С Новым годом

It seems to me that sooner or later every regular blog includes a post about the blog. For this blog, that sooner or later is today.

In September 2009 I decided to post a blog about the death of Ted Kennedy. And then I wrote another, and then I started trolling around here and there for photographs. Then I discovered, much to my surprise, that I had forgotten how much I truly enjoy writing, and by that I mean putting words to a thought or emotion or impulse with zero regard for the audience. That’s the exact opposite of my job, which requires me to write focused exclusively on the audience, with the goal of inspiring the purchase what’s being sold by whomever is paying me to write what they want written. In other words, it’s not writing at all – it’s typing. Writing this blog is another matter entirely. I write for the satisfaction of it, I write to express opinions without having to be polite about it, I write for a certain measure of therapy. It’s a self-centered enterprise, with very little thought given to who might be reading.

But a few months ago I happened across a tool I had no idea existed: In the back room of the blogging program there’s an accessory that spews forth very specific numbers and charts and bar graphs based on who drops in and when and from where. Even though I do not write with a specific audience in mind, I’d be lying if I said that I don’t find the statistics very interesting.

By a huge margin – and by that I mean several thousand – the most clicked upon or opened or read blog post is one I do not even recall writing. It’s about a city in Ohio whose basketball team had just lost a very, very celebrated player, a loss that had much of the sports world worked into a frenzy such that I thought the name of the basketball player had eclipsed the name of the city. After looking at the numbers I went back and read the post, which is one of my rambling odes to the glory of industrial cityscapes and the tragedy, I think, of elevating professional athletes to hero status. What’s truly strange is that the post doesn’t even mention the player by name, so how it caught on is a mystery to me. And it will remain so since I refuse to activate the comments function.

Another mystery pertains to the second most clicked upon or opened or read post. This mystery, for me, is more intriguing. The second most popular post in the history was about a very, very famous Russian author and a big, big book he wrote back in the 1850s. I posted it last fall, when my sisters and I were in the midst of reading that very long and very detailed book. A few months ago I discovered that not only had that post racked up some very impressive numbers but that it also altered the readership of this blog.

To this day, most of those who visit this blog do so on computers – or mobile phones perhaps – that are located in Russia. That baffles me, of course, but I do have three scenarios.

The first is that they’re Internet hackers. According to what I’ve heard and read, it’s something of a golden age of hacking over there in Russia and in countries that were once part of the big union. So perhaps every time their computers pick up a specific word – the author’s name, for example, especially when it’s in the headline – thousands of people either have a look themselves or use computers that are instructed to do so on their behalf. Of course, it’s odd that they’d continue reading, or monitoring. Anyhow, that’s my least favorite scenario.

The second is a bit more to my liking: The Russians remain deeply committed to and deeply in love with the author. Maybe people have their computers set to search for his name as a key word. Maybe people are conducting research for dissertations and on the lookout for something – anything – that testifies to the author’s power to transcend time itself. Or perhaps someone had a few hours to spare and was clicking around here and there on a cold and lonely afternoon on the eve of a Russian winter, when she (I do think of this person as she for some reason) came across a topic with which she was on intimate terms. And perhaps she forwarded it, and, to borrow the phrase of the author, so on and so forth.

Here’s my third scenario. The name of the author in the subject line prompted the blog to be picked up by various individuals and groups who are learning English. A simple forwarded e-mail that said, Look, here’s something about Tolstoy morphed into regular readership as a means of experiencing a regular dose of the language they’re learning in a more conversational rendition. That’s pure fantasy, of course, and it’s therefore not only my favorite of the three scenarios but the one I’m sticking with.

Public grief

I had some plan-free time last Monday evening so I turned on the television. I didn’t want to watch the local news so, since it was almost 5:30, I tuned in to ABC. I know I bitch too much about the clowns who host the network programs, but even NPR – NPR! – routinely trashes Diane Sawyer. I’ve only witnessed her particular brand of maudlin once, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. As I said, I had a bit of time on my hands.

It turned out she was off for the evening, so I watched a few minutes of George Stephenopolus attempting to put sense to the world. I didn’t get past the first story.

Which is that the leader, dictator, czar – whatever he is, or was – of North Korea has died. The first words out of George’s mouth weren’t that Kim etc. etc. had died, which I already knew, but that thousands (28,000 was the figure, I believe) of “American troops” stationed in South Korea are now within less than 100 miles of North Korea’s nuclear might.

I have a few questions. First and foremost, why are so many military personnel from this country doing in South Korea? Advising? Consulting? Waiting? Provoking?

That issue was not addressed, or even mentioned. I’m also curious to know if the death of the country’s dictator put the troops closer to the arsenal that waits across the border separating north from south than they were before his death. When he died over the weekend, was the launching equipment moved, or did the troops move, or both, or neither?

This question was partially answered by one of the correspondent’s, who expressed the nervousness over Kim etc. etc.’s successor, who is his youngest son. He’s still in his twenties, so the story goes, so nobody is certain whether or not he’ll feel obligated to prove himself. I guess the next logical step in that uncertainty would be to volley a few nukes toward the concentration of U.S. citizens that is, for some reason, stationed less than 100 miles away. And I suppose we should all be alarmed. And nervous.

The best part, though –and by that I mean the most offensive – was yet to come. In addition to providing many opportunities to hear an sh inserted into the word peninsula, the quick montage of footage used as a setup for the first correspondent’s report would lead you to believe that everyone in North Korea was so devastated by the passing of the leader that speaking coherently and clearly was impossible. Here’s a news anchor, weeping her way through the announcement of his sudden and unexpected passing. Here are thousands of people on the streets, crying, shrieking, mourning in the most public way imaginable. And here’s a woman holding up a newspaper and wailing that she’s not sure how she’s going to endure this loss “because he loved us all so much.”

The correspondent summed it up beautifully. This is a forced display of public grief, she proclaimed in the most openly mocking tone I’ve ever heard on a program that presents itself as the news. I know nothing of the people or culture of North Korea. I think their military march style looks nutty, not to mention overtly hostile and vaguely creepy, which I’d guess is exactly how it’s intended. But at least when they cry in public it’s over a politician, someone who for better or worse actually matters to the country. Back home, of course, we reserve that sort of thing for people like Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods.

Winter colors

It’s been an unusual December in Portland. While I love the atmospherics around here, I’m sorry to admit that the last two winters have been a bit much for me. When I say I like the winter rains, what I mean is that I like the constantly shifting sky, the dazzling ballet of light in response to gigantic cloud banks coasting across the horizon, the mist, the drizzle, the shimmering silver air of winter mornings. I do not mean downpours that last for days. I do not mean the seemingly relentless winds that cause my entire house to shake and groan.

So this December has been a gift of sorts. The week of Thanksgiving it poured, and poured, and poured some more. One day a record was broken and reset. And I thought, I am not entirely convinced that I have what it takes to endure five, six, seven, eight months of this. The morning after Thanksgiving I bolted out of here and caught a bus to a credit union branch that’s not too far from my house and where I have deposit privileges, only to find that the place was closed that day. My irritation lasted only a second or two. It was clear and cold. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. I went back to the corner to wait for the next bus for downtown, where I had some business to tend to, and thought: I’ll gladly wait here all morning. I even smiled and waved at a few vehicles as they sped past, roaring toward the mall named in honor of an interstate highway.

Sometimes when I blink my eyes I see little shooting, comet-shaped slivers for an instant afterward. Sometimes I enjoy this so much that I blink more rapidly than usual. Usually these slivers are sort of gold, or silver with a heavy dose of tan, or beige, or cream. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I sat down on my couch to read one afternoon. Two of the windows in my living room face south, and the sunlight pouring in as I sat there, the brilliance of the blue sky punctuated only by the black bare branches that announce winter like nothing else, all of it made me feel I might just be in another time zone. I blinked my eyes and what was left behind in my vision – the residue, I suppose you could call it – was not silver or gold but the most pleasant shade of blue I’ve ever experienced. It was blue with a very precise dosage of green. It wasn’t what I’d call light blue, but it had a lightness to it. Sign number one of a brain tumor taking hold, I thought. Or perhaps a holiday greeting from my long-gone grandmother. It was from her that I inherited my love of blue, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been searching for her blue dishes for decades now, and I’ve yet to find them.

The fig tree out in my side yard is doing weird things this year. This past summer, and the summer before, the fruit appeared in the spring, as it always does, but then the late-season cold and wet threw it off course. I think the people who come by in the fall with baskets and pick figs must have kept going this year because what they picked the year before was probably not good. At any rate, the leaves fell. Hundreds are composting beautifully in the yard and hundreds more have gone with the breeze. The branches are bare of leaves but the figs remain. They remind me Brussels sprouts display at the grocery store, still on their stalks.

