Angel in My Armor, Sister in My Soul*

I admit that I haven't been paying much attention for the last five or ten years. When Christina Hoff Sommers proclaimed a war against boys, and when the various pundits of that heady pre-2001 era chimed in about the denial of boyishness, I confess that that it struck a chord. Not because I felt particularly failed by the educational system (although it could be said that I'd failed it), but it was an affirming message to someone who was not very satisfied with conformity, not particularly ambitious about his career, had never really experienced this sexism thing at his level of the monkey tree, but who'd just suffered a pretty toxic dose of some nasty Andrea Dworkin-style feminism. I never did read Sommers' book, but followed some similar discussion in Salon, Camille Paglia and the rest, nodded a few times, and got on with life.

In a soberer frame of mind, I'd say the sensitive new age guy (SNAG) was already a caricature by the time he became easy fodder for punditry or parody (a fine line, there). If my keen analysis of popular culture is correct, then his intellectual heyday was between 1972 and 1983, precisely spanning Alan Alda's turn as Hawkeye Pierce, and, coincidentally enough, the first decade of my life. A bad guess, evidently: I just heard that the wussification of the American male has continued unabated. Not only is he growing up completely neutered, that emasculation is the cause of murderous rampages, not just here, but throughout the world. Cho's problem? Didn't have a manly outlet. That's the problem with the Arab world too. If only our young men could get some nookie beat their chest and fight stuff in a constructive way, all our problems with violence would be solved!

According to the NRO blurb (and thanks to IOZ for spotting it):

[Camille] Paglia believes the [high] school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. 'There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys...' Cho is a classic example of 'someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race,' Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

It's comforting for frustrated men (and their mothers) to attribute violence to (sexual) frustration. But the idea that we live in singular times of male impotence, or in singular times of American violence is (thus far) inaccurate. Not only is the cause unlikely, the alleged trend is the starkest bullshit. Here are some data I plotted for homicide rates in the last century (sources here and here**). In all of the articles I could find, my crackerjack cultural analysis of SNAG's ascendendance coincides neatly with a decrease in homicide. Oooops!



According to the papers I've found that play with these and other data, there have been three big violent crime surges in the last couple of centuries, starting, roughly, in 1850, 1900 (the start of my plot), and 1960. I'd be hesitant to ascribe any of those rises or falls to simplistic masculine ideals (I'm suspicious of arguments using abortion too), but wussification has correlated pretty well to the decline of the later one, falsifying the Paglia blather effectively. It's perhaps more likely that the hagiography of the Roosevelt- or Kennedy-esque big swingin' dicks is the bigger problem. A real man fights and kills. It took particularly senseless wars to collapse those silly avatars. Viet Nam birthed SNAG, and we remembered the Maine to the pointless expense of lives in 1898.

The obvious problem with Paglia's opinion--other than the pesky facts--is that it fails to observe that it's always been harder for the boys who aren't particularly assertive to get laid. Nice guys, they say (forgetting it's a marathon, this life), finish last. Eventually, my reaction to Dworkin feminism went somewhere other than Sommers suggested. The rebuttal to the blamers that I settled on--which has become one of my hobby horses, really--is that men suffer from ridiculous feminine ideals as much as women do from ridiculous masculine ones. Yeah, it sucks that women are held to images that center on the improbable body of a 16-year-old naif, and the mind of a 40-year-old hooker, but it also sucks that men are held to some unlikely ideal which is both entirely self-absorbed and also primally sensitive to women's needs. The sensitive rebel that can only be tamed by the right woman is equally unlikely as the sexually proficient madonna that can only be seduced by the right man. Both gender ideals are awful, and both genders suffer for it. Can a man be man enough in that paradoxical circumstance? Well, we aren't bombing the living fuck out of Iraq because our leaders felt they needed to live up to feminist ideals. I don't think the problem's wussification.

Most of my favorite people have managed to define themselves beyond the obvious gender ideals. Sure, some of my favorite men are shit-kickers (and some of my favorite women aspire to be hotties), and I have moments of toeing the turds myself. Nothing wrong with it. We're not immune, and there are bases for stereotypes. But while a role may sometimes fit, it's not the end-all. The machismo ideal bugs the shit out of me. Self-centered idiots really piss me off. I don't feel the slightest inadequacy regarding my empathy. I'm not at all uncomfortable with my "wussification". We all have a measure of each of the dumb ideals in us. Good thing for society.

My feminine side is on the couch watching Oprah, occasionally pushing aside a breast to scratch my knee. --Al Bundy

[Late note: this post does not really address gender equality other than in a personal fulfillment/social interaction sort of way. Certainly more positive attitudes about the diversity of gender roles are connected to equal treatment of actual gendered individuals. Maybe in some other post.]

K

*my anima is doing just fine, but there's no accounting for her taste in music.

** I found a data set from the U.S. Department of justice too, on violent crime rates in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but it was condensed, and I didn't want to explain to my IT guy why I needed the latest version of WinZip, stat. It contains historical data from New York City and England. Apparently it's been frequently used for gun control arguments, which is not anywhere I want to go today.

Fear, Loathing, and I-95

[Has it been a week already? I'm going to lose both of my readers at this rate. Blame the weather--I've been busy performing hard manual labor.]

Trundling around the hamster wheel, I found hotheaded denial from Michael Chertoff that the War on Terror is so totally not some bullshit made-up campaign, like certain nutty former policy-makers might have you believe. No, those airplane hijackers were part of a global movement, and we must fight it! It's difficult to say which global movement, of course (unless you're bold enough to use the I-word), but it's war, dammit. Meanwhile, John McCain, once a maverick^TM and now struggling to recall an identity that seven years of capitulation to the absurd foreign policy justifications took from him, told me on the radio this morning that he's got every confidence that if we don't succeed in the Iraq war, they (Isla-- shhhh!) will follow us home.

At another of my usual stops, twiffer became the 4,097,234th blogger to opine on the Virginia Tech shootings, noting, quite reasonably, that, um, this isn't exactly common and stuff, horrible as it is, and despite what editorialists would prefer to say, maybe we should avoid overreacting.

It's not common. Although Jake Weisberg latches onto the "regularity" of school homicides, school violence is pretty rare. There are, on average, about 20 school-related homicides per year (see the graph), and out of about 60 million Americans between 5 and 19 (according the U.S. Census bureau), that makes the rate of school shooting about 3e-7, on the order of a hundred-thousandth of a percent. A school homicide is nearly a hundred times less likely to occur than a murder in the workplace, according to these data (unsurprising? I see a tradeoff between immaturity vs. availability of weapons, especially for the under 10 set). I've got a thousandth of a percent chance of being gunned down by a disgruntled someone at work in any given year (although maybe a little better than that here).



Roughly speaking, my annual odds of getting killed in a traffic accident are about a hundredth of a percent, or one in ten thousand. That rate is enough that in a moderately-sized community, it'll make for an impressive headline every couple of months when it happens to (hopefully) someone else. I take this as a good point of reference for risk assessment, call it the I-95 test. Driving on the highway represents a sufficiently low level of risk to my life that I consider it basically beneath notice. How does a homicide at school shooting to driving on the highway? My kids are a thousand times safer there than in the car with me.

It's harder to generate a yearly stat on terrorism, of course, at least of the kind that John McCain thinks is lickng its jaws in New York harbor even as I write. How ridiculous depends over how many years you wish to average a one-time event. Even so, in 2001, you had a better chance of having a skyscraper fall on you than having your office-mate go postal, but you were still 200 times more likely to die in a flaming car wreck.

Who should we really be afraid of? It's not like history's got any shortage of shit going bad, and fast. If you're a civilian in Iraq, your odds of dying in combat are about 65 thousand/20 million/4 years, or about a tenth of a percent, a hundred times more likely than I am to rack up my Subaru. The annual odds of dying there as a result of the war is over ten times higher than that, better than one in a hundred, and that's to say nothing of the kidnappings, threats, desperation, poverty, and general lawlessness. You are probably acquainted with a hundred people. That's like taking half a dozen kids from every school in the U.S. and putting a bullet into them.

Anyway, the people telling you that we're in mortal danger over here are the same ones saying everything's just fine turning a corner over there. And no, I don't trust them.

Keifus (This is depressing. I'd never make it as an actuary.)

UPDATE: I guess no one's saying it's peachy in Iraq, and I should be careful about glib reasoning. Okay, early in the war, I remember bullshit about casualties being similar to Detroit murder rates, and just recently there was General Petraeus telling the Washington Post that "Iraq is going to have to learn – as did, say, Northern Ireland – to live with some degree of sensational attacks." But still.

Petraeus' comment is, however, a little hard to stomach, considering the United States' inability to live with any measure at all of sensational attacks is at least one reason we're so busy blowing shit up over there.

