July 2003 Archives

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Thursday, July 31: Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070), 9:00-10:00 a.m.

Thursday, July 31: Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, August 2: Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA, 9:00-10:30 a.m. nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sunday, August 3: Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY, 8:00-10:00 a.m. nature walk/ 10:00-12:00 reading and signing

Some of my pals over at Readerville started a poetry discussion. Every week, a new poem is posted, and we throw out opinions and speculations about it. We started with W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming," and we're now in the middle of John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Soon we'll be doing Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, all sorts of folks. And I'm really looking forward to it.

Poetry has haunted me for decades, but somehow I've never quite admitted that I believe in it. As a child, rhymes of all sorts tickled me, whether they were the pieces of A Child's Garden of Verse that my mom quoted or the irresistible cadences of A.A. Milne. (I defy anyone to read "James James Morrison Morrison Willoughby George DuPree" aloud without settling on the beat.) By fifth grade, I'd graduated to Ogden Nash, even going so far as to compose an ode to him:

I thank thee, Ogden Nash, for thou
Hast taught me, with each hymn,
No matter which words I may use
The lines will always rhymn.

Soon after that, I wrote a piece of free verse called "Sunsets by the Sea" which was pure and sincere and oh god it was awful. Fine for a ten-year-old, I guess, but scary to contemplate now. In fact, I live in fear that it's still lurking somewhere among my mother's papers, and will be produced by her with a triumphant cry during some awards dinner someday, and of course she'll insist on reading it aloud, and they'll revoke my award at once.

Adolescence is of course when the Muse is most likely to settle on one's brow and insist on giving the poetic part of one's brain a strenuous workout, and I was grunting and sweating with the best of them. Much of what I produced in junior high is not unlike what is often produced through grunting, but every once in a while I'd catch lightning in a jar and write something good. In 9th grade, poet Ellen T. Johnston-Hale (better known as Mrs. J) came to our English class and did a workshop. I wrote a wistful little piece called "Mustard" about a childhood fantasy my friend Bruce Crumpton and I had entertained, and I knew it was good as soon as I read it over. Alas, Mrs. J heard me read it and didn't have much to say about it. I was floored; this was primo stuff, after all. How could she not notice?

I guess she was distracted by something else in class, somebody ogling someone else's body or carving obscenities in a desk, because the next day she came back and announced that "Mustard" was quite excellent and that she must not have been paying attention before. I was mollified, and took her turnaround as a sign that I was meant to write poetry.

And I did. Repeatedly. I published several poems in my high-school literary magazine, the Different Drummer, some of which do not embarrass me today. Moreover, once I'd learned to play guitar, I started writing lyrics; when I picked up piano, I wrote even more. From high school through college and beyond, I gave my Muse all she could handle, and when I became a teacher in Fayetteville, I would often find myself composing poems during planning periods, desperately trying to keep my creative juices flowing. Haiku. Sonnets. Free verse. Villanelles, for god's sake.

What I never did, though, was attempt to publish them. I've never sent a poem to a journal or magazine. At one point I assembled a few dozen poems with the idea of submitting them to the Yale Younger Poets series, but now that I'm 40, I'm no longer eligible. I did give one (a villanelle) to an online magazine, only to realize after it appeared that I'd sent them a flawed copy--the last line of each stanza was missing a word, meaning the line didn't scan properly. I felt like a total dolt. (This is why I'm not sharing the name of the online magazine.)

And every once in a while, I'll spot one of my better efforts--"Teaching the Lake" or "Mennonite Socks"--and think "I should really do something with that." There's no money in poetry, as Ian Shoales observed, but maybe I should at least send a few things out. If nothing else, maybe I can finally get that damn Muse off my brow.

3:24 PM

LBJs

*Weight check: I'm a couple of days late, but I must be honest: this past week, I hit a plateau. No weight loss. I'm irked. On the plus side, I've found some old pictures of myself and the weight I've already lost is quite clearly visible. I've just got to get on track this week and quit sabotaging myself. (Last week, Kel made a pound cake for her book group and I was unable to resist; hey, it's only my favorite dessert...)

*I was noticing recently that a segment of the pop music population enjoys deliberately misspelling words. First there are the artists themselves: Led Zeppelin (and their copycats, Def Leppard), the Beatles, the Byrds, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Split Enz. Then there are the titles: Big Star's "September Gurls" and "What's Going Ahn," Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize" (later covered by Quiet Riot), Spearhead's Chocolate Supa Highway, and probably over half of Prince's titles, such as "I Would Die 4 U. There's also the subset that enjoys creating portmanteau words, cramming several short ones together: Everclear's "Heartspark Dollarsign," Stone Temple Pilots' "Silvergun Superman," Prince's Julian Cope's "Safesurfer" and "Spacehopper," and Prince again, with Lovesexy. I tend to think they're all deliberately playing with convention, rather than trying to spell correctly and failing, but I must admit I'm curious about where this tradition began and why it continues. As for its peak, I feel the ultimate wordplay title is probably still Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Fa Lettin Me Be Mice Elf Again)."

