End of Year Post (Includes Personal Update of Sorts)

I was laid up for a week in the middle of December with a kidney stone, which I still have, but I had a stent put in about 2 weeks ago that it is keeping me from being in pain while my system gets cleaned out. As it is likely too big to pass on its own, I am going to have to have another procedure soon to get it out but hopefully the recovery from that will be fairly quick. Between the four days of pain before I had the stent put in and four days I had to spend attached to a catheter afterwards I was pretty depressed at the beginning of last week. However after a couple of sluggish days even once I got the catheter out I have been feeling more like myself again. While I don't like allowing myself to get into the clutches of the medical system, and they took the opportunity of my presenting myself to them to draw blood and run a bunch of tests on me, there was good news in that apart from the stone I appear to be pretty healthy. One of my remaining goals in my life as a nominal member of the downwardly mobile former white middle class is to live long enough not to contribute to the in some quarters celebrated decline in life expectancy that has become a signature characteristic of this group, so I am (cautiously) happy about this apparent state of affairs.



As this was the first time in my life that I have had any problem requiring real medical intervention, as I noted above, it had a depressing effect. It was not a terribly serious problem, but it effectively took a week of my life from me, insofar as I wasn't able to drive or go out or eat or drink very much, and while I could read a little, the discomfort I was in made it difficult to derive much enjoyment from it. While the days when I had the catheter in were not as painful as what had come before, it was difficult to move around and while I won't say that was worse than being in pain, in that stage I was at least thrashing about and I couldn't concentrate as much on how depressed I was. When I was in bed with the catheter I was looking at photo albums of myself when my children were younger and we were at the beach and going on trips and eating and drinking and I thought "there is my old life, when I was healthy and strong, before I had this thing attached to me", as if all the happy part of my life were over and I would never be able to leave the house or do anything enjoyable again. It certainly made the prospect of getting prematurely sick or terribly old much more vivid and terrifying than it was previously. Even for a few days after I got the catheter out and being able to return to my routine, which I thought would energize me, I still felt rather flat and out of it. At that point I hadn't done much to take part in the Christmas season, and I didn't know if my mood would allow me to enjoy anything very much. But this week I have felt much better and have in fact been unusually happy, which kinds of mood swings are not uncommon with me anyway. I don't even care about the bill anymore. If it takes three years to pay it off so be it. I always want to be a good little dog of course and honor all my debts but I have had to learn to accept some limits with regard to how dogged I am in these responsibilities so as to not impinge too much on my actual life you know.


Three days before I went to the hospital was my 20th wedding anniversary, which was a lovely day. My beautiful wife even took off from work to hang out with me. We drove up to the Lakes Region of New Hampshire with our 2 year old (everybody else being in school) and had lunch at a venerable restaurant that has been in the same family since the 1950s and retains much of the atmosphere of those bygone days, which makes it a favorite of mine. Being both a weekday and well off-season for vacationers, there weren't many people there, but one of the perks of spending the winter up here is getting to go to popular places, assuming that they stay open, when they are quiet and calm.


I was given percoset to take to manage my kidney stone pain before they could get the stent put in. As this was my first experience taking an official opioid I was mildly concerned about developing an addiction that eventually spiraled into the ruination of my life and a premature death of the sort that I imagine would be amusing to my imaginary social rivals. While it did do an admirable job, once it kicked in, of dulling the force of my pain (I was scrupulous about not taking it more frequently than at the recommended 4-6 hour intervals), once the pain went away I felt no desire to take it any more. One interesting note I have about it is that I happened to be reading a late Henry James novel (The Awkward Age, fwiw) when this all hit and of course this was impossible to try to read before I got the medication. However when the percocet did take effect, as I had nothing else to do, I did find for an interval everything to be so slowed down and calm that I was able to read this somewhat excruciatingly dense and subtle book with much more penetration and less distraction than I was in the more normal state in which I tried to read the book before and after the period in which I was drugged. So in addition to controlling pain, one other useful function of opioids at least seems to be as an aid in reading Henry James novels.


Percoset also tends to induce a fairly heavy sleep, and when I was taking it I had the most drawn out and boring dreams I have ever had in my life. There was one where I was in a department store walking around a long table on which various customers had set down piles of purchases and I was taking an inventory of the piles: one green shirt, one red skirt, one washcloth with Pac-Man on it, etc. And I literally went through this process like 18 times! In another one an airplane I was flying in broke apart as it entered a hanger and the passengers were left floating in the air on individually numbered planks that were attracted to velcro magnets bearing corresponding numbers that were held up by numerous Africans standing on high platforms inside the hangar. As my plank, which was #34, drifted in the direction of the platform, it was apparent that the velcro on magnet 34 was worn off and the attraction was not working, meaning that my plank was going to crash at an inconvenient angle into the edifice towards which it was moving. I was shouting at the Africans that the magnet wasn't working and for them to help pull me up onto the platform as I approached it, but no one seemed to hear or understand me and I woke up just as I was about to crash into the tower...


I didn't have any new Christmas videos that I liked enough to put up this year, and we are already three days past anyway, so I guess I will skip it.


This is probably the last posting I will be making here this year, bringing my total for 2017 on this blog to a whopping 11 (I did manage to make 30 posts on my other site, which is a record for it), the eighth straight year that my post total has declined here. I have to think this will be the nadir, and next year I can manage to get that total up again somewhat. I hope so anyway.

Year in Review

I only managed to get done 35 posts in 2015 on this blog (though I did put up 27 on the spinoff Vacation blog) and readership was not so hot either. Quality, though never near as high as I anticipated when I took up this pursuit, I suspect is down even from what it was formerly. So I am in a bit of a down cycle. However, maybe this past year marked the bottom in some ways and I will be able to come back somewhat.  Become calmer, more comfortable, less distracted and rushed, or at least approaching somewhat the level I formerly had. I feel like I must be close to peak distractedness or jumpiness; well, what I really feel is that it must be impossible that I will never regain my ability to think and write somewhat coherently. In any case, here were my top-viewed posts from the last year:

1. Mid-Winter Music and Videos on this blog got 174 page views, making it by far my most popular post of 2015.

2. Author List Volume VIII from the Vacation blog, a dry catalog of writers' birthplaces, burial sites, museums and other monuments, was the runner-up of all my postings this year with 73 views.

3. The Battle of the Broadcasting Erins, a consideration of the merits of Generation-X TV newscaster babes Erin Burnett and Erin Fehlau, took the bronze medal for this year with 58 page views.

4. A movie review post with the eclectic-sounding title of Luis Bunuel/John Huston/James Joyce/Andy Williams was checked out by 44 people.

5. My recount of my experiences reading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser on the other blog attracted 39 visits.

6. Addendum to Edward Bok post (Vacation)--28

7-8. Tie between the original post on The Americanization of Edward Bok on the Vacation Blog and my account of taking my children to see the movie Tomorrowland, both with 25 views.

9. Author List Volume VII (Vacation)--24

10. Report on All's Well that Ends Well (Vacation)--23.

The least viewed post I had this year was my June reading update on the Vacation blog, which drew only 7 visitors. In general those monthly reading updates are not popular, but I started doing them to give that blog a somewhat more frequent consistent source of content, so I think I will keep it up for now. The least viewed posts for this blog were the last two I put up in December, which have both drawn 8 views. 8 seems to be about the baseline number of regular readers I have. Most of my posts get to eight views within a week and then other visitors will trickle in periodically after that.

The rather groovy early 70s video for 'Uncle Albert" on my #1 post for this year seems to have been taken down. We'll try and see if this one is any good.

Videos featuring the beautiful Mirielle from the 1980s "French in Action" TV series (one was on that prize-earning post) never stay up for long, but it is usually worthwhile to find more.

I have had a good Christmas season, of course one always has to work too much in my line of employment this time of year, but I think my children will have pleasant memories of it in their later life. Hoping my brain recovers some of its elasticity and stamina, however modest these were even at their peaks, in the New Year, and I can produce some worthy as well as more frequent posts in 2016.

Blog News

I have been away from the site for a couple of weeks because my wife had another baby, and I haven't been organized enough to put up a post about it, even just a few pictures. But things have calmed down enough that I should be able to manage to do that at least.

