RLC

no excuse not to pay your nanny tax!

2010-04-06T10:01:00.003-05:00

There's an entire company devoted to helping people pay their nanny taxes.

Direct to you from the men's room wall in the Thunderbird Cafe, Austin TX:

2010-04-03T15:50:00.003-05:00

Infant tweet: OMG, I just got born!!

30 minutes later: I miss my umbilical cord!:(((((

My Kinyarwanda Glossary (with some Swahili)

2009-11-29T17:35:00.002-06:00

* = ones I actually know

beete = hi*
nibgeza = response to "beete"
amakuru? = how are you?*
meza = I'm good*
sawa = I'm good* (Swahili)
mwatamutse = good morning
murakoze = thank you*
namway = you're welcome* (colloquial)
karibu = You are welcome* (to my home, etc) (Swahili)
Seka! = "Smile!"* (for the camera)
mumuji = downtown*
umusoze = a mountain
imisoze = plural mountains
umuduri = traditional stringed instrument; sounds like an Irish fiddle
umupira wo kwambara = T-shirt
umupira gukina = soccer ball
ambara = to wear
umwembe = mango
safari = trip, journey* (Swahili)
safari njema = have a good trip (Swahili)
inga = cow
ikiyoni = crow
ignoko = chicken
koko = really
ariko - but
amahoro* = peace
ikyayi = tea
itasi = cup

and of course...

mzungu = white person* (Swahili)
They sell sweatshirts with that word on them in the Nairobi airport. I didn't buy one.

Semi-Hiatusing

2009-11-27T13:11:00.004-06:00

Dateline: Flipnotics

Well, back at my desk I find I have relatively little new to say, old chums, except that I'd like to get out of here again. You know, I work in the same place I live -- in the same room I sleep -- and it surprises me, or not, to discover, after half a century, that being inside for too long drives me flukin STIR-CRAZY. Has this been the problem all along?

I have an absolute need for breezes, just as I do for solitude and for daily exposure to good prose.

In addition, within 24 hours of the heat coming on I start getting congested and unless I get out of there fast I cough all winter.

There are several places I'd like to drive or fly in the near future.

Meanwhile,I have belatedly discovered the secret method of leaving the house: open the door!

I do, however, have a lot of paying work in December to keep me sitting but not awakened, so I'm thinking I probably won't post very much this coming month. I type too much already.

Photos You Can Hear

2009-11-18T22:38:00.017-06:00

Mt. Horeb Holy Church Choir, Kigali, Rwanda. These should cheer you up a bit after the previous post. Photos by the gifted and adventurous Christina Syndikus.

The woman in purple was totally, I mean totally. I wanted to either marry her or steal her life force, assuming those are two different things. The woman in glasses next to her is her sister, and also a rocker.

I sometimes think that if you knew you'd be singing this music at the end of the week, you could stand almost anything during the six days prior. Plus there are rehearsals.

A singer in the choir, she just walked to the front and did that once in a while. Wait, what do I mean walked to the front?

It was a privilege to be there.

Okay, here are some more. I took these.

waiting for church

Christina outside church (Paige in foreground)

choir strutting

in purple

Yes!!!

Murambi Genocide Memorial Center; Church of Ste. Famille

2009-11-15T18:01:00.008-06:00

At Murambi, about 40 km from the Congo border, there was a vocational school with many small classroom buildings. In 1994, Hutu militia herded thousands of Tutsis into the buildings and killed them with machetes or spiked clubs. The breakage pattern produced by each kind of weapon is easy to distinguish on the skull.

The classroom buildings are now a memorial -- room after room of skeletons. The perpetrators doused the bodies with lime immediately after killing, to hasten disintegration, but the skeletons remain and some of them have patches of black hair on their heads, and even shreds of clothing.

The memorial rooms stink of death, still. On the pelvis of each skeleton there are two or three camphor balls to ameliorate the smell.

I'm including as few details as I can. I feel it is important to give you a glimpse.

Below, a mother holding her child. The red ribbon was placed there by a visiting relative.

The man below lives at the Murambi site and serves as an unofficial guide. He is standing outside the building where we saw the skeletons of his wife and five children. He does not leave the site. On the left side of his bald head you can see a round indentation where a bullet struck him but did not penetrate.

French soldiers used bulldozers to cover the mass graves at Murambi, then built volleyball courts on top. The French had commercial interests with the Hutu leaders at the time.

It's a pretty country.

Below, the church of Ste. Famille, the Holy Family, in downtown Kigali, the national capital. Many Catholic churches were genocide sites. Authorities, in more than a few cases priests, deliberately deceived the victims into thinking they would find sanctuary in a church. Thousands at a time were crammed into the small spaces: 20,000 in this one, which sounds impossible, but the perpetrators were experts at making use of space. Typically the victims were kept inside without food or water for up to two weeks, then shot or slashed. According to Costa, who stands in the foreground of the photo, the churchyard was filled with dead bodies when he arrived with the Tutsi militia on their revenge mission.

Recommended reading.

I promise, the rest of the Rwanda posts will be cheerful ones.

The Masked Neocolonialist

2009-11-14T10:44:00.004-06:00

The mask is a public-health measure designed to protect the population, and ourselves, from flu. When we arrived, there had been one confirmed case of H1N1 in the entire country, and a few days later, there were three more, all of them in our little compound. While we were in Muhanga, an hour from the capital, a couple of us felt sick and went to the central hospital in Kigali for tests, which came out positive. A third tested positive shortly afterward, and the public health officials told us to wear masks (we informed them that masks had been shown to be of zero value, but they weren't listening). I kept my mask on for about two minutes, not long enough to learn to put it on properly.

I never developed any symptoms, owing in part to the fact that I belong to the least susceptible age group of Americans, in part to having drunk about a gallon of black elder berry extract over the past weeks, and in part to not giving a shit. I've made friends with my inner germ, and if it wants me it knows where to find me. Otherwise it can go bother someone else.

Most of my colleagues remained under house arrest while Pamela (the other uninfected mzungu) and I traveled north to see some mountain gorillas. In Muhanga, a sound truck cruised the streets announcing that Americans had brought disease, and to keep away from us. When we walked through the streets, children covered their noses and mouths and turned away. The Rwandan newspaper New Times had an article about us.

It was Columbus and the Indians all over again. We came to serve, and wound up bringing a new disease. Except that in this case, we apparently managed to keep the bug away from the natives: Costa was flu-free, and our houseman Gigy, a hip young guy about whom more needs to be said at some point, tested negative despite wandering around in an enervated red-eyed funk, mask securely fastened.

Rwanda photo 1

2009-11-13T12:03:00.003-06:00

Hi folks, here's the first photo I'm putting up from the Rwanda trip. There are many more, and I'll try to get some of them sorted out this weekend.

Thanks to all of you who commented on or read my posts from the road, and it's especially nice to get comments from a few new names. Just to repeat for the latter: I went to Rwanda to see a dear friend, Costa, and meet his family, and do some volunteer work having to do with rebuilding traditional mud brick houses and facilitating a self-help inquiry method called The Work of Byron Katie. Costa and his activities are supported by Groundwork Opportunities, a small new nonprofit org whose founders I've met. They're young, hard-working, committed, and knowledgable. A higher percentage of their donations go directly to their projects than just about any foundation's, and they've received funds from the Bill Gates Foundation and elsewhere.

Taken in the front yard of Costa's house in Kigali. Clockwise from top left: Pamela, Isabelle, Denise, Richard, Brenda, Bernadette (Costa's wife), Yves, Gentil, Queen (on lap), Costa (our leader; my brother), Christina, Jon.

I did stick my hand in my wallet pocket, NY style, when in crowds, but the precaution was unnecessary. I have never felt so safe or so welcome. I had no jet lag, no intestinal problems, no flu (though a couple of us had flu or flulike symptoms), no mosquito bites. Just the time of my life.

Gorillas in the Mist, H1N1 in the Guest House, Heaven in the Church, Mud Against the Wall

2009-11-07T09:37:00.003-06:00

Help, I have a lot more to say! Here's a very quick recap:

1. I previously opined that the church service was disappointing, but the following Sunday we all went to another one, at the same church, that knocked our socks off. We'd come too late for the choir the first time, but on Sunday we were fully present and armed with the spirit. They sang beautiful African gospel harmonies, dancing to the music, passing the microphone from one section of the choir to the other; and two or three of the women, including a pair of knockout fortyish sisters (alas, I did not get their phone numbers), were possessed with the greatest joy, hopping up and down, pointing ecstatically to the congregation, and had voices to match. The visiting preacher was a visiting bishop from Kenya who oversees 500 churches, and not only the power, but the benignity, of his preaching was beautiful.

2. We went to work on finishing two traditional houses made of mud brick, funded by Groundwork Opportunities, a nonprofit that helps fund our host Costa's work. No time to link now - I'll do it in future posts so you can donate! What we did was pick up handfuls of coarse wet mud that were poured onto the ground in heaps, and sling them hard against the handmade bricks of the wall. The mud gets smoothed down with a long horizontal stick, and after drying, is stuccoed. The owners of the two neighboring houses are families that were on opposite sides of the genocide and are now close friends. They are delighted with their new homes, into which they invited us with the greatest kindness. Among them was a six-month-old girl, Giselle, who loved to chew my index finger and thumb.

3. A member of our group and I rode four buses and a moto (motorcycle taxi) through rain and mist and bad roads from Kigali in the center of the country to Volcanoes National Park in the north to visit the world's last remaining mountain gorillas. The population is a bit over 700 and gradually rising. It costs $500 a person for admission (mostly applied to conservation and community projects), up to $50 for a guest house room, and $80 for a short jeep ride to the park, and it's worth every penny. We hiked up through the rain forest for about an hour, then reached the area where the trackers said the gorillas were. (There are several gorilla troops, and small groups of up to 8 tourists are assigned to each.) Our first contact was when the silverback rose up before us at a distance of about four feet to check us out. Our lead guide went into a crouch of submission, lowering his head and covering it with his hands, showing the boss that we meant no harm. We spent an hour with our gorilla friends, who included five females and five children as well as Mr. Big. Hundreds of photos were taken; locations were carefully shifted with those of the gorilla troop; the scientifically recommended distance of 7m was maintained. It was one of the highs of a lifetime.

4. We returned to a guest house increasingly full of sick muzungus wearing useless but bureaucratically required surgical masks. Step by step the situation became a farce. A doctor with his driver drove an hour from Kigali to swab-test the First World visitors; shortly afterward, an ambulance with another doctor drove up to the community center where we were doing The Work of Byron Katie with a group of HIV-infected women. The second doctor didn't believe in the existence of the first doctor, but they were put into telephone contact after much crosstalk among many interested parties. Upshot: we do have two confirmed cases of H1N1, but no severe symptoms, and some of us may have other viruses instead. Costa, Pamela, Brenda, and I have no symptoms, and quickly tossed away the surgical masks that were presented to us as solemn necessities when we returned to our home guest house. The crucial goal now is to be declared uninfected so that one can be put back on the plane on Tuesday instead of having to spend seven days in quarantine. We'll see!

Love,
Richard

Muhanga Days

2009-11-03T23:47:00.004-06:00

We're in the very nice small town of Muhanga -- "we" meaning our little group of seven muzungus and muzungettes -- treated with the greatest hospitality by our host Costa's brother Leopold, who bought us a restaurant meal and invited us to his home to dinner, and the mayor, who's paving our way with the prison administration, and a couple of Canadian guys we don't even know who are paying our bill at a guest house for five nights.

We're finally getting down to some serious work here, which may make me feel less like I'm sponging off people. We were supposed to do the Work of Byron Katie at the prison yesterday but the warden was away and couldn't arrange security for us. Then we were supposed to assist in mud-brick house construction in the afternoon, but we had a downpour so we sat at a protected outdoor terrace for a long time having good conversation, assorted brochettes, and the by-now-expectable great, homemade fries. In the afternoon, as a group, we did The Work with five HIV-positive Rwandan women of various ages, perhaps helping open their minds to new, less painful ways of seeing their lives, and it was moving experience -- clearly difficult for the women to think about their pain, and they expressed gratitude afterward.