I decided to attempt hanging lights outside this year not long ago, early on a bright and sunny December afternoon. There are electrical considerations – as there always are in this house – but I was on the enclosed porch out back, doing my business, and out of the corner of my eye, through the south-facing window, the sun was striking a bead of moisture on top of one of the figs, which wasn’t swaying in the breeze exactly, but was moving just enough to cause the sun-captured droplet to appear to be spinning. And it was a bright, bright shade of green, almost piercing. Emerald, I suppose you would call it. For what felt like many minutes I just stared out the window, and by the time I came inside, the inclination toward bright lights this time of year made perfect sense to me. Natural, you might even say.

Holiday mating

One night last week I fired up the candles in the bathroom, turned on the hot water and headed out to the little enclosed back porch right off my kitchen for a smoke. I took one drag, blew out a few smoke rings and that’s when I heard the rustling.

The area behind my house is a treacherous mishap of ill-advised fences, decaying trees, a little pond and bowls of cat food (next door), a roof that slopes down quite low, an overhang that I swear is one day going to hang so precariously that it will simply fall off the house, a shed that’s built onto the side of the house and, like many things that are a part of this structure that has my name on it, is just off enough to render the call of should it stay or should it go impossible to make. It does prevent people from creeping from the front of my house to the back, which is a mixed blessing. At the same time, the underside of it is completely open – I’ll be damned if I know why – so animals, particularly possums, have not only a nice route away from the light and danger of the street but a protected resting area as well. And the roof of the shed slopes upward in such a way that if you were a creature blessed with the ability to leap, it’s a nice springboard to the roof of the house. Best of all, it’s not quite wide of enough to at least serve the one purpose I’d like it to. To put the lawn mower away or take it out requires lifting the entire thing and turning it to the side and then squeezing through the door. I know I dramatize and overreact to almost everything, but each and every time I’ve hoisted the lawn mower in and out my thoughts have carried me back to the afternoon I signed the stack of papers for this house, and in my mind I picture myself quietly and wordlessly taking my cigarette lighter out of my front pocket and burning each and every one of them. I’d be happy to pay the fines.

The other night, there was more rustling, then a pause, followed by more. It was not a possum. Possums have the most impressive size-to-sound ratio of any creature I’ve encountered thus far. Perhaps a cat, I thought hopefully. Then I pressed my face to the door and there, peering around the corner of the house as it perched on the top of the shed, was a big furry shadow and two little bright eyes. Get the fuck out of here, I yelled, making enough of an impression that the animal withdrew its head and scampered on up to the corrugated metal that extends a few feet behind the house. And from there, to the roof.

I turned on every light in the house and turned the water off. Then I went out the front door and stood in the street for a better look. And there, along the fence behind the house next door was another moving mass of fur and behind that, in a lit window, the guy who lives in the house behind me walking back and forth, oblivious to the terror.

My neighbor, a friend of his and I ended up standing in the street just beyond the driveway we share, where we watched the two raccoons roll and shimmy up and down the western slope of my roof. “Ahhh,” my neighbor’s friend cooed, “they’re mating.” A few minutes later they jumped into the car and drove off to a holiday gathering – the loving had not lasted long, and once it was over the raccoons ambled off to tend to whatever business it is raccoons tend to. And I came back inside and resumed the running of the bath and enjoyed the remainder of the blessedly quiet and peaceful evening.

Love letters

Last Wednesday evening I watched the last episode in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, which I’ve been hearing about and meaning to watch since the early 1990s. I don’t usually go in for painfully detailed ponderings of and on battle strategies and troop movement and intricate maps with the names of generals and arrows and tiny triangles that I believe indicate hills.

There was plenty of that, to be sure, but there was plenty more as well. For starters, I cannot make up my mind about Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation seems to have been put forth out of convenience more than anything you might call moral or ethical. What’s interesting though is that the northern folks – they were the enlightened side, as we all know – objected to the proclamation strenuously when they realized that it had become the war’s centerpiece. So much so that there was quite a movement in support of pulling out of the war unless he cancelled it, to which Abraham Lincoln said, no. I’m not sure if I consider that heroic. I suppose it is decent, though.

That’s my anti-North slam. On the anti-South side, here’s a good one. Many Southerners who happened to be in New York City protested because, according to them, the war was hurting the south far more than it was hurting the north. And I thought that causing problems – such as basing an economy on the right to own other human beings – and then racing for and clenching the victim medal was something more of our era.

I was completely entranced in a way that even I found alarming by the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Walt Whitman wrote during the war that Lincoln’s face was so complex that it beckoned the talent of the portrait artists from two or three centuries before, but Lee’s face, man, someone nailed that one. And nicely. The care with which the surrender and the dignity on display from both sides was orchestrated and recorded was intriguing to me. There was something inherently civil about it, not the least of which was that Robert E. Lee, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, dressed for the occasion.

All of this, though, falls flat alongside what I thought were the stars of the show: The letters. They were so beautifully written and recalled a language that existed in a state of grace I’ve never known but have certainly dreamed of. I hit rewind many times so I that I could listen again, and in a couple of instances I listened three or four times.

I didn’t live in the era, of course, but from what I could tell the Civil War was debated and considered and reported in vivid detail in the newspapers. This may be due to geographical immediacy and the fact that there was more at stake. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that even though there were no computers or cell phones, it seems to me that people knew more of the world in which they lived. The number of dead that comes to mind is 800,000, a figure that – and pardon me for saying this – puts another, more recent national calamity into its proper perspective, and by that I mean makes it a shadow at best. And speaking of perspective, as coincidence would have it, I finished the series on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the CBS Evening News reported that the war in Iraq – the price tag of which is well over $800 billion – is indeed over. But it was the third story of the newscast, preceded by some new bipartisan come-to-Jesus monkey business about Medicare and word that the governor of Iowa isn’t sure that Newt Gingrich is suited for the presidency.

Bashing the balls

The other day my regularly scheduled meetings got cancelled. One, as usual, was cancelled moments before it was to begin; the other, a few hours in advance. I have a few projects going at the moment, and while there were many things I could have done to move each of them forward a tad, there was nothing pressing. And that’s my biggest shortcoming in this business: If I have six “urgent” things to do, I’ll do all six of them. If, on the other hand, I have two or three or four do-it-when-you-can tasks before me, I’ll drag those out as long as possible. I guess my confession here is that even though I routinely ridicule people who slather every interaction and project with a false sense of importance, I apparently abide.

Anyhow, since it was a very cold but very sunny morning, I decided to go do a little shopping. I was going to run out to Mall 205, which is a nice walk from my house, but I hate that place. I suppose I hate all malls, but this one, starting with the sad fact that it’s named after a highway, is especially nasty in my opinion. For those of you who have never been, it’s several acres of fat, mostly white people who channel their apparent anger into the way they command their oversized vehicles. If you are walking into or out of Mall 205 or, worse, riding a bicycle, get your ass out of the way.

So as I put the key into the door as I was leaving, standing there on my front porch it occurred to me that since I had no emergencies to tend to, why not take the train out to the Target store that sits on the edge of a big shopping spread close to the airport?

The mountains were out on full display. A jet with the word Continental painted on its tail sailed overhead, and I thought, Houston. The train glided almost silently along the tracks. Out the window, slightly below it, cars crawled along and they too were blessedly silent. My visit to Target began as it almost always does. I ordered nachos with cheese and jalapenos and sat on a stool, stuffing my mouth with garbage and looking out across the parking lot, where thousands of cars caught and gave back the rays of sunlight.

After the nachos, I wandered around a bit. I looked at the cloth-covered boxes for storing things and I looked at the selection of fancy skillets and I spent a while looking at the lights. Then, I wandered over to the men’s section to look for the main item I was shopping for – long underwear. The underwear section makes me horny. That’s really all there is to it. All that flesh, all those nice curves and hidden treasures, photographed. I’ve wondered, since a very young age, what goes through the minds of those holding the cameras and what goes through the minds of those holding onto other commodities. It’s a question I never tire of pondering.

And, as it always has, visits to the underwear section have something of a lasting impact. For a certain period of time, every male being I encounter after leaving that particular section is exactly the person I’ve dreamed of for decades. It’s the oddest thing, but it’s kind of fun, being flooded by fantasies that drove me to distraction as a hormone-addled teenager and that drive me to distraction still even though I have perhaps arrived in a demographic one could maybe label “dirty old man.” I loved crotch shots then and I love them now.