Yesterday's news also had an item about a bombing at the Technical University of Baghdad. The radio mentioned some 200 casualties there so far (trying to grab this from memory, OK), and reports have, unsurprisingly, the Iraqi University system in shambles. The casualty rate may be exceeding 1% among what's left of the intelligentsia, but people are still going to the University. Would an annual 1 chance in a hundred of getting killed be enough to keep you away? (Compare it to the roughly 0.00001% shot in the U.S.)

I suppose in Iraq, the odds aren't much better outside of university, and it's not like there's a lot to do. But still.

UPDATE II: I also submitted this article to Wikifray and (especially) Slate, thinking any resident pedants might see some holes in my admittedly rough reasoning. That version of the post ended up being a whole lot more coherent.

The Disapproval Network

"You're such a whore, Phil."

"Keifus! How can you say that? Dr. Phil is not a 'whore'."

"Are you kidding me? Listen to him shill. What the hell is it this time? Some weight loss crap*? In the name of intervention? The dude's totally shameless...and not exactly the slimmest guy in the world, I might add."

"I don't care. He's not a whore. Look at that little girl crying. You can't fake that sort of compassion."

"Compassion? The knob's exploiting the poor kid's emotions on TV like that. If he really cared about these people, he wouldn't be embarrassing them on national telelvision. But you know, Sweetie, anything for ratings. The whore."

For some reason, my wife doesn't like watching TV with me very much.

I've got kind of a love/hate relationship with the medium. While I enjoy some television programming outright, I choose to apply a relatively high standard if it's purporting to keep my attention between the crass ad breaks. I'm for a free market (with some big caveats), but that doesn't mean that I'm not bloody tired of all the consumerism jammed into every goddamn crevice of my life. I hate the way TV shamelessly angles for the susceptible: those primetime ads at least attempt to entertain me between the allegedly superior programming, but children's telelvision, and the crap on the emotion-pandering-on-the-cheap world of daytime TV just offer up a barrage of inferiority complexes. So when I'm stuck in that hell, I take every perceived opportunity to unleash my inner prick. You know, make my own entertainment. And anyway, Phil McGraw is a fucking whore, and deserves to be called on it.

My libertarianism is more of a pursuit-of-happiness than a laissez-faire stripe. I'm all for that free speech, and for as little government power over individuals that can leave an overpopulated society still functioning. The government will make no law abridging the freedom of speech, but communities can still pressure people to behave, and national television makes the network homogeneous. The TV lessons range from acceptable (friends matter!) to sketchy (love the cops!) to awful (the solution to violence is more violence!). Since we have shit that needs to be peddled and TV, even with cable, is a broad brush, we get the lessons most easily absorbed by the most, and it reinforces the values of the dumbest of us. Sex is bad, says the tube (but we can't get enough--what are our neighbors doing?!). Ditto killin' people. Ditto our opinions on who's not to be trusted, and who can't be punished enough. Don Imus didn't survive this long because he had a good radio voice. He got adopted as some brand of jowly bullshittin' culture reinforcer, a dinosaur remembering the semi-mythical good old days when the uppity mice were kept away from the eggs.

Dr. Phil's message could be worse, I suppose. Self-actualization is one thing, but I could do without the busybodies chasing around the poorly actualized. One of the more odious Dr. Phil guests is a retired detective, who spies on and professionally confronts people. The segment I remember showcased a teenage bride in a sketchy (possibly illegal) relationship with an older man. The camera followed the citizen police into the home, caught his shouting match, filmed him dragging the young woman out to the car. Meanwhile, the mother tearfully milked the Nielsens back in the studio. It worked out well for the young person. On camera it always does, but how many wannabe citizen soldiers have been heartened to bust the doors down on nonconformists?

If the free market means that I have to put up with marketing, then the free exchange of ideas means that insecure people will constantly try to shame you with their loud voices. Good arguments wouldn't rule the day even in libertarian la-la land. Even then we'd have to listen to the chorus of the disapproval network. And don't get me wrong, it's not conservative ideas about community that I'm attacking here (although I'll happily single out a couple of 'em if pressed), but rather the means of reinforcement: by peer pressure, by accentuating insecurity, by barrage.

The prices of freedom, I tells ya.

K

*It was probably something else last time I was watching, actually, but the diet aid dominated the Google search. Phil-endorsed Shape Up! supplements were something he was actually called on by consumers. The handful of shows I watched had him hawking either his books or somebody's self-help or emotionally-sanctifying product of some kind. In Phil's defense, the books are a lot less bad than the television.

Doorways to Elsewhere III: Review of There are Doors by Gene Wolfe

Grade: A+ (what the hell)

"'You're a goddess.' It took some effort for him to force the words to his lips; he made the effort and they came. 'You live forever.'...

'There are many forevers'"

This is a beautiful book, a love story, a story of being lost and of lost love. Wolfe, recognizable here but playing somewhat against type, tries for lovely, whooshing prose, nailing the tone pretty much out of the gate. The narrative voice is lovestruck, lonely, bemused, but determined. It uses some strategic repetitions (you can see that above), touches some troubled or faulty memories, and never refers to the protagonist by name. These effects add to the somewhat ethereal sense of bifurcation, the airy remove of someone who's somehow watched himself step down the wrong path. There are Doors is less deliberately obfuscatory than some of this writer's work, but the plot moves about in a way that is like a coherent dream.

The story opens with a woman's goodbye. Her note, her farewell, tells the protagonist to avoid doors--it could be any topological hole really, anything closed on four sides, but some of these portals will be significant. Do not seek her through these portals, she says. He does anyway.

Given the title, and the opening warning, the theme of doors seems, at first, to be underplayed. It's one that holds some magic for me, that inadvertant passageways could take you somewhere quite unintended.* The woman is from a mirror earth, but Wolfe only presents a couple of the significant doorways to this Elsewhere world (much like our own, but with some nontrivial differences). But that's just the overt meaning--and with Wolfe you can usually delve a little--more deeply, doorways are how the plot works. On the other side, the protagonist travels through a lot of mundane versions of them, but each passage alters the setting dramatically. It's disorienting at first, as it's intended to be, as he ducks suddenly between psychiatric institutions, shops of Eastern medicine, theaters, cars, hotels, into and out of sleep. Between each portal is a little one-act play, and you can almost hear the behind-the-scenes clattering as some higher being seems to be swapping out the scenery for the next improvisational vignette. Elsewhere feels very much like a sophisticated, but ad hoc, set, transitions justified on the fly. Is his displacement a symptom of mental illness? Is his goddess real? I often like some ambiguity in these sorts of exploration, and I suppose there's still room to question the author's reality(ies), but Wolfe comes down as clearly as could be hoped for a story like this. If the explanations didn't gel at the end, this book wouldn't have been quite the same, not quite as good. It's so much easier to open mysteries after all. But for all that Wolfe can be episodic, he almost always knows where he is going. This one is well recommended.

Keifus

*Damn you Gene Wolfe, you articulate bastard you. I wrote this story, even, almost, to the how and the why of it. Sure, the one I put together was pretty amateur, and you know, you wrote this one almost twenty years before that. But damn, it was my favorite.

Obligorati
Author: Gene Wolfe
Title: There Are Doors
Genre: fiction, science fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Doorways to Elsewhere II: Review of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Grade: B+ (charitably)

If Ysabel failed due to the lack of a compelling narrative voice, then Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood succeeds on it, just barely. The premise is sketchy: there's a wood in England that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. It's driven one man to obsession, and threatens to do the same to his sons. The wood is inhabited by mythological beings, mythagos as indicated by the title, that are heroic archetypes, taken from the cultural subconscious. When the British Isles still were covered by the post-glacial Wild Wood, these heroes emerged from it, as needed, from the brains of the various cultures.

A background like that, and it's all what you do with it. Holdstock resists a sentimentalist's or escapist's approach, at least in the first half, and reveals the story as the compiled diary of the protagonist, Steven Huxley. The diary voice is fairly well done: Steven writes in a convincing nineteenth/early twentieth century mode (the story is set at the end of the second world war). The prose has the appropriate shadings of purple where expected, a convincing disaffection when describing emotion (which strikes me as English) but a lot of exclamation points. Better, the diary framework offers a nice unreliable narrator kludge to keep the story moving along, and to avoid dwelling overlong on the obvious questions that would trouble any sane person in a situation like that. It's sometimes nice not to have to dwell on every single doubt that flutters through a protagonist's brain.

The first half of the book unfolds pretty well: the wood is mysterious. It consumed Steven's father, who became some kind of mythic being himself, and then his brother. The mythagos it generates are real, people who speak and reason, and love. Attempts to breach its perimeter are rebuffed in convincingly creepy confusion, and time passes oddly for those who do pass through its borders. It recalled the genius of Crowley's Little, Big: the farther in you get, the bigger it gets. Which is something you can feel in the woodlands, where different views can appear a totally new landscape, fractal like a coastline, space filled up in twists and turns.