Today we're booked to work with prisoners again and do the house construction. It feels as if my experience is shifting from travel exploration into community service, and that feels exciting and a little scary.

I haven't had many opportunities to sit quietly in places where there's been Internet access, and at times I've been borrowing other people's paid online minutes, so I don't think I'll be able to post more frequently than I have been, but I wanted to say hello and tell you that everything's fine. Did I mention that there's wonderful camaraderie among the seven of us? I've taken lots of photos and written lots of journal notes, so when I get back to the States I'll winnow through them and post them and give you a much more detailed and thought-out picture of this experience, which I consider to be one of the privileges of my lifetime.

National Work Day

2009-10-31T02:36:00.002-05:00

Today's a national work day in Rwanda. They have it on the last day of every month. For a couple of hours in the morning, everyone does community work, cleaning the streets and so forth. This helps explain why the streets are so clean!

Meanwhile, I, the muzungu (white person), am sitting in the living room drinking excellent Rwandan mountain tea and eating chappatis and typing. Eveywhere I go, children call out, "Muzungu!" and say things like "Hello" or "How are you?" and shake my hand. The other day we walked past a long line of prisoners in orange jumpsuits -- these are men who have admited their role in the genocide and are being rehabilitated -- and a couple called out "muzungu" and I gave them the peace sign and they cheered. Have had experiences similar in the big open-air market and on the streets.

Last night I attended a charismatic church service at my hosts' chuch. I'd seen them often on TV but never in person, and I found that in person they're just like on TV! A portly, sweaty guest preacher bounced from one end of the stage to another proclaiming that nothing had given him satisfaction like God, telling us that in order to reach Canaan land you have to go through pain (the Bible text was a passage from Joshua about how God commanded the children of Israel to be circumcized again before they could enter the Promised Land). Mic'd, it was as loud as a rock concert in the 300-person room. There was singing and dancing afterward to a drum and organ accompaniment, and I was shocked to find that the Africans clapped on one and three instead of two and four! Neither was the dancing marked by any particularly magical looseness of limb, imaginative improvisation, or the like.

Yesterday was spent pleasantly sitting in a bare undecorated restaurant in the town of Muhunga, where I ate cooked cassava root and brochettes of goat meat and goat liver and, not least, some very good french fries. (There's a good beer here, BTW, called Primus, light and tangy with a slight sweetness, made from sorghum. There's also banana-based beer, which I hope to try later.)It rained briefly and hard and we went inside from the cafe terrace to watch, with a couple of new friends with whom we practiced three different languages. One was a geography teacher in secondary school, who teaches in English, a language of which he could trade only a very few phrases with me. I drew him a map of the US -- assuring hiim beforehand in French that I was the world's greatest artist -- and it was all new to him.

The schoolkids have just gotten thrugh a national exam that lasts, I think, two days. They all dress in clean outfits and wait tensely for the results. Acccording to Costa, private schools in Rwanda are good but expensive and the free public schools are overcrowded and not good. Oddly, Protestant schools here have a good reputation but Catholic schools do not.

There's much more ethnology around, much more than can fit here. Just wanted to tell you that everything's going well. Next week should be more serious for us -- doing The Work of Byron Katie with prisoners and other traumatized people. We've done a little of that so far, and it honestly seemed to have led some shut-off genocide survivors to open up. I've seen people smile who, according to my host, have not done so in years, and cry at confronting things that they had hid from for even longer.

Fourth Morning in Rwanda

2009-10-28T00:51:00.004-05:00

I'm getting used to a pleasant routine. Five-year-old Gentil is counting teabags in English before he gets ready for school; Costa is bouncing baby Queen on his lap and humming to her while his wife Bernadette takes a well-deserved break; Grace the servant (who was rescued by Costa from post-genocide abuses a couple of years ago) hands him Queen's bottle. Queen returned from the hospital yesterday afternoon, a couple of days after we'd expected. It turned out she had an intestinal infection, possibly caused by eating something off the floor while crawling. She took antibiotics IV for a couple of days, then they released her with an oral form of the medicine, and now she's looking perfectly content, although she looks at me with a puzzled expression at times.

The floors have been mopped and the front and back patios dusted, as on every morning. Yesterday my clothes were not only wash by hand but ironed, an experience most of them had never had before. Breakfast will be fresh, thick, soft Senegalese-style chappatis, sweet rolls, and Rwandan coffee or tea. Today Costa, our German friend Christina, and I will be taking a bus to the southern region of the country, about an hour away, to meet Costa's mom, who wants to give Costa her expert instructions on how to take care of Queen's convalescence.

Over the past couple of days we've been to two different genocide memorials, one, on the outskirts of town, a very suitably gruesome setup in a church where 5,000 Tutsis were rounded up and killed in one day. On a platform, hundreds of skulls are displayed; on the platform below it, countless leg bones; across the room, a collection of rusted machetes and clubs.

The other memorial, in town, was erected by the Belgian government in honor of ten Belgian soldiers who were killed trying to protect the opposition party leader on the day the genocide began. Ten simple memorial columns in the yard; educational posters in the now-empty rooms where the soldiers took their stand; grenade fragments and bloodstains on the interior walls; fist-size bullet holes all over the exterior walls.

It's hard to imagine a nation that is more constructively aware of its problems or facing them more honestly and progressively. And not just the genocide: a nationwide anti-litter campaign has been very successful, HIV awareness is all over the media (there's one TV station, government-owned, and seven radio stations, some of them foreign), and Rwanda, with the highest population density in sub-Saharan Africa, has the second lowest malaria rate, largely due to educational programs such as the Bill and Melinda Gates' foundation's work in promulgating mosquito netting. In addition, Rwanda's parliament is 55% female, the electorate having recoiled from the violent governments that produced periodic genocides and massacres from 1959 to 1995. Rwanda has received a fair amount of international aid in the past fifteen years and has used it well. To me it appears that if the average American were as aware of our nation's problems, and as committed to solving them, as the average Rwandan is for Rwanda, in a decade and a half our inner-city schools would be graduating masses of literate, ambitious, responsible adolescents, the problems of gang violence and drugs would disappear, our health care system would care for all Americans equally, and our government would mobilize a nationwide environmental cleanup and infrastructural upgrade. In other words, we would be the nation we ought to be. A much, much poorer nation than ours is accomplishing equivalent goals. We could even do it without the need for genocide memorials.

Where Am I?

2009-10-25T02:24:00.001-05:00

Using a German keyboard in an unpaved neighborhood outside the center of Kigali. Just gettting the machine ready with a Sim card transferred from a cell phone was a triumph, and I don't know how many minutes' credit I have. I recently awoke from 45 straight hours of travel, Austin-Minneapolis-Amsterdam-Nairobi-Kigali, which included an afternoon walking around Amsterdam. There's so much to report already that I don't know where to start, but the people are lovely, the setting is one of Third World low-rise urbanization familiar to those who know Morocco, Greece, Costa Rica, etc.

I've even now heard stories which are too chilling, sobering, to tell here in a rush. They require books.

Two more weeks -- how will I be different at the end? This afternoon I'm going to church, an English-language service, with Costa. I thnk I'm also scheduled to accompany him to talk to a woman who has HIV as a result of the genocide.If I can't describe such things fully yet, I hope that time will allow me to.

Costa's year-old daughter went to the hospital last night, a problem with digesting breast milk. She's okay now.

Amid all this, things like not shaving and showering,and wake-sleep shedules, and brushing teeth from a half-glass of boiled water, seem of minimal import.

The completely ordinary, and the worldwide problems of economics, coexist here with the unimaginable. Will I be able imagine it after I've heard it? If so, there's the danger of it becoming ordinary: "Oh yes, you told me that story before." A defense mechanism to keep it at safe distance.

Meanwhile, there's fun! Meeting delightful individuals, immediate friends; talking a mix of English and French, and building affection through the effort; drinking East African coffee and tea, among the world's best. Watching TV, which is just like all TV but in a different language. Saw a good Congolese movie last night, though, a somwhat realistic romance-melodrama featuring famous regional musicians and actors.

Fifteen more nights under a moquito net, in a shared hot room where no mosquitoes are seen. Playing with 5-year-old Gentil, who can count to 1,000 in English and taught me how to fold a paper boat and blow bubbles.

See you later! Forgive me if I don't answer comments while I'm here. Later there will be photos and more time to write at length.

Ready to Go

2009-10-22T08:15:00.002-05:00

I'm starting off toward Africa today and I'll return on Nov. 12.

Today it's the Minneapolis airport for five hours, which may be the most boring part of the trip. I chose a long layover rather than a 45-minute one, thinking that the latter was too risky for an international flight. Overnight to Amsterdam where my layover is long enough so that I hope to get out into the city for a walk and lunch. Then on to Kigali, Rwanda, via the Nairobi airport, which I've read is neither as bad nor as good as it could be.

I'm not bringing my computer, but there are internet cafes in Kigali so I hope to drop a few posts in here during my stay. I might save the photos for after I return -- there's a learning curve involved, I just bought a camera last night.

Stop by once in a while and see what's happening!

Bumper Sticker Patrol, Installment 7

2009-10-20T16:59:00.003-05:00

Left rear bumper: "Consumption Will Not Fill the Void."

Right rear bumper: "Black Star Pub Brewery"

Attack from the Distaff Side

2009-10-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

Returning for a moment to the milieu of the previous post, when we look back at the dawn of time we find book and movie titles such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Man in the White Suit, The Boy with Green Hair. Males baffled by circumstance, yearning for nothing more than a modicum of peace and security. And when we look for similar titles on what used to be called the distaff side, what do we find? Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman! These men are just sitting quietly, humbly, merely hoping to be allowed to watch a football game, and...they're ATTACKED! By fifty-foot women!

It's the story of my life.

What Are They Reading in 1960?

2009-10-17T12:12:00.002-05:00

The contents of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Winter 1961, when Eisenhower gave way to Kennedy:

A. The Light in the Piazza, by Elizabeth Spencer (1921- ), a literary bestseller by a genteel Southern quarterly doyenne, author of 38 books, five-time O. Henry Award recipient.

The Reader's Digest intro says, “This is a story of how the sensual beauty and warm summer sun of Florence worked their strange alchemy in the life of a lovely American girl – a story to which each reader will imagine his own sequel.”

I love the “his own sequel.” Ninety percent of the audience must have been female.

The opening sentence:

“On a June afternoon at sunset, an American woman and her daughter fended their way along a crowded street in Florence and entered with relief the spacious Piazza del Signoria.”

In other words, the nth dilution of Henry James’ Daisy Miller.

“This little book is a gem…one of the four best novels of 1960.” Orville Prescott, New York Time

But scoffers beware! This book was made into a 1962 movie (Olivia de Havilland-Rossano Brazzi-Yvette Mimieux-George Hamilton) and a well-received, innovative 2005 musical that ran for 504 performances at Lincoln Center and is regularly performed around the world, sometimes in opera houses.

B. Half Angel, by Barbara Jefferis. Lonely young Australian boy finds a mysterious cat with a jeweled collar. Problems arise! I never heard of it, though this was the height of my passion for the New York Times Book Review: I was eight.

C. A Sense of Values, by Sloan Wilson, author of the iconic 1950's executive-suite novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (reprinted in 2002 with a foreword by Jonathan Franzen)and A Summer Place, both hit movies (Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones, Ricard Egan-Dorothy McGuire), the latter the provenance of the great song "Theme from A Summer Place." A well-known cartoonist (good choice!) grapples with the problems of success, a cold wife, a troubled son, inherited “melancholia” (a much better word for it than what we use now), and alcoholism. Flashbacks to noncombat WWII. Readably written in an intelligent middlebrow style that appeals to Connecticut residents who wish Salinger were more prolific, and which, lamentably, isn’t seen much anymore on the bestseller lists. Contains a lecture by the protagonist’s wise mentor on the dangers of success -– not original but a knowledgeable summary. Undoubtedly Wilson needed to write this after his big bestseller.

