum routine, maybe even a snow day, so pay attention and get ready.

Jim, the local public radio news guy, uttered that lovely phrase this morning, along with meaningful numbers like "high in the mid-twenties" and "low around ten." The snow is already flying, barely enough to cover the ground but promising more, the way the light wind and heavy clouds hint at "heavy accumulation." Woo-hoo!!

As long as there's coffee in the can and food in the pantry, wood in the shed and gas in the car, hey, bring it on. Wax the skis, drag out the sled, put on longjohns, and hit the trail.

Winter, how do I love thee?

HR and religious experience

To paraphrase John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band, c. 1971):

I don't believe in magic,
I don't believe in Tarot,
I don't believe in I Ching,
I don't believe in mantra,
I don't believe in tantra,
I don't believe in Jesus,
I don't believe in Buddha,
I don't believe in Gita,
I don't believe in Elvis,
I don't believe in Zimmerman,
I don't believe in Beatles,
I just believe in PMP,
the Performance Management Process,
and that's reality.
The dream is over, what can I say?
I was the dreamweaver, but now I'm reborn.
I was the walrus, but now I'm Sven.
And so, dear friends, you'll just have to carry on.
The dream is over.

The wisdom of the performance-driven culture has been revealed to me, and I now understand that everything I really need to know can be found in my year-end review of goals, competencies, and developmental activities. Hallelujah!

Everything I need to know, that is, about myself and my personal and professional abilities, opportunities for personal and professional growth, and potential as a human resource. Everything I need to know about the corporate work group of which I am an integral part, in which we all have a mission and a purpose within the larger mission and purpose of the company in this momentous time and place. Can I get a witness.

There are universal themes contained within that text, brothers and sisters of the word and icon, if we only look beneath the jargon-laden surface to the larger and more subtle guidance well-hidden in the language of business. What I'm suggesting is no less than treating PMP as no less than religious text, dear friends.

For reasons of confidentiality and self-preservation, I cannot disclose here what those words, themes, and guiding thoughts are, but I'm here to testify that they are there if you look hard enough.

The reason for the seizin'

I'm no sociologist. And while I'm at it, I'm no theologian, economist, political scientist, event-planner, or philosopher-king, and, as people close to me are eager to point out, I'm no historian. But I am capable of observing the social phenomena around me, of which I am, for better or worse, a part. So I'll just lay it out there.

It appears to my untrained eye that this crazy, sacred, hectic, holy, anxious, nostalgic, stressful, special time of year is all about consuming. Consuming more and better goods and services than last year, more than Mom, Dad, Patty and all the folks back home, more than we did when we were kids, and more than the Joneses. But tastefully, with style and class.

I hasten to add that I too experience these symptoms. I too want the best available dead pine tree drying out in the living room, the best available Scandinavian foods (imported from Minneapolis) on the dining room table, colorful and pretty packages under the tree, cool arty cards in the mail to family and friends, a few nice things for Gven, Helga, and Jessi. I'm a participant, if a somewhat ambivalent and nostalgic one.

For many people this midwinter nightmare is a religious holiday that they actually celebrate with a community of the faithful. What, maybe 30 percent? I do that too. Having been raised in that way, it would feel lacking somehow not to go to church and feel the warm glow of the assembled congregation, sing the carols, light the candles.

The other 70 percent (plus most of the above 30) are worshipping at the mall or their favorite catalog or online retail site, practicing the great American secular religion of commerce. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Think of the impact on the economy if Walmart didn't have a record-breaking gross this year. It's the neighborly thing to do, supporting the multinational corporation that employs the people who buy what you and I produce, in this best of all possible interconnected webs. Just think how bad it would be if Reagan hadn't vanquished the evil empire of dialectical materialism.

If I were bold enough to ask the manic shoppers what it's all about, most would say that "It's for the kids." And they'd say it with a straight face.

Before I bust an artery in my annual rage over the holiest of holy days, I will submit for your consideration the following simile: Christmas is like a drug that everybody takes and buys lots of worthless but shiny stuff, but it's okay because you were high on Christmas.

Rumi and the Flute

The poet Rumi in the Mathnawi, I'm told, talks about music that comes from the pain of separation. The body of the flute, for example, is cut from a reed that grows from the ground but reaches for the sky, then has holes burned into it that allow it to make a sound. Seven sound-holes represent the eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth. Instrument as body, body as instrument.

The choir director Marlene talked on Sunday morning about how much she loves the flute. Her flute teacher at Luther University is very ill and losing his memory. She described their student-teacher relationship back in high school when she had the kind of personal issues that kids in high school have. They have stayed in touch over the years, and now there is a sad new chapter with his declining health. This experience is burning holes in her that she hopes will open up new ways of seeing herself and making music.

She brought out some of the flutes in her collection to show the kids in church some of the materials used by different cultures to make flutes. There was a Native American flute (wood), a Japanese shakuhachi (bamboo), a fife (silver), an Indian flute (bamboo), and a recorder (plastic). Each has a distinctive sound, meaning, and function for the people who play it.

The mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote the words to Hymn #27, "I Am That Great and Fiery Force," which closed the service. I turned to my friend Dick standing next to me and said, "That was quite amazing." He said, "Remarkable!" and we went our separate ways. I told Marlene her sermon was absolutely beautiful, then I went outside and took a walk at Alumni Creek while that simple tune of Hymn 27 repeated itself over and over in my head. I can't remember it now, but each verse had four lines, and it reminded me of the blues.

The daughter Helga placed the flat stone inscribed with the name of her cat on the little mounded spot in the back corner of the back yard on Saturday. Then she had a rough moment as it all came down to her. She has had Gus for two-thirds of her life, and now that chapter is over.

That day her aunt JoJo and cousin Bubba went back to Hotlanta after a delightful Thanksgiving visit with us in Central Swingstate. The next day, I drove Helga and her friend SaRea back to Cuyahogaville for their last two weeks of fall semester. They've done this trip many times now, so it's a familiar drill. Helga had a lot of work to do, so I didn't stick around (see Randomness Rules).

Now I'm struggling to tie together all those seemingly related fragments, armed with the detachment of looking back four days later. It's not a real strong common thread: a bunch of sweet moments pass, leaving a hard memory. This isn't meant to be a treatise, just an attempt at closure. Maybe I should sing it or drum it or play it, instead of trying to write it (see On verbocentrism), because Rumi I'm not. Wanted: a different instrument.

Advertorial, agitprop, potayto, potahto

We in the information industry are shocked - shocked! - and outraged - outraged!! - at the revelation that U.S. military officials have been planting articles in Iraqi newspapers by paying - paying!!! - journalists to print the Pentagon's version of events.

