Easter

– From E.B. White’s introduction of his late wife’s essays entitled
Onward and Upward in the Garden.

The only moment in the year when she actually got herself up for gardening was on the day in fall that she had selected, in advance, for the laying out of the spring bulb garden. The morning often turned out to be raw and overcast, with a searching wind off the water — an easterly that finds its way quickly to your bones.

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair — a folding canvas thing — that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

Sophocles 

 “There are many strange and wonderful things in this world, but none stranger than man.”

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" 

Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' 

This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 

'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40) Let us remember the second great commandment that arises from the first. I do not think it was intended to be taken as lightly as we have taken it. 

Let's also be reminded that the celebration of the Resurrection is a celebration of the wedding between the divine and the human. That, if the scriptures are to be believed, the Lord saw each and every human being as worth saving, as special, as exceptional, as we'd all like to see ourselves in our heart of hearts. It's a good day for reflecting on the mystery and the wonder of divinity and humanity.

A last reflection from an old essay

In Vernazza, the small fishing boats bobbed gently in the bay, and the lights of the city lay across the harbor like a lover’s silky slip, and the combination of dark water, small foreign towns, and being stranded from even language made us feel gloriously alone. When we left, the tracks wandered through hills striped by vineyards and into mountain tunnels that opened to views of the Ligurian Sea, and the whole ride my wife took pictures while I read a book about the founding of Rome, and no one bothered to check our tickets or ask us any questions to make sure we belonged, and we still arrived safely, in the arms of some far away heavenly city. Reader, listen closely to the churning of the wheels, to the train’s thumping engine beneath your feet, watch the waves settle into the shore, they are all one, listen to all these sounds as we travel together to the same city. Reader, You are loved. 

Mad Men Season 5 episode 1

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 1

It’s been nearly a year since we had the chance to watch Mad Men. In preparation, I watched a few minutes of the final episode from Season 4. Note: I’m still a season down, no worries for spoilers. Anyhow, I remembered one of my favorite scenes occurred when Don delivers the news of his engagement to Peggy and Joan, with a beaming smile on his too handsome face. The two of them say their polite congratulations and step away quickly, where, in the privacy of Joan’s office, they trade a few barbs at his expense like, “They are all between wives,” “I suppose she’ll get promoted now,” and “He looks so pleased as if  he’s the first man to marry his secretary.” This private little scene of interrupted domestic bliss sets the stage for the opening of season five.

The first episode of the season, when watched alone is one of the weaker episodes of the set. It begins with the crew at another ad agency dropping water bombs on people agitating for equal rights, which is  a typical Mad Men cultural nod, as the men are actually chastened when the people from the street come upstairs to confront them. However, from there the episode is light. However, what makes Mad Men such a brilliant show is the subtlety with which it operates. Yes, not much happens when we watch Pete ride the train. However, he points out that, Trudy, isn’t losing her baby weight as he thought she might. He laments the spit up on his jacket and is told by his fellow passenger that he can ride the later train home. In this brief scene, even though Pete denies it, we can see the seeds of unhappiness and probably infidelity simmering just beneath the surface. The show is the master of that simmer, letting things slowly accrete, and then having the shark’s fin rise at the last moment to keep you interested.

The show also revolved around the rather nasty relationship between Joan and her mother, which, paging Dr. Freud, no wonder Joanie didn’t find a better man. The two of them carp and bicker at one another like sniping sister rather than a typical mother and daughter. Interestingly, we see the conflicted woman of the latter half of the 20^th century beginning to be depicted in Joan, how does a person remain a good mother and a good worker? I’m interested to watch this continued development as it acts as a nice counterpoint to Peggy’s giving up of her child in order to pursue a better life, a choice which the writer’s did a wonderful job of highlighting by having her briefly hold the baby in the next episode while no one else is around. It’s those sort of moments that make the show so good.

However, the meat of the first episode is spent on Don’s relative happiness, and subsequent disinterest in work, and his wife’s interest in her new work and desire to please him. What follows is Don’s surprise birthday party, complete with booze and a group of sixties stoner types delivering live music to the bemused party goers. Though many of the scenes at the party seem strange and out of place for Mad Men, they keep the sub plots rolling, highlighting Roger’s unhappiness with his secretary marriage, an excellent counterpoint to what we’re seeing with Don and Megan. Relevant dialogue after Megan’s sexy song and dance: Roger: Why can’t you sing like that? Wife: Why don’t you look like him? Yes, it’s another carping marriage, but it is also a nice mirror or prism through which to view the new marriage of Don and Megan.