Random sentence: “Before going to New Haven that fall, I stopped at the sanitarium and visited my mother.”

D. "Warpath" “A crucial episode from Kenneth Roberts' monumental novel of Colonial history, Northwest Passage….Kenneth Roberts brings alive a little-known incident from the American past in a manner that makes it vital and exciting reading for today.”

This was an oldie even then, first published 1937, source for the 1940 movie with Spencer Tracy and for...yes, the 1958-1959 Buddy Ebsen NBC series (the latter must be why they republished it in 1960). During his lifetime Roberts (“for some time after graduating from Cornell in 1903…not until 1928 did he begin to write the great historical novels which won him a lasting fame…”) received five honorary doctorates and a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee “for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history.”

Sample sentence: “’I’ve often seen you,’ the man said, swallowing.”

C. Marnie, by Winston Graham: source for the 1964 Hitchcock movie, by the author of forty novels including the Poldark series, which was made into a hit BBC series. When you’ve got the touch, you’ve got the touch.

From the intro:

“What were the compelling forces that drove twenty-three-year-old Marnie Elmer from job to job, changing her identity each time….From the first moment his saw this strange and beautiful girl, Mark Rutland was intrigued. When her secret burst upon him with the impact of a thunderbolt, he could not follow the dictates of reason…. How Mark leads Marnie to find the key to the inner prison in which she has locked herself makes a taut, exciting story, full of suspense and sharp compassion.”

Sorry, you’re still not hitting the male audience. But to your credit, you don’t use “impact” as a verb. Today they’d write, “When her secret impacted him like a thunderbolt…” And that’s the sum total of the development of American literacy in forty-nine years.

This volume of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, one of ten on the café shelves, contains by far the most enduring novels in the group.

It feels utterly cool...

2009-10-16T17:27:00.001-05:00

...to go into Radio Shack and ask for a foreign travel electrical adapter, and when he asks what country I'm going to, say, "Rwanda."

Six more days.

By the way, this is why human beings sing.

2009-10-15T15:37:00.002-05:00

(Richard Thompson on guitar)

A Lifetime's Reading

2009-10-12T09:38:00.003-05:00

I'm entering the time of life when you want to spend more time with your loved ones. And so I want to reread Resurrection, Crime and Punishment, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Orlando, Emma, Tom Jones, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dombey and Son...and I'll get to Shakespeare's histories and Bartholomew Fair, and I'll go further in Chaucer...and when I reread A Moveable Feast I'll kiss the pages, and then I'll read Chekhov's "The Peasants" and "In the Ravine" continually, as we're told to pray continually.

No, Not Yet

2009-10-11T12:24:00.002-05:00

A twelve-year-old is singing along with "Title and Registration" by Death Cab for Cutie:

...where disappointment and regret collide
Lying awake at night...

"Do you have regrets, Agent 97?"

"No."

Ah!

Nice Description

2009-10-11T11:03:00.001-05:00

Someone once called my work "beautiful but not important." What a perfect description of this world!

Your Mom

2009-10-11T11:00:00.002-05:00

“Agent 97, I believe I’ll need the computer in a moment.”

“I believe your mom will need the computer in a moment. Dissage!”

His late grandmother!

He and his brother give each other “your mom” lines frequently.

Nameless Mass

2009-10-11T10:57:00.002-05:00

I like the title Missa Sine Nomine, by Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521).

Heard Around the House, So I'll Steal It

2009-10-11T10:55:00.001-05:00

“An empty muffin case of a man.” Old, empty, used up, disposable, and crummy, its only value being as a momentary reminder of past sweetness.

What Are You Looking At?

2009-10-10T11:06:00.001-05:00

Ten a.m. Agent 97 wakes up, drags himself to the living room to read the latest volume in whatever fantasy adventure series it is this month. I take a ninja stance, arms up, wrists cocked, wagging my fingers menacingly with a “Come on, what have you got?” look.

“Shut uppa you mouth,” he says. “Go to the store right now and get cookies.”

“Ha! I mock you” I say.

“Go get cookies!”

Cool gray Saturday morning, the second chilly day of the season. I love this weather, it makes me imagine I’m in New York or the Bay Area. It lets me wear my new favorite sweater. I’m sitting near the open window, sipping my second half-decaf au lait from a ceramic mug that Agent 83 doesn’t remember giving me when he was a child. I may take a walk to the library, or I may just imagine it. I watch a squirrel with twin nuts in its mouth run the length of a telephone wire, its back undulating. It speeds up when a little bird flies near it, though the bird can’t do it any harm.

I can see what the wire looks like through the squirrel’s eyes. The wire moving under him, and the tops of the green and tan bamboo under that, and the gray cloud-light in his peripheral vision. Pure sensation of movement, no words, pure sight and motion. Life, absolute life.

I can see what the world looks like for this Richard, too. A wide dark space with thoughts zinging across it like meteor showers that make him go, “Ah.” A space infinite but bounded; within its borders everything fits: cities, hosts of people, entire literatures, out to the galaxies. And him little in the center of it, taking in all the messages and sending ones back. Absolute life.

“Get some cookies! There’s nothing to eat around here, what’s a person to eat? What are you looking at?”

Obviosophobia

2009-10-08T10:13:00.005-05:00

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."
--John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989

Is it obvious to lay off blogging for a little while? It hasn't been planned, it's just way the days have unfolded for the past couple of weeks.

I can assure you, though, that beginning about October 22 I'll have some interesting experiences to report. On that day I fly to Rwanda for a two-week mission of peace and reconciliation.They have internet cafes there, so I hope to do some posting.

In the meantime, something every once in a while.

UPDATE: A writer friend once told me I have "a genius for the obvious." I don't know how it was intended, but I took it as a compliment.

That's What the Simple Folk Do

2009-10-03T18:58:00.004-05:00

This rain reminds me of the Northeast, an old-fashioned all-day soak with no lightning-and-thunder drama, no floods, no power outages. I’m letting cars pass me –- this is new –- and somehow through ignorance I end up in the thick traffic to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. But I smile, it’s a Saturday of no plans. Wet couples and small groups, mostly in their twenties and thirties, walk straggly-haired across the bridge over the Colorado, and it surprises me how many of the young women are wearing skirts or dresses; it reminds me of when we went back to Ann Arbor in 1976 and found that, during the three-year interval since graduation, coeds had started putting on makeup and wearing skirts again.

I’m going shopping –- strange. So this is how people spend their Saturdays! I’m buying gifts for my hosts for my forthcoming foreign stay: two children’s Texas Longhorns T-shirts in burnt orange, and two gospel CDs, one of black music and one of white. (That’s America.) Do they have a CD player at their home? I’m betting yes; after all, they’re not in the bush. Then I drive from bookstore to bookstore looking for a copy of the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment -– the Roman Polanski uproar has made me want to reread it, but I doubt if Roman’s going to find redemption in the arms of a saintly whore in the end –- and the third store I try has one used copy, with decent-size print no less.

Four o’clock and I haven’t eaten since breakfast -– this is new too -- so I swing by the Cajun saloon-restaurant, imagining fried oysters. The small parking lot is full as always but a space opens right at the front door, and I start toward it, but by the time I begin guiding my slow turn there’s a big beer-bellied man standing in the way, slurping from a 32-ounce Styrofoam of soda pop. I wait for him to see me -– he doesn’t move –- he’s standing smack between the white lines -- I extend my arm to show I want to get through -- he slurps, doesn’t move. He’s wearing a purple LSU T-shirt: this bar’s the Louisiana sports headquarters of Austin and today’s game day, the place is packed with his type. I wait, he slurps. Shaking my head, I go into reverse and, before pulling away, draw up beside him and roll down my window and say with a smile, “Thanks, you’re a prince.” How I’ve mellowed! As I’m driving away it dawns on me he’s not absolutely being a prick, he’s saving the space for a friend. I can identify, which makes it -- does it? -- all right.

To the fancy supermarket in the heavy rain -– plastic bags today, not paper! –- and I nosh on free samples to tide me over till home. I skip the pears and the avocados, they’re hard as rocks despite the loyal service workers slicing them into quarter-moons and the customers accepting them without a qualm -– I pick up a container of the house gumbo which is really good, and German bread to dip in it. And a large coconut macaroon half-draped in chocolate: “I think this is the best thing in the store!” the cashier says to me. One must remember they’re not flirting, they’re just being friendly.

After the gumbo I have coffee and take a nap, the perfect wakeup routine because when the nap’s over the coffee’s just taking effect, and start Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory -– how is it I’ve been reading him for thirty-five years and haven’t gotten to all his books yet? I’ve got two rental movies for this evening, and best of all, I’ve had time to write something of my own, even if it’s only this.

coming attraction

2009-09-29T08:20:00.003-05:00

...and yet stay tuned for when, in late October, I travel to mysterious faraway locales to bring peace and reconciliation to a strife-torn world.

All I'm saying about it now is that taking malaria pills is cool if you don't have the actual malaria.

2009-09-28T09:45:00.002-05:00

I have a feeling I won't be posting till later in the week. It's entirely a matter of workload. I spend all day at the computer or looking at print, and banging away at a keyboard for money. When it gets excessive I have to find something else to look at.

"The walls were decorated with a New York subway map and a Buddhist bead necklace."

2009-09-25T11:39:00.002-05:00

New York's Little Bhutan consists of one apartment building on University Avenue in the Bronx, named for the old Bronx campus of NYU where my Uncle Lenny went to college, not far from my grandparents' old building.

I usually don't post topical reports or link to the news, but this one gets to me. Notice the link to one of the residents' blogs.

crumpled form, mysterious sauce, pussycat rug

2009-09-24T10:24:00.002-05:00

1. Under a bed, a crumpled blank discarded yellow form: “All Students Must Have This Signed by Parent or Guardian Immediately.”

2. On the midline of the road, a plastic bag with “Have a Nice Day” and a yellow smiley face; inside is a styrofoam to-go box from which leaks a brown sauce.

3. In the street, an orange cat lies fully stretched, motionless. There’s no blood or other signs of violence, but the cat is flattened, thinned out, as if it were a cat rug. Is this truly okay with me? Is it okay that it will happen to me?

pebble ear, wrapped tree, untasted delights

2009-09-20T08:01:00.001-05:00

1. According to the medical websites, putting objects in one’s ears is a characteristic of small children and the intellectually challenged. However, I know a highly intelligent adult –- you don’t know the fellow or gal –- who put a pebble in his or her ear the other night and hasn’t removed it yet.

2. Hula hoops hanging from a chinaberry; a locked door standing alone halfway down the path from the curb to the house; a dead tree trunk wrapped in white paper painted to have frizzy black hair, goo-goo eyes, and red lipstick, the two main branches turned into upflung white arms –- these things remind us that we’re in the bobo sub-art capital of the southwest.

3. Every Friday I hope to get the half-chicken special at Pok-e-Jo’s barbecue, which can serve me for two meals, but every Friday I either have something more important to do, or forget because I’m focused on work. I must learn to treat myself better –- as people are always telling me.

the cruelest wish, existing just for me, night car wind

2009-09-17T08:48:00.001-05:00

1. Someone I dislike –- he hurt a friend of mine – just opened his second restaurant here in town, and it’s hopping with customers, even more than his first. I hope he gets everything he desires. That’ll teach him.

2. She’s sitting on the curb of the main thoroughfare in the darkness, where any car drifting too much to the right could chop her legs off. I say “she” but that’s only my best guess; this human figure is tall and stout with cropped hair, dark shorts, and pudgy legs with double folds at the knee. Under the bus stop sign with its route map, she’s stretching up to look down the road to see if the bus is coming, and checking the cell phone which she holds closed in her hand, as if insisting on two simultaneous arrivals of providence. It’s hard for me to bear in mind that she wasn’t put there solely for my appreciation.

