On my grandfather's passing

I was in Budapest when I heard about my grandfather's final illness and death last week. Whenever you are away from home you feel more attune to how time and space work, how the simple act of stepping out of your day-to-day life exposes how the threads of narrative that tie people and places together weave around each other, overlap, veer apart, and come together. It was what I thought about standing on the balcony of our friends' apartment in Budapest, thinking about how someone I tied so closely to my hometown spent so much of his youth not a day's journey away from where I was. The world felt a little smaller, and a lot more mysterious. The details of my grandfather's passing were predictable: he was 97 years old, after all, so you couldn't call it unexpected. He had been in declining health for years, which in some ways is a very sad and slow way for things to happen, but for those of us who survive it is in some ways the best, for you have plenty of time to make peace with the idea of loss before it happens. It was certainly sad to be so far away when it happened, unable to make a last visit and see the rest of my family when it did. The experience gave me a chance to witness just how pitiless airlines have gotten in these rough economic times. I hoped to make it back for the funeral on Friday, but thanks to some unfortunate restrictions on my type of ticket, it took only ten minutes on the phone with a Delta representative to reach that very rare point in customer service in which you only hear monosyllables and silence on the other end. "No. Anything else?," followed quickly by just plain "no," and waiting for me to hang-up. (I paid my respects Friday morning at St. Margaret of Hungary Church on Lehel Ter near where we were staying.) My grandfather led a full and long life, and is hard to really grasp when you think about it. When he was Mila's age, Archduke Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo, setting the fuse on the tumultuous 20th century. The entire history of the Soviet Union, from Bolshevik conspiracy to its restless aftermath, fits comfortably within his lifetime. I'm certain he could have told a multitude of interesting observations and impressions, but I didn't hear many of them. My grandfather was a profoundly laconic man, at least around me. My wife often scolded me for not learning more about his life and times. But I don't think she fully realized realize how many hundreds of afternoons I spent fishing with him on his boat on the Connecticut River, and how few questions I ever got answered. What was the 1933 Paris Exhibition like? Lots of crowds. What was interwar Poland like? we lived in a village, like any other. The stories I heard most -- about why he never took up smoking, or about how the local kids teased him for his Polish first name -- were interesting, but felt like small details of a much bigger picture. I'll never be able to say for certain why this was. Some people just don't like to talk much. I've found myself that as I get older, the days when I felt any and every occasion deserved a poem and every impression should be shared have decidedly ended. Or maybe I was just being a pest and asking the wrong questions. But it could also be that we saw things differently, and that he couldn't see what I thought was so interesting. I grew up in a small town, and didn't really begin to travel until I was done with graduate school. So the world seemed very big and interesting to me. I was full of romance and illusions. It could be my grandfather, who had seen a lot of the world by the time I came around, just saw them with a realist's eyes. That would probably be a very Old World way of looking at things. We Americans have a touchingly naive sense of history as straight line, always going up. Even our ugly chapters have a sort of cheery optimism -- like race relations for example. The big story most of us probably have in our heads is of our unfortunate history of slavery, wiped away in the Civil War, delayed during the Jim Crow era, blossoming in the Civil Rights movement, and culminating in Barack Obama becoming president. Whatever comes next, most of us probably think, will be great. We stick to it admirably, but it constantly struck me traveling around the Balkans and Hungary that no one else thinks this way. In Budapest I visited the Museum of Military History, which is located in the northern corner of the heavily touristed Castle Hill. But it was largely empty when I went -- a grandmother and her son, one other English visitor, and myself. These kinds of museums are usually of a type -- lots of uniforms, swords and armor, and usually the kind of basest nationalist chest-thumping. Hungary's museum has plenty of costumes, but the chest-thumping was astonishingly meek. Partly, that is due to Hungary's rather spotty military record -- it is a history of lamented losses, bad luck, and worse decision-making. It reflected itself in an almost self-effacing sort of museum experience. One major exhibit focused on the years 1918 to 1945. National museums are always incredibly careful about what they show and how they show it, so how this period was framed is astonishing. It begins with how the Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated at the end of WWI and was at the mercy of Czechs, Serbs, and Romanians. It follows the efforts in the interwar years by the Horthy regime to rebuild the military. It traces the country's disastrous decision to follow Hitler in the invasion of the Soviet Union (though perhaps tries a little too hard to justify this unfortunate chapter), and ends with the army's complete annihilation by the Red Army. The story goes: Big Loss, Bad Decisions, Enormous Loss. It used to be said that American southerners were the closest to Europeans because they were the only Americans that had lived through a story like that. Americans don't have the patience for this kind of difficulty and honesty in our national storytelling. Take immigration, for example, which is consistently presented to schoolchildren as a tale of osmotic motion, of people suffering in the Bad Old World, having the gumption to adventurously seek out a better life, and then arriving on America's shores to live happily ever after. It never worked that way, and for the record, it still doesn't. Consider my grandfather, who was born in Easthampton in 1912, but then moved with his family back to Poland when he was 11, after Poland became an independent nation once again. He would decide on his own to come back in the 1930s. There is something very childlike in this kind of linear sense of history, and it is perhaps something many of us carry as we are launched into the world. I always thought, for example, that as I grew older I would learn more about things. When I was younger, I was always aware that there was much I didn't know, but was confident they would be revealed as time went by. But in truth, what you learn comes in disconnected drops, and doors are constantly shut for good. So I'll never know if my father thought of me as anything other than a lingering inconvenience from his distant past. And I'll never know what my grandfather thought when he was boy traveling across the sea to Poland, or what he thought years later on another ship coming back.