The best part is the chagrin expressed by one Iraqi publisher, who, had he known he was selling editorial space to the U.S. Army, would have "charged much, much more."

Meanwhile, the diplomatic member of this long-running good cop/bad cop show, the State Department, trains Iraqis in media ethics and "The Role of Press in a Democratic Society." On the other side of the foreign policy street, something called the "Information Operations Task Force" in Baghdad has taken over an Iraqi newspaper and radio station in order to channel its own brand of information in the burgeoning media of the occupied country. Anyone calling themselves the information operations task force must really, really want to be taken seriously. I mean they could have called it the Spin Office, or the Ministry of Lies, or Pravda.

Randomness Rules

My usual spot, Susan's on Main Street, was closed, so I ended up at Starbucks for coffee and eavesdropping. Starbucks now occupies the building that used to be Brady's Cafe, a funky old campus institution that lost its lease at the corner of Main and Lincoln across from front campus of Northeast Swingstate University, to the chagrin of a small but loyal following going back to the sixties. Now it's unrecognizable, all modern, characterless, sterile, and full of customers. I'm drinking my "holiday blend" which the smiling clerk said was a dark-roast, but it just tastes like coffee to me, in a paper to-go cup just in case I need to make a break for it and finish it on the road.

I dropped my daughter at her dorm, then did a quick workout in the lowering darkness on top of a wooded knoll off Loop Road, and now I need caffeine before driving back to Americus and my everyday life. After a holiday weekend of extended and sometimes intense conversation with my sister JoJo and nephew Bubba, I will now indulge in the fine art of random dialog writing, a kind of out-sourcing in prose for those times when you think you have nothing to say. It's a game of chance, something like Draw the Weirdo (aka Exquisite Corpse).

The five of us - Gven, JoJo, Bubba, Helga, and I - played a game of Draw the Weirdo Thursday night. We've been playing it at family gatherings ever since the kids were big enough to hold a pencil: everybody draw a head, fold it over and pass to the next person, draw a torso, fold it over and pass, draw the legs and fold, etc., until each drawing has come full-circle with a cartoonish body created by five different hands. The results are invariably funny, sometimes startlingly weird, arresting, random.

The two young men at the table next to me, both dark and heavily bearded, are difficult to transcribe because they are speaking Russian or some other eastern or southern Slavic language as they consult a book and make notes on a legal pad.

Three girls in Roosevelt High School letter jackets talk animatedly at the next table: "I didn't know their birthdays were on the same day..."

Two tall, blond women talk quietly with a young Indian man at the table across from me, and I finally discern a slight accent, German or Czech, maybe Polish or one of the Baltic republics. They have the high forehead and fair skin of the Scandinavian Slavs: "No no...I don't do that kind of thing. I did it, but...so sick. I owe them twenty dollars. Lobby and objective premises. Money and, I can get them for you (laughs). Apple cider should be cold, not hot. When I first came to America..."

Two loud people walk in: "When he was here, we went to a Chinese restaurant, getting married to just somebody's friend? I need to like talk it out with someone, and we initial dinner and comes back out and like what's up, and she's like oh god, it's like it's too bad, and I walked away and my sister saw what's happening and then my dad like walks away and goes like don't talk. It was so random, oh I've never, no cuz I know but this was in Baltimore for a year and a half and I was leaving the next day, he drove an Audi and my friend's cousin, did I tell you this story, I went to my friend's wedding..."

I finished my coffee and left, headed down the interstate, and found a local radio station, which is always unpredictable. On the way up, we had heard Romanian dances played by a Hungarian string quartet, an Irish-American interviewing a high school DJ looking for a good communications school, and a Slovak-American show from Cleveland with a Slovak-speaking DJ spinning what sounded to my untrained ear like polka music.

On the way back, I heard the tail end of a John Lennon tribute compiled by someone in Albuquerque in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death on December 8, 1980, part "Where were you then?" retrospective and part Lennon songs and quotes, mostly from the post-Beatles, Plastic Ono Band years. (For the record, Gven and I were sitting at the kitchen table of our Oberlin apartment eating breakfast and listening to WOBC.)

Coincidentally we had listened to a lot of Beatles songs Wednesday night. Bubba asked about the order in which several albums came out, so we listened to Abbey Road, Sargeant Pepper, and half of the White Album. When it warmed up on Saturday, we all strolled over to Lesser's for ice cream and across the street to Sour Records for another trip down memory lane in the used CD racks. For an infrequent music buyer like me, one never knows what one will find, and I was pleasantly surprised by the selection of records I could recognize.

JoJo bought a live LP that Peter, Paul and Mary recorded in 1964 at the height of the folk revival. JoJo doesn't have a turntable anymore, so she ostensibly got it for us to play when she comes to visit. She doesn't know what became of all her albums, and she had all of PP&M's and probably knew all the words, as well as sharing the political stance of those three bohemians gone mainstream. I also listened to those records over and over, back when JoJo was 17 and I was 13, and they introduced me to Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and political folk music in general. That part wasn't so random.

Pie Profiling

It's high time you gave some serious thought to pie.

I mean beyond the obvious "What's your favorite kind?" or "What was your mother's specialty?" Turns out there is deep-dish meaning to be found in one's pie behavior, pie expectations, pie values. So naturally some educated upper-crust boomer has written a book about it and gotten her 5-minute spiel on NPR.

According to Anne Dimock, it's all about men (as pie-eaters), women (as pie-makers), and power. "It's a power that comes from quiet observation and deep knowledge about your competition." Oh please.

She has catalogued the kinds of men "worth making another pie for" after identifying a man she wanted more attention from and making pies "to test him." Some men "regard pie as an entitlement." At their worst, they "will take your pie, and you, for granted," but at their best, they "know why yours is better than anybody else's and why only yours will do." This kind of cleverness reminds me of George Carlin's substituting the word fuck for every use of kill in a TV show. Here we can just substitute ass for every reference to pie and understand where's she's coming from.

It gets worse. Men shall be judged according to where they place their arms after eating pie, how large or small their bites are, where they begin to eat the slice, whether and how they ask for a second slice, and (drum-roll) whether they dig out the filling (LIAR!!). Indeed, and you probably saw this coming, "Pie is a window to a man's soul." Come to think of it, I bet foreign-policy decisions are being made over dessert all the time at white house state dinners.

Gosh, I feel so darn empowered now, I think I'll take notes on each of my Thanksgiving dinner companions. I'll deconstruct my wife's approach to mashed potatoes, my sister's handling of cranberry sauce, my daughter's decision making regarding stuffing, and the whole ideology of white meat vs. dark meat. Maybe I could get a grant to study it. Meanwhile, somebody refill my wine glass.

Happy Thanksgiving.