*Flane and John are visiting (Hi, Flane and John!) and the former has been sucked into the GameCube again--"Animal Crossing" has her by the throat...

*I'm reading Richard Matheson's SF/horror classic I Am Legend just now; actually, I'm done with the short novel itself and am finishing up the short stories in the back of the book. It's the novel on which The Omega Man was based, a story of a plague that infects every human being on earth except one, and his struggles to survive. The reason he's struggling is that everyone else has been transformed by this plague into a vampire. I was discussing the book with Kelly yesterday and she asked, "If everyone else in the world is a vampire, why would you want to be the only human being?" An interesting question... of course, the short answer is that if there aren't any human beings left, who will the vampires feed on? Yep, each other. So you don't really gain much by letting one of them fang you to put you out of your misery.

*I checked out a copy of Superman in the Sixties from our library and lost myself in the Superman mythos for a few hours the other day. It's odd; I grew up with comics, but didn't really start getting into them until the early 70s, when they'd already become "relevant" and Neal Adams' artistic style had made a huge splash. Coming in when I did, I should have missed the 60s comics. At the same time, though, both Marvel and DC (especially the latter) made a habit of reprinting older stories, often in the back of giant-size comics like the 100-pages-for-25-cents books that I picked up on trips to the 7-11 at every opportunity. The older stories were often from the early-to-mid-60s, back when Mort Weisinger was editing all the Superman books (Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, etc.) and putting his distinctive stamp on them. Thus, for me, picking up the 60s collection was like getting lost in one's first-grade primer again; everything was clear and simple and bold, in primary colors, with Curt Swan's smooth, clean, FBI-sharp linework defining the universe.

Superman's universe was billions of miles across and about a millimeter deep. Supes (and everyone else) knew perfectly the rules under which this universe operated--there was no ambiguity--but the ways in which the universe could be folded and refolded were just about infinite. Thus, Superman could fly through time (usually in a panel filled with diaphonous calendar-like sheets bearing dates like "1492" and "1776" upon them) to meet his own parents, fall in love with a beautiful Kryptonese actress, or even attempt to save Abe Lincoln, but History Could Not Be Changed. Superman was invulnerable to all save magic and kryptonite, but when a plot twist demanded it, a whole new variety of kryptonite could appear to make his life difficult. (Green K was lethal to Supes, but an entire rainbow of the stuff soon appeared: Gold K, which would take his powers away permanently, White K, which was lethal to plant life, Blue K, which was harmless to Supes but lethal to Bizarros, and of course Red K, which had a variety of unrepeatable effects that lasted exactly 48 hours--except once when Supes encountered a specialvariety of Red K that reproduced earlier effects and lasted for weeks so that he could lose his memory and his powers and fall in love with a beautiful rancher.) Supes and his friends were prone to say things like "How ironic!" and then summarize the plot up to that point. Everyone wore a tie. And Jimmy Olsen would clumsily put himself in harm's way every issue, getting himself thrown back in time to start a Beatles craze in ancient Palestine, or accidentally turning on a ray gun that turned him into a "Giant Turtle Man." No, really.

These are supremely goofy comics, no question, but my affection for them is genuine, and I'm not alone. In the late 80s, writer Alan Moore was brought in write a capstone for the original Superman mythos; DC was bringing in new creative teams to clear out the goofier deadwood and renew the character, going so far as ending the Superman series and restarting it with issue Number One. In his finale, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", Moore took up all the Weisinger staples: the bottled city of Kandor, Krypto the Super-Dog, time travel, the Fortress of Solitude. He treated them not with smugness, not with pretentiousness, but with a becoming dignity, and in so doing, he made Weisinger's era live again, made that bright, clean, red-yellow-and-blue universe seem reachable one last time.

In a way, Moore's story was like the rocket that brought Supes from Krypton, a single powerful survivor of a long-lost world. And when I pick those childhood stories up now, I feel as if I'm flying through the time barrier myself, puncturing huge sheets of diaphonous paper--1991, 1985, 1974, 1969. Up, up and away.

3:27 PM

I'm a Tar Heel born
And a Tar Heel bred
And when I die
I'm a Tar Heel dead...

And for the second year in a row, my beloved alma mater is getting grief because it has the audacity to require its students to read a book.

Yes, strange as it seems, that's the entire controversy. For the last three years, UNC freshmen have been required to read a book over the summer prior to entering school. When they arrive in the fall, they must discuss the book. With a group of other freshmen. And a faculty member. Man, this crazed, radical approach to education has me in a cold sweat just thinking about it.

But perhaps it's not the idea of required reading per se that has people in an uproar. I must admit, many of the courses I took at UNC had required reading, and many required me to discuss what I'd read. No, what seems to be causing the uproar in this case is the book itself: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

(I haven't read the book. Of course, I suspect that many of those objecting to its being required reading haven't cracked it open, either, so if they feel qualified to judge it, they'd better extend me the same courtesy.)