The baby was a girl (this was known in advance), the second daughter after four boys. I'll be 63 when she graduates from high school, and 75 when she turns 30, if I make it that far. I sure hope all of these children will be all right by then, able to make some kind of life for themselves and so on. The general zeitgeist is so pessimistic about this unless the individual person is both unusually talented and possessed of a superhuman work ethic (I suppose it could be argued it is my duty to instill the superhuman work ethic in them, though I am not really sure what the inner qualities and motivations necessary to drive it consist of). I am not quite so pessimistic about this, first because I kind of have to be, but also simply because beyond a certain point the number of young people with a prayer of achieving any sense of success in life becomes so vanishingly small as to become logically unsustainable. What I mean is that the society will have to re-orient its understanding of what is an acceptable or desirable goal for young people, especially those of above-average brightness, to something that is at least reasonably attainable, if it hopes to reclaim some semblance of sanity. I think that it will do this over the next few decades.



The baby's name is Dorothy Harriet. It was tentatively going to be Harriet Dorothy for about a month until it was born, when some reservations about Harriet emerged. I have always wanted to name a daughter Dorothy, though I do like Harriet too. So far I find I am calling the baby Dodo Bird a lot, but this will probably not persist once the child progresses into the early grades of elementary school.

I am backtracking here to Christmas time, which I missed on the site this year. This is all four of the boys at their grandmother's house.

#1 & #4 visit the hospital. With me. This is probably what I look like most of the time.

Completely spontaneous and unposed picture of Dorothy's first homecoming. This was only a week ago. We've had about two more feet of snow and a seemingly continuous decline in the temperature since then. It is not actually unusual for us to get the amount of snow we have had in the last month, but it is unusual to have these kinds of large storms when it is simultaneously 10 or 15 degrees out (rather than say, 29). That's what has really been the story of the weather, to me.

Obviously this picture of my older (age 3) daughter was too much to pass up.

Christmas Report

I ended up having a pleasant, if extremely low-key Christmas holiday.

The week before Christmas is the darkest of the year, plus I had the stomach flu, plus everyone was still in school and had a million parties and end of year activities to organize, and the combination of all this probably wore me down more than it would have even a few years ago.

I didn't eat while I had the stomach flu for four days and lost nine pounds, which put me down to 216, which is the lightest I had been in many years. Since I recovered of course I have been eating a little more regularly and am back up to 220. However I have been having smaller portions, not having seconds, not eating late at night, so hopefully I will be able to keep this up and be able to hold at this weight or even work myself down a little more. Of course the big test is when I become depressed again, which will probably be within a few weeks.

New Year's Eve is still to come, and I am looking forward to it, as I always do, as the last gasp of Christmas. It has become fashionable to dislike this day, and I suppose it has some structural flaws, but in recent years I have tried to embrace it, have a little party at home, play some games. I suppose it appears more attractive once you have resigned yourself to a modest life in which nothing spectacular or scintillating will never happen, and can sense the approach of your own death. That clinging to Christmas for another four or five hours every year comes to have some appeal.

I am ridiculous in my adaptation of technology. I got an MP3 player as my gift this year. I have finally decided to give up on playing CDs in the car because almost all the songs skip after about five plays, and I am hoping this will work better. Also I am hoping I can download some podcasts from the internet and listen to them (I think you can do this) because this is something I simply do not have time to do at home.

We went to Odiorne Point State Park near Portsmouth on Sunday. We walked along the rocks by the sea for about an hour but then it started to pour rain (if you saw highlights of the Patriots-Buffalo football game last weekend you have an idea of the weather). They have a little science center there where we we able to take refuge. It is the sort of small scale museum I like, cheap (around $20 for all seven of us to get in), simple displays, not too much to take in. I think they had six fish tanks for example. They had two blue lobsters, which are exceedingly rare, one in 500,000 I think. They are the same species as regular lobsters, just a few have this coloring, which I had not known. I also learned that there used to be vacation homes all over the point where the park is, but the Navy seized them during World War II and built fortifications to protect the nearby Naval Yard. I'm not sure why the land was not returned to the former owners after the war but it wasn't. Evidently nobody very important had a place there. After this we went to Pizza Hut in the dark, with the rain pouring down, all of which took me back to my high school days in Maine. My wife commented that the same music was playing the last time she was in Pizza Hut--in 1989.

With all of our children if we do go out we usually have to go to pizza places because you can order in bulk (the pizza) and have them share it rather than everyone having to order his own meal. This works at Chinese restaurants too, though some of the children will only eat chicken fingers.

We have snow, currently about four inches with a top coating of slush from last night's rain/snow mix that is now frozen into a crust with the drop in temperatures--currently 8 degrees, going down to -1. We had a white Christmas, which we have here 90% of the time, though last year we did not.

My writing is really in a (distraction--completely forgot the adjective I was going to put in here) state. I am muddling, muddling, muddling through. Got to go for tonight. Happy New Year!

Music Videos, Depression, Christmas in the 1960s and Even Some Pat Boone!

I never thought I would become that cranky middle-aged man who dreaded the approach of Christmas as too burdensome in its expense and other obligations to be enjoyable anymore. For about three days, including most of this past weekend, I seemed to have become that person however. I was not excited about Christmas, or much else in what remained of life for that matter. I was even getting agitated at the thought that my children would likely wake up at 5:30 on Christmas day and I would not be able to go back to bed the whole long morning because that would not be in the 'spirit' of the holiday. Even this morning when I woke up I was still depressed and unenthusiastic about anything with regard to my situation or anything that loomed in the day ahead. The weather did not look any too promising for relieving ennui either, though it was the sort of day I had liked when I was younger--approximately 28 degrees and overcast with occasional snow showers, the earth covered with about a inch of snow from the previous day--however as the day went on I found I felt a little better. I read a chapter of the 19th century warhorse classic novel that I am re-reading, which always cheers me, and then I went outside and shoveled the walk and built three rows of an igloo, which was not my first choice of activities but it seemed to have a good effect on my general mood. The day was calm, and no great costs arose or had to be immediately addressed in the course of it, which I probably needed as well.

I am almost ready to play some Christmas videos.

"Silent Night"--(Deanna Durbin) 

From Lady On a Train. The attitude of the camerawork and the circumstance of her lolling on a luxurious bed singing this particular song were mildly scandalous in 1945.

"Christmas Waltz" (1968) "Silver Bells" (1959)

I haven't put up any Lennon Sisters videos since February. But I have been saving these. The above clip is from (I believe) a Bing Crosby Christmas Special. You see what could happen when they were able to get away from Lawrence Welk and work with some real Hollywood hairstylists, makeup artists and fashion experts. I think it can be admitted that they are a little ravissantes here. I've spent much of my life in places (New England; St John's) where the women are considered by the greater world to be, on average, uglier than in other places. There is a joke in New England about trying to describe your own or somebody else's girlfriend's looks in a favorable light by saying, "She's a Vermont ten, a New Hampshire nine, and a Maine three hundred". That said, there are of course plenty of women even in these places who are plenty attractive, but it is true that in most instances these do not maximize their potential for strikingness of look with regards to wardrobe, makeup, and so on not merely on a daily basis, but much more than a handful of times in their entire lives. I of course find this kind of endearing, as I can hardly identify with the kinds of people who are to some extent glammed up all the time, but I also take a certain pleasure in someone I consider to be coming from where I'm coming from in this regard to show that they can look more conventionally or glamorously beautiful.



I had wanted to put a version of this up several years ago, but it was taken down, and seems to have returned only recently. This is another non-Lawrence Welk appearance (the Welk show at this time was not in color) but still being young and in the 50s, the girls remain in character. When Dianne gives the gift-bearing man a kiss on the cheek at the end of the second song, i thought, if that were me I probably would have had a heart attack. Like other mid-20th century, secular Christmas Songs ("Christmas Waltz", "Marshmallow World"), that the Lennons do especially endearing versions of, this is one of my favorite Christmas songs, probably in part because I feel like it is not played to death, and never has been.