On verbocentrism

Language has its uses. I am among those who largely eat, sleep, and breathe the stuff. So when I rage against the traps and limitations inherent in reducing life (as we know it) in the real world (as we know it) to its verbal explanations, I'm counting myself among the afflicted. So I'm here to admit that I have a problem, to acknowledge that I am powerless to overcome this problem on my own, and to begin the process of recovery. My name is Sven and I'm verbocentric.

I've been running into a lot of situations where someone else (not me!) complains about a discrepancy between their theory/belief/postulate/assumption/definition of x and an observable phenomenon y. The common reaction is that there must be something terribly wrong with y because it doesn't match x, the major premise being, of course, that x is true. "I'm surprised that you'd have that reaction because you're (leftist/male/counterculture/educated/white person)." Like my every attitude and behavior ought to follow from whatever category I've been slotted into.

I'm not sure what a technical philosopher would call this, but it reminds me of debates between rationalists and empiricists, positivists and pragmatists, or the early and the later Wittgenstein. Whatever, I don't want to go there, and chances are you don't want to either. What irritates me is the expectation that any explanation of the facts could be final.

Words can, at best, define other words. They don't define the things and events that other words attempt to describe, explain, compare, etc. The elusive people, places, things, and events are more slippery than that, so on a good day human descriptions in language can only come close.

My gifted spouse Gven Golly, who by the way was born on Norwegian Independence Day, or Sittende May [pronounced SIT-uhn-da MY, or May 17, for you non-Norwegian speakers], exemplifies the opposite human type, let's call it spatiocentric. She is not afflicted with verbocentrism and thus provides me with a daily antidote in the form of nonlinear, nonlogical, nonrational thinking, which can be expressed verbally but does not attempt to reduce the world to what's in a sentence. Which most of the time drives me crazy and once in a while solves a sticky problem.

Yesterday, for example, we were in the middle of a decidely nonverbal task, connecting the woodstove to the chimney. Gven and Jessi had moved the iron stove out of the den to tile the floor, and now that the tile is finished (thanks to crafty Gven and her crafty son), it's time to make the stove functional again, and that requires a nice, tight stovepipe. It took the two of us a long time to find a way to position the stove under the chimney while fitting two sections of stovepipe snug between the stove (on floor) and chimney (in ceiling/roof). This involved sliding the stove across the nice, new tiles on a piece of (nonstick, nonscratch) felt, then deadlifting the stove, two legs at a time, onto bricks so the pipe would not leave gaps. We finally got it connected, but it took some doing and revealed a bit of flawed logic in my own engineering skill, for which the polite term would be developmentally delayed.

Long story short, we puzzled over how to fit a certain length of pipe into both stove below and chimney above. My ideas all came in the form of abstract, if-then statements, like a mechanical drawing of an actual object or plays drawn up on a blackboard. Her ideas were not as linear, logical, or precise, and not based on the Pythagorean theorem, but lo and behold, some of them worked. Her proposed solutions to the mechanical problems posed by solid objects in a finite space defied any explanation either one of us could conjure up. But sure enough, some of them brought solid metal object together in ways that my rational calculations said would not, could not, work. The stove is in place, just in time for cold weather. Don't ask me how or why.

Outside

Disclaimer: There's nothing new here. You've heard or read this before, and if you persevere and read on, you will not learn anything you didn't know before. Your mother probably told you every day of your pre-adult life to go outside and play. I am here to salute her wisdom. So stop reading and go outside!

It's Sunday around midday, and I'm taking a walk after church out by Alumni Creek Lake where Plumbline Road ends at a trailhead that leads directly down to the water. It's a sunny, windy fall day, and I welcome the quiet as I trudge down the short trail to the shore, just beginning to unwind from my own mixed reactions to my own social existence.

Reaching the tiny beach of round rocks, sandy mud, and thousands of shells the size of fingernails, I followed the shoreline around to a little inlet where I meet another male human about my age wearing waders and a backpack, carrying a fishing pole, fit as a fiddle and smiling. He says nice day, I say beautiful, how are the fish? He says if I catch one, it'll just be icing on the cake, and he strides across the mud and stones to make another cast in the lake. He clearly isn't there to accomplish anything in particular, and fishing is just an excuse to be outside for a while. He sure isn't there to talk to me, nor I to him, so we happily go our separate ways. I found a sunny spot out of the wind at the edge of the woods and did a long qigong form facing the water, and it worked like a charm.

Meaning what, exactly? It stretched my hamstrings and lower back, of course, reconnected my head and arms to my shoulders (I hate it when they fall off), and opened up the hip joints that tend to get tight as a drum. Physical stuff like that. Just spending half an hour standing in one place - especially a place in the woods facing the water - clears my head of some of the accumulated junk that's been trapped inside while I've been trapped inside four walls and a roof. I don't meditate in the bogus sense of "think about nothing" because a thousand images and problems race across the liquid crystal display screen of my mind's eye while I'm lifting qi up and pouring qi down. Afterward my mixed reactions don't seem quite so dire, and the same images and problems float in a more balanced perspective. I really don't know how it works, but it has something to do with getting outside.

More often than not as I drive to church on Sunday, I wonder what's the point of even going. An hour later, more often than not, those questions are answered well enough to reinforce the habit of showing up. For example, a young couple brought their baby girl for a child dedication - like a baptism for anabaptists. We had a simple bread communion, which I appreciate in its concreteness; we break bread together. Without fail, Rev. Susan provides a nugget of information, interpretation, call it "spin" if you like, that makes a difference in my day and week.

I'm told that the people we traditionally call "the Pilgrims" (note the cap P, as if they held the franchise on pilgrimage) were a band of Protestant (ditto) Separatists (ditto) from England via Holland who were blown off course and landed on Cape Cod by accident, so they pretty much had to make the best of it. I'm also told that about half of the folks on the fabled seed of democracy called the Mayflower were a cohesive group (the 'saints') who really chose to make a community together; the other half (the 'strangers') booked the voyage expediently to make a new start for their own reasons and had little or no commitment to the goals of the core group. Even the 'saints' had one core principle in common - separatism! - so they mostly wanted to be left alone, too. Hence the need for the famous Compact written onboard ship prior to landing on the fabled Plymouth Rock (evoking images of the apostle Peter, solid foundations, lasting institutions, and trustworthy insurance policies).

I found it helpful to know that this struggling band of separatists had very little holding them together, and in fact had little desire to be a tightly knit community. And while I appreciate the opportunity to attend, and I usually have a nice conversation or two, I was not compelled to join in the convivial silent auction/bake sale afterward. I had to get outside.

Fifty-two weeks but who's counting

This week marks my first anniversary as a blogger. That's 98 posts by my unofficial count, not including this one. Yeah, yeah, big deal, says the outside world, I just feel I should mark the day somehow.