The primary opponents of the reading assignment are a group known as "The Committee for a Better Carolina." According to the UNC General Alumni Association's website (Full story here), "The group claims that the story presented by the author, Barbara Ehrenreich, does not contribute to the fair and balanced climate of intellectual discussion that the University said it is seeking to promote with the summer reading program."

Now here's what I don't get: how can one book throw off the fairness and balance of a discussion that hasn't happened yet? (I'll leave aside the question of how one book can throw off an entire university's intellectual climate.) Sure, the book itself can be unfair, inaccurate, badly written, you name it, but if that's the case, won't the discussion of the book redress the balance? I mean, if the readers were to sit down in September and say, "My god, this is the most unfair, inaccurate, and badly written thing I've ever seen," would the CBC object? If not, why deny them the opportunity to do so? This is like claiming the World Series is rigged before we even know which teams are playing.

Of course, I suspect the CBC may have an ulterior motive in criticizing the book, and that motive appears to be political. According to the GAA, the Committee claims Ehrenreich is a "radical socialist." She is apparently an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and sits on the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws' board of directors; whether that makes her a "radical" socialist or merely a middle-of-the-road socialist I couldn't say, not knowing that many socialists, but she is a journalist, author, and contributor to the radical left-wing publication Time magazine.

In short, I think the CBC objects to the idea that freshmen have to read a book written by someone with whom they disagree (or at least assume they disagree).

I hate to break the news, gang, but that's college. A university education requires one to read the works of a variety of writers and decide which ones make sense. UNC forced me--on pain of failure!--to read a variety of writers during my time there, and I disagreed with dozens. Some were avowed Marxists (e.g. Marx), others strict Freudians (such as Freud), and some were drones who, all evidence to the contrary, thought they could write (like Henry James). Not once did my professors listen to my objections. When I pointed out that Jonathan Edwards was a crazed Puritan maniac who would condemn me to Hell as soon as look at me, did Dr. Emerson rescind the reading assignment? He did no such thing! I was forced to read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God!" And what did I learn from it? Um... well, actually, that was where I learned that Edwards was a crazed Puritan etc., etc.

In short, Committee members, if you think your education should consist of having your prejudices reinforced, you are not seeking an education. You are certainly not seeking the sort of education the University of North Carolina hopes to give you. Its motto is "Lux Libertas," after all; if you don't wish to open your mind and let the light in, or to use your liberty to think, I'm sure there are thousands of other applicants who'd be happy to take your place on the Hill.

1:46 AM

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Thursday, July 31: Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070), 9:00-10:00 a.m.

Thursday, July 31: Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, August 2: Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA, 9:00-10:30 a.m. nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sunday, August 3: Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY, 8:00-10:00 a.m. nature walk/ 10:00-12:00 reading and signing

I just finished the latest book by Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I'm going to be thinking about it for a good while.

Krakauer's books do that. You can't read Into the Wild without spending the next few days considering the character of Chris McCandless and puzzling over him; was he a mystic? A ne'er-do-well? A hermit in the making? A suburban dilettante who didn't respect the wilderness enough? All of these and more? My students read the book a few years ago, but I don't think they were ready for it; most ninth-graders wouldn't know a spiritual crisis if it bit them on the nose, and the idea that a guy might give up a life of ease in order to find personal meaning--well, they won't be putting down their GameBoys to look for it anytime soon, I can tell you that.

But an adult reading it can't help but see the same thing Krakauer sees: that there's something appealing, even enviable, about McCandless's relentless certainty. It must be nice to believe something with that kind of clarity, with that freedom from doubt. The more life experience you have, the harder it is to see things in black and white, and we grey-headed (in both senses) thinkers often feel a nostalgia for the days when reality was nothing but a true-false test with no essay; ironically, that's what makes the book tough for ninth-graders. They look at McCandless's life and death and feel compelled to mark him as either prophet or (more often) kook; I look at him and want to ask the examiner if there's an error in the question about him.

And of course, Into Thin Air is a tour de force. The life-or-death decisions made at the top of the world have a great resonance for those of us lower down, where decisions about what kind of sugar-free sweetener to use are often the most important ones we make on a given day. Krakauer's honesty, anguish, and passion for the mountain make the story work, but the story itself is almost unbearably compelling: hubris, teamwork, last-minute rescue attempts, misjudgments, miraculous escapes, and the unforgettable image of Rob Hall, trapped atop Everest, speaking via satellite to the wife in New Zealand he'll never see again... if you can read that and not carry it with you, you're not human.

Based on the above, I went into Under the Banner of Heaven (and just what is it with Krakauer and prepositional phrases?) with pretty high expectations, and I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed. The book's twin narratives concern a true-crime story on one hand and a history on the other. The crime is the 1984 murder of a Utah woman and her infant daughter by two excommunicated Mormon brothers; the history is the often violent account of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded and began splintering into smaller (and often even more violent) sects almost immediately.

