April 2002 Archives

LBJs:

*Last night I saw all five of the ancient planets at once, lined up along the ecliptic from horizon to zenith: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. Very arresting. I can only imagine what an ancient astronomer would have thought of that, but I'm betting at least part of his reaction, whether in Chaldean, Egyptian or Greek, would have best been translated as "Cool."

*There's something about Our Town that I continue to find enormously moving, even though I can fault it on a variety of levels. It's too scattershot, the New England dialect comes and goes in an irritating fashion, and characters can be both too self-revealing and too closed-mouthed within a couple of lines. At the same time, though, it touches on things that have meaning, and touches on them in a way that evokes emotions deep in the reader's heart, even if it sometimes frustrates his ear or his head. As the Stage Manager says, "Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often." Wilder's great strength in this play, I think, was knowing what to take out and look at.

*The goldfinches have returned to Virginia, so it's officially spring at last. At the same time, in the past two weeks we've had several days where the high temperature was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we had a freeze just a couple of nights ago. I don't know what the hell season it is anymore.

*Bobblehead dolls: another sign that our national pastime isn't baseball or football, but rather preying the obsessive-compulsive.

*I was a big fan of Quaker Oats cereals in my youth. My favorites were Quisp and Quake. Quisp was essentially Cap'n Crunch molded into small saucer-like shapes; it had the same slightly buttery texture and the intense sugar rush, but there was something satisfying about the way the milk collected in the concave side of the saucer, and I liked the cereal's little propeller-headed alien namesake. Quake was crunchier, less buttery, and came molded in slightly ragged rings, kind of like small grommets or nuts. Its namesake was originally a beefy guy in a red t-shirt and a hard hat, but not for long. When I was five or six, I was horrified to see a commercial where Quake himself fell into a machine that was turning the old cereal into New and Improved Quake, and he himself came out New and Improved--suddenly he was a trim, freckled redhead wearing a cape and a cowboy hat with one brim turned smartly up. It was grotesque--he'd fallen into a meat grinder and come out mockery of himself.

I knew that was the beginning of the end for poor Quake. Even when Quaker Oats used him to spin off my favorite cereal ever--Orange Quangaroos--I could look into his face and see a glimpse of despair behind the chiseled features. He had become something inhuman, something plastic and false, with its soul lashed to the bottom line like Prometheus to the side of the mountain. And god help me, I gnawed on that poor degraded bastard's liver myself.

When the end came, and they quit making the cereal, it was far too late.

Some say American innocence died at the Watergate hotel one night in 1972. I say it never died. It just metamorphosized into something inhuman, glossy and disgusting--a Saturday morning version of Gregor Samsa.



9:16 PM

Some of my best friends are--

There's just no way that sentence can end except in trouble, is there?

--as I was saying, some of my best friends are permanently decorated in various ways. Some have topological enhancements, usually new holes added to their ears, or sometimes nose, or sometimes something else that isn't always on public display. Others are topologically no different than they were at birth, but bear two-dimensional adornments of some kind, usually on the skin.

It's a fascinating subject for consideration, no question, and yet I can safely say that I have no interest whatsoever in being pierced or dyed. When I was growing up, it was a Statement for a guy to get his ear pierced, though I'll confess I was never entirely sure what the statement was. "I'm no conformist!" or something perhaps, a message that necessarily became more and more muted every time another guy got his ear pierced. Eventually I felt as though I could demonstrate my nonconformity merely by baring my untreated, unadorned lobes to the world, and better still, I saved some money in the process. Actually, I just spend all my earring money on my wife, who has ears that are good and pierced, and who seems perfectly content with that.

Tattoos are a slightly different thing. Some tattoos look cool, I'll admit--there's something balanced and appealing about a ring around an ankle or biceps. At the same time, I feel an aversion to tattoos that isn't really rational. Maybe it's cultural; my mom's family is Jewish, and for Jews, tattoos carry a lot of baggage, at least since World War II. I think a big part of my aversion, though, is simply the permanence of the tattoo; piercings may heal, and jewelry can always be removed, but you can't take a tattoo out before bed, or shop for a new one with which to replace the old one. You're counting on your aesthetic tastes to remain the same for all time, and that's something of a gamble, as Homer Simpson realized when he discovered his forgotten tattoo: "'Starland Vocal Band'? But they suck!" Kelly insists she's going to get a tattoo when she turns 50; maybe by then her tastes will be a little more settled, but personally I feel 20 years is plenty of time to change my mind about something, which is why I no longer drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, eat cheese from a spray can, believe in leprechauns, or think Styx was a better band than the Ramones.

Am I rationalizing? Quite possibly. Maybe I just don't want holes poked in me, or ink sprayed under sensitive parts of my anatomy because it will hurt. But somehow, I don't think I'm a good candidate for permanent body art. I can't even decide what I want to do with my chin hair, after all, and that grows back.


9:30 PM

I've been thinking about brow height lately. The terms are odd ones--highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. (Really, shouldn't this last describe a person whose eyebrows meet in the middle?) They're also used oddly. For one thing, the whole business smacks of phrenology, the pseudoscience of determining personal qualities from the shape of the subject's head (or, as Inspector Clouseau once put it, the practice of studying "ze bimps on ze head.") Head shape and head size don't have a thing to do with intelligence, so why does our critical vocabulary continue to suggest that they do? People used to make specious generalizations about intelligence based on the size of a woman's bust, too, but I can't imagine dismissing a work of fiction by claiming it was too big-breasted.