But when Steven gets in, all that suggestion unfortunately must be put though the paces of the plot. Too bad. Within, the wood is quite mappable, and rather than being complex, it is just huge, with various mythagos, whole societies of them, living in different parts of it. While the ambiguity worked fine in the first half, the second half suffers because Holdstock didn't reveal what the whole thing is. When the mystery of the place was stripped away, I wanted answers instead of haphazard musings: how do these roaming heroes deal with one another? Do they fight? How do they view themselves, the outside? How about other cultures? Where the hell is the ocean in these myths of the British Isles? Holdstock furthermore invents lost cultures at a rate to outnumber the remembered ones. They're not uninteresting, but with the wealth of actual ancestral lore, why not use it?

Steven, as he travels inward, becomes an archetype himself, the kinsman of the dreaded Outsider, with a destiny of his own. It's a fine Freudian mess he's gotten himself into (Daddy neglected him for the obsession, became a primitive woodland god, and his brother stole his mythago gal more or less to act out on the old man), and while it's sort of all there, Holdstock doesn't toy a lot with the psychological angle either. Too bad, it might have been fun to hold it up against the epic.

Obligorati
Author: Robert Holdstock
Title: Mythago Wood
Genre: fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Pregnancy TV?

I read a Slate article today. Evidently, there's a pregnancy-themed sitcom on ABC in the works.

It sounds absurd on the face of it, right? A woman's pregnancy will only get you through a season of programming, unless you take a truly weird take in which she's eternally preparing her nest, or has a new one just in time for every sweeps week. It's not a cartoon: sitcom kids aging is part of the deal.

But it's not like focusing on a year in the life is an unusual marketing ploy. To move all those beauty supplies, consumers are pursuaded to twist themselves to a mythic ideal of an eternally 18-year-old body. Gotta convince the tweens they need to look older, convince the twenty-somethings they're too fat and wrinkled and the forty-something men they should still be rutting like rabbits (note to self: re-evaluate on 40th birthday). (Of course developing all those products takes chemical engineering as much as advertising, so I guess it's nice that something's driving the economy these days.)

We pass through those famous couple of years hardly realizing it, even those of us who are pretty enough to achieve the body ideal. Even shorter than the traipse though the adult/teen threshold are those ten or twelve new baby months. Yeah, the passage takes about as long, but the magic rubs off a hell of a lot quicker. Without marketing, the saccharine thrill of being new parents evaporates completely by the time Junior finally starts sleeping through the night. Sure, people may have more, out of biology or carelessness or love, but I don't think most second-time moms get pushed into spending a fortune on this stuff. (I could be wrong.)

But there's a whole pregnancy industry, a bizarre time-like loop that exists betweeen the moment you find out the blessed news and the time you decide you're sick of midnight feedings. There are pregnancy magazines, pregnancy books, pregnancy party supplies, and baby registries full of endless pregnancy products. It's a pregnancy lifestyle that they push. The magazines are surreal. Covers of celebrities shooting across the sky in their moment of pregnancy fame, doing their gravid photo spread. It's a lifestyle that no one lives in very long except for the editorial board. Maybe if they push it hard enough, women would want to get pregnant again just to relive the magic.

Can Underbelly last as a sitcom? They'll have to either get an audience of well-conditioned pregnancy groupies, or else replenish the demographic every couple of months. I'd call it an insane strategy, but outside of television, there's a pretty good record of it working.

Keifus (meh. I tried to make it interesting)

Clementine

[I don't know about this one, I really don't.]

Like a flower, you advertise
clothe yourself
in brilliant orange.
You fill with moisture
a waiting womb, gravid
soon to be plucked
by a convenient lover
who won't be troubled
by your faithless seed.

I have no such compunctions.

I probe your skin with my finger
ungently
feeling for the point
that will yield.
I plunge into the breach
and strip you bare
spread and ravish you
without ceremony.
I fill my mouth with your soft flesh
my head with your floral scent
before devouring
and forgetting you for another.

Doorways to Elsewhere I: Review of Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

Grade: B-

This is the first of a series of four (or maybe five) book reviews. The connecting thread is meant to be about passages from the modern world into the fantastic, a theme cliched enough to have metastasized into a modern subgenre or two, and generally consistent with a vaguely western European Roman-era mythology, back before the Wild Wood got systematically hacked down for farmland and you could find hidden pools and spooky old oaks where spirits might still hang out. Some people's hearts crave the sea, but I like the trees, maybe heakening some ancestral memory (if you believe that crap). I'd rather see the sun turning the leaves to fairy gold than witness thirst-induced mirages in the distance on the endless open water.

I tried to pick books that didn't suck (I do as a rule: life is short), but the first two (or three) of them compare better as lessons in writing, a lesson in voice, than they do on mythic themes. Ysabel was the how-not-to example. Normally, I like Guy Gavriel Kay. He's not afraid to try for beauty in his prose, and in most of the stories I've read, he manages to serve up melodrama that doesn't feel cheap. It's a nice trick, but his normal milieu--writing mythologized versions of history (his last novel was a gorgeous retelling of the life of Alfred the Great)--lends itself to that operatic sentiment. His latest has a contemporary setting, from which he tries to peek into the magical corners of history. I was looking forward to see what he'd do with more mundane tools, and it was, unfortunately, a more mundane story. It starts out nicely enough, with light tumbling through the fields and forests of Provence, but the sun goes down a little too soon.

We find ourselves in the viewpoint of 15-year-old Ned Marriner, who spends his time jogging, joking with his cardboard gang, acompanying his famous father, learning about himself, and being a Basically Good Kid. It's Ned's point of view that really dooms this story. The kid observes far too little, and banters lamely far too much. The text reads like a not-particularly-inspired character exercise. There's nothing very remarkable about Ned's voyage and discovery (even though there are remarkable things he's discovering), and most of the supporting cast seem to be hauled up and out of the stock character bin. Ned feels like some safely realized version of a young person--he doubts himself, gets into some PG-rated trouble, finds an innocent love interest,* and is never, ever an insolent self-involved little prick. It reads like the author tried to write something safe for parents to give to their teenagers, and instead just made it boring.

The story here is that Ned stumbles on some magical rivalry that has been going on for a couple of millenia: back in the days of the old forest, a Roman and a Celt fell in love with the same woman, and have been returning to fight for her affection over many lifetimes. The mechanics of this affair aren't abundantly clear, but are developed enough for the conclusion to work, barely. The better parts of the novel are the historical musings on this theme (Provence has always been a battleground, coveted by rival cultures, and Kay remains a good historical researcher), and in the characters of the two men and their titular love. When Ned stumbles into supernatural settings, the plot seems to swing into gear again, and these bits are interesting too. More action, more of the interesting people the story's ostensibly about, more of the good description, and less of the dull protagonist voice would have saved this one.

Keifus

* I did like this character, but that's because I was projecting a lot onto her. I like cute nerd girls. (Good thing.)

Obligorati
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Title: Ysabel
Genre: fiction, contemporary fantasy, fantasy

Notes to my boss

1. Friday morning wasn't the ideal time to suggest a complete structural format of the proposal. Telling me that you "don't see any way you can complete this today" both underestimated my imagination and overestimated the depth of the commentary.

2. I don't come in on weekends as a rule, not unless there's a good reason. I don't live very close by, and going through those motions doesn't prove anything I really want to prove. I do not understand the urgency of submitting this Sunday evening when the deadline is Monday afternoon. At any rate, I'm still waiting for your final review, so maybe I can, you know, plan stuff with my family this weekend.

3. Actually boss, we got hired to do a "science project." It'd help a lot with my ego if you'd find some other term to use as a pejorative. I realize we've got to please the people in the upper channels, that they want immediate results^TM, but still, a science project is what we did in the first phase, and reasonable minds might think that completely ignoring the science project parts, could be grounds for dismissal out of hand.

4. "No one cares about all that stuff." Can you humor me by letting me assume that at least one technical person is going to evaluate this thing?


See you tonight, boss!

Love,

Keifus

[Yeah, I'm being hard on the guy. If the data were at all impressive, we would have ridden that horse in.]

Five More Thoughts (Psycho Smart Ed.)

Don't be threatened by the title, this post is meant to be about smarts, and believe me, it's meant to be ironic. If it makes you feel any better, you can snicker to yourself about the brilliance I actually display--it is mostly about me after all--but I'm aiming for unseriousness here. So what if it's Tuesday.

1. Brightness, after all, is a curse. I'm doing okay in the faculties department, at least relative to the general population, and in some rare cases, I even know when to shut the fuck up to avoid looking like a dolt. But I'd so much rather be a genius. It would make life so much easier.