Megan delivers a special birthday surprise to Don, in the form of a burlesque French song and dance number that would leave any office staff gossiping away. Don, plainly pleased and unhappy both, watches bemusedly as his wife seduces the whole room.

And, if I was going to say that the first episode had one moment of something approaching real truth, it happens in the party’s aftermath, when Don goes to lie down on the bed. His wife, wanting his approval, climbs into bed next to him, trying to rouse him from sleep. He awakes long enough to tell her not to ever throw him another surprise party, even after she reminds him that she knows his true identity, Dick Wittman, and loves him all the more for it. This is a key line since it is precisely this information which caused baby to finally call it quits with him. Here is his new wife, planning him a surprise party, loving him for who he is, and yet, dammit, sometimes you’re still unhappy, and so he lies on the bed and wonders what he’s got himself into. And Megan wanders out onto the balcony and stands in the wind and wonders precisely the same thing. And in this way you’re given a very real moment. This is a bit of what marriage might be like, but life in general. It is full of a kind of disappointment, not only because we don’t have access to one another’s thoughts but also because we often misunderstand ourselves, or are such contingent creatures that what makes us happy is a variable thing on a day to day or hour to hour basis. I’m glad the show is back on. 

This is what we all shared

It was the summer when everyone fell in for causes. Everyone had something that they were fighting for. It was sweltering that summer. Our skin would stick to the leather in your car while we drove around town looking for something to care about. The truth of the matter is that we cared about everything. We wanted to be at every protest, holding up signs telling people to stop doing things. We wanted to be on both sides of the aisle, waving signs at ourselves and chanting pithy slogans. We wanted to a part of something larger. We wanted to shed our skin like snakes and slip into something new.

You wound up devoting yourself to poetry, and I decided to devote myself to you. You'd stay awake reading Lorca, crying at certain phrases your night gown half open, collarbone exposed. I'd run my fingers through your hair as if it were silk, as if it were rain, as it were a loom and my hands were thread, as if any moment the last bit might fall to the ground, as if we would one day be older, remembering this day, fondly, as if we would one day be dead, as if we would not exist forever but only inside this eternal moment.

We made narratives by looking up at the stars.  You would point out certain symmetries of night skies and the death of famous men while I listened in the cold, damp, evening. You would tell me that both Napoleon and Caesar died under a full moon. And I would lie awake at night, watching your ribs rise and fall in sleep, such a beautiful liar.

On the way home, the moon lay like an oil slick across the water. I asked you why all of our conversations were about people who were already dead. You told me that you felt you had more in common with them than the living, that they understood you that you were  a kind of labyrinth that needed searching to be found. I kissed you on the lips, hard. I told you that I'd been searching for you all summer, through cups of coffee, trails of cigarette smoke, bits of glass upon the shore, broken fingernails and fingertips, the slight grazing of knees beneath the table. And you turned from me and said, "And yet you are still so far away." I drove away into the evening without ever thinking of you again, until tonight, when a bit of moonlight caught the water in the hotel pool in just such a way that I couldn't help but remember the purple chipped toe nail polish, the scraps of certain evenings rose up, a picture of a past self as seen through fractured glass, and I realized that I'd been missing you without ever knowing it. I walked out onto the balcony, stood and watched the morning come.

Passing

I cannot construct it from memory. I know because I thought of her skirt as beige, and it wasn’t beige, which I also knew, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps, if everything had been as it should, her skirt would have been beige. You know what I mean. The architecture of the sky was purple and rivaled even the Duomo, and the mountain was purple rimmed, clouds were inventing themselves as if they were children playing wild games in some infinitely blued sky.

It’s strange, this archeology we carry out in our minds, trekking through the Badlands to collect bits of bone, gluing them together and calling them dinosaurs. We choose to call it a life, a self, a summer, a smell of certain perfume, wintergreen trees, portals of light laid out across avenues of darkness, the white polka dots on a black dress, certain creases in her forehead, toads croaking at us from the ditches while we talked about the future, stars overhead still uncaring, and here I am again standing at the doorway to the past.

I was sitting at a table and drinking white wine in the late afternoon. We were watching basketball and talking about the women we’d never loved.  You told me that you were only happy when you were watching other people be productive. So you followed around maids and janitors, watched them sweep floors and empty trash cans. You told me that it brought you a strange kind of peace, that you knew it was the closest you’d ever get to doing anything yourself, watching her weathered hands caressing the side of an old mop.

