On the eighth day of Newton: New Year's Eve!

I think a lot of us felt just like Calvin in 2013. Here's to the new year that is upon us. One love.

Minority report

So, tonight Coco and I used some aging AMC gift cards to go see Personal Tailor, a Mandarin-language comedy (dramedy?) film that portrayed an episodic tale of a Fantasy Island-like company that makes client's dreams come true, at least for a time. Their motto is "Fulfilling you by debasing ourselves." It was pretty good: by turns funny and dark, with frequent clever insights into human nature and current affairs in China.

For some reason, the manager let us cut the line when he saw we had gift cards. As he was processing our tickets for the show, he asked us "You know this movie has sub-titles, right?"

There were about a hundred or so people in the auditorium, and Coco and I were the only non-Chinese there. I casually remarked on this as the lights went down.

During the film, I had to go to the restroom, and I left the auditorium at the same time as a young man. As we journeyed together to the men's room, we had this conversation:

Him: I thought only Chinese people would go to this movie.

Me:  Well, I think we're the only non-Chinese in there.

Him: Did you know this was a Chinese movie before you came?

Me: Oh, yes.

Him: Why did you come?

Me: Well, we saw it on the website, and watched the trailer, and it looked like it was funny.

We talked a little more as we took care of business; he said that many of the situations and set-ups in the film were just funny to Chinese people, even without the dialogue or story. (This likely explained some of the laughter we heard but did not participate in.) He said in response to my question that the sub-titles were pretty good, in his estimation. And we made out way back to our seats.

I'm not sure what to make of any of this. Foreign films are not at all unusual in Seattle, so it seemed like an odd occurrence to us that we would be the only non-Chinese there, but I can't shake the feeling we were the only two who thought it totally normal that we would go see this movie.

On the second day of Newton: Happy Holiday!

My traditional (three years running now!) holiday greeting. One love, everybody.

Getting warmed up

So, I said a little while ago that I wanted to make sure this break was fruitful and didn't just slip on by. To that end, I have dug through a file called "images to play with" and starting tomorrow we'll see a new post every day for a while, on one of the fine blogs in the WalakaNet family of blogs. We're kicking it off with a self-referential shot sent to me some time ago by a buddy, but appropriate right now.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Winter 'scape

So, here in Seattle, we'll get a total of eight hours, twenty-six minutes, and five seconds of daylight today, once the sun actually comes up in a little bit. We're within spitting distance of the shortest day of the year: this Saturday, the 21st, when the daylight will total out to 8:25:24. That will also be the start of calendrical Winter, so, when you think about it, Winter is a season of light: each successive day is longer. It is with that counter-intuitively optimistic thought that I begin Winter break.

Yesterday was Grading Day: finishing off and recording the assessment of all the final projects, presentations, and portfolios from my students. I have a bit of prep to do, but it will not be too onerous, and I'll probably make an event of it with a colleague. So there's pretty much three weeks of free time between now and my next work responsibility. Not quite eighty days of summer, but I'll take it gladly.

I imagine there will be quite a bit of TCB in there, as my whacked schedule over the past quarter has caused several home-base initiatives to falter (i.e., some chores didn't get done) but I hope to get in a lot of reading and a little creativity over this break.

And maybe that's all this relatively content-free post is about: reminding myself of that and publicly committing to not letting these days slip by without intentionality. Hopefully, you'll see some fruits of that commitment on these pages.

In the meantime, here's a picture from Geek Girl Con back in October: on of my former students won "Most in Character" for her Snow White. I think the little bird perched on her hand is what clinched it.

Acronymically correct

So, November is NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – that time of year during which aspiring authors commit to churning out a 50,000-word manuscript in the space of thirty days.

Wonder Wife, over the past few years, has been using NaNoWriMo as a spur to parallel-but-not-quite-the-same efforts, since she is a writer and artist but not a novelist. Two years ago, it was CoPoWriMo, or Coco Poem Writing Month, during which she and her writing group composed a poem a day. Last November, she undertook CoBloWriMo – Coco Blog-Writing Month – and wrote a blog post every day. This year, she is engaging with CocAnWriMo: Coco Answer-Writing Month. Her flock of peeps are sending in questions about her art and work, and she is answering one a day. Super Sissy is also getting into the act, and has committed to creating thirty haiku poems during November – to be published all at once at the end of the month.

Participating in NaNoWriMo is on my do-list, but it’s not going to happen this year, not with the teaching load I am currently carrying. At the same time, I am trying to get back to some of the structured activity that served me so well over the summer. My following Wonder Wife’s lead in approaching this began to sound like a good idea.

My first thought was NaGNoWriMo – National Graphic Novel Writing Month. It doesn’t exist, actually - although the Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper, tried to get one going a few years back. The Stranger specified a 48-page comic plus covers, but I can’t find any evidence that anyone ever produced anything under this aegis.

Since I’d be going it alone, I decided it would be called WaGNoWriMo, for Walaka Graphic Novel Writing Month. I came up with the idea of 50 pages by taking the NaNoWriMo 50,000-word standard and applying the equation 1 picture = 1,000 words (counting each comic page as one picture).

Then I realized that I am even less capable of producing a 50-page graphic novel in a month than I am of writing a prose novel in month. Forget the talent (since there is none to speak of) – I am back to not having enough time.

So then I thought: well, I can consider each panel a picture for calculating equivalent word count. If I bite Dave Gibbons's Watchmen style and use a nine-panel grid, that could be as little as six pages! Of course, it is cheating a bit – it would be hard to argue that one could get the scope of 50,000-word novel into a even a twenty-six-page comic – so a new name was needed. Thus was born

WaCoWriMo

Walaka Comic Writing Month. A more modest goal, but perhaps more doable. I’ll reveal the results at the end of November. Wish me luck!