It's a stirring pair of stories, and it has me mulling over the nature of human belief systems with a fascination I haven't felt since I read David Kertzer's brilliant The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Again, there's an element of wistful envy in Krakauer's description of the Lafferty brothers, whose certainty of their own connection to the Divine was complete--but there's also the horrific fact that this fanatical certainty led them to slaughter two innocents because they believed (and still believe) that God had ordered them to do so. And it's that dual character of certainty--beautiful, yet deadly--that Krakauer keeps seeing and showing to us, regardless of whose certainty it is. It rears its head in his account of the lynching of Joseph Smith, Jr., at the hands of an anti-Mormon mob in Carthage, Illinois, as well as in the description of the Mormons who deceived and massacred over a hundred men, women, and children in Mountain Meadows, Utah.

It is a beautiful and tempting fruit, certainty is; what Krakauer makes us realize, over and over, is that it is a fruit which human beings, perhaps, ought to consider forbidden.

5:55 AM

Weight check: down two more pounds, for a total of eighteen lost. A bit disappointing, given the rapid progress of the first three weeks, but hey, weight loss is weight loss. And it wasn't like I was terribly well-behaved this week; yesterday Kel & I went out to celebrate our 17th anniversary and decided to forgo Atkins for breakfast (sesame seed bagel w/veggie cream cheese for me) and lunch (spinach burrito--gooooooooood, too.) Compared with the earlier weeks, when I was quite rigorous about the diet, two pounds is as much as I deserve.

Book News: the third printing of The Verb 'To Bird' left the printer yesterday, which means that Amazon.com and the various sold-out stores around the country should have the paperbacks they need in a matter of days. I'll admit that seeing the legend "THIS BOOK IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE" next to your paperback on Amazon is pretty much the mother of all mixed emotions. "Aiee! No one can buy my book!" is baked right into the goodness of "Yay! They're sold out!" But the hardback, I'm happy to say, can be had at Amazon at this very moment.

I've spent the morning on the phone, attempting to arrange various interviews and appearances for the next few weeks. The "Cheap-Ass Book Tour," as I call it, has essentially two legs left (one heading northeast, one heading south), plus a few scattered appearances. Here's how it looks:

Th 7/31 Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070)
9:00-10:00 a.m.

Th 7/31 Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA
7:00 p.m.

Sat 8/2 Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA
9:00-10:30 nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sun 8/3 Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY
Walk: 8-10 a.m./Reading 10-noon

Wed 8/6 Radio interview, WVIK, Bettendorf, IA/Rock Island, IL
6:45 p.m. EDT

Fri 8/8 Barnes & Noble, Lynchburg, VA
7:00 p.m.

Sun 8/17 Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC
3:00-4:00 p.m.

Fri 8/29 Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA,
7:00 p.m.

Tu 9/2 Bull’s Head Bookshop, Chapel Hill, NC
3:30 p.m.

As far as I know, that's it for the tour this summer. Don't say you weren't warned...

6:10 PM

On Lying in Bed

(Yes, I copped the title of this entry from G.K. Chesterton.)

Last night I spent twelve hours in bed. I was tired from several busy days and disrupted nights, so I crawled in for a nap at about 8:30. Kelly came in after 11:00 and slowly began the process of getting ready for bed while I stumbled in and out of dreams. She finally climbed in with her book and read until about 1:00, at which point I came awake somewhat, and we spent a long time holding each other and talking about the previous seventeen years. (Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, but we're having the actual celebration tomorrow.)

Once the talking was done, we sought sleep, lying side-by-side, as we've done almost every night for years. I was unable to get back to dreamland, however, and instead lay in the dark until 2:30, thinking about sleep and sleepers.

Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, is a faint intimation of mortality; it's not hard to imagine lying in bed and waiting for the sleep from which we never awake. In some ways, falling asleep is a gamble; we're wagering that we'll wake up, but we can never know for sure that we will. Whether by slow steps or a rapid dive, we enter the pool of sleep each night, confident that we'll come back to the surface, but unable to know what will happen to us while we're submerged.

And that, quite naturally, is why there is such comfort in having a partner. Swimming alone is dangerous; at some level, I think we believe that sleeping alone can be, too. We want someone there to look for us when the lifeguard's whistle blows, to help us when we're too tired to make it to the shallows, to offer us a chance at rescue, if necessary to share the gift of breath.

Nonetheless, sleeping in tandem is not always easy. There is always a feeling, when two people are in bed, that the ideal is to fall asleep wrapped in one another's arms, but this ideal is rarely achieved. Anatomically, someone has to have an arm on the bottom, and that stops being comfortable after a while; it's certainly not a position conducive to easy sleep. Instead, we often find ourselves lying face to face, arms withdrawn, feeling each other's breath against our cheeks, or perhaps getting a dim vision of the light in one another's eyes. It can't last, however. The motion of knees and toenails and even hair can cause a collision, a sharp poke, a tickling that rouses one or both sleepers. We can lie flat on our backs, holding hands and perhaps brushing our legs against one another, but the position feels formal and stiff; it speaks less of relaxation than exhaustion. Much better is the position of spooning, both of us curled on the same side, one nuzzling up against the other's back, with a hand perhaps wrapped around the torso of the one in front. But even then, one's nose may be pressed into a ticklish mass of hair; the one behind cannot curl up more than the one in front; the one in front cannot straighten out more than the one behind; and there's still an arm on the bottom, pressed beneath the bodies and the pillows.