Budapest

I'm in Budapest this week, having come up from Croatia a few days before Olga and Mila to get a Russian transit visa. This is an extension of the visa hassles I wrote about a few months ago, proving that the consequences of taking your eye off the ball when dealing with Russian bureaucracy are long and annoying. But while the Russians play with my passport, I have had some time to explore what is really shaping up to be one of my favorite cities. I'm staying at our friends' apartment in the Ujilipotvaros neighborhood of the city, a quiet district along the Danube north of the center. It is almost entirely residential, and full of modernist apartment blocks built between the wars. Although it is rather densely built-up, the buildings seem designed for humans, with an abundance of balconies and courtyards. It feels like a healthy, middle class sort of place, full of shops and cafes, and with an interesting mix of people from young families with children to seniors. It is what I imagine the Upper West Side must have been like before Manhattan lost the plot and became a gentrified shopping arcade. Before I arrived, I imagined that the city was like a sort of smaller, more provincial Vienna. And indeed, a great deal of the city dates from the second half of the 19th century, during the Dual Monarchy when the country enjoyed a long golden moment in the Hapsburg fold. But its most pompous buildings -- St. Stephen's Basilica, the Opera, Parliament -- are so ridiculous that they almost become self-effacing. By some strange and pleasant force of aesthetics, it achieves a king of harmony. And if parts of Budapest feel a bit too much like it jumped out of a travel brochure, Hungary is remarkable in just how dramatically it sticks out from its neighbors. It starts at a very basic level, with the faces you see on the street, most of whom have rather striking, dark features. But it really goes to a whole new level when it comes to the language. I've never actually traveled to a place where the language is not related to something I've learned before. So the words of the language, which is closer to Finnish and Siberian native languages than to anything Romantic or Slavic, often seem like just a pile of haphazard syllables. This partly explains why despite closely studying and comparing bottles at the shop, I still keep bringing home carbonated bottled water. So much of how I see the world comes through the prism of America and Russia, and I am always pleased to come to a third country that seems comfortable and happy with itself, which I think is the direct result of not having pretensions to superpower status, either in reality or in their imagination. This is what shapes my personal adjustment process when I arrive in a new place. There are usually a few days that I spend sputtering in frustration about why Russia, a country I have so much invested in, has to be so comprehensively inadequate in how it treats guests. And there is also the inevitable reflecting on being an American, the kind of self-awareness that is so important but which way too many of my fellow citizens lack (I mean, in what civilized country do people insist on bringing firearms to a debate about health care?). You realize how we are seen, for good and for ill. When I arrived on Sunday, I took a walk around the center of the city and came upon Szabadsag Square. There is a statue there of Harry Hill Bandholz, someone I'd never heard of. He was in charge of a peacekeeping detachment sent here in the chaos of 1919, and organized the defense of the National Museum from pillage-minded Romanian troops. It is a touching thing, and in a substantial way made me proud to be American. I kept walking to the north part of the park, and noticed that a whole quadrant was blocked off by ugly grey metal pylons. I saw a ring of jersey barriers and metal gates blocking traffic, and signs in Hungarian and English wanring that photography was strictly prohibited. Yep, I'd stumbled upon the U.S. Embassy. It is a perfect embarassment, and as a taxpayer and citizen I hope that Obama is successful enough at restoring our standing in their world -- and our sense of basic self-confidence and decency -- that our embassies will someday soon stop looking like colonial outposts perched among the natives waiting to be attacked. When our embassy in a friendly, peaceful ally like Hungary looks like it belongs in Islamabad, something is deeply amiss.