Which brings me to the checkout line. I placed my items on the belt. The attractive checker (everyone is attractive by that point) removed each of the two packages containing the long underwear, the shaving cream and razors and the strand of lights and looked at each, it seemed to me, with careful consideration. Then another attractive man (everyone is attractive by that point) came up behind me. I’d say he was 38 or so, really short hair, smoky eyes that were either deep green or brown, sweatshirt, jacket, jeans. He had a cart overflowing with shit, it being the season and all, and the first thing he put on the belt was a rectangular box, the top of which was a cellophane window. And the words, in big letters, on the side that was facing me: The Electronic Ball Basher. A toy, to be sure, I thought, and I thanked the clerk and he handed me my bag and I left.

Dysfunction

I became familiar with Barney Frank back in what I now think of as the Newsweek days. A magazine used to arrive in the mail, weekly, and in it there was news. This was before the innernets took over, before updates were posted on the so-called news sites every hour whether there was any new news or not, before every story included a link to a video, or a link to anything for that matter. I got to know Barney Frank through words that had been printed on paper, and I thought he was grand. An openly gay congressman. Holy shit.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my opinion of him has gone down steadily over the years. One of the reasons for this is that I thought his indignation over the financial crisis was not only absurd but insulting as well. Wasn’t he in charge of the committee that was supposed to be minding the nation’s piggy bank? But the main reason I’ve grown less fond of Barney Frank rather than more is that I do not like the way he comes across. When a reporter thanks him for his time at the beginning of an interview or thanks him for his time at the interview’s conclusion, Barney Frank all but grunts. He’s yappy, I think, but in a way that somehow incorporates the worst of smug. It’s a deadly combo, I think.

But man, he does have a certain flair for saying things that I’d imagine will end up in a collection of quotations at some point. There was the exchange at one of the town hall meetings on healthcare, when he responded to one attendee’s blathering by saying she appeared to have all the intelligence of a piece of furniture – a dining room table, I believe. And my personal favorite – responding to a right winger’s lame taunt that he needed to take an HIV test and share the results by saying that he’d be happy to do that once she shared the results of her IQ test. I loved that.

Last week was pretty good, too. On a sort of schmaltzy interview on the Newshour, Barney Frank was asked if he thought Congress was really dysfunctional. Rather than screw around with qualifiers, his response was to ask the interviewer – Judy Woodruff – how she supposed the people who are members of Congress got there. They didn’t parachute down through the dome on the Capitol building and take their seats as if by magic, he said. The U.S. voters elected one party in 2008, and two years later they elected another. So who, exactly, is dysfunctional? While that sort of response shouldn’t be noteworthy, unfortunately it is.

Mirrors and movies

Without really meaning to, I recently read two novels with Middle Eastern themes, settings and characters. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is an almost unbearably harsh tale of endurance as experienced through the eyes of two women whose lives are forced to adapt to the ever-shifting political and religious landscape in Afghanistan. Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam, paints an equally harsh picture of what it means to leave Pakistan but only in the physical sense. In both books, there are references – quite a few of them – to the wonders of Iranian cinema. Going to see an Iranian movie, I read over and over, was a vestige of sorts, a reprieve.

Which reminded me of the fondness for those films that struck my mother toward the end of her life. It was the strangest thing, hearing about aspects of my parents’ lives together, their habits and their preferences, that took hold after their children were grown and gone. During those conversations with my mother I had to remind myself that I was one of those children, grown and gone, and that she and her husband – my father – had embarked on an adventure or two that did not include me. One of their habits made me think my parents were … dating: They liked to go to the movies, and their favorite movies, my mother told me, were Iranian. In fact, she kept close tabs on the papers to find out when a new one was scheduled to come to town. One time I asked her some questions. Was it the location of production or the subject matter that drew her in? Both, she said. And what, I asked, is it that you like about those movies? Well, she said, they’re gorgeous.

I spoke with a friend of mine on Thanksgiving whose wife died earlier this year. As it happens, her wife and my mother carried through their lives the same, understatedly beautiful name. And as it also happens, her wife and my mother shared a fondness for the Iranian cinema.

So I was out and about the day after Thanksgiving, which was beautiful here, and I found myself at the book store – the big one – and I thought, certainly there must be …

Mirrors of the Unseen, which is not only a good title for a book but could also be a good title for the lives of both my mother and my friend’s beloved, is 400 pages of Jason Elliot’s ruminations on the Iran of then and the Iran of now. The focus, though, is much more on the then, and the then, on Iran’s calendar, is so vastly endless that centuries I’ve never even heard of are referenced so casually you’d swear they’d unfolded last summer and, at the same time, last summer is discussed as if that is what we mean when we say ancient history. The whole book was wonderfully upside-down that way.

I loved the book, personally. Jason Elliot’s main obsession – and you could watch it move in and take over, as if it were a disease, and perhaps it was – is the alignment of mosques to the spaces that surround them. As seen by the naked eye, many buildings seem to be out of synch with one another but are, in fact, “singing in a chorus of geometries.” [pg. 281]. That was interesting, I thought, as were his observations on how truly ancient Persian culture is and the prevalence of its influence on the world, much of which is credited to Europeans. Here’s a good one, specific to the U.S.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Although quite a bit of that is carved into the main post office in New York, it’s straight out of the fifth century (B.C.), when those words were used to describe Persia’s Achaemenid mail couriers.

The geometry is a springboard to the country’s love – and I mean love – of adornments that could be dismissed as mere decorations but that are, in fact, more riddles of geometry. Calligraphy, tile, textiles, beadwork and, my personal favorite, the architecture. The architects of many mosques and other public buildings spent at least a decade per structure, a decade during which one of their main priorities was the incorporation of lighting, which, according to the author, they regarded as sacred and as or more critical to a building as its physical elements. All of this, of course, without computers.

What really lodged in my mind from the book, though, is this: Way, way long ago, a Persian ceramicist was accused of stealing another artist’s design. His reply: Imitation is the sincerest form of pottery. I’m not sure why that occurred to me as hysterical, but it did, and so I laughed and laughed and laughed some more.

Camping

Of all the aspects of the occupiers and their movement, there was one that seemed to rankle the general public in a way that no others did. I realized one day that if you want to really aggravate people, you need not waste your time and effort exposing your breasts, going to the gay pride parade bound and gagged, kissing another person – or two, or three – of the same gender or wearing t-shirts with naughty words on them. All you need to do, it seems to me, is camp in a public space. It drives people right to the line that separates the reasonable from the hysterical, and then, very quickly, way past it.

I don’t know what I think of it, or how I feel about it, and I’m not sure it matters. A friend of mine did ask me, nicely, how I might feel if people pitched tents up and down my street.

My initial response was that the question raised something of a moot point since my street is not a public park. The parks in downtown Portland where the camping took place are not, in my opinion, really parks: They’re one city block each (in a city of very small blocks) with statuary and, in one, a building with restrooms. While most people would be hard pressed to name them, during and following the campout these two parks have been discussed in tones and terms so reverent you’d think they were the birthplace of Jesus or one of his very close relatives.

The City of Portland is partly to blame for this. Shortly after the occupiers were evicted and parks employees came to work on a Sunday afternoon to enclose the parks with chain-link fencing to “keep everyone safe,” estimates for what it would cost to repair the parks started getting tossed around, and, as is to be expected, the local news people trumpeted the figures at the top of their talk shows. The most recent figure I heard was $180,000, and I have three things to say about that. First, why do these two city blocks warrant an arborist and a specialist to tend to one thing and another? Does every so-called park get that level of attention? A relatively large park in my neighborhood and the community center housed in it sure don’t. Second, as one occupier pointed out, the estimate for repairing the restrooms reflects what it will cost to restore those facilities to a condition that was lost long before the campers arrived. It’s distorted, in other words. And third, I’ve been on the receiving end of the city’s cost-estimating capabilities - $1,200 for three or four squares of sidewalk that absolutely did not need to be repaired in the first place and that were, ultimately, repaired poorly. I hesitate to bash a government entity, but in this case I think getting a few more bids would be a good idea.

But the more I thought about my friend’s question, the more I thought that I would find a strand of tents pitched up and down my street less problematic than the SUVs and 18-wheelers and pickup trucks sagging with refrigerators and washing machines and dish washers and other vehicles driven by generally careless idiots that roar through with zero regard for those of us who live here. People do need to sleep, and in order to do so most people need to be shielded from the elements. People do not, in my opinion, need to exceed 50 miles per hour on a street that is barely two lanes wide.