3. Sailing home with the breeze in my hair, my left hand sliding along the top ledge of the open window. There’s no other traffic, and I’m humming a song though the radio isn’t on; I’m smiling at the trees in the park as I drive past, my glance lingering to notice the friendly details of hills, volleyball court, construction site. Steering the curves with small practiced movements of one hand, which has maneuvered through this stretch of road hundreds of times, I think, This is what it feels like seconds before a fatal accident.

Love, Withheld and Otherwise

2009-09-15T09:59:00.004-05:00

Today seems to be my day for links to columnists. It's because I'm juggling three freelance assignments at once and am resorting to hit-and-run posts.

Alfie Kohn is a respected and influential somewhat radical scholar on education and children. I agree with what he says here as a utopian ideal; in practice I find it extremely difficult to live up to. Too often, one feels unconditional love but its outer expression looks conditional in response to the apparent demands of social life.

Hi-Five Nation

2009-09-15T09:40:00.002-05:00

Here's something important to say, well said by David Brooks.

The Least Justifiable Remake in Hollywood History Is...

2009-09-14T22:45:00.005-05:00

Total Recall, currently being developed by Columbia Pictures, although the original version is less than 20 years old, hasn't become dated, and contains thrilling effects and memorable performances, including the first widely noticed one of Sharon Stone's career.

I'm pleased to say that fans are already condemning, reviling, execrating, and opprobriating the remake, and that one of them points out the irony of the production company's name: Original Films.

If only Philip K. Dick were still alive to haul in the cash, and perhaps to write a story about a man who discovers that everything he touches becomes a remake of itself.

Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird

2009-09-12T08:20:00.002-05:00

Agent 97 began seventh grade recently, and I asked him whether his English class was reading anything good. Yes, he told me, there was a poem he liked:

“’Thirteen Ways –- ‘” He twists his mouth to remember. “’Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird.’”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is the highest-brow poem middle-schoolers can enjoy, and To Kill a Mockingbird is good-tasting cherry-flavored medicine, but “Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird” –- now there’s some practical reading.

A Whole Foods Triptych

2009-09-10T00:06:00.001-05:00

1. The 80,000-square-foot Whole Foods flagship store on Sixth and Lamar now offers a Premium Salt and Pepper Bar, where you can dip your scoop into eighteen bins containing the world’s finest varieties of whole peppercorns and crystal salts. Alas, no Morton’s! Regrettably, because of the local ordinance prohibiting anyone not beautiful and hip from entering the store, I was not able to sample the salt and pepper myself, but had to be satisfied with a report from an emissary.

2. There’s a crush of people at a counter. Is it free samples of organic barbecue beef brisket, or pecan-crusted sea bass with remoulade sauce, or fudge nut cookies? No, it’s twenty-five Japanese supermarket professionals, men and women wearing translator headsets, snapping their camera shutters (despite the rule that you can’t take pictures inside the store (this is a genuine rule, not like the one in #1)) to memorialize the thirteen themed cafés, the dry-aging room for sides of grass-fed beef, the walk-in room-sized beer refrigerator, the fountain of liquid chocolate for strawberry-dipping, etc. etc. etc. They will bring the wisdom of the most advanced Occidental food purveyorship back to the Orient with them, and push it into the 2010's with the most unearthly, horrifying cuteness.

3. A carton of a dozen eggs ($6.99) from Massage Ranch, where the most unconstrained, freest-living pullets in Texas graze intensively in multiple-species pastures in accordance with the Salatin model, bears the sticker, “Laid 8/27.” Lucky eggs!

The Mantra

2009-09-08T09:59:00.000-05:00

The mantra of early 21st century America: “He’s such a great guy, but he’s not a great guy for me. He’s a great guy for someone else.” Some add sorrowfully, “It’s so hard when you really love a person.”

You hear it everywhere: on streetcorners, in bars, at the next table in a restaurant, by the racks at the discount clothing outlet… Imagine a nation of people too wonderful to be right for each other!

The Falseness of Dreams

2009-09-07T09:17:00.001-05:00

I’m a kid applying to college, and as an admissions test I have to pitch a baseball game, after which the opposing batters will be asked whether they want me at their school. I strike them out and make them pop up, but as a result they don’t want me to see me again. It’s not fair! Because of my gifts, I end up going to a worse college than my brothers and friends.

This dream seems to me false in every respect. There are the obvious fictions: I wasn’t a star athlete, didn’t go to a worse college than my brothers. But there’s also the dishonesty of attitude: Look at me, the world’s against me, they hate me, they envy me, I’ve missed my destiny! A pile of crap that I’ve been telling myself for years. Immediately on waking, I recognize it as such. Did I dream it to disprove it?

After a lifetime looking to my dreams as doorways to my true self, this dream came to me to show the falseness of dreams.

leaf impressions, quack not clack, Great Pyrenees

2009-09-06T10:04:00.001-05:00

1. At the newly landscaped pond at the multi-use development, the designers imprinted leaves and grasses into the wet cement so that the impressions dried in. Not until after I drive off do I wonder whether they took real plants from the surrounding fields, or used ready-made stamps. Oh no, how will I know whether I’m allowed to like it or not?

2. A nearby clacking: at first I think it’s my phone mischievously taking snapshots inside my pocket, but it’s a pair of quacking waterbirds at the edge of the pond, small and black with off-white bills, quick-paddling this way and that through the grass and algae and dipping for munchables, and followed by three fuzzy chicks with red bills who wonder, “What’s next?”

3. The dogs are out, their masters putting on or taking off their leashes. From the other side of the pond I’m planning what I’m going to say to the leash-removers if I command myself not to chicken out. But by the time we’re all on the same side of the pond it’s occurred to me that these people may know how to handle their animals –- canine-human pairs stop on the path to greet one another and separate with no horrible consequences -- and that the only unpeaceful things in the scene are my own judgments. In a wild departure, I smile at one of the dog owners and ask him what breed his big beautiful dog is: it’s a Great Pyrenees.

valuable hair, umbrella man, sleek legs

2009-09-04T13:04:00.003-05:00

1. Toweling dry, one of my hairs lands on the rim of the bathtub curled in the shape of the tai chi (ak/a yin yang sign). Should I sell it on eBay?

2. A cloudy day at last; a man walks down the street carrying a folded umbrella. A welcome portent of rain, or is he just a doofus?

3. Few epiphanies are sexier than that constituted by a blonde in a business suit and heels striding down the sidewalk sipping from a takeout container of coffee.

rabbits are back, additional tax, gifted apprentice

2009-09-02T10:46:00.002-05:00

1. For months the sign at Long Horn Meat has said “Rabbits Are Back.” I would have thought the rabbits would have run past by now.

2. I’m working at a café this morning but I forgot to get a receipt for my latte and schnecken. That’s an extra dollar I’ll have to pay in taxes!

3. The art on the walls this week is better than usual for this kind of place. The kid -– it’s undoubtedly an art student – can draw figures, has a sense of how to position the human body to compose within a frame, uses an attractive palette – lots of white, black details, and backgrounds in nuanced shades of warm and cool-– and rarest of all, can paint facial and gestural expressions. Oil/watercolor/marker on paper. There’s a closeup of a young woman tilting her head onto her shoulder, where the head fills the upper right quadrant with white skin, red lips, and black eyebrows, leading the viewer down to the white neck and chest of the lower left: geometric and human equally. It’s hard to tell whether the paintings were done from photographs. The faces are so real, I’d say yes; but the figures’ stances are paintinglike; people don’t usually stand in those attitudes unless posing. Skillful cropping of snapshots could do it. Which in itself requires a fine eye, so it’s not cheating. A future professional, perhaps a book illustrator. I’d buy a piece if I were a bit more sentimental.

just to talk, paying myself the check, cat in bamboo

2009-09-01T09:18:00.003-05:00

1. Hearing from two faraway friends before breakfast: one is sending me a gift for a favor I did him, the other has called just to talk, the first time ever without a purpose.

2. Finishing breakfast, I take out my wallet to look for someone’s business card. In mid-motion it transforms into an automatic gesture: paying the check.

3. Outside in the bamboo, a charcoal gray cat rubs from stalk to stalk, belly slung low. When I take one step toward the window to see better, she freezes and looks at me.

The Girl Whose Heart Was Beating Fast

2009-08-28T09:59:00.001-05:00

She stopped me outside the cafe, next to the newspaper vending machine. “Excuse me, could you feel my heartbeat?”

She was small and dark-haired and wore a white T-shirt with the name of a local Protestant high school in red. The thick makeup on her cheeks was criscrossed with fine cracks: she was first learning how to use it. Her height made her look even younger.

“It’s beating really fast,” she said. “I just smoked, and I’m scared I’m going to have a heart attack and die. Could you tell me what you think? Should I go to the hospital?”

“No, don’t go to the hospital,” I said. I lay my palm on a carefully selected spot above her breast. Her heartbeat was quite fast. I made sure to look in her eyes and smile seriously. “You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know why I picked you.” (I was the only person around.) “You looked like you might understand. Have you ever done it?”

“Sure. This happens to people sometimes. It happened to me a few times. Don’t worry, you won’t get sick and die. I promise. Would you like to go inside and sit down, have some water or something?”

“No, my friend’s in there, he’ll be coming out soon…”

He was a tall, light-haired kid in a different style T-shirt from the same school.

“”She’s a little scared,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, and walked away with her. I didn’t hear whether they spoke.

I wished I’d had the chance to sit down and talk with her. To emphasize what a mistake it would be to go to the hospital, how they would call her parents and maybe give her a psychiatric diagnosis—God knows how that would end up.

Feeling her heartbeat, I’d felt the anxiety of being the father of a daughter, having to negotiate around sexuality, to worry about the survival of her innocence. Why did you approach a strange middle-aged man, I wanted to ask her? What if he’d been the wrong kind? Don’t put yourself at people’s mercy.

She was worried about the survival of her innocence too, and approaching me was her way of testing it.

I wished I could tell her all the things that would protect her and her boyfriend, like telling him how to care for a frightened girl, but there was something I wished more. I wished I could join them on their adventures, I wished I were sixteen and learning everything they were about to learn. What they knew least was: how they’d feel looking back.

2009-08-23T17:05:00.001-05:00

Hey, people, I've got two new freelance projects starting tomorrow, so I'm going to take a couple of days off from blogging. I'll try to be back here by Thursday, maybe Friday.

Why Be a Poet?

2009-08-23T14:18:00.002-05:00

Poets have an average of 11 lifetime sex partners, while accountants have an average of 3.

Source: Psychology Today, Oct. 2009, p. 45

men, men, men!

2009-08-21T00:00:00.001-05:00

1. I’m reading a suspense novel whose front cover is a photo of a naked young male. I’m afraid someone will see.

2. Which reminds me, I want to rent Brokeback Mountain – but only for Heath Ledger’s performance, you understand.

3. I read an article somewhere about the show Mad Men, in which the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, talked about having to compromise on casting. In the case of one important role, after much painful discussion they decided to go with “the beautiful one” rather than the better actor. I leaped to the conclusion that “the beautiful one” was a woman, undoubtedly either January Jones or Christina Hendricks, but now I think it was Jon Hamm, who plays the lead role, Don Draper. They can't possibly have hired him for his acting.

Slumming: An Epiphany

2009-08-20T08:15:00.000-05:00

On the surface it couldn’t look more promising: a restaurant counter at the back of a Chinese grocery. I eat at a little card table with a view of the store shelves: cardboard boxes of round fried gluten, dried noodle, board bean thread; shelf displays of soup mixes with a week’s worth of sodium per serving; ginger and maltose candy; white bread buns filled with guava paste; bags of taro-flavored shrimp chips dyed bright purple. Surely the much-maligned western diet has it over this.