Certainly, I'm no physical genius. I'm okay at some sports (and miserable at others), but certainly I'd be unlikely to achieve a competitive level even if I wasn't too old. Never had that killer instinct anyway. I play music, but even though I can bang out a tune, sort of, I can easily project an arc that has an asymptote well short of art (best I can hope for is a stuttering voice, which as it happens is good enough for me). I always wanted artistic skills, but even more than the music, my pen yields sketches that at best are "identifiable." In high school, I was bright enough to skate entirely, and even college required only select applications of effort. Grad school killed me though, as it was evident that I'd reached a level at which real study was required. If I were a brilliant scientist, then I'd have breezed right through that and right through a post-doc, publishing with reckless abandon, really making a mark. Even though I've managed to milk an occasionally clever streak, for most of my career I've had to slog hard for nuggets in order to succeed. Unfortunately, I'm not a genius of self-motivation either. No, there I'm totally retarded.

It's good to be a all-around above-average type and all, but I'm jealous of brilliance. I'd settle just for something really cool to stand out from my peers. I suspect any one of you I can point at can multiply big numbers on demand, read 200 pages per hour, recite the most obscure trivia, woo women (or men), aim, make the hard sell, memorize long numbers, perform convincing sleight of hand, bend your joints backwards, play brilliantly by ear, put people at ease, hold absurd amounts of liquor, find level and plumb by eye, bloviate. With six and a half billion people in the world, people with distinctive brain skills will rise up and concentrate to a high degree to the somewhat better levels of discourse, and stumbling awkwardly through them myself, I keep bumping into all you damned savants.

2. Well, maybe one thing I can claim is some minimal writing skill. One way I deal with my essential laziness at work is that when my schedule is full of desk tasks, I can crank out reports and proposals in a third the time that anyone else can, leaving me lots of time to scrawl crap like this.

Right now, I have a big one going on. I shouldn't be anywhere near the blog, but one thing about getting into a writing mode, is that it's actually hard to stop. I love it when my brain's in high gear--wish I could do it at will. When I go to bed tonight more words will be chasing each other around my skull. It'll stop when I get tired enough.

3. My older daughter keeps a journal for school. It's designed to keep the children in form for the writing assessment part of their evaluation testing, but it's cool, it's a good project, and my little girl--child of two engineers--is pretty good at it. I was looking through it recently, and here's what she had for her November entry:

"I'm thankful for my dad because there are already two monkeys in the family, and it's good to have at least one real person..."

Like any good father, I take every opportunity to compare my kids to lesser primates, but to tell you the truth, I don't find actual monkeys (by which I mean apes--chimpanzees--monkeys are more like squirrels that can smile) very funny at all. Staged simian hijinks always seem a little sad to me, the underlying coercion doesn't escape my notice. But the Platonic "monkey" is still pretty amusing though. The pure essence of monkeyness spends lots of time masturbating, chattering, and flinging poo. Comedy gold.

Amusing. I sometimes like to believe that I have muses. All those voices in my head, it's a barrelful of monkeys in there. Fun like that, and with a lot of flying turds.

4. That last thought was pretty shamelessly recycled, but I'm gambling that anybody who's gotten this far (either of you) didn't catch the original. If you're all tired of that thought, consider it scribed for posterity then.

We all have our own series of little performance routines, but depending on how big's your repertoire, how much you change it up, and how skilled you are at singing it, it can grating over time for anyone. One of the few upsides of meeting new people is the prospect of a fresh audience. Last week, I had such an opportunity, to meet some long-lost offshoot of my in-laws' hopelessly complicated family tree. It was fun to see my wife's parents pull out their classic material--hadn't seen it in quite a while ourselves--and be reminded that some people are best when you first get to know them. (A problem with knowing people for a long time is that you lose energy for the fun dances, or else you try your friends out as a focus group for dangerously untested material.) It was great to see them spewing out mock-philosophy with friendly enthusiasm, and just to see the general animation. Naturally, I held myself bemusedly above the fray, benignly aloof, accessible just outside the clamor. That's a big part of my act.

5. It's funny how we meet people, what with the few degrees of separation and all, contrasted with all the billions of us. I know I've read this before (probably from one of you crazy savants) that even if we find one person in a million worthwhile, that still makes for a handful of hundreds right here in North America. Blogging, and upon a time Fraying, it's like I'm chipping away at the several hundred who have similar interests and mindsets. I link to X bunch of people, who connect with Y, who… One drawback to this model is that folks like us probably pop up a little more frequently than in the ppm range.

But say there's a couple thousand that, by criteria I don't entirely understand, I'd really rather get to know, and a good couple million that I wouldn't mind in my general circle. It can't be done. Even with the help of the internet, our little communities can only reach so far. Couldn't even hope to meet a signifiant fraction of them.

This drives me batshit. In a way, it's like everything I've ever tried to organize. You'd really like detailed information for every entry, with proper cross-references, and detailed notes for all. In truth, you really end up filling those things as they're relevant. If there's anything that keeps me from going over the edge into obsession though, it's a profound sense of "good enough," call it a fundamental laziness or else call it (as I prefer) a measure of wisdom to be content in the first local minimum that's pretty comfortable and has a reasonably good view. Even though this makes me a poor carpenter and scientist, it does keep me more sane. Even though there's a maddening sensation in the back of my mind that so much is always left incomple

Juxtaposition Friday

...and Editing-For-Clarity Saturday.

Interesting drive home today. During my inexcusably long commute, I caught a couple of pieces on the radio about the latest lesser evil of the Military Commisions Act. I fear the death of irony as much as anything.

From NPR:

Hicks, who had complained of abuse in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, agrees as part of the deal that he has "never been illegally treated by a person or persons while in the custody of the U.S. government" ...Hicks' lawyers said their client was severely depressed and anxious to find a way to leave Guantanamo, where he lives by himself in a small, maximum-security cell. Observers...have suggested he pleaded guilty only to escape the isolated military prison.

Within five minutes of the first segment, and with no intentional irony, NPR reported this:

[A]nother statement from one of the captured Royal Marines was broadcast on Iranian TV. Royal Marine Nathan Summerson apologized for entering Iranian waters "without permission." British Prime Minister Tony Blair promptly denounced the treatment of the prisoners, who were captured by Iranian forces in the northern Persian Gulf last Friday.

A while back, our buddy IOZ pointed out that the most redeeming thing about the Nazis was their fashion sense. I get that. In a battle to teh bottom of the international relations morality scale, we're left with what exactly is better about America, and at least as far as bellicosity is concerned, it's a difference of degree and not kind. We dress our own evil up in nicer clothes. We don't shout "death to Iran" at football games (yet). You can get better food. We all have better toys. We drink. I personally think our national mythology is the superior one, but then I'm not religious...

There are real differences, of course, between the U.S. and Iran. Women are doing OK here, and you can bet I wouldn't be posting anything like this in the Islamic Republic. The two reports I mentioned, however, presented almost back-to-back, are in many ways equivalent in my eyes: forced confessions, detention, cultural bias as judgement. We're working real hard on making a matter of who has the more appealing uniforms.

Well, I hope this doesn't mean (more) war in any case. I'm not too optimistic.

Keifus

Fucking Karma

Late last night, in the space of time it took to walk across the hallway from my bathroom to my bedroom, something happened. There was no discernable event--no popping, no audible snap, no sudden twists and turns or tensions. I wasn't even moving very fast. Just the same, I found a new sensation as I entered one door that hadn't existed when I'd left the previous one.

It started mildly enough. "That's odd," I said, "my neck suddenly feels tight." And it was: it was tough to sleep, to get comfortable. Every toss and turn felt like a railroad spike being driven into my vertebrae. As of this afternoon, I'm getting on a first-name basis with this demon* squatting on the side of my cervix and stretching its kraken-like tentacles from my back left molars to the center of my back.

Karma, you say? Is justice coming out in the cosmic wash, like some metaphysical first law of thermodynamics reminding me of the moral impossibility of a good deed going unpunished? Consider--

cosmic fairness (I deserved this):

• this bothers me most at work, especially when I sit and type (i.e., goof off)
  
• yesterday, I took a personal day to party with my in-laws
  
• and installed plumbing for them, which I got right the first try (clearly tempting fate)
  
• drank too much
  
• stayed up late playing music (with my own father, see below)
  
• planned on skipping my morning workout anyway

cosmic unfairness (but, but...):

• it was really nice of me to buy and install some porcelain for them
  
• requesting that everyone in their family take a day off of work wasn't so cool, and I did it anyway, on short notice
  
• I taught my step-nephew-in-law a thing or two about home repair (including questions not to ask clients regarding tolerances for level and so forth)
  
• in an unlikely temptation of the odds, my father dropped by on a surprise visit (suitcase and guitar in hand) on the one day of the year no one happened to be home. Found the poor bastard asleep in his car in my driveway. (This is part of the reason I stayed up late.)

Well, metaphysical balances are pretty hard to figure out, especially when they're so easily barnumed up. I think I'm personally paying the wages of sin for my workplace laziness. As for Dad and the in-laws, they're outside the control volume, but I think my father must have fucked something up recently, and my in-laws are about due.

But yes, this is an apology for sucking today and quite likely for the rest of the week.