Enlightening vignette

Yesterday, I took an early-morning turn around Green Lake. At this time of year in the Pacific Northwest, that means I was was out walking for four miles in the dark. In the thick fog we have been having daily, it was decidedly dim. I could barely discern the sky beginning to turn from coal black to gunmetal gray.

There was something welcoming about moving through the gloom. It had been some time since I had been at the lake this early this late in the season and it felt good to be continuing my summer activities into the shortening days. I heard the familiar crunch of the gravel path beneath my invisible feet as I made my way along guided by the reflection of far-off traffic on the water and occasional washes of headlights through the trees; there were no stars or moon. Now and again I would move into a pool of yellow light cast by the lamp of a yet-unopened restroom, gradually entering the dull illumination and retuning again to the still darkness ever beyond its feeble reach. In this manner I proceed through my circuit of the lake in the quiet of the park.

From time to time however, this shadowy landscape was broken by a bright light, harsh and white, as a runner, or more frequently a cyclist, would approach from the opposite direction with the blazing halogen of an LED headlamp. These intense and incredibly white lights glowed like miniature suns: small, silent atomic explosions sailing through the darkness. Not only did they punch a jagged hole in the grayscale fabric of the morning, but their brightness would take away whatever night-vision I had developed. After they passed the world around me was even darker and I could no longer see the subtle gradations that I had been able to distinguish before.

Each time this happened, I could not begrudge these people their bubble of light - their safety, their comfort, whatever it represented. Some of them were likely commuters, needing a safe and efficient journey at the start their working day. I did wonder, however, about our tendency as a society toward solving problems with technology - and often with individual technology - rather than other cultural choices. I thought about unintended consequences, and points of view, and the rights and responsibilities of shared civic spaces. I thought about grace and how infrequently it is a criterion in our decision-making processes.

And then I closed my eyes for a moment or two to let my pupils dilate so that I could once again take in the details of the dawning day as I tread through the dark.

...the two most beautiful words in the English language

So, summer comes to a close; maybe it's time for a recap. My first summer off in a long while and I wanted to make the most of it. How'd it go, anyway?

First of all, here's the complete coded countdown: the first image appeared on this blog and the rest just on Facebook, ticking off the days left in summer break. (There was a re-set about halfway through, when I decided that enjoying more summer was more fun than making a little extra money teaching a pre-fall class, dropped the moonlight assignment, and moved my start date back ten days.)

 

Now, how about those big plans?

"Ranging" as I call it - walking, running, or walk-running - might be counted as the biggest accomplishment of the summer. I have been persistent and consistent, and in fact will run a 5K in a few days to raise funds for lymphoma research. That circuit hasn't clicked that would turn me into one of those "OMG, I just have to run today!" people, but it has become a routine practice.

Likewise exercising. I have stuck with what I call the NY Times exercise plan (because that's where I first read it) as a daily (well, nearly daily) routine for the whole summer. I was slowed down just a little bit by my skateboarding tumble, but I just modified the upper-body elements to compensate and then worked my way back. This, too, will continue.

The ukulele playing has come along well. I'm not sure I'm quite ready for a concert, but I can sure manage five or six songs without mangling them too badly. I'm still playing with a limited repertoire of chords, but it's growing as my muppet fingers learn to contort themselves a little more. I feel I have plateaued a bit in my understanding of music itself; we'll see if there's a breakthrough anytime soon.

Longboarding has been both a great success and a mild disappointment. I took to it a lot better than I thought I would, and even did a three-mile jaunt one morning. I just haven't given it enough time compared to the other goals. Too bad, cuz I look so rad doing it. And boss. And hep.

Le sigh. Drawing has been the biggest challenge, the activity in which I feel the Gap Effect most strongly. I'm not sure how to push through that membrane of disappointment into a more productive space, and I fear that an ill-suited workspace plus school demands will cause this one neglected to be over the next few months unless a new strategy can be found.

Of course, the summer has not all been all self-improvement. I did work a bit, teaching an online class during summer session and attending a three-day workshop in what has become this academic year's main non-teaching duty, High School to College transition.

We have also had some friends experiencing serious challenges, and have been fortunate enough to be able to spend time and resources helping out.

And there was tons of fun: I have been running a kickass D&D campaign with a great group of players, I had a visit from my niece and we got to meet her family, we made a trip to Spokane to watch minor league ball with dear friends, we made it to Coco's family cabin in the woods for a day, and we got to spend time with a pal visiting from Spain. And I actually read books made of paper!

As today was the last official day of summer break, I tried to make it pretty representative of this summer: exercise, a walk through the ravine, a trip to the park with Coco to read and play with the ducks, and some frozen yogurt as an evening treat. Bottling today wouldn't make a bad vintage at all...

This is what happens when you take a poet to the park

and also this

and this too.

And now summer is, for all intents and purposes, over. I imagine that the blogging and the tumblring and the tweeting will slow down a bit, especially in Fall quarter, which promises to be particularly busy. It has been a great ninety days. Thanks to all my friends, in the real world or the virtual one, for helping to make it so.

F2F

So, I was watching a BBC video thingie tonight called Have millennials forgotten how to speak? I can't embed it, but check it out - it's short.

Now, the topic of how digital technology - texting, email, chat, &c. - affects communication has been addressed from many social and cultural perspectives. Since this video concerns itself with the take from the business angle, it immediately out me in mind of this commercial from 23 years ago:

The boss in that little playlet was concerned about phone calls and faxes instead of emails and chats, but the message seems to be the same as that from the BBC talking heads: technology can be a barrier to direct interpersonal communication and that is a loss to business as well as society.

The question I have is whether even can be said to be occurring. In the 23 years since (presumably) long-distance phone calls and faxes became ubiquitous enough a replacement for sales class that an airline could cast them as a villain in a commercial, what has happened in the business world? Are the successful companies those that maintain the personal touch, or those that have leveraged new communication technologies appropriately and productively?  Does it make a difference if we look at high-tech versus traditional industries, or service versus manufacturing? Do benefits of communication technology depend on whether the client base comprises digital natives?