Out west, far away from here, but still tethered to my memory, the wind is steady from the dark sea. Somewhere nearby, a young Matthew Arnold is writing a poem about armies clashing on distant shores, and beneath the sheets, her pale shoulder exposed, sleeps his poor wife. What a strange thing is mankind, is a cricket’s chirp, is the sediment in a cheap bottle of wine, is a shaft of light curling into a dark room, is the image of you that I can still conjure up as warm breath upon a windowpane. 

On Parting

She and I had run out of clever things to say to one another, so we started drinking whiskey. It was a smoky variety that would have made us cough while our eyes watered a year or two ago. Tonight, we drank in silence. The refrigerator was making too much noise, so we unplugged it. There are shades and varieties of silence within silence as we discovered. We swam around inside them, kicked our shoes off as if our feet were slippers and the silence was some deep underground river.  

I pictured myself at the bottom of a very dark well. It was like another bad book by Haruki Murakami. I was wondering when I’d be saved by her. I called up. I wanted her to let down her hair as if she were Rapunzel. But she’d cut it. All the women I knew were cutting their hair short. They didn’t want to save men who had fallen into wells. This struck me as having some deep metaphoric value, but I was also slightly drunk.

In the meantime, she’d moved to the window and was staring out at something. The moonlight was like a quilt lay gently over the mix of Pasplum and weeds. The trees were stretching their limbs up in the posture of saints in ecstasy. Everything around us was a metaphor. “My feet are cold,” she said, stepping from the window, breaking that aesthetically pleasing silence that had been growing up around us all evening. I could picture the two of us kneeling down, our hands grazing, an electric current, as we watched our silence grow. It was in that moment that I knew we were going to part.

The moment that we actually parted was on a lonely stretch of beach just off the 101. We were talking about communism and anarchy as if they were still viable things. I told her that I couldn’t live like this. “Couldn’t live like what?” she said.

“Fighting all the time, about ideas, it seems like a waste of time.”

She said that the world itself might just be an idea in the mind of an infinite creator. Or that it might be an idea in the mind of a video game creator. She told me that an idea existed that said we weren’t three dimensional beings, but projections from a place very far away in the universe. She told me that there was an idea that an infinite number of you and I’s were standing on that beach, having the very same conversation. There’s an idea….” She started.

But I cut her off, because I was very hungry. And I wanted so desperately to sleep. She drove down the highway without me, whatever version of her that was. The tide was out, and I could see a small harbor seal down by the water, waddling off the shore and slipping gracefully into the water. I turned to tell her that it was metaphorical or intently strange to watch an animal slip from land to sea with such ease, that if our ancestors hadn’t done the exact same in reverse that none of us would be here right now. But the sun had tucked behind a cloud, and the light was purple hued and strange. I could see now that the day had emptied of her. I walked towards the shore in a quiet and happy daze, desperately ready to feel the cool water slide over my wrists, to wake up. 

Bubbles

There are certain moments that I want to float above, or watch through a pane of thick glass. The morning that we met is one of those. Neither one of us remembers it now. When we talk about it, over coffee, once every year or so, we search ourselves to see if we can find some hidden meaning in the biscotti, in the sun soaked patio, washed clean by morning rain. I remember an ash tree, its leaves veined and weathered, weeping on the sidewalk.

“You’re acting strange,” you said, not as a warning, but as an observation, as if we’d known each other for years, been to concert halls to listen to Schubert and Bach, swam from river banks in dappled light, dried on the sandy banks together our bodies nearly touching. Even now, you tell me that I am always getting ahead of myself. You say to me that a trip isn’t about dreaming of swimming in Spanish seas under the cover of the moon, it is about having a healthy income, budgeting for time off, and making hotel reservations months in advance.

I know that you are right. I wake up early in the morning and track plane tickets for early June. I buy a guidebook from the local bookstore and highlight relevant pages. I start listening to podcasts in Spanish, just so I can avoid fish and thank the man who will be sweeping the cobbled streets before the heat of the day. But you see? I have already started to dream again. I can see the backs of his hands, crisscrossed by veins and speckled with hair. He has a faint circle on his finger where a ring used to go. Living in the world takes immense effort. Pulling oneself through a day can feel like a sort of miracle.

I know that you understand, or want to understand why I’m sitting now, looking out the window at the rain. It’s because I don’t remember the day we met or what we talked about. I remember that everything was unwritten then. Steps or pavements clothed in rain. Shhh. Quiet, my love. Listen to the light coming in the window. It sings. 