*Owwhatthefuck, if you were wondering

Activities and Idiots

The turning point took about six months longer than usual. I think that has to count as something of a success. My plan was to blog about it then, sitting in the steaming clamor, but a string of missed practices--snowstorms, construction--has ruined my chances to kill time scribe insightful comments amid the shouds and splashes and uninteresting parental banter. She's only been swimming sporadically this month, and, by the consent of all involved, we've opted out of the insipid bonding rituals. Two weeks ago, we dodged what feels like the last one.

It's a well known fact that if children lack structured extracurricular activities, their skulls wither up to little husks until the clown liquefies their gray matter to the soggy ccardboard consistency of a McShake. It's understood that just booting their asses outside doesn't build quite the character that it used to (and judging by my parents' generation and mine, there might be something to this) but absent the halcyon days of child labor, I have to do my penance as child event enabler. When the whistle blows on Friday, I hightail it from my office to my wife's place of employment (this affords me an extra twenty minutes of labor, more than Junior could earn in a week, except I'm salaried), perform the kiddie switcheroo, and proceed another 45 minutes to the pool.

Though it may sound like the logical solution, my daughter does not swim at the same pool as myself. That would lack quite the number of organizational hurdles. I mean, it was good enough for her last summer, when she enjoyed the sorts of activities that normal children enjoy in pools, which is to say suffering an hour of instruction follwed by an afternoon of soggily tearing the place apart for the rest of the afternoon. But you see, that wouldn't be training for anything. Moreover, it would leave little outlet for the trainers, or rather, the motivators.

Maybe there's been some day you were lucky enough to bag work on a weekday--mild illness, mid-day dental appointment, Tuesday, whatever--and maybe you thought, "Gee, this'd be a great time to get something done," and you hiked your minivan to the supermarket and clanged your squeaky-wheeled wire cart through the teeming parking lot, thinking "wow, I thought most people worked during the day." Maybe you elbowed your way to the checkout past some sourpuss of a woman who paused yakking into her cell phone just long enough to eyeball you menacingly as you gingerly placed the plastic divider on the conveyer behind your Cheetos and bloody mary mix. You hurried out of the store in confusion and embarrassment, with a renewed vision of workplace productivity. Lucky you: you just got winged.

On one level, I know a family community is important. On another level, about 80% of the people in that community really irritate me. Probably I should have moved to a smarter town, and if that only means bonding around higher-class kiddie activities, then at least the conversations would be theoretically more interesting. Ooh, a lawn tractor Bob? That's interesting. (In that smarter town I imagine it's portfolios and affairs--so maybe just as bad.) Since I trek twenty miles to swim practice, a dropoff is infeasible, so I sit up there and watch the kids do their laps, while the little one pulls at my elbow. I look at the other "sports parents." Somehow, I'm always younger than any of them, but I don't think that's really teh source of the dissimilarity. You have some people reflecting my bored and empty stare, sure, but most of these people know each other. Most of them like it here.

My daughter's been swimming for a year. She's good at it, but she is not a competitive kid, and we've been keeping her out of meets. This is for her protection, but also our sanity. She'd been in wrestling before (not particularly good, but very enthusiastic), and her turning point in that sport came after losing five times in succession at a meet and crying on the way home. From our point of view, it was a day-long hell of smelly pubescent kids and cramped noise amid child-sized bleacers for the purpose of about five minutes of watching my little girl compete, forced to channel an antagonism she didn't enjoy. She didn't want to go back to practice after that, but Mom and Dad insisted she keep her commitment for the season--character, you understand. Plus, we'd already paid for it.

At the end of wrestling season, there were, of course, awards at which teh organizers all thanked themselves for a job well done. I will give them credit for their effort, which I do respect, but there's only so much self-appreciation I can stand. Hint: I don't care about your ski trip; I already know your kid had the best season of anyone, or that your troop is just super; I don't care who donated the baskets and I don't want to win them; it's nice to mention the organizers, but you know, not everyone needs to utter a few words, especially when none of you are any good at it. There's that urge to take a kid's activity and make it ceremonial and make them blatherfests quite out of proportion to the significance (to most of us) of the activity itself... kind of like the meets themselves, actually. There's something magical about the way amateur bloviaters can fill up an evening. If you're ever looking for a fine synecdoche of political rhetoric, may I suggest you attend a sports award ceremony for eight-year-olds? Same buffoonery, less polish.

Back at swim practice, there are a few active parents bustling around us bored-looking ones. They're planning something. Last time, it was pre-registration for an extra meet, because otherwise, there'd be four whole weeks gone past without one. It's the parents who want this. They're bubbly with excitement at the prospect of hours of waiting and shouted conversation above the deafening splashes. Two weeks ago, there was a big spaghetti dinner planned so the tykes could carb up before swimming the next day at the meet. My daughter's nine. She doesn't carb up. But it's the beginning of the end, I can feel it.

There is, of course, parental guilt involved in all of this. Shouldn't I be squeezing some life lessons from this, preparing her for a life of toiling for limited merit? Shouldn't I, uh, be devoting more?

Well, maybe when she's ten.

Keifus [when I coached soccer for her, my aim was to make sure everyone got a chance to play.]

Foodie Central III: Review of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Grade: B
Pollan, if he wanted to impress me, started this one from a deficit. By the time I got to page five, I was already prepared to dismiss his major theses: I didn't think "we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine our dinner menu;" I was (and remain) dubious about evolutionary biological justifications for diet; and what's more, Pollan has already annoyed me once with his shallow approach to food science.

I'll give him his best success first--the food source detective bit was pretty good. It turns out I appreciated greatly his explorations down the industrial food chain. I mean, I knew it had a lot of corn in it, but I wasn't quite cognizant that it had that much corn in it, didn't really grasp the pure foundational basis that a single plant culture had on the agrigultural economy. Not only does it feed cattle and become flakes, but it's the number one sweetener, thickener, and all-around plant component in foods. Pollan does an excellent job of presenting this at a macro level.* Corn overproduction is subsidized: the result is low prices (encouraging more yield), and cheap commodity corn for the industrial users. The excess pushes for new markets, and the latest is ethanol for auto fuel. It's hell on the growers (the biology of hybrids being that they produce plantable seeds in small yield and with productivity improvements tied into expensive new technology), but great for the segments of the economy that use the commodity. Even growing and burning ethanol might be a reasonable approach if we weren't pumping oil into the field to get it.

Pollan moves on to consider organic farming (these days meaning without pesticide and with limited external nitrogen sources) as well as some more sustainable grass-based farming models. The farming practices he highlights at the Polyface farm in the Shenendoah valley are, to be honest, ecologically brilliant, utilizing animal and plant symbiosis carefully, and recognizing seasonal cycles, to create a sustainable food-producing five hundred acres, even if it takes a great deal of attention. But when he starts talking grass, Pollan shows the first hints of the evolutionary romanticizing that he'll struggle with at book length. Is the agrarian pastoral the real ideal of nature? That depends a lot on where you are. Western Virginia** is one thing. New England is another. The Amazon (grass-fed, at the expense of the trees) another still.

One reason that corn has made it so big in this society--in addition to the energy density--is that it's easily storable and transportable. Do we have enough space for an arable 50 acres per person in this country? Probably not, and there's a logic at this population excess centralize people and to maximize output of farms. Now it could be more community based, and it damn well should be much more sustainable. What prevents this? Subsidies of centralized agriculture, of highways, and cheap oil. Policies matter.

I've developed over the years an allergy to science-critical non-scientists. There's a fine line between questioning motives and means, of questioning philosophy, but in order to question results, to doubt the process itself, some sufficient minimum of understanding is necessary.*** Local farming and biological congruence are perfectly good heuristics, but Pollan is constantly tempted to treat them as dogma. "Science" is his frequent enemy, those nasty chemical engineers. Like any politician or miracle-believer, however, he'll throw his deepest rhetorical support behind scientific studies that support his views. He'll gladly pick and choose those lucky few early ecological types that struck it with prescience while criticizing every chemist alive for the state of the art in 1945. It's bloody annoying. (The saints at Polyface, I'll add, are still practicing empiricism.)

One symptom of that sort of writing is a heavy reliance of psychological generalizations and treating them as empirical fact, but except for some prosaic countryside meanderings, Pollan succeeds pretty well at navigating the psychological territory (with some exceptions: his clueless surprise that hunting could be a visceral was annoying). The last third of the book is devoted to exploring the natural and modern relationship between humans and nature, from which we must unavoidably consume. He avoids the traps of anthropomorphosis of animals, and paints a reasonable-sounding ethical dodge for eating animals as part of a certain evolutionary symbiosis. That's evolutionary anthropology at its most dubious (or maybe at its most basic), but I found myself accepting it.