The daily specials are written in Chinese and English on a whiteboard, in smudged black marker. Duck tongues, pork innards… Ever the moderate, I order squid with ground pork.

I take my number tag, 44, to my table, and every time the manager emerges with a tray and shouts a number it sounds, in his accent, like “Forty-four!” An urn behind the counter offers free tea; I do not partake. A fiftyish Mexican man –- immigrant? parolee? -- buses the tables.

When my food arrives, the manager doesn’t shout “Forty-four!” He signals to me with a quiet smile, making allowances for my race. Hm, the pork is sliced, not ground, but this isn’t the kind of place where you send a dish back. The squid? It’s glossy, translucent pink and crunchy-hard. The chef has avoided the danger of overcooking. It probably skidded around in the wok for all of thirty seconds before he flipped it onto the plate. I try a few pieces, then push the rest to the side –- very well, let them think I’m a squeamish Yank! It’s the first time in my life I haven’t liked squid. But the tentacles are long and thick; maybe it’s really octopus.

I finish the pork, sliced garlic, and snow peas, and the tiny bowl of rice. Then I close my eyes and imagine how this dish would have tasted if not for the romantic appeal of the downscale ambience. A watery tan sauce; plain, insipid pork strips. I’d rather have had the standardized, sugar-zapped kung pao chicken of some middle-class palace with gold lions at the door, or the clichéd shrimp and lobster sauce of my childhood’s “Chinese-American” restaurants.

Back outside in the strip mall, I look in at a Cajun place of similar class: long rows of white clothless tables with unmatched chairs, some of them lawn chairs. In the window there’s a favorable review from a guidebook, and inside there’s one person eating, or perhaps just keeping the staff company.

On the evidence of the Chinese place, I’m not going to go here either. I’m going to get home and pour a large helping of fresh blueberries over a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

"Time to relax, rewind, and remodel the brain."

2009-08-18T10:42:00.003-05:00

Chronically stressed rats lose their behavioral plasticity -- their adaptability and cunning -- and fall back upon ineffective rote responses. The change occurs at the neural level: "regions associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed."

The rats succumbed to the rat race.

Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist who is also a first-rate writer, says, "we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new."

But genuine hope arrives fast: "with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar." (The bar they press to get a food pellet.)

“The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ....Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”

And too many pellets can make you fat.

red arc, the kind of crap I’ll eat, stakeout at RLC's

2009-08-17T21:02:00.000-05:00

1. Watering the grass in full sunlight: the afterimage of the green hose makes a red arc across the lawn.

2. What to do with leftover rice: dump leftover cold white rice into a soup bowl. Sprinkle generously with soy sauce and vinegar, and moderately with sesame oil. Drain a can of sardines, with skin and bones on, and place the fish on top of the rice in a lovely stripe or spoke pattern. Garnish with thin-sliced scallion and red or black pepper. Guaranteed to make people say, “Ew, get that away from me!”

3. At about five this afternoon a police cruiser parked in front of my house, and stayed there an hour. The cop remained in the driver’s seat the whole time. About halfway through, two local women walked up and chatted pleasantly with him for a few minutes. Then they walked on. I was inside listening to music and generally puttering about. At six I put on my gym clothes, got a bottle of water, and opened the front door. The police car was gone; I never got the chance to ask the cop what was up.

yellow lawn, raisin challah French toast, boulder to birmingham

2009-08-16T09:28:00.004-05:00

1. The lawn is just as it should be at this time of year: drought-yellow, scattered with curled brown leaves of hackberry and rose. I pour it a deep long drink, and the grass laps up the water like a dog at its bowl.

2. Without even stopping to shower, before the kids wake up, I make myself raisin challah French toast.

3. I want to slow my body rhythms, ease off from the endless self-interruption, the food-gobbling, the ever-up-and-down chore-running. Well, at least my earworms are at a slower tempo:

That Big Rockin Chair Won't Go Nowhere

2009-08-14T12:06:00.003-05:00

John doesn't have a Music Friday post today, not yet anyway, and I wanted to do one in any case.

I've been thinking about mortality lately -- "What, because of a kidney stone?" Well, yes, it was the first time I ever rode in an ambulance and the first time I ever had general anesthesia. A couple of days later I heard the song "Rockin Chair" on one of my Pandora stations, and its been singing in my head ever since.

The version I heard was a dignified, moving homage by Death Cab for Cutie on the tribute album Endless Highway.

And here's the real thing:

fabulosity, the softest thing in the world, male vanity

2009-08-09T22:05:00.002-05:00

1. Kimora, CEO of Phat Fashions and star of the reality show Life in the Fab Lane on the E! network: “The showroom must live up to my standard of fabulosity.”

2. Overheard in a wine bar: “This shirt’s made of bamboo, it’s the softest thing in the world, check it out.”

3. Graffito on a men’s room chalkboard: “Why don’t the guys get a vanity?”

gravel, gravestones, blue p

2009-08-07T18:27:00.003-05:00

1. A turning dump truck has dropped a spray of gravel over the road, like fragments of a kidney stone vaporized by a laser.

2. Small gray and brown tombstones cover the cemetery field, like fragments of a kidney stone vaporized by a laser.

3. This is the first time I've ever seen blue pee.* It's cute!

*a normal side effect of Uretron

The Cab at the Door

2009-08-06T05:22:00.003-05:00

Hey, I'm leaving in about two minutes to get my kidney stone vaporized by a laser. Talk to you in a day or so...inshallah.

"Come See the Undercover Police!"

2009-08-05T08:55:00.002-05:00

A curb sign in a grubby neighborhood says, “Undercover Police Area.” I fail to understand: if you want them to be hidden, why announce they’re here? Is this some politically correct fair-play idea, that you can’t arrest criminals without a warning?

Okay, so the purpose is to stop people from committing crimes in the first place, and then the undercover cops won’t have to reveal themselves and the street will remain safe.

But if that’s the purpose, why not put a uniformed cop on the street? That would have a stronger deterrent effect. However, there’s no such thing as a beat cop anymore; it’s an institution from the dim archaic past; the physical and political structure of the modern city makes it almost inconceivable.

So what you have is a cop who can’t visibly safeguard the community. The message is, “We’re not here to answer your distress calls, to break up your fights or report your stolen bicycles; we’re only here to send you to jail.”

I wonder why poor people and minorities distrust the police.

The only useful reason I can think of for putting up that sign would be if there were no undercover cops present. The sign would have a deterrent effect without involving any use of manpower, and undercover cops could be stationed in places without signs. But that would be laughably easy to see through, and in a month or so the sign would just be a waste of metal.

Supercool Wedding

2009-08-03T22:43:00.003-05:00

Ann and Meade's.

Congratulations and love to two extraordinary people who are creating a beautiful love story as we watch. May the inspiration of your wedding day carry through to every day of a long life together.

The Pants Detector

2009-08-03T08:04:00.001-05:00

Sears cashier, as I put two pairs of jeans on the counter: “You’re buying pants?”

“Yes.”

Seizing the advantage as she touches the pants: “You found some?”

“Yes.” Is she toying with me? Or is she asking: “Did you find those pants, or did they find you? Can one ever truly say one has found something? Was it not always here? Is there a Finder, is there anything to find, was there ever anything to lose?”

In the fluorescent-lit navel of a sparsely traveled store sits the existential gatekeeper, waiting, waiting, for the seeker who will present his offering and answer the perilous questions.

At least she didn’t ask, “So you’re starting to need Relaxed Fit?”

photo credit, I’m trying, no such word

2009-08-02T10:01:00.002-05:00

1. Agent 95 is stunningly insouciant about his photo credit on the Althouse blog. With an ironic yelp, he rushes back to the video screen to play Fallout 3.

2. In Fallout 3, a game about a postnuclear world of radiation poisoning and machine-gun marauders, a chirpy, Midwest-accented female black-marketeer gives advice to the player: “Try not to die!”

3. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged does not have an entry for “unflappable.” This discovery throws me into an uproar.

dirt search, physical abuse, Austin in a glance

2009-07-30T21:53:00.003-05:00

1. Within the space of two blocks I see two grizzled, raggedly dressed men searching the ground with pincer-tipped metal canes. I think they’re looking for aluminum tabs from beverage cans: you can recycle them for a lot of money; my kids are collecting a milk jug full of them. Are the two guys working coincidentally, or are they roommates, underpass-mates?

2. “It was one of those things where they put you up against the wall and hold you down by your elbows.” I assume she’s talking about being manhandled by the cops, but no –- chiropractic.

3. Patriot Engine Repair next door to Salvage Vanguard Theater. Are the employees of the two friendly with each other? In this town I’d bet yes.

prostate gait, drowned in vinegar, the stamp of authenticity

2009-07-29T00:03:00.002-05:00

1. Every five minutes another old guy leaves the urologist’s office, sometimes joining a gray-haired wife, sometimes exiting alone, a cotton ball bandage in the crook of his elbow, walking stiffly and a little bent forward.

2. Three gnats have drowned in the vinegar cruet -- sweet seductive vinegar. I empty it into the sink and fold a small square of aluminum foil over the conical metal cap to block the hole. No one will know.

3. Philip K. Dick says, “Any seeming reality that is obliging…is something to suspect. The hallmark of the fraudulent is that it becomes what you would like it to be.” Disappointment, he says, is “the stamp of authenticity.” As I type the quotations, my shoulders convulse with a chill: though I am alone tonight, I imagined there was a child in the room and I was reading him those words.

heavy bag, big word, O incomparable Shade

2009-07-27T23:50:00.003-05:00

1. I bring the whole equipage to the café: laptop with power cord and mouse, notebook for observations, notebook for The Work of Byron Katie, two pens, three books to read during computer breaks (The Divine Invasion, by Philip K. Dick; You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships, by Richard C. Schwartz; The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, by Addison and Steele. Oh, and the alternative weekly, for the movie schedules. Now which the hell do I open first?

2. I want to say that my carrying bag is edematous, but I won’t. Leave that to the literary types.

3. I got the last shady parking space in the lot!

simple, small, maybe

2009-07-26T08:31:00.001-05:00

1. I like simple things. Japanese brush painting. Early Hemingway. Three-chord songs. Art turned down so much it explodes. I suspect that not only will I never achieve it, but that given my personality, my history, my aptitudes and limitations and environment, my neural wiring, it’s exactly the wrong goal.

2. Or maybe I’m a born miniaturist.

3. Maybe.

I’ll notice, about the author, curse the door

2009-07-24T18:10:00.003-05:00

1. Cleaning and trimming an old post, not because anyone will notice, but because I will.

2. I’ll never have one of those About the Authors that says I was a cab driver, a stevedore, a dog walker, a bond trader, and a numbers runner before I hit it big. Every dollar I’ve earned as an adult, I’ve earned with my pen.

3. Glancing at a book on Shakespeare, I read that when we today stub our toe on a door, we say, “Shit!”, but when the Elizabethans stubbed their toes on a door, they cursed the door, the wood it was made from, the sawyer who sawed the wood, the tree the wood came from, and the acorn that grew into the tree. That’s why they were them, and we’re us.

2009-07-23T10:04:00.003-05:00

Well if Ann can say in a recent post, "Sorry, I'm too tired to provide any commentary," I feel let off the hook from not blogging in a while. I'd rather give you a blank page for a half-week or so than something I don't care about. See you soon!

Asheville Joy

2009-07-19T08:13:00.003-05:00

Hi, I'm in Asheville, NC, having, as I often do, the time of my life. Everybody's here: Steve, Lynne, Andy, Chris, Chris, John, Danielle, Ann, Meade, Mike, James -- and Ken, who had to leave early -- and Agents 95 and 97. Almost everybody...there's always someone I'd want to add, to make what's complete more complete.