With lots of encouragement (I get by with a little help from my friends), I started slowly, with three posts the first month and five each of the next three months. I had in mind making one post per week. After talking to Mr. Gutman, an early mentor, something opened up, and out came seven posts in March. Then I backslid to three in April and four in May, came back with seven in June, and went nuts with twelve in July, eleven in August, thirteen in September, and fourteen in October. The numbers seem to indicate that I'm getting into it.

The increase in quantity says nothing about quality, of course, but I'm enjoying putting fingers to keyboard, if only as a test of what odd contents of consciousness surface during this lap around the sun. It would be a better, more random, more valid test if I wrote every day, as the serious bloggers do, then there would be a more complete record of the minutiae occupying my brain while other people are doing important work. But who wants that? Or I could compartmentalize by subject and produce a separate blogs on politics, family, gardening, the arts, religion - no, I don't think so - there aren't enough categories and there's too much overlap in my interdisciplinary (jumbled) liberal arts (pseudointellectual) mind.

A couple of observations might be worth making. My low level of technical savvy is apparent in the long, slow learning curve by which I've added elements to my blog. Pictures finally appeared, but not frequently, and lately there have been more links, but still no jazzy audio or video posts. Primarily a verbal learner, Professor Gardner. As my encouraging friends and co-workers have pointed out, the wordsmithing craft of it is at least half the point, as I painstakingly revise and edit paragraphs about topics like a movie, a dream, the weather, or what I had for supper. Really earthshaking stuff, kind of like the sophomore creative writing major who really wants to write but has nothing much to say. Portrait of the artist as an old dog. Definitely a late-bloomer, Professor Piaget.

Is it the full moon or what?

Everyone around me seems to be having stronger than normal reactions to the things that are happening around them - not that that's a bad thing - and the weather is changing abruptly from mild indian summer to harsh early winter, which is the nature of fall in central swingstate, after all. It seems like people are feeling especially vulnerable, money being tight, families feeling the pressure, and holidays coming on.

I had an unusually vivid dream last night. Maybe it's the full moon tugging on astral auras, pulling the hopes and fears and anxieties out of everydayness. Or it could be the extra salsa I put in the black bean soup. Freudians, have a field day.

I'm in a big gym, with pickup basketball games going on right and left. I find a special ball on the floor among all the regular balls, and it practically calls out to me with its intense (blue) color, so I pick it up. A tall female player, whom I recognize from somewhere as a really talented athlete, walks up and tells me that's the ball she likes to use, so we start to play. Dribbling up the court, I say, "half-court?" but she says, "full-court," and I say "okay" but stop dribbling, so I have nowhere to go, so I shoot from half-court, and the ball, amazingly, goes in. Before we can continue playing, however, the special ball rolls out the door, and when I go after it, the door closes behind me, locking me out. I wait, and momentarily some guys come out the door, and as I start to go in they question whether I should be allowed in the gym, and whatever it was I said or did, they decided to let me back in.

The scene shifts to a car repair shop where a mechanic is finishing some work on my truck. I drive to a second shop to have the oil changed, but the second mechanic sees something lying on top of the hood, left there by the first mechanic, so he says, "This is from (first repair shop), so it will take two hours." I say "okay" and take two books from the truck to read while I'm waiting. Outside the second shop is a sunny hillside where a group of kids from a prep school are involved in a scavenger hunt, intently checking their lists of items and scouring the hillside to find them. A few of their parents are talking, clustered off to the side by their parked minivans.

My personal coach says its my second chakra expressing its need for the illusion of control. I say it's the full moon.

Zizek!

Christian Moerk's 12 column-inches in Sunday's New York Times got my attention: "The World's Most Unlikely Movie Star" turns out to be a Slovenian critical theorist whose "musings on postmodernism and popular culture - rich in deeply spun allusions to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch - are inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan." Oh my, how very rich, how deeply spun.

Turns out an intern at Verso Books, which distributes his books, made a film of Slavoj Zizek's 2003-2004 speaking tour, and it's being shown in festivals in Toronto, New York, and "several national dates" (Wexner Center, pay attention). "This is propaganda for nerds," according to Andra Taylor, the filmmaker. "I think it's fantastic to reveal the structures of ideology and challenge people. It's a public service." Call me a dilettante, call me a dabbler, call me a poser, but I had to know more!

So I googled a bibliography of his books at the site of something called The European Graduate School, located in Saas-Fee, Wallis; New York; and Dresden. (Where the heck is Saas-Fee, you ask? It's a little town in the Swiss Alps near the Italian border; Wallis [or Valais] is the canton. Social studies really is fun.) But dig the titles: Organs Without Bodies; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality; and my personal favorite, Enjoy Your Symptom!

A clip from the film "Zizek," as he responds to a question about belief, contains a line attributed to the physicist Niels Bohr: "No, I don't believe in it, but I'm told that it works even if you don't believe in it." You can also view the trailer there and treat yourself to another nugget to chew on: "Philosophy doesn't ask 'Is this true?' Philosophy asks, 'What do you mean when you say this is true?'" If you'll excuse me, I have to go to a style guide meeting, where a group of editors will sit around a table and argue which words should or should not be used, based on how other sources did or didn't use them. It's all quite pragmatic. Kolkata means something, not because it's right or true but because it means something to someone.

If all this seems dry as dust to you, okay, just pass it by. On the other hand, if this kind of discourse on discourse is your meat and potatoes, your rice and beans, your bread and butter, well dig in. This interview, for example, entitled "The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other," might be old news, coming shortly after 9/11, but there are some radical ideas there about tolerance and multiculturalism, for example:

Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In France, for example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism against universalism is that there are only particular identities. So, if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours?'

I guess what appeals to me about this kind of thinking is that it breaks out of the 'right-wing vs. left-wing' cliche of telling opposing versions of the same tired story, putting most of us to sleep. Now I think I'll go home and read a spy novel.

Gustav MacKenzie Surratt-Duncanson

b. April 1 (?), 1991, d. November 10, 2005.

Our cat Gus died Thursday night. I came home from work while there was still a little bit of light to rake leaves, and while changing clothes I heard an alarming little cough-like wheeze from somewhere in the bedroom. I looked everywhere I could think of - under the bed, behind books and shoes, on shelves, in other rooms, even outside in the yard - but couldn't find him. Isabel and Dali, the other cat and the dog, were present and accounted for but no help. I asked Izzy several times, "Where's your brother?" but got no reply.

Gven came home after her classes, and we both searched the house again, no luck. We ate supper, read, watched TV, walked Dali, and kept wondering where Gus was hiding. The poor guy has been sick for some time - heart murmur, thyroid condition - and has lost a lot of weight in the past year. Lately he's been losing his balance, walking unsteadily, and falling off tables without his usual aplomb. So we all saw it coming.