I think the revulsion brought about by camping is entertaining in a way. At the same time, I do wonder what’s behind it, or beneath it. Are we that disturbed by people going about the business of daily living, only outside? Does it remind us of where we came from? More troubling or more entertaining, depending, does it remind us of where we appear to be headed? Does it remind us that most of us have lost the instincts that would come in pretty handy if we were forced to survive without what we now consider the basics? Does it force us to ask ourselves as best we’re able what we would do without remote controls, without running water, without the God-given right to waste paper by placing a sheet of it on a toilet seat so that our ass cheeks don’t touch the surface that someone else’s ass cheeks touched before we do our business in a public or semi-public facility?

And what would we do without the perversion of Thanksgiving known as Black Friday? That was an interesting day this year, I thought, because it followed so closely the eviction of the occupiers from the sacred grounds in downtown Portland. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, I imagined that maybe the super sales would fall flat as people honored the time and energy the protestors invested in showing the country and the world that our economy is indeed a fairly tale. What, I wondered, under a trance of almost childlike delight, what if everyone simply occupied their own hearts, souls and spirits rather than rushing out and buying more stocking stuffers for next year’s landfill? But there was no such luck. Record sales, I believe, that actually boosted the stock market, the unintelligible details of which are now broadcast on an hourly basis, and it all got officially underway, as it usually does, with a good old-fashioned campout in the parking lots of malls across the land. And, if the breezy chattiness of the hosts and hostesses who sing the world on the television stations is any indication, that was just fine.

The search

I don’t normally give much thought to getting dressed. I try to wear clothing that serves its purpose (not short-sleeved sweaters, for example, which make zero sense to me), that’s comfortable and that attracts as little attention as possible. In other words, I strive for the exact opposite of trendy, and usually I achieve it.

This year, because I’ve been half-heartedly hunting around for a specific item, I found myself memorializing what I think is my all-time favorite piece. In 1994, I took a long train trip that wound up at Union Station in downtown Portland, Oregon. Kansas City was one of the stops early in the voyage, and while I was there I went to a Goodwill store with a then-friend’s then-girlfriend and in that store I found and bought a deep, deep blue turtleneck that was made of the heavy fabric usually used for sweatshirts. It was, quite simply, perfect: It fit, the neck and the cuffs were form-fitting but not too tight, the color was glorious and it was warm. Before I had to part with it many years later, I wore that sweatshirt (or was it a turtleneck?) pretty much always except for on laundry day. Had I realized back then that putting clothes in the drier is a pretty sure way to destroy them, I’d probably still be wearing that creation, but alas, with only a single glob of threads connecting the neck to the body, I had to part with the turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. And I remember the day clearly, even now.

I’ve checked at various stores and online, and my search – if you can call it that – leaves me with one question: Have straightforward, no-frills turtleneck sweaters been outlawed? One of the problems with buying almost everything used is that I forgot how maddening the mandatory changing of styles can be. This year, someone decided that men’s sweaters should be crapped out with what’s called a shawl collar. Sometimes these sweaters are adorned with buttons but most of the ones I’ve seen simply have a chest-level gash where one half of the sweater goes one way and the other half goes the other and the entire thing culminates in a sort of quasi hood-type thing that dangles in the back. From the perspective of pure practicality, does that “shawl” keep the wearer any warmer? Does it make the sweater fit better? Is it a structural consideration? Or is it just a decoration?

Looking for a turtleneck made out of sweatshirt-weight material online was even more puzzling. Because I don’t buy much on the Internet, I almost never do searches for specific products, which is good, because I’m not sure what the point is, exactly. Type into a search engine the words “turtleneck sweatshirt mens” and if anything remotely along those lines turns up, please let me know. Because I found pretty much everything but. Cardigans, crewnecks, V-necks, mock this and mock that, button-down shirts, underwear, you name it. It made me wonder what sort of coding actually goes into the search engine algorithms. Although the marketing teams behind the search engine biz would love for you to believe that theirs is a world of pure precision, it’s one of the sloppiest experiences I’ve had in a long while. I put the words in different order and the same shit turned up, over and over, shit I didn’t want before, shit I don’t want now.

Which brings me, sadly, to the Gap, where there is no end of shit. That was the company whose logo was on the tag of my beloved sweatshirt turtleneck – or turtleneck sweatshirt – and it’s the tag that’s on a couple of other items that I really like, items I’ve been very careful to not ever subject to the drier. As I recall, that store used to characterized by sturdy construction, solid lines, buttons and zippers that stayed where they were meant to stay and a sort of no-frills tastefulness in general. What happened?

Compromises

I found myself in the middle of a word warp last week. From two completely different stories, a single word – compromise – occurred to me in ways as different as July is from November.

First, the theatrics that went along with the committee thrown together to trim a couple trillion bucks from the budget. I thought the entire thing was a circus from the beginning. My first question, and in some ways my only question, is this: With 535 voting members representing the country’s citizenry in Congress, I wonder what’s behind selecting a dozen of them to tackle the task of solving the nation’s fiscal ills. I have two guesses. The first is that the Republicans really do want to increase taxes, but they don’t want it on their record, so being able to blame it on a committee come election day sure would be handy. The second is that everyone in Washington has acknowledged on some level that the money situation – and therefore the country – has slithered beyond the point of no return. Rather than say this out loud, having a committee to personify the dysfunction is yet another way to distract voters from the truth, which we are evidently incapable and unwilling to confront.

Which was my first encounter last week with the word compromise. Millions of us were apparently turned on by candidates whose main campaign message was that they would not compromise when it came to taxes. And based on last week’s roaring about the failure of the so-called super committee to accomplish anything, millions of us are incapable of making the simplest of connections. One evening my mouth just sort of hung open as I watched one national newscast and listened to some big shot representing the retail industry claim that he’d been blindsided by this travesty. And the rancor out on the Internets was even more appalling, I thought: Throw them out of office! What a bunch of losers! Congress is dysfunctional! As long as I’m throwing the term “millions” around, here’s a prediction: The members of the super committee will indeed be thrown out of office a year from now, and they’ll be replaced by candidates whose talking points cater to an even more simple-minded crowd of millions of voters who want to address problems that have been in the works for at least a century with an answer as simple and easy as apple pie. We want solutions, they’ll say, not compromises.

Closer to home, Oregon’s governor announced he’s putting a moratorium on all executions for the duration of his term. During his first go-round as governor, there was at least one execution carried out that left him, he says, with more questions than conclusions. To avoid finding himself – and the state – in that situation again, he declared himself unwilling to compromise. And in my own way, in spite of my tirade against the use of that word in the context of politics, I applauded.

Dreams

The first time I attempted The Audacity of Hope, I was on a train going to Los Angeles for Christmas. Barack Obama, the author, had just been elected president, and one of his first acts, as I recall, was to enlist for the inauguration the reverend who had just served as the face and voice of the campaign to exclude same-sex couples from marriage in California. I read a few chapters, and with each one the realization that even the country’s first minority president was fully capable of toying with the gays as political collateral became more clear to me, so I left the book on the train.

A few months ago I started it again, and this time I finished it. I can understand the excitement a book such as that would have generated considering the point at which it was published – several years into the W era – but in reading it three years into Obama’s administration, the book read to me like a very well-written bit of campaign literature. We can all gather round and hold hands and acknowledge our differences while at the same time, oh golly gee, we can … hope! the book seemed to be saying.

His first book, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. The key word in the title, Dreams from my Father, I believe, is from. I don’t think Obama’s father is an actual character for a single chapter in the book, but he is a presence on each page. So too are impressions gathered from a lifescape, if you will, that includes Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago, Harvard and Kenya. What Obama’s writing accomplishes that is truly stunning is the weaving together of all those impressions into an experience that leads not to answers but to questions.

Lots and lots of questions.

Is a man with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya more black than white? Is arriving in the upper echelons of the middle class a betrayal of the poor or is it an accomplishment for all? Should a black person inherently and fundamentally mistrust a white person? Have the image Kenyans have of themselves been defined more by British colonialism than by their ancestors? Is there hope – audacious or otherwise – for inner-city, serially impoverished black people? Does the black church – as a whole – harm more than it heals? What, exactly, was the significance of Harold Washington’s ascension to the mayor’s office in Chicago? Is it a crime to play your part in order to get along? Or is it a concession?