I look at my own work experience, and I get what Shapiro, the PR guy, says in the video: most of my success has come from developing and maintaining philia, what my rhetoric professor defined as relationships of ongoing positive connectedness. At the same time, I know my productivity has only increased the more I have had access to communication technology.

True tale: In the first place I worked, an industry regulatory group, my phone would ring, and it would be an insurance professional asking a technical question about an account. I would put them on hold, call the file room, ask the file clerk for the file, light a cigarette, go back to the line, and chat until the file clerk showed up with the paper file in a folder. I met my first wife working this way, so I can vouch for the communicative aspect of the process, but it was certainly unwieldy and time-consuming compared to email and file-sharing.

I guess it just seems to be a more complex issue than "is the technology good or bad for us," or even "can anything replace the personal touch?" I think we need to be looking for a balance rather than at a tension of we're going to continue to be successful as workers and as humans.

Vamping for time...

So, I was working on the Big Project last night after and evening of ice cream, catching up, and Cards Against Humanity with some pals, and I did the thing that you don't want to do when working in a Photoshop clone: did a save that flattened the layers before I was done messing with one of them. Sheesh! About two hours of meticulous work down the drain, and there isn't even anyone else to blame.

Ah, well.

So the Big Reveal will have to wait another day and the Big Project will look a little bit different since I have too much pixel fatigue to begin the process anew, but what the heck - it's supposed to be fun, not work.

And that last comment leads me to the delicate balance that has been this summer's theme: the Ongoing Projects.

I am happy to report that the physical manifestations of this theme - the daily workout and walk/run - have been resounding successes: I have developed a remarkably consistent pattern. (I have neglected the longboard of late, but that was always an adjunct to the main physicality.)

Likewise the ukulele: while I cannot say that I have played every day, I have been surprisingly disciplined at laying hands upon the instrument and I can feel constant improvement.

The art/drawing/cartooning on the other hand, has oddly been the biggest challenge, as you can see from the report today. It isn't so much this one setback, but rather a focusing issue, that has kept me from being as productive as I would have liked.

And that's the balance of work and play to which I was alluding. I am a firm believer in data-based decision making, measurable goals, and the magic power of spreadsheets, and I have been having Summer Themes for a long time now, but I don't want doing the things I want to do to become doing the things I have to do, because that sorta takes all the fun out of being on summer vacation, doesn't it? And yet I do want to meet my goals, or at least make a good faith effort. And that's where that delicate balance comes in.

Enough of that. One of the first rules of writing is that when you have said enough, or run out of things to say, post a picture of Lego Wonder Woman. So here you go:

Courtesy of the same guy who did Lego-me

Don't dangle that participle at me

So, I'm usually not too much of a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar. As Philip Marlowe said in The Big Sleep, "I went to college. I can still speak English when my business demands it." And since I am an English teacher, that's pretty much all the time. But grammatical rules and niceties have never been a high priority for me - certainly not higher than communication or grace. And that's why I am wondering why a certain passage bothers me so much.

Last night, I was casting about for another summer book, having found The Life of Pi not to my taste. Coco was offering some some suggestions from the few volumes on her shelves that are not spiritual-metaphysical self-improvement/guidance books (Thich Nhat Hanh and the like) or small business/entrepreneurial guides. She handed me a copy of Maisie Dobbs, a "National Bestseller" that, according to the blurbs, was about an adventurous woman private detective in 1929 London. That sounded promising, so I gave the first page a glance:

I stopped short and two thoughts came rushing into my mind. The first was that, according to the first sentence, "Jack Barker" was the "last person to walk through the turnstile..." But Jack seems to be referred to as she. But she must really mean the "tall, slender woman" mentioned later in the sentence, because the next sentence has the possessive pronoun his in it, dispelling my initial thought that the female lead was named Jack. What was going on? Oh, noes - it was a misplaced modifier! The classic dangling participle!

The second thought that came to me was this has happened before. I suddenly recalled that Coco had suggested this book to me a year or so ago, when she first obtained it and I was looking for some light reading. And I recalled having then the same response I was having now: I cannot read this book.

I had absolutely no confidence in the author. A misplaced modifier is neither a mortal sin nor a moral failing, but c'mon - in the first sentence? And comprising an error that raises gender confusion when a reader might easily be expecting to meet the female protagonist on the first page?

I can't get past it. I couldn't a year ago, and can't now. The wind is gone from my sails, and however captivating Maisie the Detective might be, I will never know. That one inauspicious grammatical misstep that opened the book severed and cauterized whatever bond might have grown between reader and writer. So it goes.

I found a Michener book I hadn't read, Hawaii. There were no people in the entire first chapter, just rocks and seeds and some birds. But there were no dangling participles, either.

Bugdom

So, I'm out here in Eastern Washington at a workshop in the boonies, and as we were walking through the grounds, my colleagues and I came upon a big beetle upside-down in the walkway, waving his legs around. I remembered reading that flat surfaces, like sidewalks and paths, are treacherous for bugs like beetles. If they get flipped over on natural, uneven ground, they are capable of wiggling and rocking themselves over using nearby imperfections for leverage (like a driver righting a rolled-over Isetta). But on artificially smooth surfaces, a flipped-over bug not be able to re-orient.

I put a little stick within reach and Buggy grabbed on and I deposited him back in the dirt where he belongs.

Happy ending for whatever the heck this guy is.

Lego-me

So, it seems a buddy has taken up a new pursuit: Legos. And one of his first creations was a minifig of yours truly. Here he is in the majestic Stuart Range of the Cascade Mountains.

We got the glasses, the Samuel-L-style backwards-Kangol, and the customized gray goatee. Awesome.

I am honored to be part of this new career latest obsession wonderful hobby of yours, pal.