This is the first time I've looked at a computer in three days, and the reason I opened it up this morning was to see the photos Ann posted of some of our group. (And this one of herself.) Ann and John are excellent nonprofessional photographers and Lynne's an excellent professional one, so we've got people snapping away like mad, taking pictures of each other taking pictures, and memorializing how lucky I am to belong to this loving, welcoming, sparkling, comical, brilliant family who are helping create the new life of the world.

If more photos show up I'll direct you to their locations. Right now I've got to go have more fun!

A Brief Vacation

2009-07-15T09:24:00.002-05:00

Hi folks, I'm hitting the road from Thursday morning through next Monday night and may not be blogging during that time. Talk to you later!

Love,
Richard

heat indicator, taco vans, patient hunchback

2009-07-14T16:25:00.002-05:00

1. A tough-looking young black man in a white T-shirt carries a parasol as he walks through a mile of heat shimmer alongside the new mall and over the highway bridge.

2. There are so many taco vans in Austin that there’s a repair shop dedicated to them.

3. I often see him sitting at the bus stop near the supermarket with a couple of plastic grocery bags on the ground beside him. He’s about three and a half feet tall, spindly arms and legs, one shoulder much lower than the other. He half-sits against the telephone pole, fitting into its skinny shadow. He doesn’t pop up and crane his head to see if the bus is coming, as I would. He seems comfortable and extremely patient. But then he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?

Ender, What Do You Present As?, Bargain

2009-07-12T11:35:00.012-05:00

1. An Asian-American guy in his twenties, lime-green preppie shirt, shorts, black-rimmed glasses, is at the last twenty pages or so of Ender's Game*, avidly turning pages while his girlfriend, across the table, works at her laptop. He's shaking his head to himself as he nears the last page. He's at the part where the generals are cheering and weeping and Ender doesn't understand why. I'm waiting for him to get up and go to the bathroom after he finishes, so I can say as he passes, "That's a hell of a book."

*Plot summary at this link contains spoiler.

2. I'm thinking of using the medical "presents as..." locution when I talk about people I encounter. "She presents as cropped blond hair, a pink thrift-shop blouse with a white lace collar, and the beginning of a pot belly." "He presents as three-day whiskers, microbrewed beer, and flipflops."

3. The guy standing at the highway intersection presents as a cardboard sign saying, "ON THE ROAD -- HUNGRY." He's about sixty, collarbone-length gray beard, dusty broken-in backpack, black baseball cap that, when he takes it off to thank me for for my dollar, reveals a bald head. "How long do you stand out here on a day like this?" I ask. It's ten-thirty in the morning and well into the 90s. He says, "I can only take it for about thirty minutes, then I go inside somewhere, get some water and something to eat. I try to get three meals a day. I go to Wendy's and get one of those dollar burgers." "A double stack! That's the best!" I say from considerable experience. Two dollars for a satisfying lunch if you're on the go and starting to shake from low blood sugar.

In writerly fashion, I imagine inviting him for a meal and paying him for his life story. My stream of consciousness rolls on as I drive away: I'm asking him how well he does in his line of work, and a bystander is asking, "What do you mean line of work?" "He works as hard as me," I say. Bystander: "But he doesn't make anything. He doesn't create wealth, he just takes." As so often happens in my fantasies, I correct an ignoramus' misconception: "He makes you feel good when you give him something. You'll go about your day in a better mood and treat people kinder. It's a bargain at one dollar. He's a teacher."

great deleted scenes, oracular arts and crafts, anniversary price tag

2009-07-10T23:44:00.004-05:00

1. Finally watching a movie you’ve been putting off mistrustfully, and loving it so much you watch all the special features and deleted scenes.

2. Attending a show of crafts the kids made in summer camp: seeing the life they live when you’re not there, the aptitudes they didn’t know they had last month, the memories they’ll have fifty years from now, the roads they’ll go on their own.

3. Unplanned anniversary celebration with a former love: no gifts, no flowers, much laughter and free-hearted talk.

your friend the brain, it’s the arts, it’s all a conspiracy

2009-07-09T07:49:00.001-05:00

1. The human brain has no delete function, yet there has never been a case of one running out of storage capacity.

2. Stories are an attempt to see the future. Music is an attempt to undo time. Painting is an attempt to unfold space.

3. Society is a vast conspiracy to miss the point. But that may be the only way we can get where we’re going.

Bibliotherapy

2009-07-07T09:48:00.000-05:00

When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them. When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined.

They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates.

the last inexplicable fact in the universe, recipe for iced coffee concentrate, the ultimate secret revealed

2009-07-06T11:13:00.003-05:00

1. Sales of cake are steady year-round, but sales of pie spike around Thanksgiving and again in late February. Why late February? No one knows.

2. Why did the laws of physics arrange it so that a pound of coffee steeped in a gallon of water for twelve to sixteen hours will produce a perfect iced-coffee concentrate? The units of measurement aren’t even metric.

3. Three o'clock: the grandfather clock's chimes harmonize perfectly with the indie-rock song on the speakers – and by “harmonize perfectly” I mean with a charming slight dissonance. The singer goes:

Last night I had the strangest dream
Where everything was exactly how it seemed.

How rare it is to grasp this truth!

Outdoor Shakespeare, Eavesdropper's Heaven, Walker's Paradise

2009-07-02T15:54:00.002-05:00

1. From the Times review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound, in Connecticut: “The audience’s enthusiasm is particularly infectious when children are present, excitedly feeding off the bouncy moments of comedy. I overheard one thrilled youngster burbling happily about having run into Puck while going on an ice cream run. Perhaps a lifelong theater lover was born in that moment.” Sweet!

2. John and Danielle are on vacation in New York. Maybe they'll get some good eavesdropping.

3. My current neighborhood in Austin has a walkability score of 45 out of 100 –- “car-dependent.” Alas, I agree. My previous Austin address gets a 77 – “very walkable.” Yeah, by American standards, I guess. The street on which I grew up in the Bronx only gets a 78, probably because of low socio-economic standing, but anyone who thinks it’s a mere one point more than any street is Austin is effing crazy; it was a 98 if you ask me. The street on which I lived in Greenwich Village from 1977 to 1979 (scroll down to Ann’s second comment) gets 100 out of 100 – “walker’s paradise.” Extremely true; from that corner you could walk between the worlds. (h/t JAC)

African plans, macrobiotics, white bread

2009-07-02T05:35:00.002-05:00

1. I look into flights and immunizations for my autumn trip to Africa.

2. After a long workout I take myself to dinner at the all-you-can-eat macrobiotic restaurant, Casa de Luz. Sweet potato soup, aduki beans and brown rice, steamed zucchini with walnut kombu miso sauce, blanched greens, daikon, beet-and-carrot cornmeal pie, urns of twig tea. You can eat an infinite amount of that stuff and not gain weight.

It’s in a little Central American-looking complex of meditation rooms and yoga rooms and a preschool. Tropical trees shield a narrow red-cobbled walk and an assortment of sitting nooks. A pomegranate tree; banana leaves; notice boards; a black stone statuette of an elephant god; an oak draped with tiny antiqued lampshades. A blond-haired little brother and sister –- her name, inevitably, is Zoe –- argue in the most reasonable polite tones about how to break a stalk from the carefully groomed stand of bamboo.

The dining room is like an audition hall for roles requiring tall, lean, healthy, pink people. A few tall gray stoop-shouldered ones lurk around hoping against hope for callbacks. Multigeneration families discuss meaningful issues; strangers venture conversation at communal tables; regulars rush to hug hello. The tall pink waiter with the unchanging minimal smile makes sure not to be accusable of impatience when I ask him to explain the food-ordering system. He has embraced silence but sometimes acknowledges a spiritual duty to interrupt it for a customer.

By the window sit a group of unrelated adults, a class in some meritorious subject. Two of them, a white-haired man and a sexy fortyish brunette, stand and bow repeatedly to the setting sun through the window, clap three times, and thank each other very much. Later everyone in the group sits with their right arm extended in midair.

The studenty foursome at my table wonder aloud about the arm-raisers, and reminisce about a convenience store in Lafayette, Louisiana that serves immense magnificent delicious po’boy sandwiches piled with oysters and dripping with mayonnaise. I could use one myself. The most memorable of the four, short and wiry, Appalachian-looking, visually out of place here, wearing a half-grown beard and a green gimme cap, talks about his travels with a landscape crew digging gardens for the wealthy. The inexplicable competitive lust to outdo one’s neighbor’s plants. He and his friends fantasize about a plot of land they’ve seen for sale, almost seven acres with an unlivable 1920s farmhouse, just outside the city, for $110,000, but who can get that kind of money?

I’m practicing taking surreptitious notes. I’ve got a science fiction novel open and am apparently recording my insights about it. I stare off at the ceiling with intense detachment while hanging onto the voices here beside me. I open and close my notebook at unpredictable intervals as if inspired by shuddering fancies all my own.

The fools! Little do they know I have captured their dreams.

3. Home, I allow myself to eat packaged white bread, which I keep only for my children. The sky doesn’t fall.

Bergman vs. Fellini: Rematch of the Gladiators

2009-06-30T09:10:00.002-05:00

I met my project deadline a couple of hours early; it’s 97 degrees outside, six degrees cooler than yesterday; I’m shutting the blinds and putting on Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, followed by Fellini’s Variety Lights. Two early b/w films by masters, both of them about young women who fall in with troupes of third-rate traveling entertainers.

My verdict: Bergman by a mile.

The Fellini is a charming, involving (largely because of its starry-eyed brunette ingenue, Carla del Poggio, and her rival for love, Giulietta Masina) tragicomedy about performers deluding themselves in work and love, and about the squalid and ritzy sides of Rome, which Fellini always describes with such zest and affection. The themes are true and almost too recognizable –- there’s a fair amount of All About Eve, some of The Blue Angel, a lot of smile-making ethnographic portraiture, and pleasure in the beauty of ugliness –- and we finish the movie feeling tenderness for characters who, whether they’ve won or lost in worldly terms, are traveling on a train they’ll never get off.

Visually, the film, which Fellini only co-directed, but conceived and co-wrote, is apprentice work: it’s almost all straight montage, very little camera movement, and what there is seeming tentative, studenty, no hint of the extravagant, comically startling swoops and pans of the mature Fellini.

Sawdust and Tinsel is on a whole other level of art. The fact that it’s considered one of the director’s minor works, made before his breakthrough with Smiles of a Summer Night, is a comment in itself. Most other directors would die happy if they made one film of this quality.

Many of the themes of Variety Lights are visible here too: a traveling performing company is a wonderful metaphor for life’s journey of pretense and attempted escape. Once again there’s a magnetically sexy young female lead (Harriet Andersson) and an aging manager clinging to false hopes despite repeated betrayal.

But there’s a profound understanding here which is manifest in the treatment of the characters. The manager isn’t just a foolish would-be lover; he’s torn in every direction, clinging to a love he knows is shabby, jealousy rejecting her, bullying and being beaten at his own game; itching to escape his circus, trying to sabotage it, ultimately accepting his small portion of life with a grudgingness that can’t quite conceal blessedness. Every look in his eye reveals a thought-out complexity. The young woman is not just grasping or faintly conflicted; she’s kind and unkind, haughty and humiliated, and her mistakes come from fighting for her life. The triangular relationship with the manager’s wife isn’t schematic; details and subtleties, ambivalences, give it actuality and dimension. (Is it that Swedes are just more serious, that Swedish actors are better?)

Sawdust and Tinsel is stylistically masterful by any standard. Already there are the beautiful landscapes of The Seventh Seal, with slow-moving horse-drawn wagons enlivening the sharp ridge under the gray sky. The film progresses by means of set pieces, such as a Felliniesque (before Fellini was doing it) seaside striptease before an entire company of soldiers by an aging sexpot, shot silent-movie-style, which comic interlude rises to the pity and awe of tragedy when her husband, in full clown costume, comes to rescue her. The ending keeps us guessing among a few obvious alternatives, but it combines them in a way that evokes the “Ahh” of the just-right. These performers’ journey is touched by the numinous. It’s in their faces and in the airy chiaroscuro surrounding their wagons and their silhouetted walking figures.