One of the biggest questions, for me anyhow, is the interpretation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By the time Obama started his community organizing job in Chicago, Wright’s church had evolved into a clearinghouse of sorts for the city’s impoverished south side. I’m oversimplifying here, but here’s a synopsis of Wright’s position. It’s great for black people to get ahead socially and economically. It’s not so great when they succumb to what he called “middleincomeness” and shift their allegiances away from where they’ve been to where they’re hoping to go. Another of his trademarks is the notion that as much as those who remain in the inner city have to learn from those who have arrived in the inner sanctum, the reverse is equally true: There are plenty of lessons black corporate lawyers can learn from black women raising four children in public housing in a neighborhood where the sound of gunfire is so ordinary it’s barely noticed. Back in 2008, when I first heard the recordings of the reverend yelling about white folks, my guess that it was the handiwork of shrill conservatives, who consider use of the word “context” an act of elitism; after reading the book, I’d put money on that hunch. A lot of it.

For me, the most intriguing part of the book is the way it tackles nuance. While the main point of a lot of what’s written these days seems to be that we all share something called an “American character” that dictates to us a consistent set of hopes and ambitions, I think our president did a stunning job at underscoring the way different experience and history results in different narratives that, when placed alongside one another and occasionally intersected, define the United States. Everyone’s story, the book seems to say, has merit and has a place in the ongoing national conversation. Even those whose job is to fill the empty heads of people like Sarah Palin with empty words written and spoken with the sole purpose of ridiculing and trivializing the idea that a democracy hears the voices of those many would prefer remain disenfranchised.

Thanksgiving with the alcoholics

Until I became one of them a few years ago, I had always been baffled by people who speak ill of the holidays. What’s not to like? I’d wonder. For me, for years, I didn’t enjoy the holidays because they were a time to gather with people and appreciate one another and share profound – if short-lived – realizations about gratitude and humility. I just tend to like group get togethers and the way that holiday lights and candles and even the music soften the year’s coldest afternoons and evenings. Plus, I really like to eat.

And then, in 2008, I decided to part ways with alcohol, which changed everything. Or it changed the way I experience everything. Most of it is good. The holidays, unfortunately, particularly Thanksgiving, are one of the few exceptions.

It began with one of my brothers. I plan to explore this one more thoroughly someday, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some sharing right here and right now. It’s the holiday season, after all. He’d had Thanksgiving at his house for a few years in a row. At his house, his wife made the turkey according to her specifications (she read somewhere, or perhaps heard from her mommy, that stuffing can turn toxic, which strikes me, in hindsight, as a spectacular metaphor). At his house the guests included his wife’s uncle and his partner, his and his wife’s children, around whose schedules everything revolved, including the ringing of the telephone, and a group of his and his wife’s friends. At his house the dinner was served on matching flatware from matching bowls and platters on a dining room table with extra leaves so that it could be expanded to seat everyone. Like most of their possessions, the table was expensive, but, also like most of their possessions, it had not put a dent in their budget because it was a wedding gift. Even though this meal was held at his house, I like to cook on Thanksgiving, so I always brought a lot of food with me.

So imagine my surprise when, in early November that year, my brother’s beleaguered, put-upon and yet accusatory response to my mention of Thanksgiving: “God, seems like you could do it at your house once in a while.” I will never forget the shock I felt at the end of that telephone call. Since that year was perhaps the last before he and his wife and their children moved to California so that their children could grow up to be more like my brother’s wife’s people than his own, coupled with the fact that our father was clearly in his final days, I had believed that it was going to be really nice, or maybe even special, to spend an afternoon and evening together. In a way that’s both tragic and worthy of celebration, when it comes to members of my family, I made a vow to never, ever entertain such foolish sentiments again. And thus far, I’ve honored it.

Then there’s my friend who I’ve known for 10 years or so. He’s a writer but he’s also quite good at remodeling and building and he’s one of the most well-read people I know. He’s also quite an entertainer, and every year, the week of Thanksgiving, he calls me to tell me that he and his boyfriend are going, as is the custom, to some long-standing mid-day meal hosted and attended by what my friend describes as the bitchiest group of queens in Portland. But after that, my friend always informs me, he’s cooking a huge meal, which he’ll be serving to “half the town” at his place. Somehow, though I’ve been hearing about this gathering for many years and I’ve lived in Portland for many more, I’ve never been part of that particular half of town. I’m almost proud of that.

Many years ago one of my friends introduced a routine so weird I’m still not sure what to call it. After a family gathering, he would say “My mother asked how you were and said it would have been fine if you’d come to dinner.” This usually happened right after Easter, as I recall. Then, after my mother died, he started railing about how much he dislikes Mother’s Day. To which I finally said, “Don’t worry – she’ll be dead before you know it.” So I suppose what happened last year was an upping of the ante on his part, although I’m not sure because I’ve never broached the subject, nor do I intend to. We went out for breakfast right before Christmas, and as we sat there my friend started telling me about an old acquaintance who was in town and how he was being avoided because he was, according to my friend, one of the most annoying, deceitful people to ever come along. Finally, my friend said, “Oh yeah, and he was always invited to our house for holiday dinners.” Clueless to a point that defies description? Or, fully aware that I was on my own for Christmas, just really mean spirited? While I’ve considered this particular person a friend since I was 30 years old, neither explanation works for me. Nor does the friendship.

But other things do work, and they work quite well.

I do remember that it was rainy and cold on Thanksgiving in 2008. I remember thinking, several times, that being in my house, by myself, on a holiday bedazzled with togetherness was the definition of personal failure. While I don’t remember what I made, I do remember walking down my street in the late-afternoon darkness, terrified that I would run into someone I knew and have to quickly come up with something believable if asked where I was going in the pouring rain with a dish covered with aluminum foil. Because going to a Thanksgiving potluck organized and hosted by one of the many nearby Alcoholics Anonymous groups I’d discovered over the previous two months would certainly turn out to be something I’d later recall as a low point, which is a funny thing to remember, three years later, because it was anything but.

Judging a book by its cover

There are very few downsides to reading books like Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one of them is that whatever novel you read following one of them has an unusually high chance of disappointing. And disappointment is exactly what I was left with after reading the last page of Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam.

I found it at a recent used book sale and there were two reasons I bought it: I liked the cover, and I liked the title. After enduring all 369 pages, I still really like the cover, and I still really like the title.

I think the story itself is compelling. Focused on one family, the book is a tour of day-to-day life among a community of immigrants from Pakistan living in the U.K., in a city that was not immediately recognizable to me. It seems to me there were two, possibly three, main plot lines. The first is the search for the killers of the husband’s brother and his live-in girlfriend. The second is the husband’s affair with a woman who, it turns out, needs to accomplish some very specific things according to the almighty Allah: Since her alcoholic husband beat the shit out of her and then uttered the word “divorce” three times in a row, her mandate, as understood by the faithful, is to marry another man and then divorce him. Once that’s accomplished, she has the blessing of Allah to return to her abusive, alcoholic husband and remarry him. Don’t feel bad if you need to reread that to make sure you’ve got the order of it correctly. I sure did.

The biggest disappointment was the third plot line (and I hesitate to call it that because I’m not sure it qualifies), which focuses on the family’s wife and mother, Kaukab. The most devout of the characters, she’s at war on one level or another with all three of her children, with her husband, with the neighbors and with England, in a way that’s both specific and general.

What fell apart for me was that Kaukab’s concerns, like the concerns of nearly every character, are written in a way that is so trite I think I rolled my eyes through most of it. With the exception of the few paragraphs dedicated to Kaukab’s struggle with the language and the disparity between what she says and what she feels, which I thought were excellent, Nadeem Aslam paints her in the same way he paints the rest. He trots out one cliché after another, and they’re clichés conveyed with writing that rarely rises above the level of an earnest amateur.

Of course, in fairness, I do wonder how the book would have struck me had I read it at a different time. Because after a few weeks in Macondo with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the driver’s seat, most writing is bound to fall flat, including mine.

Pictures

This is not really a tale of Occupy Portland, but about something that happened as a result of my visit to it a couple of weekends ago. I saw two situations, or scenes, that I struck me much more like photographs than stories.

The first was a weary, weathered looking man in a wheelchair, and leaning into him in a way that suggested her body was constructed not of solid bones but of something more along the lines of rubber bands was a young woman with a clipboard. I stopped just in time to hear her explain something about the process of registering to vote, and then slowly – and this, to me, was the moment meant for a picture – she handed him the clipboard in such a way that it appeared they were at the same level, vertically, which they were not. There was something communion-ish about it, I thought.