Keifus


* As an aside, I'll try to remember to keep an eye for more information about the Ever-Normal Granary plan: it seems a reasonable, sustainable, hedge against market fluctuations, but I'm not sure it would work without adjustment against large-scale macroeconomic trends.
** I lived in the DC area for awhile, so I can call it that.
*** For example, don't say things like "a form of butane" when describing the horrors of t-butyl hydroquinone. Within pages, he's extolling polyquinones as glorious antioxidants, but simpler ones, hydroquinone say, are nasty. (I think alkylated phenols are a lot worse, but you know, the point is that these distinctions matter.)

Obligorati
Author: Michael Pollan
Title: The Omnivore's Dilemma
Genre: non-fiction, food

Blogging FM Radio

Yesterday afternoon, a late-season snowstorm hit New England (I shoveled out about a foot this morning). I left work a little early--when it started to look like it was sticking--but it still took me about an hour to make the trip. Unfortunately, this coincided witn NPR's spring fund drive. (Those drives are oxymoronic: if I paid for the service, I'd expect not to have to listen to their hectoring.) Anyway, that led me to an extra-long session of my twice-yearly excursion through the higher FM bands. Since there's nothing wiser than scribbling minor life observations as dense highway traffic fishtails around you, here's what I got

• Giving a radio station a first name is to curse it with terminal suckiness. I pictured Frank Effem to be some stoopbacked alcoholic slob waiting out his mother's demise in their dingy Worcester apartment. Every night, Frank dons his mid-eighties vintage clothing and sneaks out of his room and hits unsuccessfully on the fortysomething barflies. His brother, Mike Effem, is a fat, uncoordinated, shaggy-haired doofus who can be found in the underpopulated rock bars, dancing enthusiastically to the same ten tired songs humming along on the house PA, jamming wildly on his air guitar and making devil-horns signs, while the regulars quietly sip beers and ignore him.
  
  
• The River, The Wave, The Rock: these are just as ridiculous, but instead of anthropomorphosis, they go with tactile feeeelings. On the plus side, by moving away from the period and style motifs (hip-hop, classic rock, metal, easy listening) that I'm used to, they've also added half a dozen new songs to the mix tape, and flicking randomly through the airwaves is more likely than it used to be to yield something I may actually want to listen to. At least if I don't make a habit of it.
  
  
• Rock bands used to have simple names. Really just barely enough to encapsulate an object or thought: Pink Floyd, Poison, Queen, Zeppelin, Rush, Metallica (though not all were created equal in talent!). On the way home, I listened to a piece of crap by a band called Killswitch Engaged. What the fuck is that? Way too much to think about, just to name them. In my day, it would have just been Killswitch.
  
  
• Speaking of Queen, I remember how big androgyny was in the day, but I was completely oblivious to the queer part of it. Were they all gay, and if they weren't, why'd they agree to a name like Queen? Was it weird for Freddie to have to sing "I've loved a million women" or "Fat Bottom Girls" (presumably for marketability)? Why didn't this clue me in?
  
  
• Speaking of Pink Floyd, listening to the opening riff of "Money," it occurred to me that the sounds they sampled are all either obsolete or nearly obsolete. Paper reciepts, the chugga-chugga of the paper feed, a register actually going ka-ching. Why not just get the hand-cranked adding machines going, grandpa? (Dark Side of the Moon is as old as I am.)
  
  
• Numbers in a band's name are a pretty good suckometer. U-2: pretty good. Three doors down: tolerable. Matchbox twenty: ugh. Blink 182: head for the hills.
  
  
• Choir effects can be cheap drama, when a song is already thin. I like U-2's "Red Hill Mining Town" pretty well, but the oooh-oohs haven't aged well. On the other hand, using actual choirs is as silly as it is cool. A string section should never be found within a mile of an electric guitar. (After all, what sound does that whining guitar replace?)
  
  
• I have an inexplicable fondness for the sleazy guitar virtuosity of the 80s hair bands. The popular metal that replaced it seems to have lost the musical showiness, but kept its laser focus on the 14-year-old boy demographic. Possibly, I'm just getting old.
  
  
• On the other hand, the pop radio music today--if the crap they play in the gym and on American Idol is any indication--sounds totally indistinguishable from anything I might have heard in 1982 or so. Plus ca change, and all that crap.

Here's hoping the pledge drive ends by Monday. Anything but the morning DJ's!

Foodie Central II: Review of The United States of Arugula by David Kamp

Grade: B+
So when I was a child in the eighties, entering my teenage years or nearly so, I'd go every once in a while with my friend's family to a Polish Deli in New Britain, CT. They had all the coolest-looking cold cuts, stuff you couldn't buy in the regular supermarket, the assorted jars of preserved oddities that decorate any ethnic store, and some horrible, chalky-tasting eastern European candy. My friend's mother, in that time-honored immigrant fashion, loved nothing more than to cram food into me when I visited, so I tasted most of the stuff. The bread she bought stunk though, and if you're in those parts and you want good bread--fluffy authentic-tasting Italian stuff, with a fabulous thick chewy crust--it has to come from a certain bakery just off of I-84, still in operation today and delivering in small batches to the surrounding towns. (It makes such great toast.) I still can't get Asian ingredients in the normal markets, even here in the People's Republic, and every couple of months, when the jones strikes, we bundle up the family and storm the nearest Indian shop, a couple towns away. I love to pore over all of the unusual knobby vegetables.

In The United States of Arugula (he really should have thought of a better title), David Kamp covers the culinary awakenings in the U.S. over the past 75 years or so. It's a good popular history, but please do take the point above people have been eating wonderful traditional fare for as long as there have been immigrants. Kamp doesn't ignore this perspective, but even before he skims the nineteenth century, he counterbalances the food movement against the most ridiculous point of American culinary history, at the height of the marketing boom for awful, awful processed foods. And he's got a point: no amount of ignored immigrant communities can excuse the chemical horrors of Wonder Bread, Velveeta, and Spam. Though the U.S., late in its history, does get some credit for developing homegrown artistic cuisine,* Kamp's is less a history of the existence of good food, and more a history of its entry into popular (which is to say, marketed) culture. Or maybe it's just a history of culinary publications.

If you think about it, the colonials and frontiersman were unlikely epicureans, whether dour Puritanical sorts or rugged individualists, and with a mostly English cultural heritage, food was, without a plantation and a slave economy at least, an unenjoyed duty. We poor Yankees especially suffered through long winters of salted meat and withered root cellar fare, even if we still managed to invent chowda** somewhere along the way. Kamp breezes through a hundred fifty years of early food history, nodding briefly at Fannie Farmer, Gilded Age gentleman's clubs, Delmonico's, and W. K. Kellogg before taking a grand anticipatory gasp at the 1939 World's Fair, where (then-modern) French cooking was finally introduced with ceremony to the clueless American masses.

From there, The U.S. of A. grows into an entertaining history of the culinary movement, a series of miniature biographies basically, of seminal kitchens, restaurants, and writers. There are quite a lot of people in there, and too many footnotes, but Kamp's got a snappy style (he could almost be writing a good blog), an odd focus on sexuality (or maybe not, food is a sensualist medium too), and a refreshing optimism about our whole foodie culture. His basic point is that we're lucky to have all this good sensibility and good product available, catching up to western Europe after centuries of overcooked meat and potatoes, and if most of the country still eats the enriched, bastardized, processed schlock, then even that is more gastronomically informed, and there is, thank god, a viable alternative for people who care.

There are a couple of interesting trends that Kamp observes over the twentieth century. One is that, despite the fact that a number of women were influential in the movement, American conceptions needed to veer away from the female kitchen and get man-ified for epicureanism to take off as a cultural force. Another gradual trend that Kamp describes is a sense of quality that moved from (French) technique to (local, fresh, seasonal) ingredients.

Which isn't to say we didn't steal that idea from the Europeans too--pretty much every figure profiled in this book had a gastronomical awakening during a trip to France--but, though it kills me, you do have to credit those California boomers for stressing locally produced fresh ingredients (which, of course, is an easy pedestal to preach from where it's summer eleven months out of the year), and I think the seventies-vintage Golden Staters also deserve some credit for popularizing authentic American cuisine too, grown out of idealistic hippie enthusiasm, even though you'd think that the moldering ghosts of Battle Creek must have been casting some karmic shadows in that direction too.

[As an aside, I've been going on recently about the foodie-ism that I grew up with. My mom always called her cooking "gourmet," which I never really understood, as it wasn't really anything for technique. But man, it was always the best ingredients served at their most delicious. I had no idea--and I don't even know if Mom sees it this way--that the Keifus homestead was riding on a bigger natural foods movement. It's always annoying to discover you were part of a crowd. I think we just preferred stuff that tasted good.]

According to Kamp, we continued to steal classics from rustics throughout the seventies and eighties, as well as more urbane fare from France and, a little later, Japan, mixing and matching over the later years with wild and delicious abandon as chefs became celebrity cool. What's the future? Since the world doesn't have too many more peasant cultures to exploit (maybe east African food is coming up next), and since the days of terrapin and caviar (and Chilean sea bass and probably stuff like cod too) are behind us too, I fear, frankly, that it's going to be back to the lab (and callin' it haute--I think this may actually be the "past"), and an explosion of offal, and, depending on how things shake down with the oil and the topsoil in the next century, maybe it'll be anything we can get our hands on: fresh food by necessity.