So when the lights are out, Kelly and I almost invariably end up on our sides, back to back, our legs gently tangling like the filaments suspended beneath two jellyfish. We drift along in the currents of sleep, softly nudging one another from time to time, floating in the dim marine light, breathing together as long as we can breathe.

4:47 PM

Things I've Never Done

*watched an entire episode of Friends
*eaten hog jowls, pigs' feet, souse, chicken gizzards, calves' brains, sweetbreads, chitlins, Rocky Mountain oysters, or fugu
*been to Africa, Asia, Australia, Antarctica, or South America
*read Moby Dick, David Copperfield, War and Peace, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or anything by John Grisham
*kissed a sea lion
*ridden a hang-glider, dirigible, or hot air balloon
*set foot in the Mississippi River
*visited Maine, Michigan, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, either Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, or Alaska.
*played paintball
*landed a billfish
*given someone a black eye or a busted lip
*seen a movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, or Pauly Shore
*tried to play the bagpipes
*kissed the Blarney Stone
*undergone general anesthesia
*laughed at a Sally Forth comic strip
*imbibed a gibson, a grasshopper, a sloe gin fizz, an absinthe, a gimlet, a stinger, a yellow bird, or a pina colada
*taken a drag off a cigarette or cigar
*no, seriously--I really haven't
*seen The Who, XTC, or the Kinks in concert
*been sued or filed suit
*attended an NFL game
*played organized lacrosse, ice hockey, squash, racquetball, or tennis
*birdied a par-four or par-five hole
*had sex with Madonna, Britney Spears, JFK, or Wilt Chamberlain
*owned a lawn mower
*wanted to own a lawnmower
*called my wife "the old ball and chain"
*ridden a donkey, camel, mule, or llama
*owned a cat, snake, lizard, tarantula, or guinea pig
*gambled on horses, blackjack, roulette, or slots
*lost a game of Diplomacy
*joined the Boy Scouts, the US military, the ACLU, the National Education Association, MENSA, or any fraternity
*knitted anything
*opened the carefully Christmas-wrapped plastic lobster we received as a gift from Steve Pardington in 1986; really, we're only guessing that it's a lobster from the overall shape...
*sought a divorce or a restraining order
*apologized properly to my junior-high girlfriends, Helen and Terry, for being a jerk
*regretted ordering Beef Chow Mein at Lee Ho Fook's in London
*played cards with a man named Doc, eaten at a place called Mom's, or slept with anyone crazier than myself
*been to me.

4:55 PM

Weight check: down another five pounds this week, for a total of 16 lost so far. I also put in 15 miles of biking this afternoon, and for the first time this summer didn't have to walk the bike up a hill. Granted, it helped that we took a route that had long, gentle slopes, rather than short, steep ones. It was a beautiful day, if a tad warm, and I was able to see and hear quite a few red-winged blackbirds and dozens of indigo buntings. During the summer, the latter can be spotted pretty easily; the males often sit at the top of trees and taller shrubs, and as long as you know that their plumage appears blackish or very dark blue if the light's not perfect, you can often get a good look. It's easier to hear them, as long as you know what to listen for: a long and varied series of twitters, but almost always paired. You don't have to know the call so much as you have to listen for the pairing: twee-twee-twiddleum-twiddleum-sheee-sheee-chippy-chippy-twee-twee. I also got to hear my first cicada of the summer, buzzing loudly--astonishingly loudly--in the shady forest at the side of the road.

The comforting sounds of birds and insects put me in mind of a recent experience, too. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to appear on "The State of Things," a radio show hosted by Frank Stacio for WUNC Chapel Hill (91.5 on your FM dial), and got to see one of my old friends, Keith Weston, who's now one of the show's producers. I met Keith back in 1981, when we were both announcers at Carolina's student-run station, WXYC, and later the two of us worked side-by-side at the Record Bar in downtown CH. Keith's musical tastes and mine overlap pretty broadly; we're both suckers for a catchy melody, we both think the Beatles set the standard for pop music, and words like "quirky," "psychedelic," and "jangly" get us all excited.

For all of these reasons, I shouldn't have been surprised at the music Keith picked out for the show: the closing theme was a very cool jazz piano trio version of the Beatles' "Blackbird," wholly appropriate for the topic of the show that day, but I didn't catch his other little touch until he sent me a CD copy of the show. It was just a little snippet of sound, but I knew it and knew it cold--and moreover, Keith knew I would know it cold: the sampled crickets and birds from "Summer's Cauldron," the first track on XTC's masterpiece, Skylarking.