The second scene I witnessed – and failed to photograph because I did not, at that time, have or own a camera – centered around the long row of narrow tables, covered in white plastic and stacked high with hamburger buns, loaves of bread, energy bars and so on. Behind the tables stood three people – servers, I presume – and behind them the statuary figures of three men, the hand of one of them holding a gigantic fork someone had placed there. And behind the statue, or over it, a white tarp that transformed the dismal light of a November afternoon into a quality that could almost be called bright. I cannot articulate the particulars of it, or the physics, but as I stood facing the food tables I had the distinct impression that the scene itself was both moving toward and moving above me, like a jet, I suppose, coming toward you as it prepares to lift and fly over the point where you’re standing.

The camera I bought on Sunday morning, after waking up to thoughts of the photographs I’d missed the day before, is a shiny silver Nikon Coolpix S3100. I’m still getting used to it, of course. On the one hand I feel like I’m carrying a pistol without a permit. On the other, I feel like I’m learning a new language, which has always struck me as a worthwhile pursuit.

Letter to the editor

I’m not sure how I feel about just retyping a letter I saw in a magazine and calling it a blog post. It’s not what I set out to do here, that’s for sure. But, I read a letter in this month’s Harper’s and it says exactly what I feel and think about our president’s perceived stature as a liberal. Or, more specifically, the country’s collective liberal mouthpiece’s ongoing insistence that it’s a stature that’s been abandoned by our president, which is impossible according to my calculations because his voting record clearly indicates that he wasn’t a liberal to begin with, at least not by my definition. But Chris Runk of New York City put it much more succinctly, so I’ll defer to her, or him:

In enumerating his proposals for a stronger America, George S. McGovern assumes that the president is a leftist and thus could be expected to endorse some of them [“A Letter to Barack Obama, Easy Chair, September]. This assumption is not new. Even before he was elected president, many of Obama’s champions took for granted his liberalism, notwithstanding that, as senator, he equivocated on free-trade agreements, indicated his support for an intensification of the war in Afghanistan, and voted for the release from civil liability of the telecommunications firms that assisted the Bush Administration’s wiretapping.

Some Obama apologists are keen to tout the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act as vindication of his liberal bona fides, but, in fact, that legislation represented the apotheosis of Obama’s “preemptive compromise” – in this case, an incremental, regressive abandonment of the ideal of universal health care.

And now, given the president’s near-total capitulation to Republican tax demagoguery, that anyone could still indulge in the pernicious illusion of his liberalism speaks more to the lamentable condition of liberals – and to the success of right-wing rhetoric – than to his political views.

This is just a test

My about-face

On Saturday afternoon I went downtown and took a tour of the two blocks occupied by Occupy Portland, and what I spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day thinking about was not the event itself but the response to it.

While I never personally witnessed the demonstrations in the south in the 1950s and 1960s or the protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, I have read and heard enough to register a few common themes, the same themes, believe it or not, that took hold in the 1980s when a shamefully small group of brave men and women took to the streets to call attention to the fact that thousands were dying of a virus most people who were not directly affected by it preferred to ignore. Catastrophically for many, among those who refused to acknowledge or address the virus and its implications were the residents of the White House.

Martin Luther King and those who had to make more than one attempt to even begin the march to Montgomery because they didn’t have appropriate permits to cross a bridge on the outskirts of Selma were deemed lawless in many newspapers, including the New York Times. A few years later, the people who believed that the country’s participation in the war in Vietnam was wrong were dismissed and marginalized for equally trivial (in my opinion) concerns: their clothing, the length of their hair, their music, the fact that they preferred their alteration in the form of smoke rather than drink. Forcing what I consider the ultimate act of patriotism into verb form, they were dismissed as unpatriotic.

From what I think is an impressive range of people, I am amazed, and not in a good way, at the response to Occupy Portland: Isn’t it ironic that they’re using Facebook? Isn’t it ironic that they’re protesting big business and yet almost everything in the encampment contains petroleum? And isn’t it ironic that the rally to urge people to move their accounts from one of the big banks to a credit union was staged at Pioneer Courthouse Square, where there’s not only a Starbucks but a Bank of America ATM as well?

After thinking about it and talking about it and debating it with myself and with others, here’s my answer: No.

In terms of the petroleum content and holding a gathering in a space occupied – pardon me – by two of the most egregious brands of all time, I’m comfortable shooting down both notions with the same missile. Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland is an easy to find, easily accessible gathering spot. The fact that the Starbucks on the busiest corner of the square has a Bank of America ATM beside the south entrance is not the fault of the Occupy Portland participants. Our short sightedness about allowing for-profit corporations to tarnish public spaces should not deter those exercising what’s left of the right to assemble to do so in a place known as “Portland’s Living Room,” a space that as of today still belongs to us all. Similarly, in terms of petroleum’s presence in a mind-boggling array of products, placing the burden of our decades-long preference for cheap over responsible on the shoulders of the occupiers is nothing more than an easy way to ignore the main point and focus instead on the incidentals.

My reaction to the criticism of the occupiers for doing their business on Facebook is a bit harder to explain. I do feel that the role of the cranky old man sitting in a broken down rocking chair out on the front porch, bellowing ridicule at any and all who are not wholeheartedly of his era, is one that I was born to play, not just because I like it but because I am good at it. So try to imagine how painful it was over the weekend when certain thoughts invaded the outskirts of my consciousness, and imagine how painful it is for me right now to type the following letters:

I love Facebook.

Seriously. It’s free, it’s easy to use, you can talk to the world almost instantly and without censure with nothing more than an Internet connection, and if you don’t have one you can go to the library and use the connection there. And, in a way I imagine is similar to how religion was regarded in this country once upon a time, you are free to not participate. While I think a lot of what gets posted on Facebook is horrid, a bit of blessedly uninterrupted reflection during the extra hours of Sunday morning led me to the very simple conclusion that hating Facebook because of the inane postings, of which there are millions (in my opinion), makes as much sense as blaming the U.S. Postal Service, one of our national treasures, for the avalanche of credit card offers and special deals on insuring your car, whether you own one or not.

If you want to get technical about it – and I do – forget for a moment the notion that Facebook is corporate, which, for the record, I think is inaccurate. There is indeed advertising on it, as there always is when the marketing team gets involved, and many companies have pages with thousands of followers who are offered special deals on this that and the other. And that, say some, makes Facebook corporate. As one friend said to me on Sunday morning, if the protesters were truly sincere about opposing corporations they would have chosen craigslist to communicate rather than Facebook. Or they could communicate with blogs. Why the hell should they? Facebook is there, an astounding number of people spend an astounding amount of time already signed in and it’s free. Well yeah, said my friend, but it’s corporate. There’s advertising. To which I said, there is advertising on the Number 20 bus I ride downtown from time to time. Does that mean public transportation in Portland is corporate? And furthermore, if ads make it corporate, does my riding it undermine my belief that public transportation is a critical component of a city’s character? I don’t think so.

What I decided on Sunday morning is that the wrongness of what friends have said to me about the hypocrisy of using Facebook to protest corporate domination really stands out when applied to the protests against Vietnam and last-class citizenship of black people in the south. Those demonstrations, after all, were staged on streets and sidewalks and in plazas built and maintained by the very government against which they were protesting.

So, their endeavors were hypocritical? Yes, according to the many who preferred commenting from the safety of the sidelines over actual participation, but, according to many more, whose clarity of purpose became only more so with the passing of years, no.

No cake

The latest on marriage arrived in this month’s issue of the Atlantic, a magazine I’d never subscribe to on my own but that a friend of mine gives me as a gift each year, a friend I do not have the heart to tell what I really think of the magazine. I think it’s smug. I think it purports to embrace a liberal point of view when in actuality it’s the magazine version of the Clinton Administration: It’s bourgeois in that it disguises an embrace of the rich and powerful behind a screen of adoration in a way that’s just slick enough that it can be denied later. In addition to publishing writing that I think is of a questionable quality – James Fallows comes to mind – the magazine sponsors all kinds of forums and summits on various pressing issues – like social media – and the lists of speakers always strike me as people with a lot of money and a lot of privileges – like Bill Clinton, like Tina Brown – who think we should all have an equal shot as long as they get theirs first.

This month’s take on marriage was written by a woman called Kate Bolick. Maybe she’s a great writer. Maybe she’s got phenomenal insights and instincts. I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s the “culture editor” – apologies for the quote marks, but seriously – of a magazine called Veranda, which, according to its website, offers its audience a front row seat to “the best of everything.” Compared to the fact that an article about an approach to paying for healthcare in the same issue was penned by a couple of partners at a huge consulting conglomerate who have just published a book on marketing, I guess it’s not so egregious to dedicate many pages to a lifestyle magazine writer’s musings on a subject that many believe is their birthright while many others think it is, of should be, a civil right. But for a magazine once considered a standard bearer, I think it’s unfortunate.