Another weird thing is that critics rarely seem to complain that works are too highbrow or too lowbrow, but seem much more willing to use "middlebrow" as a pejorative term. This tendency seems to fly in the face of Aristotle's Golden Mean, for one thing, and it pretty much flips the bird to Buddha's concept of the Middle Path at the same time. If I were convinced that highbrow meant "good" and lowbrow meant "bad," I suppose I'd at least be able to see middlebrow as "mediocre," but I can't really see how the middle position is the one most deserving of scorn.

Part of my issue with the browbeaters is my natural tendency toward irreverence. When an artist orders me to pay him critical obeisance, my first instinct is to spit on his shoes while I'm bent over. The ones before whom I willingly bow tend to be the ones who don't take themselves too seriously. In Lectures on Shakespeare, W.H. Auden said it far better than I can:

In the early sonnets [Shakespeare] talks about his works outlasting time. But increasingly he suggests, as Theseus does in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that "The best in this kind are but shadows" (V.i.214), that art is rather a bore. He spends his life at it, but he doesn't think it's very important. His characters behave like men of action, but they talk so like Shakespeare himself, so subtly and sensitively, that if they were real, they would not be able to act, they'd be exhausted. I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously. When art takes itself too seriously, it tries to do more than it can... But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.

And there's nothing quite like the pleasure of porridge that's juuuuust right, is there?



8:03 PM

Barry Took died a week or so back. He was not a household name, but he's significant to me and to many others because of a task he undertook (pardon the pun) in the late Sixties, namely the construction of a BBC-TV comedy series. By assembling the talents of three brash young comedians from Do Not Adjust Your Set, another two from At Last the 1948 Show, and a crazed American artist/animator, he set in motion what would eventually become Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Python's humor has been, to put it mildly, a big influence on me. My brother is really the one to blame, because back in 1975 it was he who told me about the Bridge of Death sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after he'd seen it while spending a weekend with a friend. I found the idea amusing enough to seek out the film on my own, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. For an impressionable twelve-year-old, it was a smorgasbord, a display of comedy of every sort, piled high and steaming fresh: the twisted (Chico) Marxian logic of the witch trial, the grand guignol slapstick of the Black Knight's dismemberment, the visual surrealism of the animated medieval illuminations, the relentless silliness of the Knights Who Say "Ni!", and even a dirty word or two to keep me paying attention. It was the perfect humor for a nerd just entering puberty, when nerdhood blossoms bold and brightly, and laughter is in short supply.

Needless to say, I wasn't alone. My friends were Python fans, and I even took one of my first dates to see a late show of Holy Grail near the end of sixth grade, and got my first kiss out of the deal, too. When I got to Chapel Hill High School, though, I saw just how big a touchstone Python really was for the nerds of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System. When I and the other members of the Drama Club (always a popular haven for nerds) gathered for our yearbook photo during my sophomore year, we waited a good twenty minutes for the photographer to arrive. When he finally opened the door and walked in, he discovered a good three dozen of us milling around aimlessly--but Peter Rogers immediately brought us all to attention by intoning "And there was much rejoicing!"

Instantly, and much to the photographer's bewilderment, three dozen voices were raised in a faint and totally unrehearsed "Yaaaaay."

And so I thank Mr. Took, who gave me something to share with others. So many of the people I hold dear came into my life because of those years in the Drama Club, and so many of those years were peppered with shared giggles over jokes from a group that never would have existed without him. If Python did nothing else, it got me kissed.

4:08 AM

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.


7:57 PM

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.

9:13 PM

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.



12:14 AM

If it's not already obvious, I love lists. I love making lists, actually; I don't particularly enjoy doing anything about them, like shopping or home repairs, but there's something deeply satisfying about imposing a sequence, however brief, on the chaos of human life.

Needless to say, I found Nick Hornby's High Fidelity a completely engaging read, not least because the main character and his record-store cohorts are obsessive rock-and-roll list-makers, and I liked the film, too. When Rob is challenged to come up with his top five Side One-Track One songs, he's being asked to do something I cheerfully do all the time. And when Barry dissects his list, explaining Rob's pretexts for including each item on it, I howled with laughter--and with self-recognition as well, because those were exactly the sort of rationalizations I give myself when I compose a list.

So from time to time, I'll simply throw out a list or two or three. Perhaps these will provide more evidence of my growing obsessive-compulsive disorder, or maybe they'll just start some arguments. If you have comments or disagreements, please feel free to e-mail me. I like arguments.

Top Five Side One-Track One Songs
1) XTC/ “Respectable Street” from Black Sea
2) Nirvana/ “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from Nevermind
3) Talking Heads/ “Blind” from Naked
4) Pete Townshend/ “Rough Boys” from Empty Glass
5) Big Star/ “Feel” from #1 Record
(Note: The Who’s “The Real Me” would be on here, but technically it’s the second song on Quadrophenia, following the swirling but mostly nonmusical “I Am the Sea.”)

Top Five Tracks Named After Girls
1) Rank & File’s “Amanda Ruth”
2) BR5-49’s “Little Ramona”
3) The Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”
4) Matthew Sweet’s “Evangeline”
5) Spike Jones’s “Laura”

Top Five TWO-Hit Wonders
1) Sugarloaf—“Green-Eyed Lady” and “Don’t Call Us (We’ll Call You)
2) Looking Glass—“Brandy” and “Jimmy Loves Mary Ann”
3) The Zombies—“Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There”
4) Faith No More—“Epic” and “We Care a Lot”
5) the cranberries—“Linger” and “Zombie”

Top Five Songs Sung by Drummers
1) The Romantics/ “What I Like About You”
2) The Who/ “Bell Boy”
3) The Carpenters/ “Goodbye to Love”
4) Phil Collins/ “In the Air Tonight”
5) The Pixies/ “La-La Love You”


5:09 PM