Another year...let's keep it positive

As I always post E.B. White at Easter, I think I'm going to post David Foster Wallace on birthdays. Because hey, nothing says let's have a party like DFW. (Okay, maybe party hats and those kazoo type toys say party better than DFW. But it's close. Honestly, nothing says party like a skating rink full of children and me awkwardly holding on to the side and trying not to fall down while everyone else at the party moves around like a young Nancy Kerrigan, but let's not remember those years. Is it cake time? Why this awkward little room? When does this party end? This summarizes most of the parties I went to in my youth and the senior all night party in high school). Anyhow, let's cheer ourselves up with some David Foster Wallace:


“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day.  Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.  And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.  It is dreadful.  But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

I'm sufficiently cheered. My bar is a bit low, I'll admit. In fact, I'm routinely cheered by staring at fish who aren't dead. In my limited childhood experience with fish, and others fish, they nearly always died. So now, the mere sight of a goldfish, or any kind of fish for that matter, not floating belly up, is a happy occasion for me. I usually tap the glass and say, "Keep doing your thing, buddy." 

I am also cheered by classical music. It's not that I like classical music, or derive any particular pleasure from it. It's that I enjoy that other people take pleasure in classical music, and the mere thought of them, conducting away with their pens or pencils etc. makes me happy. 

I am cheered by what little regard Americans have for the MLS. My coach when I was, eight, nine, made me play fullback for an entire year. What kind of a thankless position is fullback? Any sport that has a position like fullback in it is probably not awesome. Also, if my coach had played me at forward I'd be on the San Jose Fire or Mountain goat eating lions or whatever the name is. 

I am enlivened by the fact that people have finally stopped writing books. I've spent a large portion of my life concerned that I'll never read all of the classics and what about all the new classics that are also being written? How will I read them all? I'm staying up nights and worrying. And now I've read articles that the novel is dead, and I have to say, "thank God," it may give me an honest chance at finally catching up with my reading list. I wished they'd killed it a hundred years or so ago to have made it even easier. 

I am cheered by so many things that it's hard to include them all: pictures of otters holding hands, even if it's platonic, it's cute, songs where someone sings sadly about wasted time or loves lost, children doing adorable things, sorbet, eating the last brownie in a pan, even when I'm full just to make sure I get it, the proliferation of good television shows, family, pictures of otters holding hands in a non-platonic manner, which has a subtext that says, "Hey, I love this guy, look at how adorable we are," and maybe it has a subtitle that says, "I'd have no otter" or something saccharine like that. Let your mind go. 

Passing Time

He was staring out at the sea. The water was green, marred by bits of foam being expelled by the ship engine’s motor, propelling them across the Pacific towards some distant chain of islands, mere spots on a map.

“Wait,” he said, looking not at the woman that he is speaking to but out at the sea instead, which was, possessed of an intensely vibrant kind of aesthetic beauty that no human being would ever be capable of achieving, largely due to problems like the ephemerality of humanity etc. In short, it was not an unnatural gesture.

“You’re saying that you liked the movie?”

“You’re saying it as though it’s some grievous sin,” she answered, looking over her left shoulder at him and brushing the hair from her cheek with her left hand and pushing it back behind her ear. He was still not looking at her. A seal, or maybe a piece of driftwood was bobbing up and down within his line of sight, though she didn’t know if he was “looking” as in actually looking, or doing some sort of internal search that was being manifested outwardly as this blank stare. It was the sort of problem that always arose when two people were having a conversation. Who the hell really knew what the other person was thinking?

“That’s because it is a grievous sin to like a movie like that.”

Near blinding skeins of light were coming off the water from a largely untroubled sky. Little wisps of clouds, cirrus or something, floated above, half-heartedly making shapes that looked like clouds who had lost their imagination and just wound up looking like clouds.

“Are we talking venial or mortal?”

“I’m unfamiliar with the term, venial.”

He wasn’t sure why he was lying about not knowing venial. It was a strange thing to do, to lie for no good reason, and yet he found himself doing it all the time. Earlier in the trip he’d told an elderly gentleman that he helped to capture birds from Amazon rain forests for sale on the black market.  And he’d told a matronly looking woman with glasses, who looked like someone’s aunt, that he captained a shrimp schooner (he later regretted his choice of the word schooner and thought he should have gone with the more colloquial sounding and correct term, boat) in Louisiana. During the conversation he’d affected an accent that he thought sounded Southern, but what he later determined was actually just the strange and ubiquitous rural accent of everywhere in the U.S. He did not know if it held in other countries. He had held forth for a while, lamenting the plight of the common folk like him after the big spill, describing in some detail, the negative impact that the spill had on the economy and ecosystem, which he guessed from radio stories had to be true.