*though he focuses on California as the origin of a gourmet movement, it's also unfair to assert that there were no good home-grown "peasant" food traditions that developed in the States, whether that's New England seafoods, Louisiana Creole, southern soul food, barbecue, or whatever.
**Say it, Frenchie!

Obligorati
Author: David Kamp
Title: The United States of Arugula
Genre: non-fiction, food

Bedtime Reading: Two Books for Children Reviewed

"Daddyyyyy."

Oh, crap.

"Daddy, can I use the computer?"

"Not right now, sweetie. You need to do your homework. And I'm using it right this minute anyway."

"Daddy?"

"Homework."

"Daddy, did you write your book report on The Wee Free Men yet?

"Well..."

"You said that you write a book report on every book you read."

Me and my big mouth.

"So did you write the report for The Wee Free Men? Daddy?"

"Um, yeah, about that. I was waiting until we finish the other one, then I thought I'd review them together. And don't you have homework to do?"

"Ohhhh Kayyyy...."

"Crivens, my wee hag?"

"Crivens!"

I dodged the bullet, but only temporarily. Now that Westley's within a page of his miracle cure, I can feel the pressure coming on again. I guess there's nothing for it but to keep my promises.

Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men is almost perfectly designed to read to my little girl. Granted, she's not quite the introspective misfit that is the main character, nor is she quite so practical-minded, nor so cool and logical in the face of adversity, but she still finds a lot of herself in a book about a brainy nine-year-old witch out to rescue her pesky younger sibling from nasty fairies. (Technically, I am reading these to both of my girls, but the little one draws and sings and scampers and chatters incessantly as I try to do so. Anything but listen.)

Tiffany, the young witch, has stumbled into a clan of Nac Mac Feegle, monstrously strong little blue men who drink and fight and steal and otherwise run around like a crew of deranged smurfs. With Scottish accents. Oh man, is it ever fun to read hollerin' and (PG-rated) cursin' and carryin' on in a Scottish accent. These little creatures are pictsies--emphatically not pixies--a characteristically ridiculous Pratchett-esque pun (and not one the kids got). Tiffany's still a bit young for it, but she needs to establish her role as the local wisdom, and guardian of the little blue psychos.

Terry Pratchett reads well as a children's author, probably better than he reads as a writer for adults. If you've come across anything by this guy, then you've already got a good handle on the motif. Dumb puns extended to the point of meaning something. Serious (and occasionally profound) thoughts stashed amid the rampant (and occasionally humorous) silliness. At a grown up level, it doesn't really succeed enough at either humor or gravity, and it gets old quick (best in small doses), but it's great for young people. The plot ain't much to speak of: while coursing through fairyland to find her brother, Tiffany must uncover her inner strengths. The fairy business was, for kids, a little confusing in parts, consisting of a number of intentional dream sequences and fakeouts and goofy existentialism. Pratchett's general Discworld mileu is represented too, and with little significance or introduction to the new reader, it's not much of a boon (but probably working fine as a gateway drug--my daughter can't wait to read the next one).

Also, Pratchett does a good job of drawing a main character whose independent thought processes are just beginning to take off. Tiffany must choose love and choose to accept the burdens of character--the author is honest about showing the doubts that would rattle about the head of a girl with responsibility. It was a pleasure to see my daughter's reaction to these crises of confidence, and to see the satisfaction of their resolution in her expressive little face. In addition to personal and community responisbility, Pratchett throws some thoughts around on the relationships between governance and authority, compassion and defiance, that are honest and realistically complex. It's healthy stuff for young minds to begin considering.

In order to get that kind of stuff from William Goldman's The Princess Bride, you have to already understand satire. Or else you must bother to read the frame story. When I first read this book, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, I remember noting that, although it was quite possibly the most faithful movie adaptation ever made (except for that thing with Inigo, but still), it indulged a totally different vehicle to tell it. What I'd forgotten was that the background story was the entertaining part. It was a lot more amusing and interesting than even the abridged "Morgenstern" version of the story itself. I started reading the text as Goldman wrote it:

"Daddy, this is boring. Where's the princess?"

"Aw, c'mon sweetie, it's the author talking to us. See? He's talking about his teacher here."

"Daddy, it's boring."

"Okay, fine, have it your way. You know what he's saying in all these sections? He's saying it's fine to go ahead and read only the good parts. He's saying we can skip this stuff."

"Yay!"

Kids.

Even though she didn't get into the meta story, my daughter did get a kick out of the humor, appreciating (to my approval) all of the running gags pretty well. She bought the love between Westley and Buttercup (missing Goldman's occasional sarcasm on the matter), caught the deviousness of the villains, and liked Inigo and Fezzik well enough. When Westley got caught and strapped into the machine, she whined for him in wide-eyed horror, but even at nine, she's been around the block enough to realize that The Princess Bride is basically an amusing theme park ride of a story, with the resolution never in doubt. It's one for which it's appropriate to pretend to be scared and enjoy the ups and down, but lacking any real sense of irony (and there's no hurry for that, frankly) then she's not getting much else out of it but a smile.

I enjoyed this one more than she did.


Obligorati
Author: Terry Pratchett
Title: The Wee Free Men
Author: William Goldman
Title: The Princess Bride
Genre: fiction, young adult, fantasy

Maybe They'll Call It "Meatwad's Law"

I don't, for the record, support legislation by anecdote. The title refers to the unfortunate American habit of naming laws, as though conjuring the image of some precious youngster tragically departed could add enough gravity to justify circumventing the usual legal process. It's a symptom of the same disease that causes us to try minors as adults, or to establish murky legal categories to indefinitely detain suspicious Arabs. It's the false belief that our current times are significant enough to abandon those pesky legal protections.

On the off chance that the local follies haven't reached a national audience, the city of Boston has fallen victim to two "guerrilla marketing" campaigns in 2007. One, advertising for the terrorists at the Cartoon Network, confused local authorities into thinking Lite Brite^TM displays were bombs. (I mean, they didn't even have red ticking numbers. Those terrorists are nothing if not crafty.) Another recent campaign by Dr. Pepper led scavenger hunters into protected historic monuments. The first brought out the full pressure of the authorities: bomb squads and sirens and guys in uniforms getting their faces blotted with powder for the cameras. The second merely induced some carefully directed public outrage.

Rather than admit that the reaction was overheated, expensive, and retarded, the city of Boston called a hearing yesterday to best prevent these perpetrators from terrorizing [sic] us again. Quoth the Globe:

In the aftermath of two recent guerrilla marketing stunts that ran afoul of local authorities, members of the City Council said today they would consider forcing all corporate marketers to obtain city licenses before they can push products.

The proposal’s authors, Maureen E. Feeney and Stephen J. Murphy, said new measures are needed because fines and regulations on the books do little to deter massive corporations seeking publicity through unconventional marketing campaigns.

Because, you know, existing laws just weren't good enough, and it's assumed in all cases that if the guys in uniforms are excited, then someone else is responsible.

"You can work all you want to, Jay...

"...but I'm not going to pay you."

My grandfather, dead nearly seven years now. Angry, bigoted, fair, loving, talented, alcoholic, childish, paternal. Self-taught professional engineer, building contractor, jazz pianist. He was the only person in the family who had a library that looked like it had once been used, the only person I knew as a kid who repaired small electronics. He did this not with the zeal not of a hobbyist, but with the loving devotion of a skinflint, and it was not that he was cheap, exactly, but he was careful about where the dollars went. He was the guy who'd peruse Consumer Reports for a month before purchasing an appliance, make the decision to buy a piece of crap anyway, and then keep it running indefinitely. He was the guy that tuned his car perfectly and then drove it at twenty miles an hour, leather gloves on his hands and the most unstylish cap imaginable slung jauntily across his brow.

I must have been 18 that summer, living at home between college sessions. My grandfather hired me on the weekends to cut grass, trim hedges, install (but not finish) drywall, you name it. He did this out of both charity and a sense of grandfatherly character-building. Even though he was starting to get on in years, he still had more energy for pure labor than I did, and I don't think he really needed teenagers to work for him. I did it because I felt obligated--both to my parents and to the old man himself. I had a weekday job, but it was understood that if Mom and Dad were paying the tuition, I'd spend the summers scaring up whatever cash I could to help out. He paid six or seven bucks an hour. It was a matter to pride to offer something competitive with whatever I might be earning on the outside with my limited skill set.

When Jay pulled his econo-styled vehicle into the driveway, I was poised with pickaxe over my head, unflatteringly shirtless, knocking chunks out of granddad's concrete retaining wall.

"Jesus K, what the hell are you doing?"

"What the fuck does it look like I'm doing?"

"Are you almost done?"