"Sleigh Ride" (1963)

There is another group of older songs that I don't recall ever hearing on the radio in the 70s and 80s that since sometime in the 90s have become extremely popular and are in danger of being played to death. This is one; "Santa Baby" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are two others of this class that come immediately to mind. When I was at college, there was a guy on my floor who had the Phil Spector Christmas Album and played it regularly during the revelrous few weeks of the season when you are still at school (we didn't have exams at our school, so the opportunity for parties, dinners, egg nog tastings, etc, of a universal nature was considerably expanded). Never having heard any of the songs, I declared to somebody, whether the owner of the record or someone else I don't remember, "this is great", and the other person replied, "Yes. Everybody loves the Wall of Sound". But now everybody knows this record and this year especially I sense that "Sleigh Ride" is being overplayed, which ultimately kills the pleasing effect of the song.

As you can probably tell, my idea of Christmas is, and probably always will be, rooted in the ever receding 1960s, even though I wasn't alive in that time. But most of the Christmases of my childhood, being spent mostly at my grandparents' houses, were stylistically reprisals of Christmas as it had been in 1965 with only slight changes that did not begin to become noticeable at all until the late 80s; the same artificial tree, the same ornaments, the same door decorations, the same music, the same candy dishes, etc and etc. Neither of my grandparents' households contained much in the way of books, so my idle time was passed looking endlessly through the old photo albums that were deposited in the cabinets of all the endtables, which were heavily weighted towards the legendary Christmases of the years immediately predating my birth, before the old neighborhood broke up and various of the riotous neighbors had moved away and Wild Uncle Bill had had his unfortunate coronary at age 46, and the witty, endlessly entertaining family friend who looked just like James Joyce had had his embarrassing embezzlement scandal and ceased to come around anymore. These larger than life characters had been replaced by me, a neurotic eight year old with thick glasses, and my mother, who in 1970s party people terms was kind of like Karen Carpenter without any singing or entertainment component at all. As you can imagine, things were not what they had been. But I still like to think I was able to absorb something of the flavor of the time, at second hand.  

"Love Letters in the Sand" (Pat Boone)

So we're getting away from the Christmas theme a little bit. I am not a Pat Boone fan, although I do like this song. When I was young of course, Pat Boone was widely regarded as the most awful person in the history of music, primarily because he was a soulless white guy who made millions of dollars by ripping off black geniuses, who never got to make the money that was rightfully theirs (This is an aside, but whenever I read some lament about genius musicians who are living in poverty while Pat Boone and various oleaginous record producers are the lords of financial empires looted from the work of these impoverished geniuses, I always wonder why the National Endowment of the Arts or some similar body cannot at least provide some kind of pension to these contributors to the cultural life of the nation similar to that which Samuel Johnson received from the Crown. The obvious answer is that King of England could decide arbitrarily to give one guy a pension and not another, and that was the final word on the matter, while in our system the fighting over who deserved the money and who didn't, and how much was just and so on wold be neverending. But it seems like somebody could have set up a private foundation at some point to try to address this issue that everyone indignantly complains about but are apparently impotent to resolve). Anyway, I've always been mildly fascinated with Pat Boone, for the hatred he inspires among a certain type of person for being more or less like me and 90% of the people I know. He is goofier and more discomfiting than the people I know because he is comparatively unselfconsciousness about who he is and what he represents and how repulsive that is to basically everyone who is cool, but I recognize the instinct.

One of the comments on this video--Pat Boone videos draw a lot of heated commentary, because of what he symbolizes and the emotions this produces--began "I am a 57 year old black man, and I love Pat Boone." It could be trolling, but I actually think it is real, because the guy went on to talk about being a Christian and so on. It is just funny, because it is the sort of thing the Official Narrative had always led me to believe could never happen. 

Brief Notes on Secondary Reading

Seeing as I am about 4 years behind on the notes on my primary reading you would think that would be a higher priority. And I am going to try to bring that somewhat up to date over the next few months. This post could also be skipped, since none of these books I thought was especially good, and two of them were more or less abominable, but I feel like I should examine my complaints about them and why I have not been able to do markedly better. In any area of life.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I have not been reading many novels in my official list for the better part of two years now--long poems, Victorian biographies, philosophical treatises and some works of the Fathers of the Church have filled up the space once dominated by them--and at a certain point in the late summer or early fall I was craving one. Why I chose this I cannot logically account for; every now and then I am overcome by an urge to look into something contemporary, this was named one of the top 10 novels of the year (2006) by the New York Times and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and it apparently even sold decently. It was supposed to be an accurate depiction of a certain influential and refined milieu. I hope for the sake of the milieu in question that it was not.

Successful literary types often love to recount moments when some joker wannabe reads something by one of the legitimate geniuses of his own generation and realizes he cannot compete in that league, but Claire Messud has something of the opposite effect. She reminds the contemporary would-have-been author that the pool of literary talent in his time was evidently so thin that anybody possessed of even modest ability should have had a golden opportunity not only to break into the field but to become a substantial figure in it. That is how abysmal this book is.

Now it is true that I read it all the way through. This was in part because I wanted to be sure that I was not utterly deceiving myself about the book's quality, but the main reason was that, insipid and insubstantial as the  rich, good-looking, expensively educated, fashionably dressed, culinarily sophisticated, Manhattan residing cultural creative characters were, I am of course obsessed enough with such people to try to find out what the secret of their grip over so much of our national artistic and intellectual life is, because it does not appear to be stupendous intelligence or learning. Apart from snobbery towards provincials and working class people, and maybe the details of clothes and lunches with the smart set, the book is pitifully weak in detail and giving much sense of what being alive on a minute to minute basis in contemporary New York is like, unless the sum of all mental and visual sensation of living there now results in a kind of cumulative emptiness. There is no story, or part of a story, or character, or scene, that is remotely gripping. I suppose the likes of me can take heart that in modern creative class New York there are apparently no straight American-born men. I only noted 2 in the book, one a fat loser from the provinces who primarily subsisted on Coca-Cola and potato chips and did not bathe regularly (no sex for him, needless to say), and the other a prominent liberal intellectual in his 60s who, as if to underscore the dearth of men in their 30s and 40s who are both acceptable to modern educated women and are sexually inclined in their direction, did have a robust affair with one of the main characters, a well-endowed 30 year old working in television. This absence was so blatant in fact that after I got through the book I made an outline for a short comic novel tentatively titled A Heterosexual in New York, in which a character like myself 15 years ago manages to become a force on the young New York literary social scene just by exerting a little heterosexual energy; but of course I haven't gotten going with writing any of it yet.

For what it's worth, Claire Messud is married to James Woods, whose current ranking among the most important literary critics in the United States would put him safely in the running for a BCS bid with a real shot at getting into the title game. She also attended Yale, and one of the characters in her book refers several times to an old professor whose theories happen to be the same as Harold Bloom's, so it is not implausible to presume that she was a student of this luminary's as well. She is also listed as a fellow with the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study). She is obviously well-steeped in almost the highest literary and cultural circles our society has to offer, or at least that the general public is vaguely aware of, yet the dominant characteristics of her work are banality and a general lack of vigorous talent. She has a good grasp on the construction of sentences, I suppose we can grant her that. There is no meat or power in the sentences though.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack features in the book. I admit that the events of that day as they seem to have been experienced by people who were in New York at the time have never really gripped my imagination. My own memories of the day, from afar, granted, are of a kind of absurdity. The media was apparently telling people to give blood, so we had people showing up at the hospital where I work rolling up their sleeves and demanding that someone draw their blood, screaming "Do you know what is happening?" and that sort of thing. The organization was not set up to service all of these donors on the spot but they did schedule a blood drive for a couple of days later to appease the mob, which ended up being cancelled because of course there weren't any survivors who needed it. My sense with writers trying to write about the catastrophe is that something about it always seems incongruous with what it really was, not that I know what it really was either, but I don't think the note that is taken by most authors on the subject has been the right one.