“I’ll explain it to you when you’re older,” she said.

A bird of some sort was winging its way across the vast expanse of the sky.

“Do you have a rifle?” he asked, gesturing to the bird.

“What?”

“As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean…Not a Coleridge fan?”

“Not really. However, I remember that poem. I think there was a period of time where every kid in some sort of advanced placement literature course had to read Coleridge. And now it’s one of these pieces of ephemera that get lodged in your brain, only slightly, like I remember that the Mariner shot an albatross, and that this was apparently a poor decision. And I know that Colerdige loved opium. But I’m not sure how much good that’s doing me, knowing about the albatross and the opium.”

“Probably like the fourth circle of the Inferno,” he said, finally looking at her, and then looking away at the piece of driftwood bobbing up and down trying its hardest to look like a seal.

“Were there seven levels?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he answered. (It’s actually nine but that’s a sort of forgivable offense that we allow two people who are speaking to one another off the cuff, so to speak).

“Am I above that guy who ate his children?”

“Uggulino?”

“Yeah. The guy who ate his kids? That’s literally the only thing I remember about The Inferno.”

“You’re slightly above him and somewhere below Paolo and Francesca. Though you at least have to ask, or wonder if the kids were getting whiny or not, what with the starving. There are versions of the story where the children offer themselves up to him. What’s a man supposed to do?”

“Not eat his children.”

“Fair enough.”

The ship had assigned tables that every person sat at during the evening meal. They’d met one another while eyeing a particularly pleasing set of hors d'oeveres. They had had a brief conversation about what was actually inside the small pastry shells. He’d settled on crab, and they’d had a brief debate over whether he might possibly be wrong. A possibility which he indicated he wouldn’t even consider.

“But really, if you had to eat your children…”

“This is wonderful conversation and all,” she said, edging away slightly and flirtatiously, I suppose.

“It’s a serious dilemma.”

“So we are going to keep talking about this.”

“Anyhow, do you, assuming you’ve got at least two handy, eat the one you love the most first or second? It’s a philosophical sort of dilemma. I mean, obviously you’re really scarring the child who is watching you eat his brother, but you’re also not eating him, which is kind of a nice gesture. I guess Solomon would probably solve the problem by saying you eat them both concurrently or something.”

She was wondering now if he was insane or just incredibly unaware of her. It was not like talking to a person, but a person who was acting as though they were a person. She could see how someone could interpret his meanderings as somehow authentic or endearing, but it seemed to her that it was an act, or at least she hoped it was in act or he was deeply narcissistic. A trait, all too common in men she’d been with before. It seemed interesting at first, these random disquisitions on stars or lengthy Italian literature, but it grew tiresome after a while, as all things grow tiresome. She wanted to find someone nice. But you could not ask a person if they were nice. You had to spend time with them to figure it out. If she had to guess though, right at the moment, she’d guess that he wasn’t nice in the slightest though he probably thought of himself that way.

The piece of driftwood had given up on being a seal and was just now fading into the obscurity from whence it had come. The couple who he sat with at dinner was approaching the two of the, which was probably for the best, though he felt it odd to have ended the conversation by talking about eating children, as was probably appropriate. The older couple commented on the weather, noting the pleasure of the slight breeze that was just now lifting off the water. And they all agreed that the weather was indeed nice, and chatting amicably in the way of people passing time.

He hadn’t really meant to start talking about The Inferno. What had gotten him on that subject anyway? A certain movie she’d said she liked, which was really quite terrible. That was the strange part about conversation, its unpredictability, its pleasure, though when one wound up speaking about Renaissance poetry, it was a safe bet that things had probably gone astray. He wished that he still smoked cigarettes, so he could leave the group and be by himself. Instead, he stood in the small group of four, remarking for a second time that it really was “quite a beautiful day.”

Snow Day...kind of

A snowy day should begin like any other, with poetry.

Along the last stretch of coast that day

We found the mournful, unwounded land we sought,

Stone-galled meadows fraught

With gorse, slopes of a headland running away

To embrace the downfallen moon

Of its valley, and the sky reflecting a sea

Like a stitched and thistled moor

The blues and slates of Donegal tweed,

Water the color of milk tea poured around black rocks

Gritty with limpets and barnacles,

Tresses of glinting kelp bound in torcs

Beaten from the supplest of submarine metals,

Found—and lost to the wheel and grind

Of downshifting stars. Lost. But found.