Amazingly, this film received bad reviews when it was released in 1953; one prominent Swedish critic called it "a piece of vomit."

In the little interview that’s a special feature on the DVD, Bergman says, “It’s a good movie”; he says he has a soft spot for it. If you’ve made Wild Strawberries and Cries and Whispers afterward, I guess that’s a fair assessment.

Old Settlers, New Family, Stupid Uniform

2009-06-28T23:00:00.004-05:00

1. In the old cemetery, the names on some of the gravestones are the names of streets in town. On one tilted, weathered brown stone the name “Ulit” is carved. What an unusual name, I think. Within half a mile I come to Ulit Street.

2. Sitting side by side on the hood of their pickup truck in the dirt front yard, the young wife leans onto her husband’s arm to point to something in the scrapbook open on his lap. Their young son and daughter are sitting on the ground, playing, laughing. Two pairs, two levels, inseparable.

3. I hate wearing the white martial arts tunic with its patches and green piping. It makes a false claim about me, I cringe at what people must think; whether positive or negative, it’s bogus either way. Then, as I walk out the front door, the little kids across the street call out, “Nice suit!”

How to Get Lucky

2009-06-26T16:12:00.003-05:00

As one who'd like to get lucky someday, my attention was drawn to this teaser on the cover of the August issue of Psychology Today:

"Four Traits of Lucky People.

Then I decided I could write the article without having to read it. Here were my predictions:

1. They work hard but take vacations.

2. They learn from their mistakes/ don’t let failure get them down.

3. They associate with successful, positive people.

4. They’re oriented to process, not results.

The actuality:

1. Break routine – meet new people, walk a different route to work, etc etc.

2. Turn bad into good – “if something upsetting happens consider how it could have been worse, and try to draw something positive from it.

3. Follow your gut -- “decisions informed by intuition often produce happier outcomes.”

4. Look up – “positive expectations are often self-fulfilling because they increase motivation and persistence.”

I got 100%! That’s because I’m looking up.

Shades of blue creativity...

Flowered Van, New Tire, Who’s There?

2009-06-26T08:28:00.001-05:00

1. An old blue van painted with huge yellow and red flowers drives by the café window: it’s my kids' day camp van! They’re going to their lives.

2. Suddenly there’s a scent of clean rubber in the coffeehouse. I look around -– a student walks by, a new bicycle tire slung over his shoulder.

3. Unlocking my front door, I accidentally press the doorbell. Hearing it ring inside, I tense up and wonder, “Who’s there?”

You Asked, "What's on the Clearance Rack at Half-Price Books?"

2009-06-22T23:15:00.004-05:00

• This Book Will Get You Laid –- why aren't readers rushing to show this title at the cashier’s stand?

• Medical Abbreviations: 24,000 Conveniences at the Expense of Communications and Safety, 11th edition -– including such dread ailments as:

DWW – dynamic wall walk
RTS –- raised toilet seat
MPO -– male-pattern obesity
PMZ -– postmenopausal zest

• Business Polish Glossary -- so I’m making an ethic joke, so sue me! It's not even on Amazon -- do you realize how hard that is to achieve?

• Ultimate Tailgater’s Big 12 Handbook -- all the potential readers bought six-packs instead

• C. C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America -– the saga of the "bunion derby" -- what the publishers forgot was that their customers are people who spend most of their lives sitting comfortably in chairs

• Enola Gay: The Bombing of Hiroshima –- this book will get you laid by a sociopathic World War II veteran

• Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks –- words fail me; and they consistently fail Stevie Nicks, too

• The Art of the Band T-Shirt -– would make a great twofer with the Stevie Nicks -- rock on!

• Ferrets for Dummies –- indispensable for “For Dummies” completists

and my favorite...I can't believe it isn't a bestseller...

• How to Tell If Your Boyfriend is the Antichrist (And If He Is, Should You Break Up with Him?) –- how to tell if your girlfriend is bad news: she’s reading this book

...but seriously, folks...

• Shakespeare's sonnets (you don't need a link for this, I hope)
• Virgil's Aeneid the high-tone new Robert Fagles translation -- however... Virgil ≠ Homer. I'd like to know how much of a bath Viking took on this one. It's the #60 seller among epic poems -- I didn't even know there were 60 epic poems.
• Pushkin: A Biography -- British of course, an award-winner by an Oxford don, it rightly sank in mid-Atlantic, for what true American cares about the greatest Russian poet?

...and one I'd really buy, if my tigers were still cubs:

• Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild

It's a Wise Child

2009-06-21T14:40:00.004-05:00

Whenever possible I pour drops of paternal wisdom into my children’s ear canals. This time I bought Agent 97 a copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens. Skimming it, I thought that many of its lessons would be useful for adults too, one of the good ones in the series rather than the useless pablum.

97 reads down the table of contents and responds to the chapter titles:

“’Don’t Throw Up on Your Friends!’ I wasn’t going to.

“’Don’t Sweat the Breakups’ I don’t have a girlfriend.

“’Practice Mental Aikido.’” (Snorts, doesn’t deign to reply.)

“’Avoid the Words “I Know” When Someone Is Talking”’ I already know that.

“’Check Out These Odds! (The Likelihood that Everyone Will Like You)’. Everyone does like me.

“’Get Out of the Emergency Lane.’ I don’t drive.

“’Be OK With Your Bad Hair Day.’ Every day is a bad hair day for me.”

I think he’s got it!

“I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

2009-06-20T08:53:00.002-05:00

I have loved this man since I was twelve, and I always will.

Contrast with another aged idol of my teens, who has a different set of values.

How to Tell You're in a Good Mood

2009-06-18T18:31:00.005-05:00

1. I’m envisioning trips I’ll take when my house is paid off in three years.

2. Utility crew’s tearing up the street in the blazing afternoon sun, and I think, “What a nice place to work, with the purple port-a-san under the long row of shady trees.”

3. I’m singing “The Golden Road” as I wander hither and yon in my limitless city.

Up From, or To, OCD

2009-06-18T11:43:00.002-05:00

1. I’ve stopped pressing the trip odometer back to zero when I fill the gas tank.

2. I rearranged my silverware drawer. I used to have the large and small spoons in the same compartment and the large and small forks in two different compartments, but now I have the large and small spoons in two different compartments and the large and small forks in the same compartment. It’s more logical.

3. The usage “can’t help but” used to drive me up the wall, but yesterday I found it in Muriel Spark’s 1981 novel Loitering with Intent. I still don’t like it, but I no longer object: if it’s good enough for Muriel Spark, it’s good enough.

The Nanny Problem

2009-06-16T00:27:00.004-05:00

A little blond-haired boy, a toddler, is riding in a shopping cart facing his nanny, a young Japanese woman who is -- I cannot adequately convey this -- who is so beautiful that the peaches in the produce bin start leaking when she stops to consider them.

(Am I the only one who notices? Have miracles become so commonplace? The other shoppers are older women, they’re not going to give her an extra glance, and the two guys stacking endive in the corner are discussing the imminent arrival of a shipment of Holland tomatoes. This is a fancy store.)

She’s tall and slim in a cream-colored silk blouse with the cuffs folded above her wrists; two extraordinarily fortunate gold bracelets dangle on the left wrist knob. Ivory skin draws her eyelids tight toward wide cheekbones, and her black hair sweeps above one ear and down to the other shoulder. Utamaro would have made a famous series of prints of her.

The blond-haired boy, drinking milk from a sippie cup, looks right and left at this excellent world, but always his gaze returns to the center, to her. His clean white sneakers, bobbing, kick her softly in the tummy. She doesn’t object but doesn’t encourage. She’s absorbed in her employer’s shopping list. She’s attentive to the boy, she answers his two-syllable questions and offers him a sweet cracker from a box in her handbag, but she doesn’t baby-talk or burble or dandle.

With a calm smile she takes a delft-blue washcloth from the bag and wipes a tear-streak of milk from his chin. He grabs for it, and looks at it with wonder because she has touched it.

The poor little guy. He’s going to spend his whole life searching for her, and he’ll never see her like again.

Watching her push the cart to the checkout in her long flared cocoa-brown pants, I say to myself, “I want a nanny.”

Pruned Roses

2009-06-15T10:31:00.005-05:00

Pruned the rose bushes. Made me feel like Meade, only less skillful.

It was hot, but I shouldn't have worn shorts.

UPDATE:

Meade ripostes with this:

Pruned a poem of Richard's. Made me feel like me.

It was hot. That's the long and shorts of it.

Then he adds:

Pruned Richard's poem.
A koan co-Ann:
It was long and hot
but should I've shortened it?

I thought I was writing prose, but any time someone takes my prose for poetry, I won't complain.

Also I've changed the ex-title of this piece from "Bittersweet Roses," which was misleading, to my first idea, "Pruned Roses."

Agony Blogs -- Via Via

2009-06-14T10:22:00.004-05:00

Third and last blog recommendation for today: Via Negativa posts a whole list of what he calls agony blogs -- blogs that compile anecdotes of suffering, from the quirky to the misadventurous to the artistic to the schandenfreudenous to the "unnecessary" to the gloriously, gloriously New York.

And many more. They're all cruelly funny: the characteristic humor of our time.

Invaluable for the student of contemporary life. A goldmine for future historians.

Is hell exothermic or endothermic?

2009-06-14T09:58:00.003-05:00

Find the answer here. (Scroll down to the italicized section.)

When people recommend something to me as "hilarious," I'm usually disappointed, but this one is.

I'm enjoying linking to old-favorite blogfriends today. This one's Lucy at Box Elder, an Englishwoman who lives in Brittany with her husband and posts richly detailed descriptions and crisp bucolic photos of her travels through France.

"They know everything's bullshit. They find it funny, challenging, stimulating."

2009-06-14T09:14:00.004-05:00

My very good blogging friend True Ancestor only posts once in a celestial convergence these days, because in middle age he's attending the University of Chicago Divinity School -- an academic height that somewhat dizzies me -- but his first year has successfully ended and he's put up a couple of communiques which, true to form, are insightful and cogent and smoothly styled. His latest is a sharp-eyed, admiring portrait of fellow students who are a generation younger than him ("he," for you grammar fans).

He does something all good writers should: makes me want to be there. Also he makes me proud to have played a part in the raising of this generation. I recognize the portrait.

olfactory zones, jelly glass wine, cabaraoke

2009-06-14T08:23:00.004-05:00

1. Freestanding olfactory zones:
• the highway underpass intersection saturated with the stench of bat guano –- even blindfolded, I’d know where to turn onto the road for the gym
• the armpit of the men’s locker room -– a corner with a permanent funk of body odor when no one’s there
• the top shelf of my kitchen cupboard, amid the olive oil and vinegar and sesame oil and soy sauce, that always smells of lavender soap

2. Dinner: Australian shiraz in a jelly glass* – I opened the bottle a couple of days ago, it’s a little sour, Passovery – and pipe rigate with thawed meat sauce that I compiled incrementally from the leftovers of previous meat sauces. Fantastico!

3. In black block letters on the back of a yellow taxi: “CABARAOKE” -– a cab in which the passenger is encouraged to sing to a karaoke tape. I investigate no further.

*Bonne Maman brand invaluable for this purpose –- not only attractive glasses, but the best preserves

chocolate brown parasol, hot key, Tejano soldier

2009-06-12T17:23:00.004-05:00

1. Woman with a chocolate brown parasol, in a billowy white blouse, brown pants, tan leather handbag, walks past a half-built house with its pale tan walls, brown trim, half-exposed white drywall: a color scheme!