Before I slam the author properly, I would like to applaud her for finally saying something that’s long overdue (even if others with less cache than she have said it before, which I’m sure they have). The business about two-parent families of yesteryear where the mother stayed at home with the young ones while the father went to a job every morning that he returned from in the evening was a television show. That’s because the poor have always been forced to take jobs that required them to do things like build ships or railroads or fight in wars waged by the money for extended periods or, for the poor women, work in other people’s homes, where they raised other people’s children and did other people’s laundry. And the rich, even though they aren’t and weren’t forced to spend a lot of time outside of their homes away from their heirs, did and do so because … well, who knows? Perhaps they’re dialoguing at forums sponsored by the Atlantic.

It’s all downhill from there, unfortunately. It seems Kate Bolick is unable to get her hands on husband material because, in spite of the thousands of words it took her to explain it, she just cannot find anyone good enough for her. And being good enough for her would be a tall order, I suppose. She did an internship at the Atlantic (full disclosure!) and she lives on both coasts and she stayed, while writing the article, at an impressive array of digs described in the article in a way that really flexed her culture editor muscles and that, sadly, seemed perfectly natural in an Atlantic cover story that, if I were the betting type, I’d say will mark her ascent into the realm of big-time culture commentator: books that explain to us how we feel about ourselves and that explain, furthermore, how she discovered how we feel about ourselves and how wrong those who went before her were, and how this all relates to her mother, and how she’s had a much rougher go of it than her mother, and big fees for speaking at conferences and appearances on an endless slew of talk shows, where she’ll doubtlessly explain what’s trending this way and that and why it’s all really, really interesting.

The inclusion of a snippet of chatty e-mail she exchanged with Julianne Moore while writing the article was unforgivable, but worse, I think, was this. Near the beginning of the article, the following passage was so painful that it made my fillings ache:

We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

I’m confused, you know, about the men you – which I assume means her – don’t want to go out with. I kept waiting for a reason or two, and all I could find, over and over again, was that the kind of man with the looks and the position and the money Kate Bolick believes she’s entitled to is elusive. Which for me, you know, begs a very specific question, one that, in spite of the thousands of words dedicated to her take on the whole situation, was not explained: What’s so special about Kate Bolick?

No smelly books

Although there are several of them throughout the year, the granddaddy of Portland’s used book sales happened over the weekend. On Monday morning, just for the hell of it, I looked up the Friends of the Multnomah County Library on the Internet and learned a thing or two. This weekend marked the 38th year that the sale has been held. There were more than 100,000 books for sale in the airplane hangar-esque room at the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel, and there are guidelines regarding what the friends will and will not accept: Books with excessive markings are out, as are computer books older than 2007 and books deemed “smelly.”

There are many reasons I love this particular sale. First of all, it’s huge, and it’s annual, and there’s a certain ritualistic feel to it. Somehow it’s highly organized without being regimented for regiment’s sake. I also like the fact that it’s held in the fall. Saturday was so autumnal it was almost Midwestern. It was warm, and the sky was blue, and the sidewalks my friend and I hurried along were covered with gold and golden brown leaves that whispered across the concrete.

Inside there was, as always, row upon row of long tables marked with signs and covered with books of all shapes, sizes and subjects. Which brings me to one of the best aspects of the book sale: The people who shop it. You have to move slowly along the side of a table looking down at a stunning array of titles on the spines of books. Even though there are people on either side of you doing exactly the same thing, there is, for reasons I have yet to understand, a rhythm to it that enables people to glide along the edges of tables going in different directions and somehow not run into each other. Here’s what it looks like: Hold both of your hands up in front of you, palms out, and move them slowly toward each other. When they’re about to touch, pull your right hand back and continue moving your left hand in the same direction until it is eclipsed from your view by your right hand.

I have no idea if these two facts are related or not, but first of all, I did not witness or experience a single sloppy, slovenly collision. And secondly, although there were many hundreds of people looking at books for the more than two hours that I was there, I did not overhear a single cell phone conversation. And I didn’t see anyone texting, either. Is that because people who go to events sponsored by an organization whose sole purpose is to support the democratization of the written word have better manners? Or are they simply more focused? Either way, as “an elitist” I like it. I like it a lot.

Before I get to the books, there are two other things I really like about the sale. Maybe they do this every year, but Saturday was the first time I noticed what they call The Book Depot. If you’re finding so many books that they’re getting difficult to carry, you just go to a table and they put them in a box, write your name on it and hold it there until you’ve got another load. The second is that, in the same way I prefer yard sales and thrift shops to stores where everything is new, the tables at the book sale are full of surprises.

Every time I leave a job, voluntarily or otherwise, I take a dictionary with me, so I have a lot of dictionaries. And now I have one more: The Tormont Webster’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary. It’s huge, and it’s beautiful, and it’s printed in a font a bit larger than my others. That was the first thing that caught my attention, and while I moved on initially, two tables later I returned. The second find of the morning was even better. On Saturday morning, as I was finishing a section of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the sister book group, I thought that I’d like to start Christmas morning this year with Love in the Time of Cholera, preferably a hardback edition. And there it was, waiting for me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini’s second novel. His first was The Kite Runner, which I thought was great. I’ve always wanted to read Willa Cather, and now I have a beautiful copy of My Antonia. I picked up Dreams from My Father because my enthusiasm for knowing that I live in a country whose president can write a decent sentence has yet to wane. One of the books I bought is Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I bought it for a reason that has never before compelled me: I really like the cover.

And finally, a bit of moderation. I forced myself on Saturday to not lunge after everything that catches my attention. While I haven’t craved either of them, there are two fairly recent books by David McCullough that seem interesting to me. One is entitled, simply, John Adams; the other, entitled even more simply, is 1776. I’ll buy one, I thought, and then, next year, if the interest is still there, hope to find the other. The one turned out to be 1776, and while I try to not have two books going at once, figuring that one novel and one history doesn’t really count as two – it does, of course – I started 1776 on Sunday evening, and although I’ve barely dented it, the tales of this country’s quest for independence, I must say, are as intriguing as they are familiar.

Stadium ghosts

Whenever people start talking and shouting and carrying on about their sports teams, I roll my eyes and make remarks that are as snide as possible and then I run along. And then the Saint Louis Cardinals make it into the World Series, and my sports snobbery goes right out the window. I am not sure if it’s because I know the particulars of the skyline when it appears on the television, or if it’s that the players are consistently hot, or if the fact that the team has been swinging bats in the same city for more than a century does actually give it an edge in the vibe department.

There’s something really elegant about baseball, I think. I think the beauty of fielding in particular is on par with ballet, or can be. I’m impressed by the combination of speed and accuracy required to throw a baseball with such force that it clocks in at 89 miles per hour as it blasts through a very small, very precise box of space. And the men who throw those balls with such speed and precision. I watched one of the league championship games broadcast from Milwaukee a couple of weekends ago, and the sight of the pitcher holding forth out there on the mound, winding up and letting it rip was something else again. Then my sister e-mailed me a three-word message on the morning of the second World Series game: Jaime’s up tonight. So I went across the street to my neighbors’ house and watched, and besides Jaime Garcia’s beautiful, beautiful mouth, I saw very little baseball.

Measured against the nation’s clock, Saint Louis is an old, old city, and in a way that I’ve never seen quite pulled off elsewhere, it’s a place that manages to accommodate itself to the times and, at the same time, refuses to. For two centuries, a lot of people have moved there and a lot of people have left there, and there have been a lot of people born in that city and a lot of people who have died there as well, and what I think I saw watching those baseball games recently, more clearly than anything else, was the ghosts.

There are parts of it that are intact. If you go to Saint Louis during the summer – which I do not recommend – you can still stand in line on Chippewa Street or South Grand and, as long as you don’t collapse – it happens – order a frozen custard concoction known as “a concrete.” They’re so cold they’ll make your brains sore for a minute or two, and they are good. You can still order brain sandwiches in certain neighborhoods. At nearly every grocery store, regardless of neighborhood, you can get a cut of pork that for some reason has yet to arrive on the other side of the Rockies. You can still see cemeteries at a rate that would be alarming if they weren’t such spectacular manifestations of the deep, almost festive reverence Saint Louis bestows upon her dead. The recipe at Imo’s hasn’t changed as far as anyone can tell. Although it was moved for a number of years to Chesterfield, the Strassenfest has returned to its original neighborhood in South City, which is where my brother and sister and I once witnessed, in fascinated horror, a very rotund woman who simply leaned out of an arched brick doorway and puked with a propulsion I’ve yet to see equaled. The river remains mighty and the sight of the art museum in that normally elusive period between sunset and darkness still has its own vocabulary and the first 10 to 12 minutes of the local news is still a quick run-through of the homicides and, if it’s a slow day, the investigations of them. The Arch is still there, and it’s still called, amazingly enough, The Arch.