Finally around midnight Gven found him, curled up inside a wardrobe-type suitcase that was hanging in the back of her closet, quite dead. We laid him on a tee-shirt and talked about what to do next. He was limp and lifeless but not yet cold or rigid. I put my hand on him for a long time, and began to feel my own pulse, a strange sensation, but no, no miracles today. Dali hovered behind Gven, looking very concerned. Isabel stayed away for quite a while, seemingly oblivious, and finally sauntered over, sniffed around the corner of the room by the closet, and quickly walked right by with no outward response. Gven thought maybe she wasn't even acknowledging the body on the floor because his essence wasn't there anymore. Hard to tell.

We decided to bury him in the garden, and I found a wicker basket about his size. Since it was a cool evening, we put him in the closed garage overnight. Tonight or tomorrow I will dig a hole with the brand-new Sears Craftsman long-handled spade that has never been used. I just got it in exchange for the old shovel that had recently broken from hard use. There's a nice spot under a couple of smallish evergreens, and we'll place a little plaque there. First we have to tell Helga, which won't be easy. Gus was always her cat.

Gus and Isabel came to us as littermates from my running partner (see MacKenzie's Laws, Archives April 2005) and his family's family of cats. Funny, I hadn't seen the MacKenzies for years, then ran into his daughter at the coop Wednesday night, long time no see. We got Gus and Izzy as kittens on Helga's seventh birthday when we lived in Grandview. They were both longhaired little furballs and completely adorable. They moved with us to Alabama later that year, then back to Clintonville a year later, then to another house in Clintonville where we actually stayed put for ten years, and finally to Northeasterville, where Gus will remain.

On bullshit

Harry G. Frankfurt's new book from Princton U. Press, On Bullshit, "explores why there is so much bullshit, what bullshit is exactly, and what functions bullshit serves," according to the introduction. In my field (educational publishing) these are salient questions with important consequences. That and a perverse curiosity about the subject piqued my interest when my sister sent me the book on CD.

"The phenomenon is so vast and amorphous," according to the author, and his treatment of it so refreshingly straightforward. It's a serious, but not TOO serious, analysis, and I had to laugh at times. You might find yourself thinking of people you know as he describes some of the types and traits of bullshitters. The quick little book doesn't disappoint. Thanks, Jo Jo.

Like the older and more genteel term humbug, which is explained by Max Black in his book The Prevalence of Humbug, bullshit misrepresents something but falls short of outright lying. Frankfurt cites public relations, advertising, and politics as realms of tireless and careful attention to bullshit. He uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of nonsense to shed light on the nature of bullshit as involving a kind of laxity toward what is true or can be know to be true. This leads to the conclusion that the essence of bullshit has to do not with a speaker's intent to deceive but with the speaker's lack of concern with the truth at all.

The OED, which apparently has plenty of material on the subject, cites a poem by Ezra Pound about using biblical passages to make a point, wherein Pound demands more from a speaker than empty talk, in effect calling their bluff. Frankfurt concludes that the bullshitter, like the fake and the phoney, engages in a relatively benign inauthenticity rather than the more offensive lie. The craft of lying is more specific and bound to truth-value than the wide-ranging art of bullshit. Liars and truth-tellers are playing on opposite sides in the same rule-bound game, while the bullshitter plays a different game altogether, free of those constraints.

Other synonyms (readers, please add more):

nonsense, bunkum, humbug, misrepresentation, insincerity, trivia, hot air, caca, quackery, balderdash, hocum, drivel, imposture, claptrap...

Why is there so much bullshit now? Maybe because there is more communication now, and the proportion of bullshit is unchanged. Frankfort goes into a short discussion of the corollary issues of skepticism and whether objective truths are knowable, ending with proposition that all a person can do is know and express how they feel. In that case, sincerity replaces truth as the standard of utterances, to which the author replies, "Sincerity is bullshit."

London calling

My little girl is going to London and Paris during winter break from school. She's confirmed on her flights from Cleveland/Hopkins to New York/Kennedy and Kennedy to London/Heathrow the day after Christmas. Ten days later, it's Heathrow to Washington/Dulles, and Dulles back to Hopkins. Oh my.

It's the contents of that sandwich of plane trips, of course, that will be the real adventure. It's just that right now, the eTicket is what makes it real compared to the tentative plans and speculative what-ifs leading up to it. Confirmed flights mean she's in the art history group from Northeast Swingstate University (NESU) and enrolled in the tour. A rough itinerary:

December 27 - arrive London, orientation, general tour & National Gallery
28 - British Museum, ancient, agrican/Mexican and bookstores ('agrican'?)
29 - National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum
30 - British Museum, medieval, National Gallery and theatre
31 - Salisbury, Stonehenge, cathedral/churches
January 1 - Tate modern, Wallace collection
2 - to Paris via Eurostar and optional evening tour
3 - Louvre, free time
4 - Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, architectural, evening to london

A few details remain to be worked out, like a passport, and Helga's rapid-fire mind is probably busy listing things to do in the next few weeks. But if we could just maintain our focus for a little while longer on research and writing art history, Picasso, the art of Central Africa, elementary French, intro to glassworking, and metals I, then all will be well when it's time for the trip.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture

It's a cute line from a cute movie about a dysfunctional family with a catalog of relationship issues, all of which are tidily resolved in just under two hours. Something about "Heart" in the title. But I still like that line because it addresses the incommensurability of different art forms, which I find interesting because it lets me use one of my favorite words [IN kum EN sur uh BIL uh tee]. But it can also be frustrating, because sometimes those experiences that I would most like to communicate are the most difficult to put into language. Know what I mean?

I don't read many music reviews. Besides the generation gaps, culture gaps, and education gaps separating me from most rock, classical, jazz, you name the genre, critics, it is rare indeed to read a music review that succeeds in conveying something about the music that engages but doesn't gag me. I prefer to listen to the music, thank you, with or without an understanding of its theoretical, historical, or social context. My loss I guess. Dance reviews are similar. I see an article in the Sunday Times and think I'll read it, but it's written in dancecriticese, so I get as far as the second paragraph and turn the page. Visual art, forget it, I don't speak ze lingeau, capiche?

Theater and movies, on the other hand, like poetry and fiction, history and philosophy, I can read ABOUT because, duh, the work in question, like the review, is in, duh, language. It's not that I have any "training" in theater, movies, poetry, fiction, or history, and I'm therefore schooled in the special discourse of the discipline. I don't and I'm not. I don't speak theaterese or filmese or poetrese or literaturese or historish, and when I'm around those people at the party, I'm either observing them as an anthropologist observes the social habits of an exotic band of islanders or I'm crossing the room to talk to the jocks.