Mini recital

Sissy came over the other day while I was practicing the ukulele, and I played a song for her. She was warm and supportive, but said I needed to be louder, so I did this, which represents the pinnacle, the apex, the summit, the zenith of six weeks practice.

Sheesh. At least it's louder.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Here's a clip from an episode of the show Freaks and Geeks which originally aired in January 2000. The geeks are welcoming a transfer student from Florida to their high school. Coco and I watched this tonight and our jaws dropped at the same time.

It could have gone another way

So, I am a Word Guy. Philosophy undergrad, master's in Rhetoric, teacher of English, writer of reports, and longtime servant of the pen. I have no gripes with this path; verbal acuity has served me well and helped me build a life of satisfaction and contentment.

And yet...

Numbers still hold their allure. I dig how underneath the universe, it's all math. I loved my statistics class until I had to drop out because I made detective. I enjoy quantitative analyses and have done them on the dialogue of plays I have been involved with and on parking patterns for a college campus. I keep spreadsheets on attendance in the movie group, biking and exercise, and mileage on the car, complete with rolling averages and projections. I daydream about what it would be like to do - or even better, teach - economics.

It is not to be. I have walked down this road too far, for too long, to go back now.

But there was a moment - a time when the crossroads was in front of me, and could have taken a different path. Who knows what would have become of me had I chosen beige over pink.

Ataraxia

So, as I have gotten older, I have mellowed out quite a bit. In my salad days, I may have been a bit, how shall we say... mercurial? Volatile? Prone to expressive responses? I did more than my share of waving my arms around and shouting and the slightest provocation. While I never held grudges, the very act of getting agitated was often counter-productive.

These days, things are a little quieter with me. I'd like to say that it came from compassion and a sense of understanding of the needs of others, but I'm not sure it was quite as altruistic as all that. Much of it came from self-preservation: from realizing that all the sturm und drang was not only not helping whatever situation I was in, but also not helping me much. Some of that wisdom = fatigue idea started sinking in, and slowly, with a lot of influence from Coco, I have been changing into the calm one. The attainment of ataraxia - that "state of consciousness characterized by freedom from mental agitation" so valued by Epicurus and the Stoics - has been a personal goal for some time.

It has been a conscious effort, and sometimes it still takes effort - my loud,  Brooklyn, Italian-American upbringing, while not long on equanimity, instilled a lot of solid values as well as useful ways and means for dealing with the world, and I never want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And this also isn't just a recent pursuit. As a freshman in college, I wrote a paper extolling the benefits of living in the modern world according to the precepts of Epicurus. My philosopher professor gave this insightful feedback:

Like many freshman initiatives, it mostly went nowhere.

A few years back, I was flirting with Buddhism. It never really took, not because of the discipline - I was ready for that - but because in the end, it's a religion, and that's a deal-breaker. (This Slate piece explains a lot of the conflict I had.) While I was still striving toward ataraxia, I was doing so without any formal structure. So, for one of my projects this summer, I decided to go back and re-read Epicurus more mindfully. Most of what we have of his is fragmentary, but there's enough to make a study of, and I bookmarked The Principal Doctrines - a collection of quotations that comprise a generally accepted sort-of summary of Epicurean philosophy.

I hadn't gotten around to doing much about it, but the past few weeks have been quite the impetus. From the Snowden affair to the debacle in Florida, the national news remains depressing. In my personal orbit, breast cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma have all decided to visit the lives of various people I care about. Ataraxia was slipping away.

I pulled out the Doctrines and took a look. 

1. A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is free from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness. 

5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. 

27. Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

Yeah, I'll start with those.

Now, as promised:

Some sad synchronicity

So, about a month ago I encountered some buzz about a particularly tasteless event. Apparently an "edgy" online magazine called Vice published a photo spread titled "Last Words" in which models posed as famous women authors who had committed suicide, in circumstances evocative of those suicides. The shoot was designed as a fashion spread, and the notes for each photograph included, along with factoids about the author, the fashion credits for the clothing and accessories each model was wearing/holding/using. There was a pretty severe negative response to the piece, and Vice would up pulling it pretty quickly. You can read their "apology" here, and coverage from Jezebel (including some of the pics) here and here.

Just coincidentally, at about the same time I happened upon a BuzzFeed article called "16 Wonderful Photos Of Women Writers At Work." This was a charming and respectful piece, comprising (mostly) shots of famous women authors that gave a glimpse as to what they looked like when they were actually writing. As is often the case at BuzzFeed, not all the photos actually lived up to the intent - one was a publicity shot and another looked to have been taken at a signing - but for all intents and purposes, it was a pretty nice piece of photojournalism.

Because of the flap over the Vice fashion shoot, a thought occurred to me and I did some quick research into the authors featured at BuzzFeed:

• Sylvia Plath - suicide, carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Doris Lessing  - alive
• Edith Wharton - stroke
• Virginia Woolf - suicide, drowning
• Anne Sexton – suicide, carbon monoxide poisoning
• Alice B. Sheldon - suicide, gunshot (killed husband as well)
• Agatha Christie – natural causes
• Dorothy Parker – heart attack (had attempted suicide)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman – suicide, chloroform overdose
• Iris Chang – suicide, gunshot
• Marilynne Robinson - alive
• A.S. Byatt - alive
• Flannery O’Connor – complications from lupus
• Toni Morrison - alive
• Noel Streatfeild – natural causes
• Anne Frank – typhus, but actually Nazism

Out of the sixteen authors chosen (I presume) because they were famous and somebody had their photos, twelve are dead. Of those twelve, six were suicides, and another died of natural causes but had attempted suicide; four died of natural causes and one died tragically.

Let's say that again: half the authors who were dead committed suicide.

I might be guilty of the same sin as many of my writing students - creating an essay that has no thesis - but I just don't know what to do with this. Is it something about art and depression? That seems too simple. I haven't done the research, but I'd be willing to bet that you could create ten or twenty random sets of sixteen famous male authors and you wouldn't get close to these proportions in cause of death. There seems to be something gender-based going on, something about roles and acceptance of roles.