This is an album that sits very high my personal pantheon. After it came out in 1986, I listened to it incessantly; in all probability, I listened to it more often than any other album I've owned (with the possible exception of America's Greatest Hits, which I left on more-or-less-infinite repeat when I was thirteen.) Its making nearly drove the band mad. Their producer, Todd Rundgren, was both a legendary musician and as big a fan of Beatley pop as they were, but his working style did not sit at all well with Andy Partridge, XTC's temperamental leader. For example, Rundgren, not the band, picked the songs they would record, and moreover he demanded that they be recorded in the same order they would appear on the album--not at all the way most producers work.

For all the conflict, however, the finished product is superb. Rich, melodic, harmonious, alternately hypnotic and energetic... it's a thing of beauty. It also has a little something for everyone.

First, it contains one of pop music's all-time great tunes, "Earn Enough for Us," a tune I featured prominently when I made my "This Would Be a Top Five Hit in Utopia" mix tape.

Second, it features one of XTC's best-known (and most controversial) hits, "Dear God," a tune which was actually left off the first pressing of the album and relegated to the B-side of the "Grass" single; when college radio DJs found it on the flip side, they played it onto the charts. (I've heard it's got a great video, too, but I've never seen it.) It's written in the form of a letter to God, stating that, based on the evidence of a world full of suffering, the writer cannot believe in Him. Needless to say, it got plenty of attention from the religious right, which was instrumental in helping it sell more copies.

Third, it has a blatant Kinks rip-off, "Season Cycle," which is Partridge's attempt to do "Autumn Almanac." Of course, if you like the Kinks, as I do, this is a good thing.

Fourth, it contains several of my favorite songs by bassist Colin Moulding, including "The Meeting Place" and "Sacrificial Bonfire," which show that Colin may not be as prolific as Andy, but he does just fine, thanks.

And last but not least, the album opens with a beautiful, warm, hazy pair of pastoral songs, "Summer's Cauldron" and "Grass." The first sound we hear is crickets, pulsing on a summer's morning. Then birds join in. Then a faint synthesizer wash appears in the background. At about the same moment you realize the birds and the crickets are calling in rhythm, a melodica plays the song's plaintive theme. "Drowning here in summer's cauldron, under mats of flower lava..." sings Andy's voice, and we're off into the heat haze. The song pulses along to its rich, Sergeant-Peppery conclusion, whereupon Rundgren blends it seamlessly into the innocent raga-jangle of "Grass." The crickets keep pulsing, and over them Moulding sings wistfully of the pleasures of lying on green hills with a loved one: "You are helpless now, over and over we flatten the clover." And as the final line fades away, the crickets and birds fade up again, bringing the whole cycle to a close--a beautiful summer's day, tied up in six minutes, twenty seconds.

This was that kind of day. Thanks, Keith.

3:18 AM

Feelin' listy:

Top Five Amendments from the Bill of Rights
1) Amendment I--the single best reason to be an American. Believe what you want, say what you want, redress what you want.
2) Amendment IV--granted, it's not always crystal-clear, but the right to privacy valued so highly by most of us is lurking somewhere under these waters.
3) Amendment IX--sheer genius, this. The founders had wit enough to realize they couldn't think of everything, so they hedged their bets by allowing for Constitutional rights they hadn't mentioned--brilliant.
4) Amendment V--unwieldy and sprawling in its writing, but crucial in its impact. Your life, liberty & property, protected by the Big Five.
5) Amendment III--I love this one because it's the only Amendment about which there is no controversy. Every American believes it--no, soldiers should not be quartered on my property without my permission, thankyouverymuch.

Top Five Cover Versions Done By Bands I Was In
1) "Nite Klub" by the Specials, covered by Rohrwaggon, 1987. Sorry, this festival of death-metal-meets-flaming-ska was better than the original. John Plymale's guitar and Jack Campbell's bass alone could have brought down a small plane.
2) "Respectable Street" by XTC, covered by Terminal Mouse, 1984. First song on which I ever put down the instruments and just sang. Liberating in the extreme.
3) "Heaven" by Talking Heads, covered by Elmo & PC, 1989. Guitar, keyboard, harmony--all you need.
4) "Back in Flesh" by Wall of Voodoo, covered by Great Wall of Doo Doo, 1985. Bryon "Torrid Elmo" Settle singing lead in a newspaper suit, Mike "Waffle O'Cheeseman" Beard pounding an electric football field with a kickdrum pedal, John "Zippy" Plymale and Dan "Zingo" Munger searching for new, unreachable volume, and yrs. truly filling the air with squirrelly alarm-clock noises and obscene call-and-response vocals. And people say cover bands are boring.
5) "Piece of My Heart" by Big Brother and the Holding Company, covered by Terminal Mouse, 1984. Often covered, but never done justice--except when Taz Halloween channelled Janis onstage. I still get goosebumps.

