It has taken a long time for me to learn that Shutting Up is often a wise policy.

It's not at all something that comes naturally. I'm interested in a lot of things, I have opinions about a lot of things, and I even know a fair number of things, though there's not necessarily much overlap between the items in those three groups.

I'm pretty good at being oblivious to things, mind you, but once I've noticed something, I find it very hard not to comment on it somehow; perhaps I feel that commenting on it gives me the illusion of control over it. Regardless of my reasons, I've recently had occasion to keep my trap shut in several different arenas. One was a faculty meeting. Over the years, I've become much better about keeping quiet during these, though my colleagues may find that hard to believe. Unlike many past meetings, in this one I did not feel compelled to comment on every student who came up for discussion; I think I probably raised my hand a half-dozen times all told. Not a great performance, but an improvement over my early days at WFS, when I could easily offer a tidbit about every student I'd ever met and simultaneously drag the meeting out to three hours in length.

The other two moments of silence occurred during online discussions, one a conversation on our school's intranet, on which I'm an active participant, and the other at an international online forum. In the former case, several students were engaged in a debate over some question of religion or other--I think a non-Catholic student had gotten the ball rolling by saying something provocative about Catholicism--and another student wrote a lengthy post offering a bunch of reasons why evolution doesn't work. It was nothing new; I've seen the same arguments over and over for years, especially since I started teaching Inherit the Wind in 1995. This time, though, I chose to stay out of the fray, and found myself wondering why; was I losing my edge, my willingness to debate the merits of an argument? No. The conversation was taking place in a forum expressly designed for discussion of religion, and I realized that offering scientific evidence in a religious debate would be as out of place (and as ultimately useless) as offering biblical evidence in a scientific debate. In another arena I'll be happy to discuss the matter with the student--but not just there, not just then.

And finally, there was the black fly in the Chardonnay of modern online life, the jerk who jumps into a discussion and begins slinging insults at the posters, trying to get a rise out of them. I've had a lot of encounters with this sort, alas--anyone who ever went to the Doonesbury.com Hot Buttons chat room will remember a few of them--but after long and painful experience, I've developed the ability to ignore them. As a couple of my wise friends put it, I've learned to "channel Dionne." Walk on by. That's the ticket. Say nothing.

Except, of course, in your online journal.

11:57 AM

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LBJs:

*The initials stand for "Little Brown Jobs," the catch-all term for the small, briefly-glimpsed, and basically unidentifiable birds that any birder will see dozens of times in a day of birding. It also stands for "Little Bits of Journal" when I don't feel like writing anything longer and more unified.

*Sometimes I come up with good lines. Whenever I do, though, I worry that I'm not actually the creator of the line, but that I've swiped it from some source I can't quite recall. Today, for instance, I was discussing education with some online friends and noted that everyone who's been educated considers himself an expert. I finished by saying "Oddly, everyone's been born, but not everyone considers himself a competent obstetrician." That's a good line, if it's not immodest of me to say so myself--but did I really write it? And if not, am I being complimentary when I say "That's a good line"?

*I don't eat red meat. Well, to be honest, I backslide. But I don't backslide with high-quality things like steak or pork loin. When I get a red-meat craving, it's for something like ham biscuits, or link sausages, or beef stroganoff, or a fast-food cheeseburgers. I guess this means that my cravings for red meat have very little to do with the meat itself.

*Only once have I ever heard a remix of a song that improved on the original: the "E. Cola Mix" of Pete Townshend's "Let My Love Open the Door," available on the soundtrack to Grosse Pointe Blank. It's slower, more pensive, and on the whole a lot less like "Silly Love Songs." It even works in a little bit of "Baba O'Riley" underneath.

*Yesterday I took a twenty-one mile bike ride through the pouring rain. Sodden through and through, we ended it by wading across the Rapidan River with our bikes over our heads. All in all, it was a marvelous thing to have done, though it wasn't so marvelous while we were doing it. I can recall thinking at one point that it was fine to have to ride up a steep hill from the river, and that having to do so on a dirt road was all right, and that it was okay to be riding in the rain, and that even riding into the wind wasn't so bad, but that having to do all of them at once seemed completely unreasonable.

*Though I'm a serious fan of minor-league baseball--the Durham Bulls, the Fayetteville Generals, the Savannah Sand Gnats--I haven't been to a Major League game since I caught a Braves/Reds game in Atlanta back in the Seventies. (How long ago was that? Hank Aaron and Johnny Bench were still playing.) I now have a chance to see the Pirates play in Pittsburgh this May. I'm wondering if there'll be any particular charge in the air.