2. Getting out of my car on a June day, I put the key in my mouth as usual. It burns my lip.

3. The dusty old dark blue Ford Bronco has a bumper sticker: "My Brother Is in the Army."I pull up alongside at the light: its windows are open, Tejano music -- or is it conjunto -- is coming out: the worst music on the face of the earth! Oom-pah bass, polka-pumping accordion, jauntily would-be-seductive baritone. A horror beyond description! Is there anyone I don't owe my life to?

It's Okay to Read Stories

2009-06-12T13:45:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting on a bench in an empty outdoor amphitheater, reading my current favorite novelist, J. G. Farrell, when from behind me comes an exclamation:

"No, that's a bad choice!"

I turn around: it's a boy of about eleven or twelve reading a paperback of Brave New World. "Oh, God!" he calls out in dismay to the characters.

I'm reassured that there's a point in reading fiction other than to study the craft or keep reality at bay.

They say girls mature faster than boys, but...

2009-06-12T08:45:00.004-05:00

On the bus to day camp, the girls sing:

Found a peanut, found a peanut,
Found a peanut just now

and the boys sing:

I lost my virginity to the killer queen

Five Views of Highway 290

2009-06-10T12:39:00.002-05:00

Any writer worth his salt could make a career, à la Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, out of the “little postage stamp of native soil” between Dripping Springs and Fredericksburg surrounding Texas Highway 290 in the hill country. Back out of sight of the road, the whole range of human activity must be spread out, from first dates and church services to meth labs and murder.

1. Around Stonewall, there’s a peach stand just about every hundred yards, from Dutch-door shacks to full-size red barns and inn-like two-storey houses. Peaches in quart and peck baskets, pies, cobblers, ice cream, jam, salsa. The Stonewall Peach Jamboree is held every year on the third Saturday and Sunday in June. In recent years, vineyards have been growing up near the peach orchards, the hopeful new vines only a couple of feet high on their upright stakes, the ground sandy and bare. Are the peach growers and the vintners at each others’ throats like the cattlemen and sheep farmers of the Old West? Is there a song yet, “The grape man and the peach man should be friends”?

2. The historical resonances of the name Stonewall have changed through the years. Are the residents prepared?

3. The mascot of Stonewall Elementary School, on Peach Street, is a billie goat; the team is the Billie Kids. The Billie Kids! I could just hug them. (The school has a 76 rating on a scale of 100 among Texas schools.)In sharp contrast, Stonewall Elementary in Clear Brook, Virginia has the Wildcats.

4. Two camels graze on a roadside pasture. Raised for…what…milk? meat? camel’s hair coats? Shriner Circus rides for kids? roles in Arabian-adventure films? training for desert commandos? tax breaks?

5. Tierra Mañana –- Land of Tomorrow -– a gated community planned for the site of a former ranch. It’s got a big gorgeous gate with a sandstone wall, and a sign proclaiming seventeen lots with acreage and views; and there’s no evidence of dwelling sites or construction. Just fields and meadows of purple flowers, all with acreage and views.

“Most of our isolation is self-chosen.”

2009-06-07T20:01:00.004-05:00

A quotation from the French theologian Henri Nouwen.

Do you realize that this June’s the __th anniversary of my high school graduation? I’ll say it aloud: 40th. I intend to be continually stunned by numbers like this –- and even higher ones! -- for the next many, many years.

I went to a public high school for the gifted, and had a terrible time emotionally. It wasn’t the school’s fault or the teachers’ or my classmates’ or mine, either, it was just deep teenage blues, augmented by historical turmoil -- assassinations of father-figures, a trend for freakouts and literature-induced alienation -- that I took too much to heart. A high school made up almost exclusively of hippies and dorks, and I couldn’t tell whether I was both or neither. Adolescent males either act out or withdraw, and I was bred for the latter.

I've been staying away from that school for forty years. Never sent them my address, never got any reunion announcements.

But last week someone forwarded me a document, a file of capsule biographies my classmates have been submitting. About a hundred, out of a class of 980. I figured it was the most popular ones, or the nerdiest ones, who wrote them.

My instant reaction was, I'm not going to do that.

These people's careers have been pretty intimidating. One of us is now the director of theoretical physics at MIT. About half of the graduates who sent in their bios seem to be doctors or professors. One woman led the world’s foremost study on twins separated at birth. Another is the principal of an elementary school in Chinatown/Little Italy which she turned into one of New York City’s prize success stories, and where Bush and Giuliani held their press conference after 9/11. Many have made small or large fortunes in business. One sent in a genial report about how he wandered aimlessly through his twenties, following the Maharishi and so forth, and, by happenstance, ended up on the ground floor of the computer industry, helped develop “a bunch of new types of tech products including digital photography, advertiser supported email, healthcare information systems, information security technologies, advanced decision support methodologies and virtual world media services,” and now pursues photography. One of us is a jazz musician who played with Miles Davis in the 70s. Another had his picture on the cover of Bass Player magazine. You get the idea.

Well, that’s okay, I can mask envy with pride, but what bothered me was that so many of them wrote things like, “My lovely wife of thirty years and I have been living in Boston since I became partner at Smith, Jones...” “I met X, the love of my life, in Drama Club when he was a junior and I was a sophomore…”

How did they do it? Did they study hard for marriage they way they did for math tests? They’ve gotten all A’s in life. (One of them, in his bio, recounts how he got a 90 in his first high school test and the girl next to him, who’d gotten 100, sympathetically asked him what had gone wrong.) (I did okay, I got an A-minus average by showing up.)

When I read those bios, feelings of inferiority overwhelmed in a way I’d thought I’d outgrown. I wasn’t one of these people; I didn’t belong; they were more fortunate than me; they didn’t know I existed. I recognized lots of their names –- they were people I hadn’t dared speak to back then, because if they were male they were too hip, and if they were female they were too pretty, and in both cases too popular, too urban-mature.

I was sixteen again, in the worst way. And I wasn’t going to send them my stupid bio, I wasn’t going to be like them, nor was I going to send it in just to be snubbed by them either, look how self-satisfied they all were, everybody doing things perfectly in the same way. I’d send in a sarcastic bio, I’d tell them off, it would be the only one that didn’t comply with their format, and they wouldn’t know what to do with me, they’d ignore me and that would prove I was above them…

I read the bios again, to verify how dull and conventional they were -– and they weren’t. These were fine people, living skillfully and well –- they even wrote well. They liked each other and might be willing to like me. Most of them wouldn’t remember me at all; some might recall my name vaguely; but I wanted to know how their plots had turned out; I wanted to do what I’d never deigned to in high school -- learn from them.

I wasn’t sixteen anymore, thank God.

The most dazzling surprises in my life have occurred when, against all my preconceptions, I could no longer avoid seeing that people sought my friendship, that I had something to contribute to a relationship. That realization has been such discomfiting good news, I haven’t been able to surrender to it until it’s hit me again and again and again.

The lessons we most need to learn are the ones we’ve already learned.

I sent in my little bio, and it’s just like everyone else’s, not cleverer or more iconoclastic, not duller or more humdrum, either. It’s a genre piece. Its life comes from it species, it doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t have a mutant’s conceit. All it might be is an exorcism for the haunted classroom of my past.

Virtual Car Wash: A Stopgap Post

2009-06-07T09:43:00.003-05:00

"Hey, Agent 97, are you still interested in washing my car?"

(transfixed by game screen) "No."

"Are you interested in washing your Sims family's car?"

"Yes."

Dream Clips: bus breast, zoo swim, plate tectonics, undersea flight

2009-06-05T08:22:00.005-05:00

Naked, I’m the sole rider on a bus driven by an old girlfriend of mine. As we talk, the bus becomes a giant breast, and I settle in comfortably.

--------------------------

I’m the only one who knows that the zoo animals are threatened by terrorism. Sensing the danger, I sneak into the locker room so I can stay in the zoo swimming pool overnight, when it’s closed, and protect the aquatic animals. But the security guards think I’m the terrorist, and I have to evade them.

--------------------------

I’m supposed to fill out a form for my kids’ school, stating our past and present locations, but I can’t because in the time we’ve moved, the continents have shifted.

--------------------------

I’m walking and leaping in an underwater landscape: meadows, gullies, mazelike hedges of sea fronds which I swim through and over. Just when I get clear of the vegetation, I come upon a building-size battleship-gray fish, its face all lumps and bumps and swollen lips and steel whiskers, waiting to attack me. I leap upward and fly through the water as the fish chases me over a Western prairie landscape of purple flowers and rugged valleys. Racing easily, I stay a body’s-length ahead of the horrendous fish, teasing it, and whenever its jaws snap too close I surge just far enough ahead to get out of harm’s way. It’s the pure joy of risk.

Rags, Cupcakes, Carousels

2009-06-03T21:15:00.002-05:00

I must have been born in the last decade –- the Fifties –- when you could hear a ragman crying his wares on the streets of New York. And our ragman must have been one of the last to keep to his rounds rather than to be settled into a retirement home by successful offspring, or evaporate into the fumes of the street along with the garbage and gasoline.

What he cried out was, “I cash clothes! I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

One jabbing note in a ringing nasal tenor that echoed metallically from the fire escapes, repeated down block after city block. He came around in the morning every few weeks -- must have walked a big circuit through the Bronx, spanning the neighborhoods, crossing the ethnic groups, returning to our street periodically. I was less than school age, to be home at that time. In my memory of his voice, the day is sunny, it’s spring, and a streetsweeper has just passed, leaving a neat swirl of gray dust behind him, his broom resting upended in his cart: he too a circler of neighborhoods on some esoteric calendrical orbit.

“I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

His voice chilled me as delightfully as a ghost story. I rarely caught a glimpse of him -– a gray-haired man with a nose as sharp as his voice –- and even more rarely saw anyone conduct business with him. Sometimes a housewife would rush down and to catch him before he left the block, some old shirts in her hand, and receive what?, some coins, a dollar bill? Maybe the older housewives rushed down to reminisce with him about the Lower East Side in the Depression, their glory days.

I couldn’t fathom what he was doing or why. I asked my mother about it and her answer smacked of the subterranean, of sorcery performed in alleys and sewers: he went around asking people for their old clothes, and he paid them for the clothes, and somehow he earned his living by paying them. She might have hastily added that he resold the clothes –- hastily because she assumed, correctly, that I wouldn’t understand; but buying things from some people in order to sell them to others –- and such cheap things too, things no one I knew wanted –- hardly sounded like a believable way of earning a living. In my experience, parents, aunts, and uncles all earned their livings from the civil service, safe and predictable.

The years of street vendors. There was a knife-sharpener too, another occupation that absolutely stumped me. My mother sharpened her knives once in a blue moon on a little wheel of rough metal that she kept in a kitchen drawer. A man wandered the streets begging for acceptance as a substitute for that?

The ones I understood were the food vendors. The truck from Dugan’s Bakery, from which we only bought flat-topped yellow cupcakes spread with smooth fudgy chocolate. The two competing ice cream companies, Good Humor and Bungalow Bar, in trucks and hand-pushed carts: Good Humor daring us its avant-garde flavors of banana split and strawberry shortcake, but Bungalow Bar kindly offering my favorite, the chocolate malted popsicle. Sometimes, infrequently enough to always be a surprise, a carousel truck came by, with sides and roof of rusty orange wire and a bullhorn playing brain-grinding merry-go-round music, us little kids jumping down the apartment building steps and thronging the driver, quarters in hand. Then there were trucks my parents never bought from, though I pleaded: the seltzer truck with its wood crates full of blue siphon bottles; the dairy delivery man with milk, eggs, butter. My mother had her worldview down pat: seltzer delivery was for other families.

I didn’t notice when the ragman stopped coming around. And the delivery trucks disappeared gradually, probably into my college years, though there's been a mild fizzy trickle of retro seltzer delivery in recent years, staking out a route for customers who’ve heard of such things from their grandparents. Oh, no, there's one that delivers to Marin County -- and wouldn't you know it, seltzer delivery helps the environment!

Right now, I’d like a Dugan’s cupcake and a Bungalow Bar chocolate malted popsicle, melting all down my fingers.