CA Snow

You remember being awakened to your first snow. You were eight or nine, the exact date isn’t as important or memorable as the event itself, snow was falling from the cold grey sky. The snow appeared like petals cast down from some infinite field of flowers in the far away sky. These are the sorts of inanities you can dream up as a child, and what a shame they don’t turn out to be true. You, and your two siblings played outside on your small patch of grass, now a shade of white. Someone, perhaps your mother made a snow ball, though you may be conflating this with another memory of a trip you all took up to the snow.

The real memory is not of the snow. It is not of the little flakes dusting the grass and the street in white, nor the thin strips that cling to tree limbs. The memory is of the incomprehensible strangeness of that snow. You were aware even then how out of place it was. How it didn’t belong? And this memory, leads to a congruency between you and the snow on the cold winter day, feeling the cold and wet stain on your pajamas and hoping that no one would notice that you once again had wet the bed. Years removed from that day, I can still call up the memory of those pajamas, of the thin flakes of snow, and the feeling of being alone, hidden.

Ann Arbor

I don’t remember the first snow in Ann Arbor. I just remember that it snowed a lot, seventy two inches our first winter there. We’d moved from CA where it snowed roughly once every ten years, and I believe the first time that I drove in a substantial snow in Ann Arbor I spun out in the car. It was less because I was inexperienced and more because the car didn’t cooperate at high speeds. I figured it was safest to drive fast and get off the wet and dangerous roads as quickly as possible. It’s logical, yes?

The day that I remember most clearly, was cold and sunless, like most days in Ann Arbor. It’s a beautiful place to visit. I recommend staying there for a weekend to anyone, you may just want to keep it under a week between the months of November and March. Anyhow, a gentle freezing rain was falling outside, coating the sidewalks and grass in a sheet of ice. I’m a terrible ice skater, awful at all balance sports, or I’d have just thrown on my skates and been like a young Katarina Witt coasting across the ice on my way to victory. However, I am not.

Instead, I remember trying to walk to work, which was slightly uphill, and not being able to get there. My feet would suddenly start to slide, (and I hear the voice of my mother reminding me of those Yack Track type things she got me, and no, mother, I wasn’t wearing them that day) and I’d wind up finding myself at the bottom of the small hill by the time they’d gained traction. I wound up walking to work in the small patches of grass that morning, crushing through the thin layer of ice to find some safe foothold. I arrived to work ten minutes late that day, and I sat in a cubical organizing admissions letters for people I didn’t know.

Maybe the thin ice on the grass is some kind of metaphor. Maybe it’s supposed to draw some sort of verisimilitude to the grander journey of life. Petrarch wrote a similar essay once about a mountain. Of course, the ice was not a metaphor, so it’s hard to convince myself to use it in that way. Maybe it was an obstacle, physical, emotional, spiritual etc. Or maybe it was just a thin sheet of ice, another grey and cold morning. Maybe life is a collection of such mornings and trying to attach something significant to any of them is a fool’s errand.

DC Snow

Stand at a window, and peer into the sooty light at snow falling. Do not think of the snow as an abstraction, some metaphor for time that has already passed. Snow reminds everyone who is watching it from windows of peace. When you have exhausted your sense of peace, make yourself some hot chocolate. Drink it slowly, savoring the steam that lifts like a low lying fog in some novel by a Bronte. And since you’re thinking of the Brontes, spend the afternoon of found time writing letters to people that you once knew. Write about the little things you miss, the slight indentation above her right eye, was it from a horse’s hoof or was it always there? You never got to know. Settle into the chair and listen to the wind whipping about the house. Do not personify the wind as anything other than the wind. If you do, you’ll wind up asking it a thousand stupid questions about the things that it has known. The snow is still falling in great white lumpy flakes, brushing against the windowpane like the smoke in some poem by T.S. Eliot. These are the trifling thoughts that flit through the mind as light through deep water. You imagine again that you are a little boy, waking to your first snow, stumbling out into the morning to greet it, such a small miracle amongst many. 

Review: Argo

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie, Argo, is how tight and taut the film really is. I remember people feeling that Ben Afleck had been fleeced when he wasn’t nominated for best director this year, and, after having watched the movie, I’d have to agree. The movie is literally stomach churning. From the moment that the walls of the embassy are scaled at the U.S. embassy in Iran it’s hard not to put yourself in the shoes of the six employees who escaped before the mob arrived. From that first scene your stomach is tying itself in all sorts of knots, trying to imagine what that was like.