King Rat by James Clavell

From 1963. Best Seller. Opposite situation to The Emperor's Children, in that the premise of the story and the main character have real literary potential, but I found the writing something of a chore to get through. It was somewhat like Forever Amber, in that when I would take it up and get into it I could plow through 30 or 40 pages in a sitting, but I was never all that eager to take it up again until several days interval had passed. The Emperor's Children I actually got through fairly quickly--fairly quickly for me meaning 15-20 pages a day--and on a regular schedule, even though the book was lousy. I think I felt like its very existence was such an indictment of myself and my whole lousy literary generation that I was compelled by association, however tenuous, to wallow in the shame that it represented for as long as it lasted. There was a part in King Rat that, while typical of its time and not especially well-written, arrested me, about one of the loser lower-middle aspiring to middle-middle class character's agony over his inability to persuade his wife to willingly have sex with him. All of his desperate requests and attempts at seduction are met with a frigid "No" and the night before he is to leave for duty--the book is set in a Japanese prison camp during World War II--he violently tears apart the expensive dress she has put on to go out somewhere and I suppose it is implied that he raped her, though I don't have the book in front of me anymore and don't remember whether that was implied or if he just gave up when he realized she was completely uninterested in having relations with him. That one passage about frustration really stuck with me. And the King is really an excellent character, though my memory of details where he is concerned seems to be fading already.

The movie based on this that came out in 1965 is very good. I got it expecting it to be one of those lumbering 1960s World War II films, because it is not especially celebrated, so I was surprised by how well it worked as a movie. Even my wife, who is not the target demographic for World War II prison camp movies, thought it was good, and handled its subject matter tastefully (maybe this is why it has not been more highly rated by the critics). The King was played by George Segal, who seemed positioned around this time to become a fairly major leading man if one or two of his films, such as this one, had taken off, but that did not quite happen. His timing was unlucky I think in that he had a kind of classic All-American look and demeanor which became suspect in the minds of many serious art people just at the time he emerged on the scene. I have not seen him in much, but I've generally liked him, perhaps because he never did make that ascent to superstardom. The co-star and foil of the King is Tom Courtenay, who starred in a number of notable British movies of the early 60s like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Liar.

Carlo Cipollo--The Economic History of World Population

From 1962. A very short book (117 pages). Demography is one of my peculiar fascinations, and interesting readable books about it are fairly rare, so whenever I come across anything on the subject that looks interesting I give it a try. I found my copy of this in the donations bin at the supermarket.

I always enjoy reading books from this time period because I find the tone and point of view which the authors of the era usually take to be more agreeable than that of contemporary writers. They may even be saying the same things, but they tend to be less hysterical about them. Carlo Cipollo for example, talks about the necessity going forward of adopting a more global point of view and the eventuality of resource depletion, but he manages to write about these matters, it seems to me, without the accusatory or imperious attitude that people promoting these positions feel compelled to inject into their statements on these subjects today. I am certain that he probably had such attitudes--his essays on human stupidity apparently rank among his better known works--but he was able to temper the urge to express them in his published work. Indeed, according to his Wikipedia page one of his tenets regarding stupidity was that "The probability that a person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person" which strikes me a sensible observation that people have totally lost sight of today.

The 1960s was, it strikes me, kind of a golden age of popular anthropological writing. I remember as a child my father's having numerous books that presented the story of prehistoric man in his journey from hunter and gatherer to maker of tools to his discovery of agriculture and language and primitive art and his eventual development into a creature vaguely resembling ourselves. It seems to me that this narrative regarding our human origins is not as prominent, or vivid in the collective consciousness anymore. Cipolla has a whole chapter in this vein which took me right back to the era of The Naked Ape and The Epic of Man and the opening scene of 2001 and the similar productions and imagery from that time.

Cipolla was quite concerned, and rightly so, at the time, about overpopulation. At the time he was writing, even though birth rates in the West had declined considerably since 1800 or so, they were still well above the replacement level everywhere, and of course in the third world they were absolutely astronomical. There seemed no likelihood that the birth rate would ever drop to a level low enough to meaningfully slow the rate of population growth, let alone stabilize it, though that did happen all across the West within a few years of the book's being written, and has since happened across much of the rest of the world, apart from sub-Saharan Africa and several (though not all) Islamic countries.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

I wouldn't even consider this to be a real book. It's one of those ubiquitous modern non-fiction exercises where a bunch of disparate examples are thrown together--this one had employee training at Starbucks, the Montgomery bus boycott, Paul O'Neill's reviving of the fortunes of the Alcoa corporation, the deadly London Tube fire of 1987, the excruciating process of figuring out how to market Febreze, middle-class people who are dumb as rocks but somehow have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars to blow at casinos, and the relentless mining of personal spending data by all major corporations--in support of a not especially compelling idea. Given that most of the chapters are concerned in some way with a triumph derived from some application of the principles of habit delineated in the book that resulted in soaring profits for some mega-company, I am assuming it is aimed at the business crowd. The depiction of the world it offers I think would be too depressing for anybody else to contemplate. The author is a reporter for the New York Times. He seems to find the corporate vision for human life going forward to be acceptable, legitimate and perhaps even interesting. His whole 90s Ivy League package--that includes his picture as well as his style of writing--is as if calculated to be extremely annoying to me anyway. I don't know these people at all. I don't know why you would write a book like this.

Bonus Recommendations: Children's Books

My older boys are reading the Great Brain series of books by John Fitzgerald, which originally came out in the 1960s and 70s. I never knew about them at the time, though they are the kind of thing I would have read. They are reminiscences of the author's childhood in Utah at the turn of the 20th century, at which time that part of the country was still very much on the frontier in many ways, though amenities of civilization like running water and mass market toys have already begun to make their insidious inroads on the theretofore unsullied lives of the settlers. Indeed, one of the big events in the series is when the author's family (the Great Brain is the author's elder brother) gets the first flush toilet in town. Republican types will like it, as all of the boys in the book--girls aren't referred to much throughout the series--are resourceful when it comes to satisfying their material needs, and naturally entrepreneurial. If there is some desirable item that you want, your parents aren't just going to go out and buy you the identical thing, or give you enough money to ever get it yourself, so your only hope of obtaining it is to either swindle it away from another kid who has it, or device a scheme to relieve your peers of their own allowances. The Great Brain--who has a lot of similarities to King Rat now that I think of it--is the master of devising such enterprises. The series loses a little steam as it gets into the later volumes--there is less of a sense of continuity binding one episode to the next, and the tone of the stories becomes less warm, I think--but I think they make for more entertaining reading than the various fantasy/magic/kids versus dark forces of evil books that are so popular now, and that my own children also like quite a lot.

The Pink Refrigerator by Tim Egan is a book for 3-5 year olds that I confess to liking. The premise is that there is this middle aged male creature of some kind who owns a junk shop. He lives alone and has been stuck in a routine for years. He never misses his favorite television shows though he usually falls asleep in his chair in front of the set. It is never implied that he is unhappy, just that he is not living life to the fullest. One day a mysterious pink refrigerator shows up in his junkyard. It has an old rusty magnet on it that has a different message every day. It also has something new inside it every day. One day it was a set of old literary classics. Another a set of paints. On the third a horn of some kind or other. One day there was a globe. At first our marmot-man does not know quite what to do with them, but they seem to exert magic powers. He puts the books in his shop window for sale, but finds he is unable to part with them when someone wishes to buy them. At length even the urge to watch television is overpowered. By the end of the book he is closing up his shop and setting out on a trip. It speaks to me. The guy who sleeps and watches television all the time is not a hopeless moron who needs a major intervention to reach enlightenment, he has just become lazy and needs a nudge, a reason, to engage in some degree with mental life again.

I completely missed the Christmas season. I couldn't find any Christmas videos this year that I just loved, so I guess I will skip that for 2012 and see if anything strikes my fancy next year.

Merry Christmas II



One could fill up many posts on the subject of Christmas music--I was just revisiting 'Christmas in Hollis', another blast from my youth that I don't expect I will ever be hearing on a regular basis in these parts--but I have had my eye on this song for this spot for several months, and as it's still working for me, it will stay. This is a good number for them. Their interpretation embodies the spirit of the song.

There is always a danger, not so much in being wrong, but in being facile, to make some comment such as that 1959 was likely one of our sweller Christmases. I am quite certain that by the standards of the people who love the American-style Christmas the most, the 1959 season played out as close to that ideal as any other (in my family either '65 or '66 was the template for the perfect Christmas because it snowed a beautiful powdery snow in Philadelphia, nobody on either side of the family had any significant problems, and my parents were young, beautiful and in love, which must indeed have been something to see). While I have heard some bad words about things individual people did in the year 1959, I have never heard anybody speak poorly of the year itself, and heard many people affirm it was a good year for them. I even once met a guy hiking in the woods in Maine who it turned out had grown up in Concord and graduated from the high school in 1959, which was the same class as my father-in-law, whom of course he knew, and his parents and brother as well, as which revelation my wife turned to me and said, 'didn't you just know he was going to say the class of '59?' to which the man said 'yes, I guess I just have the look about me that says 1959. It was a good year.'