But people in Saint Louis now work for Boeing, and most of the airport is vacant. Jack Buck and Jack Carney are long gone, replaced from what I hear by Rush Limbaugh, who is from Missouri and now cheapens the airwaves of KMOX, which is a travesty. Styx Baer & Fuller is history, as is Bettendorf’s. Channel 2 is now a Fox affiliate. The Globe Democrat folded – literally – long ago and for years I have not been able to find, even on thoroughfares such as Choteau or Vandeventer, a single copy of The Evening Whirl, a black paper with news stories that were once upon a time, even though rap music had yet to come along, written in rap pentameter. And, as a result of one of the most bizarre and contentious real estate transactions I’ve ever witnessed, as a result of the most indisputable indications that one phase of life has ended and another begun, my sister now presides over the house where we grew up.

And that’s the wall of ghosts I crash into, recklessly, at high speeds and without air bags, at the mere sight of the Saint Louis Cardinals on national television in the month of October, playing against a backdrop of stage-lit courthouse domes and cathedrals and a very tall stainless steel sculpture that is a monument to leaving town.

Which might be the point of sports, professional and otherwise. At their worst I think they encourage a lot of herd behavior, but at the other end of the reaction spectrum, maybe one of the purposes they serve is to remind us of ourselves, to divide the passing of time into chunks that are for the most part manageable. A couple of weeks ago and a couple thousand miles west of my childhood, I was reminded of an autumn afternoon in 1982 when the last, make-it-or-break it game of the playoffs was played down at what is now called, in memoriam, the old Busch Stadium. The high school I went to didn’t shut down early, not officially anyhow, not in a way that was discussed or announced: Everyone just left early. It was a warm afternoon, one defined in my memory by the almost blinding contrast between the golden leaves and the brilliant blue sky behind and above them and by the voice of Jack Buck on KMOX, seeping as sure as cigar smoke through screen doors and open windows as I walked along Big Bend Boulevard. Shortly after I got home that afternoon, the Cardinals won.

An honorable pact with solitude

Although we’ve been interrupted by the World Series and one of my nieces checking herself into rehab, my sisters and I are progressing on our reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I told a friend of mine this recently and she replied that the man she lives with read it a few years back and that the experience ruined for him every other book. I am not there just yet, but I’m close enough that I’ve caught a few glimpses of how different the world, after this book, might look.

At the heart of the tale is the Buendia family whose patriarch founded the town of Macondo. I am only about halfway through the book, and already I have conceded any hope of summarizing the twists and the turns – some of them feasible, others, based on my standards anyhow, completely surreal – encountered by the family, or, as Ursula, the matriarch, calls it, “the line.” On any page you are likely to encounter gypsies and alchemists and babies born with a century’s worth of memory and young men who fall in love with their aunts and the remains of parents contained in a bag that hums and jostles and many, many characters who are named Aureliano, Arcadio, Jose or some combination thereof.

The way my sisters and I tackle books is to read a pre-determined number of pages per week. So, since I tend to get ahead of our schedule, I read each section twice. The story is hard to follow, so a second read is helpful, but the main reason I’ve read each page twice thus far is that I’ve permitted myself the luxury of dedicating the first reading to simply enjoying the sensation that follows the intake of a truly exquisite sentence. They’re infused with personal history, swerving, often with nothing more than a comma, from one generation to the next, or a couple back. They are thrust forward by action, by movement, by a masterful use of the verb.

In the sentences of One Hundred Years of Solitude, time comes home to roost with the most prudent use of language I’ve ever read. Here, just for fun, are two of my favorites thus far.

Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. [221]

Which explains, among other things, not the plot of the novel, or its theme, but the writing, because time is indeed going in a circle, one that expands and contracts many times on a single page, often within a single sentence. Jose Arcadio Beundia is Ursula’s husband, long gone but eternally present, the founder of Macando. Aureliano Triste is one of her 17 grandsons who bear the name Aureliano, each of whom was born of a different mother during the war years. He shows up in Macondo one day with the rest of them – it is quite a gathering – and is one of the two Aurelianos to take up permanent residence there. The other Aureliano to remain in Macondo – Aureliano Cantes – picks up the family’s multi-generational fascination with the making of ice, drawing from a childhood memory that is not his own but his father’s, who is Colonel Auereliano Buendia.

I am not certain about this but the main character of the book is either the colonel – the original Aureliano Buendias – or his mother, Ursula. Thus far, I believe it is the colonel. For me, he seems the most likely embodiment of the theme, which seems to me to be pitfalls of becoming a part of the world::

Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. [199]

Super responsive

I was talking with a woman recently whose work is similar to mine. We get together regularly and we bitch. A lot. She was explaining to me that one of the things she does to keep things as organized as possible is to draw a circle on a piece of paper, divide it into quadrants and then fill those quadrants with the things she needs to do according to their urgency. The top two quadrants are important, one more so than the other. The two quadrants at the bottom of the circle are not.

Lists really are not my thing. Until recently, the last serious list I made was to prioritize the things that needed to be done with this house. The top portion of the list was for things that needed to be done “this year,” which was 2002. The bottom portion of the list was for those tasks I figured could wait until “next year.” A year or two ago, I happened across that list as I was searching for something else, and it is completely and utterly comical.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give list making another go. The reason for this is that over the past several months I have felt like my work projects are slowly but surely becoming unmanageable. I feel like I’m racing from one thing to another without ever truly focusing on any one specific thing. I’m making mistakes that should not be made, and there is less breathing room between the time I finish something and the time at which it is due, which cuts into my ability to carefully read through documents before I send them. I usually shut my office down sometime between 5 and 5:30 in the afternoon, and I noticed that more often than not the experience of watching my computer screen go black had ceased to be a relief and was becoming, instead, another source of anxiety. I wasn’t thinking of the things I’d accomplished during the day. I was thinking of what I’d missed.

So one Wednesday night, on the back of an envelope in which a credit card offer had been mailed to me, I wrote down the four things I wanted to accomplish the following day. My list was deliriously simple. I needed to write a blog post about how to transfer the contents of one PC to another, write the final section of an article about developing applications for mobile devices, rewrite the tips and tricks section of an article I’d written about professional networking in continuing education classes and write two of the five executive biographies for a client that’s a local technology reseller and customizer. On paper, I don’t have that much to do. I don’t have an overwhelming volume of what the cool people call “deliverables.” In fact, it’s almost embarrassing how little I have going on at any one time.

What was most beneficial about the list was that it served to turn the work portion of my day completely off when it was over. There are many things I like to do in the evening, and I am absolutely intolerant and inflexible about interruptions, especially work-related interruptions, even if they’re only in the form of wondering if I did this or that or having a little spell of panic as I contemplate what needs to be accomplished the following day.

Contrary to what has evidently become the standard way of doing business, I refuse to check mail during my off hours. I don’t synch the shit to my cell phone because (a) I do not have a cell phone and (b) that sort of blind flinging of things far and wide and letting them land where they may, with or without a clear purpose, breeds inefficiency. It took me nearly a decade to draw these lines in permanent ink, and I am sticking to them. First and foremost, sending mail around in the middle of the night and from airports and while driving to the coast gives those to whom they’re being sent the impression – rightly so – that you’re available around the clock. And from there the logical conclusion is never far behind: If you’re available around the clock, everyone should be. Number two, it’s the mark of a person with zero capacity to differentiate and prioritize one thing from another: When everything is deemed urgent, the result is that nothing truly is. And number three, it demonstrates that you either are incapable of completing what’s expected of you during business hours or completely disorganized. Either way, people who consistently send things back and forth at 10:47 p.m. either need to hire someone to help out or find a new job.

The least beneficial part of the list is that I discovered – by making check marks beside an item on the list each time I needed to tend to it – that there is always one thing that derails the day. And it’s usually the smallest, or seemingly smallest, item on the list. And we return to it over and over and over again because each time we craft and send responses and edits and one thing and another at the speed of lightening, we do so, alas, in a way that’s more mistake than solution. To my horror, the PR people I work with and with whom I’ve discussed this call it being “super responsive.” I call it super sloppy.