On top of that uneasiness, there's the distastefulness of the commodification of women; for every innocuous BuzzFeed list, there seem to be several fashion shoots dancing in the same ballroom as the Vice piece: women bound, women done violence to, women objectified (sometimes literally, as furniture). What is it about female misery that is commercial?

It feels like it's been a particularly rough week to be a human being; I think that the coincidence of these pieces was a little too striking in the middle of that malaise.

Next time: baby pandas. Promise.

Squirrel tale

So, the pal formerly know as RAB twittered this tweet earlier today:

I just saw the most remarkable thing in Washington Square Park: a squirrel carrying an entire slice of pizza up a tree.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

And then followed it up with this:

Squirrel was carrying the slice by its crust, went by too fast for a picture.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

Now, I'm not trying to play Can You Top This? in regard to the preternatural abilities of new York squirrels, but I do have a squirrel story that I have wanted to share for a long time, and this gives me the opportunity.

I'm sitting in Central Park, sometime during high school. I watch a squirrel dragging a paper grocery bag along the ground. The bag isn't flattened, it's still mostly open; the squirrel looks like nothing more than a cartoon burglar with a giant loot sack. The squirrel crosses the grass in front of my bench and heads to a tree, a tall skinny tree, as I remember, with no low limbs; he climbs about twenty-five feet up the trunk, still carrying the bag with him, until he reaches a open knot or bole or whatever those holes are called.

The squirrel climbs in the hole and starts pulling the bag in after him. The bag is bigger than the hole, so the squirrel pulls the edges of the open end in, side by side, so now the bottom of the bag is kind of ballooning out of the hole. It starts being pulled in little by little, and then just stops. For a few seconds, all is still and silent.

Then the tree starts to shake. And all of a sudden, the bag explodes as the squirrel comes blasting out of the hole right through it. Hot on his tail is another squirrel, screeching and chattering up a storm. The first squirrel flees down the trunk of the tree and tears off; the second squirrel chases him halfway down the trunk, yelling after him, cursing up a storm in squirrel-talk, and waving a tiny little fist.

To this day I still believe I was witness to what might have been the Great Nut Robbery of the Twentieth Century, had our bushy-tailed Raffles not miscalculated and come when his intended victim, apparently the Joe Pesci of squirreldom, was at home. And, my hand to god (as Alan King would say), all of this is 100% true.

Except for the tiny little fist part.

What are you lookin' at?

Seepage

So, I really don't know what a chord even is.

As I mentioned in the prior post, one of my summer projects is the ukulele. This is actually my second formal run at this particular objective. The summer before I went into the deans' hallway, I actually took lessons from a fellow down at Dusty Strings in Fremont. I didn't get very far, probably because I insisted that he teach to my left-brain style. I wanted to understand how music worked, in detail, before I could attempt to actually play anything. I mean, I know there's math in there - it's all about ratios and intervals and how far one note is from another, and it all boils down to numbers of hertz and stuff at the bottom.

Well, it turns out knowing all that stuff, even if you can keep it straight, which I couldn't, really doesn't help much. Or maybe more precisely, that approach is unnecessary. I mean, Coco couldn't tell a hertz from a hearse, but she can harmonize at the drop of a hat and tell me that my A string is out of tune when I have to look at the app on my smartphone.

Harmony is something I have never been able to do. I never understood how some folks just know  what note to sing that will sound good with the note someone else is singing. How do learn that? Not my learning math, apparently.

And I beginning to understand that this is what a chord is - it's a bunch of notes sung or played at the same time that sound good together because they are in harmony. And I think I get that when I play chords on my ukelele, the chords sorta match the note being played or sung to produce the melody - I think because the note is actually in the chord or because it somehow otherwise matches the notes that make up the chord.

Now, that paragraph totally exhausted my musical knowledge. But like Donald Rumsfeld, I recognize the existence of known unknowns. I mean, I know that there are different types of chords, but I have no idea what they are and how they differ from each other. And some of the notes that make up the chords are minor, and some are sharps, and some are flats, and some have a "7," and I don't really know what any of that means, except I think it has something to do with the math and the hertz.

And I guess where I am going with this is that I am not going to try to figure it out beforehand. I am going to practice my chords, and practice my chord changes, and then play the chords to songs I know how to sing and see how they sound. And maybe if I do this like a million times, something will start to seep in about how this music stuff works. And if I start to get some sort of sense of it, maybe then the math will start to make sense.

I might even learn how to harmonize.

Slowly I turned...

So, the theme for this summer was to going be Around Walaka in 80 Days. You see, I was going to have eighty days off between graduation and when I had to start teaching pre-fall classes, and that sounded like a clever label for the self-improvement goals that I had set out for my first summer off in a long time. As it turns out, I will be teaching a class over the summer after all, albeit an online class, so the purity of the concept has been lost, but the intention remains.

The goals for the summer are manifold, and both physical and mental, involving art, exercise, writing, and music, but I have discovered in the eleven days that have passed so far a commonality among them: none of them will be accomplished without steadfast attention and incremental advances.

I have been walking and running more and more, even before summer began, and summer will allow me to be much more consistent. No one four-mile circuit around Green Lake makes any  discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean a marathon down the road.


I have adopted the exercise program recently mentioned in the NY Times. Just a few minutes every morning, but a killer few minutes - I was dripping with sweat today, and not just from the humidity. No one session makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean an improvement in my overall fitness by my birthday.


I am still just struggling with moving through a set of chords on the ukulele; I hope to move up to an actual song sometime soon. No one evening's practice makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean an actual performance at a Labor Day picnic.

I have taken up the challenge of learning to longboard, and went for my first mile-long ride yesterday. It was tough going, although there were moments that I had a hint of what it might feel like to get good at this. No one ride makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean a longboard commute in the fall.