Am I belaboring the obvious? Yes. Am I betraying the fact that I personally am more of a "word person" than a musically or spatially intelligent person, in the jargon of Howard Gardner, whom I happen to like and respect because he writes well about those boundaries? Yes. Am I realizing, for the umpteenth time, that my vain attempts at a liberal arts education have not made me into a renaissance man? Sad but true.

Part of the difficulty, I'm sure, is my lack of education in the arts. I haven't studied art, so I don't have much of a vocabulary in which to discuss visual arts. I haven't studied music, so I am similarly handicapped in discussing any period or style of music. My name is Sven and I'm illiterate. (Hi Sven) In both cases, I can have an emotional response, but I can't articulate what caused it or where it fits in the larger scheme of things visual or musical. Maybe there's a 12-step program for people with my problem, but I don't speak their language either.

On the other hand, I have studied writing a little, so I am better equipped to write or talk about it, alright in a kind of a limited way for an off night, and I have studied movement and sport, so I have a vocabulary that's commensurable with it. In short, I guess it's all about me. Or you. Us.

There's a drum circle that meets the first Monday of the month at Central Swingstate Percussion on High Street across from Graceland. Last night there was a nice little group, maybe eight people, that got some hot rhythms going, let me tell you. And I would tell you if I could. You'd have to be there to hear the rhythm move around the circle, pull someone in, build in volume and intensity, change a little here and there, accents coming and going, and eventually come down again, get real quiet, and disappear. One of the proprietors of the shop was giving a tiny bit of instruction to help us novice hand drummers, but 99 percent of it is experiential, whatever that means. You grab a drum, sit down, listen, try your hand, pick up on something, see where it goes and go with it. What can I say?

Bittersweet

Jessi Golly is on his way to Tucson for the next leg of his epic journey across America. His friend Kiley is expecting him Wednesday. Get on the bus, Gus, don't need to discuss much, just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.

There were only minor complications. To use the October 20 ticket, he had to check in at the Greyhound station and pay $10 to have it changed for departure November 7. No problem. Sometimes you get inconsistent information from different people at 1-800-houndog. This bus stops in Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, El Paso, and Phoenix instead of Dayton, Nashville, Dallas, and El Paso, six of one half dozen of the other. Arrival in Tucson is about the same time early Wednesday morning.

A good place for people-watching, the bus station. All sizes, shapes, colors, ages; arrivals, departures, transients. There are a million stories in the naked city. They announced the arrival at gate 14, and Jessi got in line with his backpack. Big hug. "It was good to have you home for a while. Have a good trip. Be careful; you know what you're doing." Handshake. Turn and walk out to Fourth Street, go east on Town, return a DVD at the library, go north on Grant, hit the interstate to the office, go to work as usual.

The soundtrack? WCBE played a rock version of a Hindu chant, then a very up-tempo thing called "Night Train" about lunch in Shanghai, sticky rice, business travelers, Westerners on holiday, and if it stays on schedule there will be breakfast in Bangkok. Jessi's journey will be slightly less exotic than that, but some of us can romanticize anything.

Sunday he went to see a family friend in Clintonville (see Your Worst Nightmare, August 15) and came back with a couple of good photos of a young man who went to war. Later another friend came over to our house and stayed for supper. We had a batch of bread in the oven and a cauldron of spicy bean soup in the crock pot. Gven and I were tired and ready for a black and tan after grouting the floor of the den, the dark green ceramic tile floor that Gven and Jessi laid last week. It looks great, by the way. It was pleasant to sit in the dining room and eat a meal with the bright and animated Aura and Jessi, who have know each other since fourth grade and are still fast friends.

Saturday Gven did a yoga workshop at Picturesque College with her friend Jody. It was a near-perfect day outside, so Jess and I took the canoe out on Hoover Reservoir. It's a simple matter to hoist the canoe from its sawhorses and tie it on top of the truck, drive a couple of miles to the southwestern edge of Northeasterville, push off from the muddy bank, and paddle around for an hour and a half. Well worth taking a break from yard work and other chores to get out on the water, listen to the geese, watch the blue heron, talk a little, but mainly just float and paddle on a partly cloudy Indian Summer day that defies description. Then we hauled the canoe out of the water and back to its sawhorses, and we climbed up on the roof to sweep leaves and clean gutters.

Pretty mundane stuff, but as I said, some people can romanticize anything. Let's see, he's probably crossing the Mississippi right about now.

Good night and good luck

The movie was a little disappointing, or was it the rest of the evening, it's hard to tell. No review is objective, and who would want an object's analysis of another object anyway? I'm not sure what I was expecting, having watched another Clooney vehicle, "Ocean's 11," a few nights earlier, but this one didn't quite deliver.

I appreciate the distress call Clooney et al are sending and the period re-creation of circa 1953. Black and white film works well for this picture of cramped smoke-filled rooms in the masculine domain of the TV news business in its heyday. I appreciate the symbolic omnipresence of cigarettes in that world - smoke-screens, smoke and mirrors, smoke signals, where there's smoke there's fire - and the body language of men in suits lighting up next to their Underwood typewriters and big microphones.

I get the storyline of compromises built on compromises in the big-time game of journalism qua entertainment qua advertising, and I understand the self-preservation through self-censorship that occurs within the battle against censorship. Pick your battles, etc. And anyone with a pulse will get the unstated parallel with the media 50 years later, still tip-toeing around a ruthless crusade of lies and insinuations against civil liberties and those who have the cojones to exercise them. Murrow does not come across as an optimist. Good night and good luck indeed.

Somehow I failed to suspend disbelief and feel like it was Murrow I was watching and not David Strathairn, an actor I respect from his many John Sayles movies (Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, Matewan, Brother from Another Planet, etc.). Frank Langella was excellent as CBS boss William Paley, the tallest guy in the best suit. George Clooney and Robert Downey, Jr., gave confincing portrayals of square-jawed pretty faces in gray flannel suits. Joseph McCarthy gave a superb performance as himself. I'd like to see the same movie made by John Sayles with a tenth of the money, but that would be a John Sayles film, rather than an imitation of one.

The green tea and berry pie at the Radio Cafe were tasty, but the waitperson behind the glass case was so loud I couldn't hear myself think. Maybe that's her way of telling us to go away, it's closing time. And it wasn't her fault the ensuing conversation was amorphous and my two companions and I had trouble understanding one another's critique of public education. It was probably my fault for trying to steer the conversation in that direction. So I drove home wallowing in the inability of three otherwise articulate people to communicate beyond the anecdotal retelling of their personal histories. When I was in fourth grade, blah blah blah. Oh yeah, well when I was in sixth grade, blah blah blah. Yes, but when I was in eleventh grade, blah blah blah. Maybe the movie had more of an effect than I give it credit for, since the title sums up my attitude at the end of the evening.