Merry Christmas I




I have noticed in recent years that the radio stations where I live at least have largely dropped this song, and indeed most of the 80s contributions to the holiday canon. A few years back I noticed when I heard this song around December 21st that it was the first time I had heard it the whole season, and I made a point of looking out for it during subsequent Christmases. The next year it made its appearance early, around the 10th, but last year I went right down to the wire again, not appearing until the 22nd or 23rd, and this year, as of 9:46pm on the 23rd, I have yet to hear it on commercial radio, Rite Aid radio (I spend a lot of time at Rite Aid), other stores. I haven't been to a party in years but they probably aren't playing this at the parties I would be most likely to be invited to either. Yet for some of us d'un certain age, this is as much a part of the fabric of the season as White Christmas and Dick Clark on New Year's Eve. Granted, the scenario in the video of being stuck in a cabin in the mountains with a bunch of 80s yuppies couples, two of which include George Michael and Ridgeley, his erstwhile Wham! bandmate, approaches very close to my worst nightmare not involving prison or homelessness or starvation. In fact, I actually hate it. I don't even really like the song that much, to be honest, but I find I am unable to fully engage with the spirit of the season until I hear it in a public setting, where it must set loose several vital associations with Christmases past that enable me to move forward.

Along with several other Wham! songs--"Careless Whisper", "Everything She Wants"--which describe romantic strife in much more detail than is ordinary in popular music songs, I was at the age of 14 greatly impressed by the sophisticated adult relationships I imagined George Michael and Ridgeley must have. They argue, they cry, they are way beyond expressing any kindness for the other person, she's having his baby even though she doesn't seem to like him and he is openly indifferent about the matter as well. This was heavy stuff to me, who primarily related to the traditional trifecta of boy-meets-girl-boy-asks-girl-out-girl-likes-boy-they-get-married-and-live-happily-ever-after, boys-sees-hot-girl-boy-wants-hot-girl-boy-gets-hot-girl-hot-girl-starts-to-annoy-boy-so-he-shows-her-the-door, and the one I was most partial to, boy-sees-girl-boy-wants-girl-boy-cannot-get-girl-boy-is-wretched. So Wham! seemed to be operating on a totally foreign level. Which ultimately of course they were.

So Unfocused I Can't Even Come Up With a Credible Title

Still not up to writing much lately. I seem to be going through some further life transition, which seems unfortunately to be steering me even further away from mental activity of any passable quality than I was before. What is the nature of these afflictions which beset me? The usual busyness. Anxiety and mild depression. Sentimentality--despite still having 2 babies and a 5-year old, I find myself of late missing the years when my oldest two boys were little. At the time of course I was doubtless as anxious and I was certainly quite a bit poorer than I am at the moment at least, but the past, being safely gotten through, is easily remembered as a happier time. And in fact, I was younger, and there was more time and less housework with 2 than there is with 5, and I still perceived myself to be able to write halfway decently, which, while almost certainly a deception, did still inject a joy and sense of purpose into my private mental life that I have had trouble accessing the past few years. I am unable to find pleasure in many of the things I formerly found pleasure in, and while I think my children are likely to be worthy human beings who would be capable of being contributors to a worthy society where they will feel themselves to belong, I have grown overly pessimistic that they will ever inhabit such a society, not for any long term. And also before they were in school we used, it seemed, to go so many places. All over New England, Montreal once a year, the Mid-Atlantic three times or more. Gas was much cheaper. I still have one of the cars I had then. It cost $16 to fill the gas tank at that time. It's around $35-40 now.

This used to be the time of year--from October through New Year's Day--in which I formerly took the most pleasure. Lately I scarcely notice it in passing, such is my general distraction. I am lucky if I manage to spend three days in the whole of these months in the observance of some ritual of the season--but enough of this weak-headed lamenting. I would like to be able to have some more time to appreciate the spirit of the seasons though, especially around Christmas. I haven't got all that many left anymore.

This post was originally going to be, not an insistence on, but a defense or attempted justification of going to college in certain circumstances, even of liberal arts coursework, in response to the ever-growing ranks of those who think almost anything would be a more constructive use of a capable young person's time and money, let alone an incapable one's. My main problem of course in attempting this task is that all the doubters as to the virtues I would be espousing would have to buy into the idea that I am, in the heart of midlife, an acceptably developed or educated man by the most minimum standards denoted by those words, who could be demonstrably shown to have acquired any knowledge or experience in the course of my education that I carry with me through life that is even roughly equivalent to the expense which Somebody incurred to have it imparted to me; and my impression is that this is exceedingly unlikely to happen. I am not merely in most people's eyes, including, frequently, my own, a poor advertisement for expensive 'humanistic' schooling, but the very portrait of the fate people congratulate themselves as avoiding when they choose to concentrate in other fields. At the same time I do know a few people who studied the same course and received the same degree as I did who do strike me as excellent advertisements for this same (though this does not seem to cut any ice with the naysayers). And even with regard to myself I still have a hard time convincing myself that I would have been any better off, or significantly happier, forgoing the course I did take, for the army, or the pursuit of a trade, or entrepreneurship, or what would have been a likely futile course of study in the hard sciences or engineering or even computers, for which I had no significant preparation up to that age. My essential problems are deeper set in the way I relate to the world, my general level of comfort in it, etc, which have always been uncertain and confused, and have always been largely impervious to attempts at improvement. I have never been very much in any harmony with my surroundings--the things I write about most on the blog are those where I feel closest to attaining this sense.

I think the defenders of humanism should drop the "it teaches you how to think" meme for a while, since non-believers don't seem to be buying it, and anyway if it were true and people were honest with themselves it should be largely manifest when you met such a person. I am coming around to Ruskin's view on this matter, that genuinely intelligent people think as naturally as they breathe. I do not think at this point particularly well, though I during and for a few years after school my studies and the generally higher caliber of everyday discourse and interactions did inculcate some stronger habits of thought, attentiveness, attunedness to environment, etc, than I was wont to have formerly. Now however I have been removed from higher intensity mental environments for so many years that I seem to have regressed back to that more confused and sluggish method of thinking and perceiving.

So if humanistic studies don't teach you how to think in some superior way, what good are they for exactly? First of all, they may well teach you to think in some way highly prized by the better classes of society--I just don't think people should insist upon it where it is not evident in itself. Done reasonably well of course, they should give you a strong foundation of general knowledge, not merely practical facts, but a better awareness of what kinds of things (smart/smarter) people think about, and the way that they think or came to think about them. I think for introverts of a high academic intelligence quotient it has a social value that seems to be woefully underappreciated. Yes, people do a lot of drinking and wasting time in school, but above a certain threshold of intelligence social and intellectual life are not really capable of being separate entities. To be brief, it is important for smart people to be predominantly around other smart people sometimes. Of course there is much examination of and guidance on the nature of existence as a whole, how to approach life, to become attuned to and become somewhat at home in all the various part's of one's mental and aesthetic world, one's language, physical environment, sense of proportion, and justice, perhaps it enables one to discover and understand strengths within himself, though this never quite happened for me. Unfortunately emphasis on mastering demonstrable skills--in languages, composition, rhetoric/public speaking, music, as well as those areas of math and science in which a general competence is well within the capacity of the intelligent non-specialist--before the degree is awarded has never been strong in this country, so this realm of learning as a whole has come to be seen as less difficult and therefore the province of less substantial men and women than the hard sciences especially.

Article about young writers in New York--seems something like the kind of scene I would have liked to have found at that age, though they seem a little too nice and devoid of edge to make much of a literary impression. As usual in modern literary circles, vital male heterosexual energy seems to be lacking, as well as any sign of a genuinely unconventional take on life, and usually where these are absent, there is not much hope of compelling work being produced. Still, it is hard not to think that if I had been able to achieve success in my chosen career, these are the types of girls who would likely hold me in high esteem and even awe now, and those thoughts are pleasing to me.