And drawing. Sheesh. I have decided to try my hand a bit of cartooning again. Alas. This seems the steepest hill. I make a picture and it doesn't seem any better than anything else I have ever done. No one drawing makes any discernable difference, but seventy-five or eighty over the summer might mean I can look at one without wincing.

If I want to accomplish anything toward any of these goals, I am going to have to do it Niagara Falls style: step by step, inch by inch. I'm not sure why this is hard for me. Part of it, I know, is just the Gap Effect. Part of it, I know, is that the past two-plus years of deaning have not left me a lot of time to focus on my own projects anyway. Maybe after years of teaching stuff I know well I have forgotten how to learn stuff I don't know well.  Maybe it is just that the pace of life is now geared toward instant gratification and drag-and-drop simplicity and I have just gotten out of the habit of actually working at things to get good at them. Maybe, if I were honest, I would say that in the past I have only accepted those challenges for things that came easy to me, and that this summer is going to be good for my character as well as my skillsets.

Whatever it is, I just have to get over it. Eighty days is a long time, but it's not forever.

A whiff of the past

So, as I was walking past the big retirement community on the way home from a turn around the lake, I caught the smell of a cigar. The earthy tang was coming from a codger leaning on a fence taking the summery air with a stogie all fired up and burning. The smell took me back forty years or more, and put me in mind of uncles and family friends and strangers on the street in what seemed like a simpler time and which must have been a much more aromatic one.

My father had smoked cigars in his younger days; one of my favorite pictures of him was taken before I was born: a vital, dark-haired young man in fancy dress is seated at a table with a bunch of cronies at the end of what appeared to have been a sumptuous meal, a big cigar clutched in his hand and a sly, almost feral smile on his face. I never knew what occasion might have put this working-class meat-cutter, card-player, and fan of the trotters into such luxurious surroundings, but he sure had the cigar to match.

When I knew him, though, he was a pipe man. When I was a child, the aroma of pipe tobacco filled our home. My older sisters and their men smoked cigarettes: Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield.  Pop hung with Prince Albert. He would sit and smoke, reading his bowling books, and the air would become redolent of the "most delightful and wholesome" tobacco. I would watch him manipulate all the accoutrement of pipe smoking and play with the stuff while he was gone: the cans of tobacco, the tamping tool, the cleaning spike, the racks, and, of course, the pipes themselves. He had several, some with curved stems and some with straight, one with a really large bowl, all of them acrid and bitter-tasting when I put them in my mouth in imitation, the taste not at all like the smell they had when they were burning.  And the beautiful racks, the curved dark wood stands that held these tools of his habit. When I encountered some racks at a local thrift store, they had held onto their aroma and it only took a little imagining to fill the empty spaces with the artifacts of my remembered father.

Somewhere along the line, Pop quit smoking. I don't remember exactly when it happened, or even that it was ever marked as a Thing, but while I was still small, I noticed the pipes just remained in their racks and the gear went unused until eventually my mother removed it all from the little table next to the big chair in the living room. When we moved to a new apartment, there was no trace of this - what, hobby? Habit? Pastime? - to be found anywhere, and another age was gone as the present became the past and we all slipped into a future that held many things, but no jetpacks and no smoking.

My father died when I was twenty-six, almost thirty years ago, and I am sure he had quit smoking fifteen years before that. But all it takes is a little tobacco smoke to bring him into the room again.

I gave the labyrinth another try

A stroll through the ruins of HKC, the ur-blog, will reveal my historical distaste for the Seattle Central Library, the award-winning ugly building that is the "flagship library of the SPL system" (according to Wikipedia). Well, I found myself downtown today with a little time to kill and decided to give the building another try.

I entered and took the elevator to the tenth floor. The lonely suicide balcony now has some signs that try to convince you it is a viewpoint, and I guess it is, albeit one that is hidden and has no ambiance or amenities.

I waked down the sloping floors past the silent reading room to the ninth level, which is the start of the book stack spiral. I followed the spiral all the way down Dewey's decimals, from Reference, Biographies, and the 900s to the 000s, straying off the path only at 741.5 for a quick perusal of the shelves there. The trip was actually pleasant; the sloping floor has the same effect as the wide spiral of the Guggenhein museum: a tendency to keep one moving forward, down, and out. I was pleased to see that some folks had found snags in the current: there were lots of people in the shelves and working at desks scattered about.

Eventually I found myself on level six, and once again, as at the grand opening years ago, I was struck by the banality of the end of the spiral. It is physically and spiritually a back alley of the library, the cul-de-sac of computer science, magazines, and "general works." Nothing marks the end of the trail, no reading room, no grand egress, not even a sign. The experience of the stacks-spiral ends with all the ceremony of a projector feeding past the end of the film: abrupt and inconclusive.

I sighed and found a fire-department stairwell; it took me to level five, the "Mixing Chamber," one great room full of computer terminals, transients, and librarians. From there an escalator led to the third floor, but bypassed four, sparing me the menstrual-red meeting-room level whose hallways look like the giant heart your biology teacher made you walk through at the science center.

The third floor has a Fifth Avenue/Uphill entrance; I wanted the first floor, on the Fourth Avenue/Downhill side. I grabbed another back stairwell; this one wound down only to level two, a staff-only floor, and stopped at a key-coded door. A library employee happened to be coming out; I asked him how to get down to the first floor and he said I would have to go back up to three first. Back up on three, I asked a volunteer how to get down to Third Avenue.

"Well, there are two ways. We have an elevator, or you can go outside and walk around the block."

"But there aren't any stairs?"

"No, no stairs."