Top Five Unexpected Life Birds
1) Hoopoe, Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy, 2003. (In a tree atop a hundred-foot cliff; aren't they ground-feeders?)
2) Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher, Madison County, VA, 2000. (A nesting pair in a field in near the Rapidan River, over a thousand miles from their usual range--I just about put the car in the ditch when I saw one on a roadside fence.)
3) Yellow-throated Warbler, Fayetteville Botanical Garden, 1995. (Sitting right on a low pine branch--I didn't even need binoculars.)
4) Ruffed Grouse, Shenandoah National Park, 1998. (A whole flock flew up out of the brush while we were hiking--scared the bejeezus out of me.)
5) Red Kite over Blenheim Palace, England, 1999. (The second one I'd seen in two weeks--I thought they were rare.)

Top Five Coen Brothers Movies
1) Raising Arizona
2) O, Brother, Where Art Thou?
3) The Big Lebowski
4) Miller's Crossing
5) Fargo

Top Five Lines from The Simpsons
1) Lisa: "I AM the Lizard Queen!"
2) Homer: "Bart! You want to see my new chain saw and hockey mask?!"
3) Flanders: "STELLAAAAA! STELLAAAAA! Can't you hear me yell-a? You're puttin' me through Hell-a..."
4) Groundskeeper Willie: "Och, I'm bad at this."
5) Homer: "Baby on board, something something... Burt Ward. Hey, this thing writes itself!"

Top Five Numbers Worn By PC In Competitive Sports
1) 10, Grey Culbreth Jr. High Soccer, 9th grade (Not only Pele's number but that of Padraic Baxter, our starting sweeper back and defensive anchor from the year before; I inherited it with pride.)
2) 34, Grey Culbreth Jr. High Basketball, 8th grade (My best year on the court, despite all the broken bones, and my number belonged to UNC's all-time top overachiever, Bobby Jones, to boot--and later to Akeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley.)
3) 23, Grey Culbreth Jr. High Basketball, 9th grade (An unwanted leftover number at the time--I wore it before my contemporary, Michael Jordan, made it cool.)
4) 8, Grey Culbreth Jr. High Soccer, 8th grade (Nice and symmetrical.)
5) 14, Chapel Hill Carrboro Recreation Department, Jets, 1st grade (Orange and black jerseys, which looked cool--and UNC's best wideout that year, Ricky Lanier, wore it as well.)


5:38 PM

It's the Fourth of July and I've got Aaron Copland in my headphones. Yes, I'm proud to be an American.

Of course, Independence Day is a day when I usually get a bee in my bonnet about what it means to be an American. It's a question that seems to be in need of an answer, because I'm seeing a lot more flags on cars and hearing a lot less sense in voices than I used to; this suggests to me that an occasional examination of the State of the Union might be appropriate fodder for an online journal. Sure, maybe it's not polite to talk politics (or religion, or sex), but politeness has never stopped me before, has it?

I've got numerous concerns about our President, our Attorney General, our international standing, our intelligence community, our military, and the way all of the above have been interacting, but since it's a holiday, let's focus on the good stuff.

I've been pleased to see two decisions by the Supreme Court that strike me as eminently sensible: the striking down of Texas' anti-sodomy law, and the preservation of at least one form of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. The former, to me, is the classic no-brainer. I cannot see any way in which the state has any compelling interest in what two of its citizens do to, with, around, on, or in each other. If they want to read Proust, eat olives, dance the macarena, watch Buffy reruns, sign complex insurance forms, mix concrete, or shag like a pair of weasels, fine. The government and the rest of the citizenry can just sit politely outside the bedroom door and wait for the two involved to come out. I'm a straight, married man with no particularly interesting kinks that I know of, but neither I nor any other American should have to worry about whether the way I like to have sex taxes the imaginations of Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, and the members of the local police force.

The affirmative action issue, by contrast, is less open-and-shut. I certainly look forward to the day when race is not an issue in America, but lord, when's that going to be? Selma, the Watts riots, the assassinations of X and MLK--I was young, but alive for all of these. I remember for myself the Boston busing controversy, the Bakke decision, the acquittal of three KKK members who started a gunfight in Greensboro, the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed. I was in grad school before there was a black quarterback in the Super Bowl, and I was a father of two when Jesse Helms played the race card (the infamous "white hands" TV commercial) to get himself re-elected for the last time. I've sat at this very computer and watched Trent Lott self-destruct, and I know of black colleagues--college graduates, family men, some of them more conservative than I am--who've been pulled for "DWB" several times. The argument that our race problems are all gone, so we shouldn't do anything to fix them--well, it's just laughable.

The question then is: what should we do to fix them? Well, there's the less open-and-shut part. I do think the Supremes got one important thing right in the Bakke decision: racial quotas are a powder keg. No admissions or hiring decision should be based exclusively on race. At the same time, I do think race can be a factor in admissions and hiring--and I think so despite of what happened to me when I was fresh out of grad school and looking for a teaching job.

I had driven over three hours from Chapel Hill in order to interview for an English position at a public high school. A few weeks later, the principal called me to let me know I hadn't gotten it. I was disappointed; Kelly and I had a baby on the way, and I was getting pretty desperate to find a full-time teaching job. I'd looked forward to the possibility of getting this one, even to the point of doing a little research into rents and real estate; it was a town I liked, and even knew a little about, and I liked the location, too. But no, the principal thanked me for my interest and said the job had gone to "a young man from Winston-Salem State."