Don't you hit me with that cosmic debris!

(With thanks to Frank Z.)
Being a collection of random junk found floating through the somatosphere during the last 48 hours or so.

1. The meteors I've been seeing on my nightly walk with the family dog, Dali Golly, apparently are visible to folks on the Continent too. Some of them have had a little different reaction, however, taking them for UFOs instead of making a wish, as I did. But the Germans are always ahead of the curve (or I'm always behind it). So, what do you make of it, Scully? "These people are obviously delusional, Mulder."

2. While drifting in or out of twilight sleep the other night, I had the following very brief dream: I'm standing on a beach, walking slowly toward the water, and there are several other people standing to my right and left. I don't see their faces and can't recognize them, only their half-lit, shadowy figures moving even slower than I am.

Both Gven's relatives and mine have talked about a beach reunion in 2006; am I anticipating that?

3. Another, longer dream last night: I'm at a party at my old friend Hank's parents' large, rambling suburban house in Michigan. His dad is actively circulating from room to room, talking with everyone and making us all feel welcome. I don't recall seeing Hank himself at the party, although his presence was somehow evident. I don't recall other individuals either, but there were lots of people there. The space was long and open, uncrowded enough for people to flow freely from room to room, and the adjoining rooms were a step or two up or down on both ends of the one I was in. There was plenty of food and drink set out on low tables, which Hank's dad kept inviting us to have and enjoy. I woke up with the old pop song "Friday on my Mind" by the Easy Beats (thank you, Lulu and Kevin) on my mind.

Hank and I spent a lot of time together in the mid-seventies, then we went our separate ways, him to Purdue and then the Navy, me to Oberlin and other adventures. I haven't seen him since the early nineties, when we both had little kids. Now we send each other Christmas cards about our families growing up; maybe something is telling me to get in touch.

4. The mother and daughter duo in my Thursday night beginning taiji class seemed to enjoy the last meeting of the quarter. As usual, a full roster of students in September dwindled as the weeks went by, and by week seven they were the only ones left. We practiced Basic Movement and clarified a couple of their questions about the mechanics of shifting the weight and turning the torso in order to fully focus on doing one thing at a time. Then we tried out the first few moves of a form they hadn't done before to give them a sense of what it's like at the next level. The mom said she's going to do the Basic class again, and the daughter is going to think about it.

That's the way it goes. Last summer there were three very enthusiastic, purposeful, inquisitive women, around my age or older, in the Saturday morning class that met outside in the park. At the time they were all anxious to start up again in the fall, and I haven't seen them since. A youngish man who practiced diligently all spring quarter disappeared during the summer, then resurfaced this fall. You never know.

meteors

I saw another shooting star last night, the second one in three nights. It streaked in an arc across the southern sky just like the one Monday nighat. This time I was standing in the back yard after suppere, checking in with the garden. It's kind of neat to witness something like that, out of the dark blue, as it were.

Is there a well-known meteor shower happening now? I'm not in the habit of checking on current events in the sky, although I read somewhere that Mars and Venus are both visible right after sunset. I should listen to Block and Bird on "Earth and Sky" on the radio.

So I looked at Earth and Sky online, and they list the major annual meteor showers, of which there are two around this time of year:

October 21, Orionids. This is a modest shower but one that performs consistently. Its ZHR at maximum is 25, and with the radiant rising conveniently around 10 o'clock, meteors can be seen all night. Orionid meteors are zippy and faint, so if there is a Moon in the sky, you may as well pass on this one. You need a dark sky and dedicated vigilance.

November 5, Taurids. The Taurids is one of the humblest of the annual showers with a ZHR at maximum of only 10. And yet, I recall one early morning observing session with my telescope when I unintentionally stumbled upon an active display of meteors issuing from a region near the Pleiades, the shower's radiant. In one hour I counted a dozen or so meteors. These meteors are generally slow and fairly bright, and produce the occasional fireball.

Those don't sound like what I saw, Agent Mulder, but I know I saw something. "This man is obviously delusional," Scully added tersely. I'll be out there again tonight to see what I can see. Any naturalistic (or other) explanations?

Frost!

It snuck up on me this year. It's not like I didn't know it was coming. Maybe I was just preoccupied with my own petty personal transitions, a trip out of town, back into the routine of work, classes, meetings, sleeping in my own bed. It must have been Friday night that the plants got zapped - the potted lilies that I should have brought inside, the tomatoes of course, a volunteer squash vine, and a couple of basil plants long gone to seed. I don't know why all 16 pepper plants went unscathed, or why nothing ever gets "scathed" if it takes a direct hit from some scathing death rays. Anyway.

It's getting colder, and not all of a sudden, although it seems that way. The trees are turning - all of a sudden. The maple tree across Plum Street from our house went from green to bright yellow in two days, or so my brain registered it. The white pines along the north side of our yard have shed a ton of pinestraw, which looks good beside the raised beds and stepping stones, just one more reason to love pine trees. And these surface changes made me glad to be back in my own garden after my visit to the MoreGardens! house in the Bronx last week. It felt cozily good to walk in the back gate and up the walk into the enclosed yard, which is still my favorite room in the house, before going in the back door. Home is where the freely falling mulch is.

I guess the time change has something to do with my sudden recognition of the obvious gradual changes, and the fact that it coincides with Halloween. It's colder, it's darker, the plants are either dying or going to sleep for six months. All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, this is the dying time of year. Ghosts and skeletons walking every street (also pirates and princesses, but I'm ignoring whatever doesn't fit my thesis). It's all around us, people, and we should ponder the gravity of it all, as befits the prevailing darkness, cold, and deepening gloom!

Not necessarily. I saw a praying mantis yesterday lounging on the underside of a wheelbarrow in the late-afternoon sun. That's a good omen, right, mantises are friendly garden creatures? I saw a shooting star last night while walking the dog down by Alumni Creek. That should mean something too.

Jessi went up to Northeast Swingstate U. for the weekend to visit his sister, and they celebrated Halloween with Helga's friends and 20,000 other young people decked out in their ghoulish best. The streets of Cuyahogaburg were packed with costumed revelers, so apparently that campus has followed the lead of its sister school, Southeast Swingstate U. down in Hockingville, and turned Halloween into the major annual party. Just speculating here, but maybe the fall harvest coldsnap and festival of darkness is this culture's unofficial night of wild bacchanalian release, as Mardi Gras and Carnival are for our Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Brazilian partying brethren, but inverted for us northerners.