*By the way, I've got no use for hockey on TV, but if anyone invites you to see a game live--especially a Blues-Black Hawks game in St. Louis--drop everything and go.

*I am not a scientist. Therefore, when a scientist says something that even I recognize as stupid, it's a sad thing. Today I was flipping through The Week, a new news digest magazine, and saw that a British scientist had recently claimed that human evolution was being affected by the tendency of today's kids to use their thumbs for things like video game controls. First, I think he's looking at a very narrow sample of kids--i.e., middle-and-upper-class kids in industrialized nations--but it's also a complete misunderstanding of how evolution works. A trait is only significant in evolutionary terms if it affects an organism's odds of reproducing, and I don't think the ability to win at Tomb Raider is going to make a guy a reproductive success--indeed, judging by the video-game addicts I've met, I'd say exactly the opposite. Moreover, the fact that THESE kids have strong thumbs doesn't mean THEIR kids will have strong thumbs; exercise doesn't affect one's genes. If it did, every sit-up my dad did would shrink my gut, and my kids' thighs would be exhausted from biking twenty-one miles in the pouring rain yesterday.

*One argument advanced by those who believe Shakespeare didn't really write his works is that he was just a regular guy from Warwickshire, and only a courtier could have written about Italian courtly manners

By that logic, Kafka was a cockroach and Homer was a god.
1:13 PM

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Several times of late I've had to write brief autobiographical sketches, and I still don't feel as though I've written a good one. I've usually ended up summarizing my education, my various residences, my jobs, blah blah blah, and I have to wonder if there's any real way that a reader can learn much about a writer from that sort of thing. It's not as though I have trouble writing about my own experiences, though; heck, I just wrote a whole book about them.

But when I write one of these little biographical summaries, I'm always painfully aware of what's not included. There are experiences vital to me--ones that altered my life, that smacked me across the face or pounded me on the head or pierced my heart with a long, thin, supercharged electrode--that nonetheless don't seem to fit in the framework. I'm perfectly comfortable with personal narratives; anyone who's ever conversed with me for any length of time knows that I can easily turn the conversation to What I Used to Play on WXYC, or The Year I Lived in Manchester, or What I Learned from Teaching in Fayetteville, even if we're discussing campaign finance reform or African eco-tourism. Those narratives, however, seem self-contained and clearly defined. They're polygons on a plane, and I can look down on them and fully comprehend their shapes.

Autobiography, however, seems like a whole different problem. There you are, still in the middle of things, resting on the same plane they rest on, and suddenly you have to visualize what their borders look like. Being asked to write an autobiography is like being asked to fly through the roof of your house so that you can look down and tell readers what the floor plan looks like. Incidents, emotions, people, places--even the most important parts of your life can be hard to see from the inside out. And then describing what you see to someone else... Sometimes I wonder if it can be done at all. Other times I wonder if it can be done, but only by writers with more skill than I.

I do know one thing: the longest, loudest, hardest laugh I ever had came when I was about fifteen. My very first band, which never even got organized enough to have a name, let alone a career, was practicing in my parents' living room. We wanted to have a slow song in our set, and had somehow decided that Exile's "Kiss You All Over" qualified, even though it's obviously a midtempo number. We kept playing it into a plodding, deadly dullness, and our drummer, Jim Fine, kept yelling that it was dragging. Mike Maxwell, the bass player, kept looking at me; we had no idea what we could do to improve things. Finally Jim got fed up and started to crank up the tempo, but he didn't stop speeding up. Faster and faster he went, and we kept up gamely. Then Paul Maxwell, the other guitarist, suddenly stepped on his footswitch and changed the tone of his Gibson SG to that of a distorted buzzsaw--and without warning we were tearing through a punk version that the Ramones might have envied. I stopped playing chords, brought my left hand up the neck, cranked up the volume with my right, and launched into a blistering solo that lasted about fifteen notes before Jim dropped his sticks and fell over his drum kit in hysterics. The rest of us stopped playing as well, eyes watering, sides heaving, leaving the heavy hum of free-ringing strings to fill the room. We kept laughing, unable to stop, for at least a solid minute. I have been playing music for over twenty-five years, and that minute remains the single most intense, vivid, and unforgettable experience I've ever had with an instrument in my hand.

Maybe you had to be there.


4:14 PM

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