It was, I'll add, something of a perfect July afternoon. In my mind's eye, I can see the soft blades of the old man's perfect lawn right there on my left, gigantic maples swaying in the slight breeze and casting mottled shade across the lawn and the wall and the black driveway a level below. Free of the tree, the slanting rays held promises of the sort I could still read in those days.

I was not anywhere near done.

"I've got to finish breaking off all this crumbling stuff, and then get down just a little deeper than that."

"You got another pickaxe?"

My wife doesn't really understand why Jay and I haven't drifted further apart over the years. This sort of thing is a big part of it. Gamely, he picked up a hammer and started swinging. We were at it a good half hour before my grandfather stormed out with those words, famous now in our memories. It was startling at the time, but with twice the years under our belts, we joke about them. (For my grandfather's part, I think he really enjoyed shouting them out.)

I painted three houses in my youth, for pretty much the same reasons. One was the home of my dad's boss, who was shaping the place up (on the cheap) to sell. Another was, along with a couple of my friends, the summer cabin of Dad's work buddy. We spent the weekend on some forgotten pond somewhere in New Hampshire, minors, armed with employer-provided paint and beer and a free place to crash. It should have been the best house-painting experience ever (in truth, we sort of failed to seize the moment), but it paled next to the caretaking of my grandfather's house.

It must have been the year after the wall, though possibly it was the same year. I try to pinpoint the moment by the succession of junk heaps my younger brother was driving. Since I'd by then done the painting gig a couple of times before, Granddad hired me to paint his house while he went on vacation with his wife, $500 for the whole thing. It was more than generous in his mind, considering the quality of the help he was getting. He was probably right.

I had only a couple of weeks to get the project done, so I subcontracted Jay and my brother as helpers, offering them a cut. $500 dollars seemed a little parsimonious to us budding entrepreneurs, so we compensated the income by shamelessly raiding the old man's liquor closet. My parents had a liquor cabinet, but my grandfather had a fully stocked armoir. He bought gin and vermouth in bulk, at whatever discount he could find, and though he could keep track of every cent he spent, the booze itself had a habit of disappearing by its own accord. (Hey, he was retired.) It took a lot of balls, but the incursion wasn't really very risky.

Ladders and gin mix about as well as you might imagine. Jay and I still debate just who put the end of one through the kitchen window, but on the plus side, keeping those muscles loose probably saved my friend's life when the footing gave, and the ladder slid two stories to the pavement, with Jay perched at the top.

Here's where he interrupts. "Dude, tell 'em about the car!" It's one of those stories that requires this sort of excited interjection at points. (I'm doing my best here.)

My brother wasn't much into the "work" part of the project, and, annoyed with constantly seeing him through the windows slouching in front of the TV, Jay and I deemed it his job to run to the store for tonic and limes, and to keep the pitchers full. My brother failed miserably at even that, and, it was determined, required a lesson in responsibility and consequences.

He drove a sputtering little wreck of a Nissan, my brother did, and we two older kids determined (picture the drunken sagely nods as we discussed this) that it needed a paint job. Some flowers here maybe, yeah, a lot of flowers, that's just the sort of class we're looking for. A peace sign spanning the hood would be perfect. Oh, and let's write 'Mystery Machine' on the side. Oh yeah, now that's nice!

I know my brother cursed us for evil bastards, but I didn't hear it, laughing as hard as I was. Frantically hosing and scrubbing his shitbox down was the closest thing he did to work over the course of the whole two weeks. Thank god for latex paint. The gutter on the street flowed hazy green all the way down the hill. Drunk on power (and hung over on gin), I took my brother's indiscretion out of his salary.*

"Only two kinds of people drink straight gin..."

My grandfather again, fast forwarded a couple of years, at a party for my college graduation (if I remember correctly). By then, he was actually starting to look a little frail. He probably shrank an inch in height since he castigated Jay for working. More noticeably his discretion had shrunk, but that might have been his diluted gin talking (it had come within a few inches of a vermouth bottle that may have even been open). When he visited my parents for things like this, he often took his dinner martini in a little suitcase, guaranteeing he got 'em how he liked 'em, or maybe it was to keep from getting cut off.

One of the kinds of people who drink straight gin, according to my grandfather, is Englishmen. It's interesting to get to know someone as an adult after seeing them your entire life from a child's eyes. The other type, Bowdlerizing a little here, is African-Americans. This is another story that's humorous in recollection, but that's only because of the jaw-dropping shock value. It's not something he'd be likely to say sober, and not in front of the kids, even of the nearly adult variety. Any racism in my family was carefully hidden from the young generations (usually), and in my little pocket of the clan, I got a pretty strong and constant dose of judging people on their internal worth, which I value to this day. I wouldn't guess till I was older how this was a rebellion of sorts on my mother's part. I knew he hated lawyers and doctors and unions and FDR, but somehow I grew up without reading the racial code words in my granddad's speech. I couldn't get over the brazenness of using that word in broad daylight. (Jesus, the man played fucking jazz. I wish I could go back and ask him about his influences.)

My grandfather was a great proclaimer of things, and enjoyed the center of attention, the head of the table, where he could profess the way things ought to be, and pontificate on how they ought to be done. He was a Lebowski sort of Republican: though he did pull off some amazing feats of will and accomplishment in his life, he didn't exactly start in the gutter. It was all pretty tough on his children, growing up under that opinionated sort of authority. Most of them abandoned their northeastern roots at an early opportunity. He was great to the grandkids though, endless affection and an easy way with the young children even if the transition to adulthood often stressed that familial bond. (I know that his oldest grandchild, my talented and unaccomplished cousin, disappointed him--I'd have never guessed that he'd outlive our grandfather by such a small number of years. I'm researching Seattle flights for a final get-together and send-off for the summer. It's what's pulling out all the reminiscences now.)

Though he was the other family member that stuck around for the brunt of the later years, I don't think the old man ever got through to my cousin very much. Not enough that he'd turn down a free meal anyway, but my cousin liked to spend time with family too, and even in the worst moments, he always kept his oddball composure. With only one foot anchored in that side of the tribe, I had my some survival tools of my own as well. My mother's family are not ones for witty repartee, but they're not humorless either, and evidently with too little silliness in their lives, my father runs through these people like a whirlwind. It's fun to watch. I got some of my dad's wit, that straightfaced unseriousness (but unfortunately, little of his ability to make people feel comfortable enough to laugh), and it's been enough to carry me through.

My dad called his father-in-law "the chief." I think he did it because it carried an insincere brand of respect, but in later years, my grandfather assumed an uncanny resemblance to Ed Platt's version of the character. (But then so do a lot of old men.) Or maybe it was one of my father's many subtle protest moves: do you think he was good enough to marry the chief's daughter? Under no circumstances would my father call the man anything as affectionate as "Dad." You could have easily painted my grandfather as the old bastard father-in-law in Bachelor Party (played by George Grizzard, I didn't find a good photo), but I like him even better as the lamented Ted Knight , certainly on the golf course. And I know if that hat did come with a free bowl of soup, the old man would have taken it. And complained about the soup.

As part of the cast that still lived nearby, we visited my grandparents often when I was a child, a lot of dinner parties. (Most of the other regulars disappeared over time, dying or moving.) They had a nice dining room and a great screened-in porch, and they loved to entertain. Those memories are mostly fond, and the best picture I can conjure has my grandparents standing in front of their house waving as we drove away.

But there were moments, even then. One time when I was young, I remember I called my brother a nigger at their table.

"What did you just say?" (My mom, about four octaves higher than usual.)

Confused, I whispered the offending word. I had no idea what it meant.

"Where did you learn that?" (Two octaves now, and dropping.)

I learned it on the playground. Some asshole kid had called me it that afternoon, and then knocked me over. I tried to explain.

"Don't ever use that word. It was... it means very hurtful things." She explained without explaining.

There was a rumble from the head of the table. "Well, actually..." A couple of martinis in, and a rant was taking shape, a little calling of it as it was seen. It was going to be a ripper. I had no concept of the momentum at that age, but even I could sense that something in the room was off, like the pressure drop before a thunderstorm. There was still light oustside, and suddenly the swings looked like a good place for me and my brother to play. Or so we were encouraged. And so we went. The voices inside grew louder than usual, but the two boys had already forgotten their own argument.

About twenty minutes later, my father came out to join us, quietly and almost formally.

"Hey Keifus, mind if I sit here?"

"Daddy? Is everything OK?"

"I'll be all right."

He sat there for a while, staring in the general direction of the sunset. I looked at him too, also quiet. It couldn't have been very long that we sat out there, and we went in together soon enough, once the voices from within quieted to their normal level.

But I've got the clearest image of my father sitting on the swing in the dusk, swaying a hair boozily himself, staring, uncharacteristically pensive. His hair is full, beard red, and he's thin. In the picture, he's the same age as I am now.




* In the interest of full disclosure, my brother doesn't agree with all of these details.