Unless the architects planned to make navigating the library a physical manifestation of the research process, replete as it is with false starts, dead ends, and do-overs, I can't understand the thinking behind a design that actually impedes communication between spaces. The building is sharp and attractive in many ways, even as it starts to show signs of wear (it is approaching its tenth anniversary, after all) but I can't get past how poorly it is programmed. Or maybe I'm just without the skillset SPL expects of its visitors. I don't know, I'm just used to being able to get from one floor to another without map, and I'm not sure I can do that in the Central Library.

Bite me

So, we had get-together at a local brew pub to celebrate the awarding of tenure to some friends and colleagues. They gave us the back room, since about thirty people showed up, and two servers just for us, and plenty of food and drink contributed to the merriment. My wife Coco and I had been among the first to arrive and I placed the first food order, a "Hawaii 5-0" burger (pineapple and teriyaki sauce) with a veggie patty for me and a salad with added tofu for my sweetie.

You might surmise that we have a vegetarian household, the two of us. Coco became a vegetarian when she was a kid, and has been at it for over twenty years now. She just doesn't want to eat any animals, simple as that. I starting cutting all meat out of my diet about fifteen years ago, having already given up beef; that process accelerated when I met Courtney. My motivation is more eco-political, having to do with factory farms and additives and so on, so I'll have some fresh-caught fish a few times a year or some organic, free-range, psychologically-well-adjusted, high-self-esteem chicken when I can get it. It's easier just to go vegetarian most of the time.

So, the tofu and salad came, and so did lots of other people's food, sliders and salads and nachos, and some mini corn dogs for my administrative assistant. But no Hawaii 5-0. I caught the server and by the look in her eye I could tell that she had forgotten to put the order in; she mumbled something about the kitchen and went off, coming back a little while later to tell me they were right on it.

A few minutes later an expediter came and brought me someone else's burger.

I caught the server again and explained and she rolled her eyes and headed back to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came back with the other server assigned to our room, and they both set a Hawaii 5-0 before me. I thanked them and took a big bite.

Of a hot, juicy, beef patty. For the first time in probably twenty years.

I was french-kissing the Devil. My eyebrows shot up as sense memory kicked in, blasting open synapses that had been long shut. This was a good burger. The flavor, texture, and temperature were all perfect; it was enticing, voluptuous and powerful, the taste cutting through the toppings and bun to deliver pure, distilled essence of hamburger to my tongue and brain. The Tempter had chosen his form well.

I put the sandwich down and stared at it on my plate in silence for a long moment. Then, at a break in the conversation, I said to my tablemates "This is not veggie." A look of horror from Coco and a flurry of concern from everyone else met the announcement, clucks of disapproval and craned necks. The waitress was once again summoned, and with defeated posture she took the plate away to return to the kitchen yet again with this order from Hell. Eventually, the correct meal came, all was well, and we laughed and drank and gave congratulations. The fuss and feathers around my order from start to finish took shape as just one of the minor anecdotes that would come out of the evening.

Except that from the darkest corner of the pub I could hear Old Scratch chuckling.

False spring

Today's weather seems to mirror the state of the series of changes heretofore described in this post. At least in the northeast section of the city, today looks like summer, or at least spring break: mostly blue skies, some fluffy clouds, and lots of sunshine. The light coming though the windows warms the room I am in quite effectively, so that shorts and bare feet seem entirely appropriate. Of course, a simple walk to the curb to check the mail puts lie to those appearances: there's still quite a nip in the air, and a few errant raindrops remind me that we are not at all into the dry season.

Such is it with my transition from deaconal to didactic responsibilities. Last Wednesday was my last day in-service as a dean; we had the farewell lunch and the after-work drinks, the card and balloons and the bottle of champagne, and the genuine sense that this was actually happening. I am technically on vacation now, and I sure look like a between-quarters faculty member again: hanging out at home, running through training modules for a new e-learning platform and blowing the dust off my syllabus to update it.

But the transition hasn't really taken hold yet; appearances to the contrary, I am still deaning it. First of all, this is a typical administrative vacation, meaning I am on email tying off loose ends, providing needed info, putting out fires, and so on. I even went into the office for a short time last Friday to handle some time-sensitive issues.  Further, I will be continuing some of the responsibilities I had as dean as my service (non-teaching) workload when I return to faculty; I will continue to manage a number of projects without missing a step. And while there is an interim plan to respond to the vacancy my "migration" (as our president calls it) creates, I don't expect a permanent solution anytime soon. While I gave notice of my intended transition on December 3rd, the first campus meeting to discuss options was not held until February 26th, and I am not anticipating a swift resolution to the situation.

So, I expect that I will live for a while with a foot in each camp: continuing to "think like a dean" when it comes to advancing the initiatives I have kept on my plate and trying to "think like an instructor" when it comes to developing my class and working with students again. I'm not sure that I will be able to completely let go of my appointment until a permanent replacement (of one sort or another) is found and my colleagues and former staff can stop covering my area as well as theirs. Until then, that thing devoutly to be wished - a transition of my focus from the macro to the micro, a decrement in responsibility - will be just out of reach, and those halcyon days when my blog posts were cute and fun, or reflective and insightful, instead of serious or dour will not return quite yet.

On a walk around the lake today, a dear friend opined that this plan of mine to disengage somewhat from work will not last long. She's probably correct, but we'll never know unless I get it started.

Up, up and away.

Good try, yellow brick road

I'm going to try to do this without sounding too cranky or curmudgeonly.

On a walk over the weekend, I chanced upon this sidewalk sign at a local fitness center:

Now, by the tagline on the readerboard, one would imagine that the ad is meant to invoke the the iconic "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" chant from The Wizard of Oz (Judy Garland version). This should be a simple matter, but in a mere seven words the sign fails.

Much of the allure of this trope lies in its rhythm, as a viewing of the linked video shows. The meter is dactyl-dactyl-molossus  - or more simply Long-short-short/Long-short-short/Long-Long-Long - or even more simply [two-syllable word] AND [two-syllable word] AND [one-syllable word] OH MY. Any effective pastiche of this expression must conform to this rhythm to be successful.