Miscellenea #2

College Football Recap

A little late--the holidays, which in the early part of one's life are a two or even three week holiday, are now almost too busy to properly enjoy--but it has become a mini-tradition here at the site. Once again I did not actually watch any games, and I wouldn't be able to recognize any of the season's celebrated players if they came into my office to discuss the article, but then my review has not much to do with any actual play on the field, but with the various trends that struck me in paying cursory attention to the sport, mainly via radio and the internet, over the last 4 months.

1. This nonsense of playing numerous bowl games all the way to January 10th, including longtime New Year's staples such as the Sugar, Orange and Cotton bowls, causes me the sort of mild displeasure that I however fear repeated too many times will eventually take a toll on my continued enthusiasm for such aspects of life as I formerly enjoyed. The season should be completed by midnight on January 2nd (local time of wherever the last game is being played). Though I rarely watched them even when I had time, I associate the bowl season with the holidays and the festive atmosphere of the 2 or so weeks between December 15th and New Year's Day, after which this festive atmosphere is really over, and college football should be too. I also despise the slotting that they have now to determine the matchups, e.g., where the 7th place team from the Big 10 plays the 4th place team from the SEC West and all that. Can it get any lamer? And while we're at it, whatever happened to the Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston? That, along with the still existant Sun Bowl in El Paso at either end of strange and far-off Texas, were the 2 pillars of football on New's Year Eve, at least when it fell on a weekday.

2. It would be nice if the northeastern schools could be a little more competitive on the national level, though most people in these parts who follow the sport believe that all of the top southern teams, and a fair number of the lousy ones, cheat shamelessly and don't even make a pretense of offering their players even any trappings of an education, which absolves us from being too much chagrined by their superiority in football.

3. Another really bad trend is the fervor for firing coaches who are actually pretty good because they aren't contending for the national title. Two schools in the east which I thought were fairly sensible, West Virginia and Maryland, just did this. West Virginia's coach was 28-11 over 3 years--a winning percentage over .700, which traditionally has been enough to at least stay employed--when he was sent packing, and Maryland's coach, though evidently not a spectacular enough recruiter, seems to have been regarded as an intelligent and sound teacher of the game, which is the kind of person who I feel like used to be appreciated a little bit more in this society, especially by universities, though perhaps I am deluded. He was also coming off an 8-4 season. No one wants these days to come off as espousing mediocrity, which is being ever redefined, if not upwards, at least so as to encompass more and more people who would formerly have been regarded as generally competent and successful, but churning through even coaches who post decent records every 3-5 years because the program is not in the top 5, or top 10 nationally, seems like a foolish policy at most places, given that nearly all the colleges that are in the top 10 in football are, or quickly become, more or less insane in the pursuit or maintenance of this success, and to my mind usually lose a considerable portion of their institutional dignity in the process.

4. My favorite team, Penn State, on the other hand, had a decidedly mediocre year, going 7-6, 4-4 in the league, and being essentially non-competitive whenever they played anybody who was remotely good. In recent years they have been treading water by usually beating the teams that are worse than they are--a bad loss to Illinois this year was an exception to this general rule--while they have not won a game in which they were a substantial underdog in years--maybe not since they have joined the Big 10. The recent collapse of Michigan to the bottom ranks of the league has been a godsend, though on the other hand Iowa seems to have replaced them for the time being as a team that Penn State is no longer well-coached enough to beat.

Though Joe Paterno is now 84 and obviously is not a front rank coach anymore, I am glad that his situation is still being handled with some delicacy, though really how much longer can they let him go on? About 10 years ago--maybe 2002-03, when he was merely 75-76--the team went 4-8 and 3-9 in back to back seasons, and he survived that, which no one else could have done--and which I doubt even he would have been able to do had the climate been what it is now--and he still survives, and the team has come back to winning fairly consistently, and even has won the Big 10 twice, which level of success I have extolled elsewhere as such that supporters of teams should find acceptable provided the character of the program does not detract too terribly from the that of the university overall, which at Penn State has for the most part I believe been the case. However I can't help but think once he got into his mid-70s that they kept letting him stay on figuring it will only be another 2-3 years and then he'll retire. It's already been 10, and I'm sure they're still thinking there's no way he's going to want to be out there in 3 years when he's 87. We'll see. Nonetheless I will miss him when he finally does go. I have no doubt can be and has been ornery over the years, and probably let drop some hint that he knows and believes that football is ultimately more important than academics, but I have always sensed that he belongs to an distant enough generation that he has some conception of what a university's ideal mission really consists of, and may even actually believe people such as English and history professors have some value and are entitled to a certain amount of respect, even from football coaches. Perhaps the Nick Sabans and Jimmy Johnsons of the world have something of this attitude and conception and I impugn them unfairly, though their way of expressing their feelings does not make them entirely clear. And really, how could they? Big time coaches get paid millions of dollars a year, and if they do really well generate even more, while history and philosophy departments barely bother to hire full time scholars and pay them a respectable wage anymore. I know the basketball coach at Duke, Kryszewski, projects himself as respecting scholarship, though I think what he respects and wishes to align himself with, like most contemporary successful people, tends towards outward proofs of success and importance on something approaching his own scale, which is natural in the environment in which he moves, and has been moving for the last 25 years. So much of the society has adopted this corporate mentality of interpreting and measuring one's own life and that of other people that we have largely come to take it for granted as the natural order of the world. But there was much of our national life where this was not always the case, or at least not entirely the case, and due in great part to the current circumstances, will be so again in the foreseeable future.

5. I was rooting for Boise State to make it into the championship game, though I never believed the system would allow them to get in unless about ten unlikely stumbles by other teams gave the voters as well as the computers no other option. The fervency of the outrage from various fan bases--mainly in the SEC it seemed--regarding their being ranked #3 much of the season and seemingly threatening to qualify for the title was ridiculous. People need to lighten up. They were a good story, they've only been pretty much killing everyone one who they can get to play them for about 10 years (their record since 2002 is 106-12), and they have earned the chance to play in some meaningful big games to show what they can do. One of the knocks against them is that they wouldn't be able to endure the grind of a major conference schedule. First of all, none of the major leagues is going to invite them in--believe me, they would accept the invitation--so holding this circumstance against them, while it may be true, seems an invalid reason for excluding them from championship consideration if they continue to go 13-0, 12-1 every year and beat their opponents by an average score of 50-7. They tried to upgrade their conference this year and all of the decent teams in it (TCU, BYU, Utah) promptly left. I think they would have been an above .500 team in the Pac-10 or Big-12 most of the last few years--they have acquitted themselves well against some of the better teams in the BCS conferences during that time, and their home field would be an uncomfortable trip even for the power schools with the exception of historical level juggernauts, like some of the USC teams of the mid-2000s or some of the more explosive Oklahoma teams. I think they could even go .500 in the SEC, certainly this year, though of course there is no reason why they would ever be in the SEC, seeing as they are in Idaho. No, the recruiting base is not as deep, and they do not have access to as many blue chip prospects. But the regional nature of the sport--that the team from Idaho with all the players nobody has ever heard of turns out to be pretty good after all--is one of the things that makes it interesting.

I have much more miscellenea than this, though seeing as it has taken 5 days to get this out, I will save the rest for future posts. There is always time and opportunity for that, and if what I have to say on these subjects is insignificant next week, then it would have been just as insignificant today, and better off not done.

I do promise that this will be my last sports topic for a while. I am burned out on it. I used to wonder if somehow my life could not be wholly complete if the Philadelphia Eagles never won the Super Bowl, but I think it's time to start approaching my plans for the remainder of my time here under the assumption that that is not going to happen, and to seek the meaning and wholeness that this looked to event was supposed to convey to one of the voids in my spiritual development elsewhere.