The majority of the movie continues in this vein. The first portion of the film does have the fake Hollywood movie portion, which was part of the CIA mission. Affleck does a masterful job of skewering Hollywood, showing its essential silliness with zingy one liners delivered by comedic greats like Alan Arkin like, “So let me get this straight. You want to come in here and walk around like a big shot without doing anything. (Pause) You’ll fit right in.” These scenes are juxtaposed with scenes from Iran of the violence that followed the ouster of the Shah, which creates an interesting dynamic of internal guilt about the laughter, the essential unseriousness of the plot when measured against the bodies hanging suspended from cranes.

I suppose I avoided talking about the first and extremely interesting history lesson that the movie begins with, an all too familiar one in the U.S. The movie talks about the U.S. role in the death of the previous leader of Iran, and its help in the installation of the murderous and rich Shah. The movie paints a bleak picture of U.S. foreign policy without moralizing over its necessity, or idiocy. The facts are merely presented as available to the viewer. And, because of this affectlessness, the viewer is able to freely root for the six ambassadors to escape from Iran without feeling that they are somehow sanctioning the evil done in the country by the U.S. It seems to me that this was either a stroke of genius or a bit cowardly. I know not which.

What it winds up being as a film is pretty excellent. Affleck has a nice eye for detail, and the audience is in a near constant state of emotional distress over whether a stamp will be applied to a plane ticket, whether a phone call will be answered or whether a house keeper will betray the six U.S. citizens hiding in the Canadian embassy. What’s impressive about the film is how much drama is generated without anything particularly scary or violent happening to the people involved.

The movie has a host of interesting elements, poor children trying to reconstruct pictures of every employee from shredded paper, to see if anyone is missing. The house keeper possibly betraying them, the necessity that each of the six people learn their cover story in order to escape the country.  And Affleck manages to make all these moving parts work so well together that you’re tempted to think the man would probably make a damn fine clock if he set his mind to it.

Personally, after watching the movie, the craft and care of all these seemingly small moments in life ramped up in intensity by the direction, coupled with the sharp dialogue and occasional wit makes Argo one of the best directed movies that I’ve seen in a while. It seems rather a shame that he didn’t at least get nominated.

Of course, though I’m not equally surprised by its win, Argo is not the movie that I would have voted for as Best Picture. The movie is so taut, so bound up in actual events, (special shout out for keeping the movie at a tight two hours as well) that it never left the characters any room to breathe. The closest that we get to a touching human moment is when agent, Mendez, played by Affleck, returns home to find his wife and son. However, it’s pretty clear by that point in the movie that the familial relationship is not the show. It’s more of a small cherry on top of an already delicious sundae.

I’ll admit that my bias against Argo may just be one of personal proclivity. I have a degree in writing and think that the novel is a superior form at accessing other human beings consciousness, which is what really great art, is able to do. The problem with Argo, (I’m not really arguing that it’s much of a problem for the movie, which is a very good and taut thriller, but rather a problem if it’s the best our country has to offer in this particular art form. I hope the distinction is somewhat clear. It’s fine as it is, I suppose, probably worthy of a nominee for its technical skill, just not a win) is that we are never allowed access to the six people’s consciousness. We have a brief scene where Mendez is questioned by one of the escapees, but it is quieted rather quickly.

I’m partial to the zany decomposition of friendships that happens in a movie like Suicide Kings than I am in everyone moving around to the beat of some internal drum of history. I don’t mind history lessons. In fact, if you know enough of them you can sound intelligent at parties. However, the best art is (at least in my mind) is about that access to other people’s minds. It’s one of the few ways , at least for me, which you can use from here on out for anything I say, that I am able to feel a little bit less lonely in the world, a bit less crazy. It is this kind of access that often reassures me that I am not alone in being conflicted, strange, at odds with myself, capable of doing good or evil, sometimes seemingly on a whim. I don’t know that Argo had enough space for any of that to happen. The parameters of the story were already preordained. It’s pretty much a very effective action-suspense movie, a genre that doesn’t rely too heavily on character studies. Perhaps asking a movie to be War and Peace is a bit too much.

The real issue, if I haven’t stated it well enough above, is that the characters feel exactly as I’d feel in that situation. They do nothing that surprised me. They are too busy being carried along by events to become flesh and blood as I’m sure the real captives were. Because we lack the access to their direct thoughts, they become pawns moved on a chess board rather than people. Not that the board isn’t beautiful, the scene at the bazaar where they are almost taken by a mob is full of stomach churning dread coupled with tons of human identification, as in, that would scare the shi- out of me as well. It reminds me, to extend the metaphor, of the chess set that my uncle always had set up at his house, each piece hand-crafted and individually painted. And yet, the real beauty of the regal queen didn’t come out when she was standing on the board, glaring at the back of a pawn. No, the beauty came in the movement.  