This sign has all the necessary elements: Yoga and Zumba are both two-syllable words, and Barre is a one-syllable word. But the words are configured inappropriately. Barre clearly needs to come last, just to maintain the meter; an added bonus is that Barre is a slant rhyme to bear, emphasizing the imitation. The unstressed uh sounds at the end of Yoga and Zumba are nearly assonant to an unstressed er sound, so either could come in the middle spot to evoke tiger; I would place zumba there and put yoga in first place for a visual match with the o in lion.

So, instead of

Zumba and Barre and Yoga, oh my!

we would have

Yoga and Zumba and Barre, oh my!

Demonstrably better. And I say that only to illustrate that when English teachers grade writing, it is not purely subjective; there are objective measures to which we can, and do, look.

Up, up and away.

Analog jam

Nu, I have been cleaning out the office over the past few weeks and getting rid of stuff, including books. After having worked in a library, I have come to want own fewer books rather than more: after all, I know that most books can be in my hand in no time at all, more easily than ever now with the advent of e-books. (I have never been one to fetishize the artifacts themselves: it is the text that matters most, not the delivery box.) The exception I have most consistently made involves obscure, out-of-print or hard-to-find books; I will hold onto those. And I am not entirely without sentiment: a few books are keepsakes. The two pairs of volumes that I am now thinking about fall across both those categories.

The first set at hand is the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia, complete in two volumes. (For some reason "Aa to Lavaca Bay" has been burned into my brain, but I had to look at its spine to see that the second volume is "Laval, F.X. de to Zworykin." I guess the second does have less euphony.) I have a battered 1968 edition; the first copyright was 1953. These are among the few books that I remember being in the house in Brooklyn when I was a child, and I took them away with me, first to college and then cross-country to the west coast.

For years, this set was my go-to source during discussions or debates, a Whitman's Sampler of Western Civilization, as good for a late-night stroll through new neighborhoods of knowledge as it was for finding the point that settled a disagreement. After going to the movies, I would come home and look up people or places or historical events mentioned in the film, following related words through as many entries as possible before I had had my fill. Now, of course, I just come home to Google and Wikipedia.

This delightful little pair of books takes up less space than a gallon of milk, and could easily rest in peace on my bookshelf. But to what end, I have to ask myself? It is hopelessly out of date. Sure, the short entry on the Dutch East India Company will hold onto whatever relevance it has, but Neil Armstrong has no listing and the Vietnam entry just mentions that U.S. ground and air forces were committed to the region and ends with "A constituent assembly was elected in 1966 to draft a new constitution." A lot has happened since 1968: think about it.

And it's not like the books have a lot else to recommend them. This is no 1911 Britannica: there is no deathless prose and the list of contributors holds no names that are recognizable, much less famous, today. As find as I am of these books, unassuming is the word that comes to mind when describing them.

The next entry is quite the opposite.

The People's Almanac by David "Reclaiming-My-Ethnic-Heritage" Wallechinsky and his dad, writer Irving Wallace, are about as assuming as it gets. Released in 1975 and 1978, this series is painfully counter-culture and in-your-face alternative. The books purported to "go beyond often repeated, unchallenged data and offer the behind-the scenes, frequently omitted truths." For example, the entries in the "World Nations" chapter of this almanac have the subheadings Location, How Created, Size, Population, Who Rules, and Who REALLY Rules. This take can be both refreshing and annoying.

It is useful to have an unvarnished account of U.S. history, without the typical whitewashing. For example, the books remind us of the medal awarded to Charles Lindbergh by Hitler in 1939 and how Lindbergh blamed America's involvement in World War 2 on "the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration." However, the books suffer from sloppy scholarship and writing. In this example, the clear implication is that Lindbergh made his remark when he received the medal, when in fact, the quotation comes from a speech given in Des Moines in September 1941. (And I'm no Lindbergh scholar, but it only took 45 seconds on Google to find a citation.)

When the books are not "lifting a few historic rocks to see what crawls beneath" they are reveling in the groovy: "She Wrote It, He Got the Credit," "Dictionary of Sex Related Terms," and "Inside the Good Earth: What's Going On under Our Feet?" are some of the sections. Many of these are entertaining; many of them fall into the trap of accepting the anti-establishment set of facts without demanding proof, as much as the almanacs they were counter to accepted the establishment line. A good example is the book's non-critical take on long-lived Georgians in "Guide to Shangri-La: The Leading Longevity Sites on Earth."

The  biggest flaw in the series, however, is its lack of organization. I remember a collection of some teaching stories, little monk parables, that I enjoyed from the book; I cannot find them again. The section headings are clever rather than descriptive; the indices are underdeveloped; and with almost 3,000 pages between the two volumes, browsing for anything specific is useless. It has been 35 years and I still haven't found the stories again.

There are some gems in here.  In the chapter "Eureka! - Science and Technology," the section "Can Man Change the Climate?" ends with "Of course, no one knows for sure whether the atmosphere's temperature will increase because of the increased carbon dioxide, or if it does, what effect it will have on climate. We do know, however, that the effect of increased carbon dioxide in the air needs further study." Right on, man.

In Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, one protagonist spends the last hours before post-comet-strike social breakdown securing his personal library in a septic tank, each book preserved with bug spray and sealed in ziplock bag. He later buys his way out of the chaos and into an enclave of civilization with Volume 2 of The Way Things Work and the admonition that Volume 1 and four thousand other books were in a safe place.

I am not sure that either the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia or the People's Almanac would make that cut; their usefulness in rebuilding civilization is questionable. Clearly, the books are markers of their age; in fact, their juxtaposition tells much about what "the Sixties" were actually all about. I am not sure that cultural curiosity is enough for them to keep their places on my shelf, and I don't think I'll be storing them in a septic tank vault, but I must see some value in these paper wikipedias or they would have gone to the thrift store long ago.