Miscellenea (Part 1)

Christmas Shopping

My half-hearted efforts to support local businesses in my Christmas shopping this year largely failed. I am not used to the kind of personal interaction that involves bantering with salespeople, and especially thinking of them as authorities on their various lines of goods to whose expertise I should appeal in making purchasing decisions. This is doubtless emblematic of wider cultural decline, but such habits of sociability need to be cultivated, and if a long grown person has never been forced to practice them, he isn't going to have them. Then of course the gradations of most products above a certain level of obvious cheapness are of little interest to me. I am usually more than content with a good of middling quality. Then other of these small business-people are shockingly bad salesmen. I went into an independent hobby store on Main Street which had not been open long determined to buy my 8-year old son an old-fashioned kind of model ship that you build yourself. I was the only person in the store, which immediately made me a sitting duck for the proprieter, who looked to be of that school of people who spent most of the time between age 14 and 22 playing Dungeons and Dragons or some such thing. I was poking around among the modest selection of model kits on display and he yelled from behind the counter "Can I help you?" I replied no and continued poking around, apparently unconvincingly, because thirty seconds later he demanded to know the age of the person for whom I was shopping. I reluctlantly answered this question. "I don't really have anything here for eight-year olds." Well, I guess that was that, wasn't it? The brown-haired girl working the cash register at Michael's craft store did not interrogate me about my purchases (though I might not have minded so much if she had) when I was driven there to get the thing I wanted.

I have similar difficulties shopping at my local independent bookstore, though it is pleasant and has an adequate selection. The owner however is just a bit smug for my liking. His literary taste as far as I can discern runs towards displays of cleverness, the more extreme and inaccessible the better, and antagonism to almost anything that might have a chance of genuinely appealing to any mind that could easily be tarred by the label 'conventional'. He is one of those tiresome individuals who seems to genuinely believe he has managed to escape mind-enslavement by the mass media and the ruling establishment (I should add that he went to Harvard, so he probably considers himself part of the ruling establishment even though he runs a small bookstore cafe in New Hampshire as opposed to a New York investment brokerage or whatever they are called) while everyone else has not. Buying a volume of Camus or, God forbid, one of the old New Yorker writers from this guy gets a smirk that struggles to contain itself from bursting into laughter. Weightier, or at least cleverer and less utterly cliched stuff, Gogol, say, or Mann or Thomas Pynchon, merits more of a raised eyebrow and a looking over, presumably to gauge one's capability of seriously taking on such a work. People who buy The Da Vinci Code? Given that his expectations of the local customer base appear to be pretty low, I assume he must have reached a comfort level with this class of patron. And besides, he has to pay his bills, right?

My wife, who apparently presents herself to educated people as one of their own kind in a way that seems to be beyond my ability to project, I should note gets along much better with this gentleman. He even cracks knowing jokes to her. One Christmas, while buying an installment of a popular children's series for one of our nephews, he quipped to her in a tired monotone, "Another victim of Lemony Snicket. Truly a series of unfortunate events." One wonders how long he had been waiting to break out that line...

Mid-Atlantic Excursion

I went down to Pennsylvania for a couple of days over the Christmas holiday. I don't stay long, because my family gets on my nerves--I probably would not go at all except that my wife, with her exquisitely attuned sense of propriety, thinks it is important--but I enjoy the trip at least. The way down, although 3 days had passed since the not-especially-big snowstorm which somehow managed to cripple that part of the country for several days, took 11 and half hours--that would be 4 hours from Concord to around Milford, CT, which is normal, and 7 1/2 more from there to Philadelphia, which is excessive. The roads in the New York area were essentially immobilized. After inching along for more than an hour to get over the bridge into New Jersey my children claimed to be dying of the need to use the bathroom, so I got off the highway in that jungle that is Ridgefield/Passaic and could not get back out of that local traffic for another hour after that. I usually have a pretty good tolerance for highway traffic, but getting stuck on local roads is a soul-sapper. "This part of the country has become unliveable" I declared. My children wanted pancakes, so we had dinner at the IHOP in Watchung. My own dinner was terrible, but everybody else--even the wife!--enjoyed their food a great deal, so I was satisfied. Also the decor of the restaurant struck me as being very New Jersey somehow, which pleased me. It had these forlorn yet half-festive cardboard and crepe-paper Christmas decorations hung up, which reminded me of something my grandmother would have had, and the likes of which I never see, or least never notice, in New England. Also the place was huge, open, and nearly empty except for a handful of scraggly families, which gave it a further poignancy.

The fiasco which the snow produced in that region however does not bode well for the ongoing functionality of this society. This was not a major snowstorm by any stretch of the imagination, and 3 and 4 days later, with the sun out and the temperature rising to nearly 40 degrees, I passed by an incredible number of still unplowed sidestreets. Even worse, I had the opportunity to pass or drive behind a number of plows and salt trucks, and whoever was driving them frequently gave the impression that they had received faulty training in how to use the devices on their vehicles. One salt truck I got behind in New York on the way home--by which day the need for any more salt on the highway was long past, anyway--was conducting itself in an especially odd manner, shooting its supply of salt upwards so that it came raining down on the hoods and windshields of the cars around it, which I have never seen a truck do in New England to quite so extreme an extent, though I have lived there for many years at this point.

I have reached the age where whenever I go back to the old neighborhood--neighborhood in this instance incorporating an area 20 or 30 square miles in size--I wonder how many more times I will ever be back. Lately I have still been going down 3-4 times a year, though many of those occasions are a stopover on the way to somewhere else. However, my mother is likely moving within the year out of her house that has been in the family since 1957 (ed--as of June 2011, this has been put off to at least of couple of years further into the future), and while she won't totally leave the region (one hopes), there is talk of moving 10 or 20 or 30 miles out of Philadelphia--she is about 2 blocks out of it now--and those places do not have the same associations obviously as the Cheltenham/Abington neighborhood does. My relatives will probably live a great many years yet, but perhaps I will cease to have so much cause or desire to visit them. I took care to go to a hoagie restaurant that dates back to my childhood--such places (that date back so far) now are grown rare--and had a cheesesteak with a side order of cheese fries, that horrible delight of old times, the number of which such meals I have remaining to me surely dwindling to a low number now. Indeed, like Dick Clark I feel it incumbent now to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve, as I sense that any year could be the last one, and, despite the essential absurdity of the holiday and the letdown when everyone abandons the party and goes to bed at 12:15 or so-- is the excitement of any other event so rapidly exhausted?--I still enjoy the day in a kind of morose way.

I have more miscellaneous subjects but I think I will save those for another post.

Sports Old-Fogeyism, Part II

My God it takes me a long time to write even a single little post on nothing.


The 1977 NFC Divisional Playoffs. Minnesota Vikings vs. the Los Angeles Rams at the L.A. Coliseum. Rain and mud. The underdog Vikings, being in a state of general decline from their mid-70s peak, and playing without Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton, who had broken his leg a few weeks earlier, won 14-7. I remember watching this game live. I was seven years old, about a week shy of eight. It was the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's. My grandparents were having a cocktail party which in my memory was quite well attended, at least 15 people or so. Even if one had that many friends nowadays, he would be hard-pressed to get such a turnout on that weekend. The guests were almost all old full-blooded ethnic Lithuanians, and such they were not particularly riotous, though they all drank and smoked at least. An old great-uncle who had palled around with Babe Ruth in a former life was there, though he was on his last legs at that party, and was hooked up to an oxygen tank; I'm sure it was the last time I ever saw him. The game was on in the background--sporting events were always on in the background at such functions in my youth. I was excited because I was rarely allowed to watch the 4pm game at home. At age seven, I regarded this as something cool people who lived in more laid-back households got to do, even if I would not have been able to express it in this precise terminology.

Rewatching some of this game 33 years later, along with some other vintage footage that is up on Youtube, I cannot but say that I miss these old days of football, especially the media coverage of it--doubtless if I could remember 1961 or 1950 I would lament them even more, but '77 has become, in relation to the present, quaint enough to be lamented too. Yes, the players are inferior, extremely so in certain notable instances, but the atmosphere surrounding the '77 game looks a lot more fun. Though complained about at the time too, everything--the tickets, the stadiums, the salaries, the groundskeeping, the television contracts, the joie de vivre of the fans--has only become ever more expensive, more extravagant, more contrived and more deadly serious with the passing of time. In 1977 the players' bodies, the hype, the luxury, even the personality of the fans, were still somewhat in line with the scale of what I would regard as normal life. But I have written about all of this before...