I don’t know what reviewing is for. However, this is a movie worth seeing. It’s a very good piece of film making combined with a historical lesson that may or may not lead to you arguing with your significant other until 1 A.M. about U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. I think Mr. Affleck deserved to be nominated for Best Director, or maybe even win the award.  At the end of the day he’s made a very good film, gotten it tied together with a nice script and even has the flourish of it being based on a true story.  It’s a very good movie.

Hey Internet, stop hating Anne Hathaway

This blog is a late one to the party. The Atlantic has already written a piece about how fashionable it is to hate Anne Hathaway. This article cites numerous other articles that have been written about hating Anne Hathaway. The majority of these posts have focused on why people might dislike Hathaway, pretty much settling on the fact that she's a geeky theater kid who is trying to be cool, and, in doing so, is kind of obnoxious by virtue of not being an authentic self, but someone acting like an authentic self, which we find distrustful.

I haven't read an article about why young women find Jennifer Lawrence so appealing, despite the fact that I've demanded it, however, I've speculated that it has to do with the fact that she's exactly the opposite of Hathaway. She doesn't seem to care about the limelight and the way she's perceived, which I think has something to do with her youth and a certain kind of blase attitude that is, yes, a bit charming.

Interestingly, what I haven't yet read, and what I read over and over again in the late great David Foster Wallace's fiction, "Good Old Neon," immediately comes to mind, is how most of us are a hell of a lot more like Hathaway than we'd like to admit. Yes it's annoying when someone is cold, calculated, seemingly changing their personality based on whoever they're interacting with. Perhaps this means they look a true and "authentic self." Or maybe it just means they've learned how to function in society.

Good Old Neon:
There was a basic logical paradox that I called the "fraudulence paradox" that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. . . . The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside–you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year old became aware of this paradox, he'd stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he'd figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn't eve have a form or name–I didn't, I couldn't. Discovering that first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I'd basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad . .

And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, ad of course you try to manage what part they see if you now its only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock.

Have you ever been at a party or a gathering where someone can't help but be their authentic self? It's charming, and exhausting. You kind of just want them to learn the social mores and stop being themself for two seconds. It can be exhausting to be around people who don't adjust their personalities like chameleons. I think what people resent so much in Hathway is precisely what we're, or at least I am often guilty of. I'm a very contingent creature. I do tend to be a bit bawdier when the circumstances call for it and reserved when they don't. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually like it when people enjoy my company and find my conversation interesting. In fact, I enjoy that more, particularly initially, than just being my "authentic self," which, really what does that mean anyway? Is it the person you are when you're alone? When you're at church? At a bar? At a prayer retreat? At your job? At your house? With your cousins? Your best friend(s)? With your parents? Someone else's parents? Your spouse/girlfriend boyfriend? It's a variable thing, the self. Borges has a nice essay about it and Sartre has his nice little spiel about the waiter and his bad faith existentialism. Is a self, or who you are comprised of what you do, what you'd like to do, what you think?

Maybe the rest of the world is a lot better at this than I am. Maybe everybody else isn't as contingent. I admire them. However, I'm going to go ahead and call bs on the internet and society in general for hating Miss Hathaway. She's like the rest of us only slightly more annoying because she wins Oscars and is a theater kid who is overly dramatic and you know, bleh, which I don't mean in a derogatory manner, except that I kind of do, but I blame the Atlantic piece for poisoning the well or whatever that saying is and theater people are all wonderful. (See, I don't want to upset anyone).

Anyhow, I'm not blaming anyone for loving Jennifer Lawrence and being on some sort of vision quest to discover their authentic self who doesn't give a crap about what anyone thinks of them. However, human beings are social creatures, designed to function together in groups, a part of which is sublimating certain desires or feelings at times to keep the group dynamic functional. There is something both charming and childish about the way that Jennifer Lawrence handles herself. It's certainly appealing to think of ourselves as that type of person, but I know that type of person, they are called children and there's a pretty good reason we don't remain that way for our entire adult lives. And that reason is Communism. I jest. Anyhow, It all seems kind of unavoidable, and I think the real take away is that she didn't deserve to win for emoting with dirt on her face, not because she's Anne Hathway, but because she was barely in the movie.

This is your basic, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" kind of a situation. You don't have to love Fantine, Internet, but let's not hate her either. She sings pretty.