I mulled that comment over for a long time. Why had he made it? Was it just a slip of the tongue, or did he mean to tell me something? If the latter, what did he mean? There was no reason to mention the man who'd gotten the job except to tell me that he'd graduated from WSS, and the only reason to casually mention WSS was the fact that most of its students are (and have been for years) black. Was he telling me that he'd passed on me and hired this WSS grad because I was white and he wasn't? Eventually, I decided that he was. And how did I feel about that, with a baby on the way and no job of my own?

Pretty much the same way I do now. I'm white by luck of the draw, not by deserving it, yet I benefit from my skin color in a variety of ways; I don't get stopped randomly by traffic cops, nor do people make assumptions about my political views or taste in music, nor do I worry that I'll have trouble getting a bank loan (well, not because of skin color, anyway...) Many of these benefits don't even occur to me because I take them for granted.

So for once in my life my whiteness worked to my detriment? Well, darn. Man bites dog for once.

I went back out and found myself a different job. And I hope that anonymous guy from Winston-Salem State has been a great role model and an inspiration to a decade's worth of kids.

Happy Fourth, everybody. E pluribus unum.

3:44 PM

(Stop me if you've heard this: Blogger.com is doing something weird right now. As a result, a couple of my archive links are behaving strangely. We're on the case, but we may end up having to do something creative to get all my journal entries into the archives. Joy.)

Weight report: another five pounds gone, making a total of eleven for the two weeks I've been on Atkins. I'm shooting for losing another thirty; at that point I'll consider my options. Every time I've looked at a Body Mass Index table, I've been freaked out by the numbers; apparently the BMI assumes that everyone of the same height must also be of the same build, and I just don't think that's so. My brother's a good inch or two taller than I, but even if we were both at the peak of our muscular development, with the same minimal degree of body fat--this is purely hypothetical, understand--I'd be astonished if I didn't outweigh him.

Today I celebrated my weigh-in by going on a sixteen-mile bike trip, which was a good deal easier than last week's nineteen-miler. (The ten extra degrees of heat we had last week made last week a lot tougher.) We've also invested in some low-carb snack bars and some pecans, both of which are permitted after you're done with the Induction phase of Atkins and have moved into the OWL phase. (That's "Ongoing Weight Loss," by the way--we're not eating mice and casting up the bones in disgusting little furry pellets a few hours later.) I'm not sure I really want to go to the OWL phase right now, since weight loss does slow down when you do so, but I'll admit that the lack of variety in our menu, especially at breakfast, has been a bit frustrating. I'm hoping I can hover on the edge of the Induction phase for a couple more weeks and keep losing fat at a quick clip.

Of course, many of you are now rolling your eyes and thinking The only thing worse than hearing about someone else's dreams is hearing about someone else's diet. And of course you're right. Unfortunately, it's a pretty big part of my life right now, and sadly, it's needed to be a big part of my life for some time. There was a brief period in my life when I was lean--it started in eighth grade and ended in my junior year of college when I went to England and discovered beer I liked. (Actually, I've seen some pictures from my senior year, and I still wasn't that pudgy yet.) But during my entire married life, which began in 1986, I've carried between 200 and 250 pounds on my six-foot frame, and the vast majority of it was centered on my center. My legs have always been fairly lean, since I've long worked in jobs where standing and walking are the norm, but my gut has long made up for that fact, and no amount of prodding from Kelly got me to lose it.

Kelly's prodding comes from a pretty straightforward source: her family's history of heart trouble and other weight-related complications. Her dad had congestive heart failure; three of her brothers have had heart attacks; one of them developed diabetes, another one hypoglycemia. These experiences make her Extremely Concerned About My Health. On one occasion early in our marriage when I was working a reeeeeeally bad temp job, I woke up one morning with a pain in my chest, and mentioned it casually.

She looked me in the eye and said, "You're going to the doctor. Now."

I didn't mess with her. Luckily, it wasn't a cardiac problem. The doctor diagnosed me with, of all things, a pulled muscle in my rib cage--a pull produced by the temp job, which had caught me between the rock of tension (since I was constantly gritting my teeth about my irritating coworkers and the nonstop pumped-in Muzak) and the hard place of overcaffeination (since the job's dull and repetitive tasks made me so stuporous that I was swilling ten or twelve cups of coffee a day just to stay awake.) I often think it was the Muzak version of Talking Heads' "And She Was" that sent me over the edge.

But now I'm forty, getting to the point where exercise often hurts enough to prevent me from getting more exercise. I'm on sabbatical from school, with time to spend on my physical well-being and relatively few job-related distractions to take my attention from it. If I'm going to lighten the load of stress Kelly's carrying about my health, now's the time to start.

Think you can bear with me for a couple more weeks?

6:44 AM