The abysmal quality of the field in this game is unbelievable. It goes without saying that nobody involved with even serious high school football would submit to playing in this kind of muck nowadays--maybe some Class C schools in Maine wouldn't be able to see any other solution and just deal with it. Otherwise all the good coaches and players would be indignant, and the wannabes would feign it, hapless lower-level employees responsible for the upkeep of the field would be publicly berated or even fired. For a while there were still a few old-timer broadcasters still around--even John Madden to a certain extent made one of this group--who would have downplayed the complaints about playing on a muddy field with poor footing, but adherents of this attitude are almost all gone now.

The quarterback play in this game is atrocious by current standards. The Vikings backup QB, Bob Lee, who mercifully only had to throw about ten passes the entire game, literally does not look like he has a skill set much broader than mine when he tries to run around and throw the ball more than five yards downfield. The Rams QB, Pat Haden, who was a Rhodes Scholar and college standout at USC, was supposed to be better, a rising star even, but he stunk the joint out in this game too. Mentally soft, as legend has it, he would go on the next year to choke in an even more humiliating fashion in a 28-0 loss to the Cowboys in the NFC championship game in the southern California sunshine which effectively ended his career. While the field conditions made passing perhaps especially difficult in this game, watching footage from other games of the same period played in decent weather is to be no less struck by how amateurish the passing game is vis-a-vis today. In some ways it makes for a more exciting game, as the risk of an interception is considerably higher than it is now, and a successful long pass play takes on the character of something of a minor miracle.

The commentators on this broadcast are the legendary Vin Scully and some guy who sounds like he broke into the business on Hee Haw and whom I have no memory of ever hearing again after this game. I must confess that for most of my life I detested Vin Scully, though he is practically sainted nowadays as one of the two or three most intelligent and greatest sportscasters of all time. My youthful animosity towards him came about mainly due to his association with and clear favoritism for the Dodgers, who I hated, and, like many people on the east coast at that time, I loathed and feared everything that was too blatantly and proudly from California generally, the Golden State then being perceived to be the ascendant, dynamic place, while we, who had formerly been the center of American life, were in terminal decline. (I realize that many people of a certain age now regard New York in the 70s to have been culturally in a golden age as well, though as I was under the influence in those days of people who had partied there during the Gatsby era and not spent any significant time there at all since the 50s, my impression was that the age of Studio 54 and the burned out Bronx represented a significant comedown from that city's former grandeur). My opinion of Scully is coming around, mainly as the result of much thoughtful and heartfelt writing extolling him that I have read in the last few years, his marvelous poetic powers of description, the classical smoothness and fluency of his American English speech that elevates the experience of the game, his nightly providing the Los Angeles metropolitan area with not merely the binding quality of a shared experience, but something almost resembling a soul, which latter would be a most impressive accomplishment indeed. Also he is in his 80s now, the Dodgers have been a mediocre and insignificant team for the last 20 years, I have become something of an adult; all of which has tempered my erstwhile visceral dislike of the him, though I don't think I will ever become one of his more fervent admirers.

On the other hand, this game also features my all-time favorite football coach, and maybe my favorite coach in any sport, Bud Grant. There hasn't been anybody remotely as cool as this guy in football in decades. In a playoff game, on the road in a monsoon with an undermanned team, an ulcer-inducing scenario for the typical coach, Bud Grant is not yelling, pacing, scowling, stalking, looking worried, looking confused or otherwise making a spectacle of himself. With only the hood of his windbreaker being pulled up acknowledging the downpour he is standing in, his expression and body language convey both intelligence and unflappability, the sense being, 'I know what I'm doing and I very well may win this game; if I do lose this particular game however, the overall quality of my life, with which I am genuinely at peace (and within which I have developed certain important mental faculties to a degree sufficient to make an informed determination), will not be significantly affected'. Unlike say, Phil Jackson, who states all this more or less directly and therefore convinces one it is actually insincere, Bud Grant never expressed his philosophy, or much of anything else, directly. I am projecting based upon what I detect.

Another odd thing about watching game footage from the 70s is that the gap in 'athleticism' between black and white players appears smaller than in any other era--that is to say, the white players generally look like they belong on the field, and many of the clearly better players even on defense are white, and no one seems to consider this unusual yet. In the 60s, there were often only two or three black players on the field at any given time who, usually being elite talents, really stood out athletically (think Jim Brown or Gale Sayers running on the nearly all-white defenses of their era). In recent years the reverse has become true, especially on defense, where white players stand out noticeably, and are frequently perceived as doing so in a negative sense with regard to speed, strength, etc, even when this is not necessarily the case. But in the 70s there was almost a kind of equilibrium reached, where many white non-quarterbacks were athletically competitive with the top black players. This was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in basketball.

I had wanted to do even more stuff but this post has to go to press. Ridiculous.

Deliverance Part 2

I seemed to think that the prose poem type style employed in this book was big at the time. What else could I have been thinking of? John Gardner's Grendel? Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall? The works of Donald Barthelme? It does seem to be characteristic of the kind of writing that was praised in university writing programs of the period, the better examples of which I have begun to find more tolerable in recent years.

The woods in the north are not as scary as what we find in this book, though judging by my trip to the Blue Ridge and Smokies this summer, even much of Appalachia has largely been tamed and brought within the pale of semi-respectable civilization.

Page 28, some married, mature adult sex talk (My initial response was 'yucky'). "I knelt and entered her, and her buttocks rose and fell. 'Oh,' she said, 'oh yes.'" Hey, I'm sure he did. Good for him.

On page 37, a reminiscence of vomiting after the office Christmas party. One thing I am truly jealous of the 60s for is that it had awesome Christmas parties, both at the office and in private homes, the like of which seem unlikely to return before I am too far gone into my dotage to enjoy them any longer.


These guys really are suburban if they can't recognize different kinds of trees, never see deer, and so on. Of course at this time, and throughout my earlier childhood certainly, one did not see nearly as many animals out by the highway as one does today. Deer especially, though one occasionally saw them in the country, but turkeys, skunks, foxes, porcupines, I don't recall ever seeing at all until I was in my twenties at least, and now they seem to be quite numerous even in well-populated areas.

P. 69: "He went down the other side as I came up, feeling dirt on my hands for the first time in years." This has to be an exaggeration. His wife never wanted him to dig or pull up any roots or trees in the backyard?

On page 76 there is a discussion of plastic, how it does not decompose and go back to its elements. Plastic is a good example of a evil that people at the time when it began its ascendence recognized and denounced almost at once, and of which everyone was more or less powerless to stop the proliferation anyway. Was much in the collective thought of the era.

What is the word for what this story is trying to be? A fable? It is trying to do the kind of thing I really like, which is to write about something quite implausible in such a way that it seems, or becomes for the time anyway, as believable and 'real' as anything else one's mind has encountered, but I don't think it quite makes it.

The kind of male-bonding that is a big part of this book is not really done much anymore, at least among urban/overcivilized types, of which group I am kind of a member. Personally I would prefer the Mr Chips style male bonding holiday, where one discusses theories of art or geological discoveries with a mental and social equal rather than carrying weapons and fighting with either wild animals or savage men, though it looks like neither is very likely to happen anytime soon.

The theme of the book, I venture, is that we should always assume trouble. It is the normal condition of life. We have let our guard down in comfortable modern life--life is supposed to be fairly horrible a good deal of the time, and we try to skirt that at our own peril.

This is definitely a pre-cell phone adventure.

The narrator, on the unfortunate friend who got raped, after the fact: "None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me. I remembered how he had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was when he screamed." Yes Abby, we're a long way from Wordsworth now.

Is the book optimistic about human capability even when the proper manly spirit and knowledge have atrophied? I think it is on the fence.

I wa surprised at the brevity of the famous scene. The rest of the plot--about 150 pages--seems dictated by necessities that are predictable based on the length of the book.

Beholding (as opposed to seeing) the river is presented as having some kind of relevance to life. Nature in this book is always presented as being rather alien to the most refined human qualities. On page 171 alone it is described as "blank", "mindless", "icy" and "uncomprehending". It offers no guidance to a man. Compare this with some lines from John Denham on the Thames River, written in 1655:

"O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

This is culturally, I think, a more serious and useful way of engaging with nature.