I see London, I see France

I'm getting strong, but still unofficial, signals from my dear, mysterious daughter, Helga Golly, that she is going to Europe for a two-week art history workshop over the holidays. Northeast Swingstate U. is offering a whirlwind museum and gallery study-tour of London and Paris starting the day after Christmas, with research and writing to follow. Kind of like The Twelve Days of Christmas abroad.

On the first day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me a whole day in the Louvre.
On the second day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me Notre Dame cathedral and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the third day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the fourth day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me the National Gallery, Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the fifth day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me the Brit - ish Mus - eum! National Gallery, Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.

That's not the whole itinerary, just a representative sample. It sounds like a great opportunity to travel, experience some amazing places, get a somewhat structured exposure to art objects and historical sites that are deemed "important" to academics, and get credit for it. I sound like a dad. Helga is excited about it, Gven is excited about it for her in a motherly way, and I am excited about it. Don't I sound excited? How excited am I? Let me count the dollars, I means the ways.

Some details are still tentative, but in general it looks good. I'll update this space when I know more and continue to vicariously live the dream.

To bling or not to bling?

That is the question the sporting sage of the airwaves brought before us humble listeners this morning. My timing was perfect. I tuned in just in time to hear the loud mouth of Frank DeFord quoting the loud mouth of Charles Barkley at the very end of the former's weekly pearl of wisdom, so I was lucky enough to miss the heaving bulk of his commentary on the weighty world issue of the day, the NBA dress code.

League management (franchise/capital/property owners) is requiring their workers (players/labor/means of production) to dress in "business casual" attire when appearing in public as a member (employee/human resource) of the team (company/plantation), i.e. traveling, hotels, promotional events. No more sideways caps, headphones, vintage jerseys, warmups, tee-shirts, no mo baggy hip-hop pants, no mo gaudy gold jewelry. Yo, no more loud expressive stylin' individuality. Will it be the end of Western civilization as we know it? Has that already happened? If so, is that a bad thing? Why does anybody care?

The league cares because they have a product to sell, and the suits are worried about their numbers. Players care because they have careers and endorsements to protect, and they're worried about the numbers. Older and white fans care because they're offended by black gangsta players. (Note to self: When someone says something is wrong because it offends them, they have no argument.) Younger and black fans care because they like the way Allen Iverson swaggers and talks back to the man. The rest of us have tuned out the NBA (NFL, NHL, MLB, BFD) as it increasingly resembles the World Wrestling Federation or whatever they call that other road show.

If Commissioner David Stern and the other impresarios think treating their performers like children - in order to make them look like adults - will help them maintain market share, go for it. See if the grown-ups get their way by acting like children themselves. If the bad-boy players comply, I can't wait to see what the unintended consequences will be. The fact that Mr. Expert Frank DeFord and I are even talking about it proves that it's working, because, as Mr. Steinbrenner knows, any publicity is good publicity.

Buckeye in Big Apple

(Sung to the tune of Merle Haggard's immortal "Okie from Muscogee")

I'm proud to be a buckeye in the Big Apple,
A place where even squares can have a ball...

I love that line "where even squares can have a ball." As I write this, I'm back in the Heart of it All and into the recovery phase of a weekend trip to New York. Jess and I got home last night after a trouble-free nine hours on the road, making good time driving through rainy western and clear eastern Pennsylvania, talking most of the way about this and that. The folks at More Gardens! gave us a nice send-off yesterday morning with homemade biscuits and strong coffee and a ritual smudge on the sidewalk on east 162nd street in the Bronx. It was bittersweet, as leaving sometimes is, but his plan is to return next spring.

Sunday night there was a campfire in Courtland Garden, where Jess and his friends do most of their gardening and where the summer camp for kids took place (see More Gardens! post). Alex, Gabby, Night, Aresh, Trey, and I spent most of the afternoon moving a big pile of 4x8 timbers from a corner of the Courtland garden to the Alvarez garden a few blocks away, while Jess and Luis finished the roof of the casita in another corner of the garden. It gave me a chance to help out a little in the work and to put the truck to use. It took three trips and it was fun loading, unloading, and solving the minor problems that come up in a project like that. I was impressed with their ability to work through the small glitches and get it done in good spirits. Afterwards, Jess and I took off for the Lower East Side and found a good, cheap Indian restaurant and enjoyed a kick-ass meal.

Saturday night was the big going-away party for Jessi. Someone in the house was cooking all day long while Jess and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so there was lots of great food and beer. Quesadillas, pasta, a yummy eggplant dish, a squash dish, something with tofu, cakes, brownies, and quarts of Ballantine Ale. Despite the cool, rainy weather, lots of people came over from Brooklyn and around town. Joe, an old friend from Oberlin, Ellie, and Jess all played a lot of songs on the guitar, and some of them are still going through my head, like Leonard Cohen's "Halleluja" and Joe's Yiddish version of "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." It was a gas just to sit on my rolled-up sleeping bag and eavesdrop or take part in the flow of multiple conversations. One of the hot topics - and the best metaphor of the entire evening - was a book called Wild Fermentation about various ways of preserving food from different cultures. Check it out if you ever want to make pickles, cheese, wine, beer, or sourdough bread.

The Met was a trip and a half. I love the fact that anyone can go there for next to nothing, and the admission prices are suggested donations. In general, I have an love-hate relationship with museums, and the great museums of the world - the Prado, the Louvre, Chicago, Cleveland, the Metropolitan - just intensify that ambivalence. But that's another story. I had a great time in a small exhibit of artists influenced by van Gogh, especially a couple of drawings by Paul Klee, and a larger exhibit of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava that was tai chi writ large. It was cool to see his sketches of legs, wings, torsos, and heads alongside kinetic sculptures of rib-like structures moving up and down in continuous waves, alongside scale models and video of the buildings he designed for the Athens Olympics, a theater in Seville, and the new train station under the World Trade Center. After a few hours there, we were pretty drained, so we walked through the shi-shi neighborhood until we found a suitable place for coffee, where the gruff proprietor made us sit at the counter because we weren't ordering enough for a table with a tablecloth.

Friday night, my first night in the city, we went to a Greenpeace benefit on an old boat called the Frying Pan down at Chelsea Pier on the west side. It was a warm, clear night, and it felt good to be outside after driving all day. A klezmer/gypsy band from Brooklyn, Athens, and Yellow Springs called the Luminescent Orchestrae played an amazing set: three violins, guitar, and a large bass-like stringed instrument. Then a Latino/ska/punk band followed, and the dancing got a little more raucous. It was a lot of fun to meet some of Jessi's friends from the gardening scene and the music scene and the political scene, all of which overlap a great deal. They were all, without exception, completely welcoming and friendly. I'll try to write more when I come down.