Marching on Red Square

Mila on our trip downtown, Tuesday, July 21, 2009.

The first leg of our trip to visit family in Moscow is complete, and we're off now for a little more exploring.

Trendy newspaper design

Newspaper design sometimes feels like a "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" kind of endeavor. It's a thankless job, and having done it for awhile, I appreciate it when it is done well. A big part of the challenge of the work is dealing with the work cut out for you by the wizards who run the business. It is where the admonition to "do more with less" is most apparent.

They have fewer actually designers to do the work, there are fewer reporters and editors producing the content, and they even have to endure the injustice of having less paper -- less space -- to work with. Those incredible shrinking newspapers are a nightmare to make anything meaningful on.

Of course, newspaper designers haven't always helped themselves out much. The whole field is prone to fads and foolishness that occasionally sweeps through. First and foremost is the recent failure to remember that this is a print medium, and however important visual imagery is, it is second banana to the words around it. These aren't picture books, for crying out loud. And many charts, graphs, boxes, and briefs exist simply to eliminate "gray space" -- the design world's unfortunate and obnoxious term for what we old-fashioned folks call "text." Another particularly silly meme was that newspapers should somehow "look like websites." This came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a newspaper is, and a the kind of ham-handed cross-marketing effort dreamed up in a B-school seminar.

The Hartford Courant bit hard on this kind of stuff, and the newspaper I picked up on recent Sunday on a trip to Torrington bore almost no resemblance to any other newspaper I've seen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The flag was off to the side, the Courant's delightfully weird logo (with a bright red heart, crown, and pigeon holding a telegram) was placed too prominently up top, and you had a hard time finding out where basic bits of info like the price and date. But scrolling down, you noticed that they appeared to have their own second thoughts about the subject...

All this is a great shame, because newspaper design doesn't need to suffer this much. On a recent trip to the UK, Olga brought me back a stack of newspaper, including several of the Sunday broadsheets. In the UK, broadsheet still means "broad sheet." During the week, most of the respectable British papers have switched to a tabloid size, which despite being a major taboo in the U.S., makes a ton of sense. It saves paper, it puts an emphasis on the text, and it gives advertising much more impact (businesses that pay for tiny ads at the bottom of a broadsheet page are wasting their money). But for their Sunday editions, they blow it all out. And suddenly, you realize the value of it -- huge photo spreads, properly constructed in-depth packages including break-out material -- in other words, something worth paying money for and spending some time with.

Michael Jackson's legend

What can you say about our culture? You're checking in with the NBA draft, and suddenly an interview with Shaquille O'Neal begins with him offering condolences to the Jackson family. Huh? Then CNN and MSNBC have dueling helicopter shots on another helicopter waiting for a corpse to cross a parking lot to a coroner's office. It was the dark apotheosis of celebrity culture, the gross spectacle at the end of modern capitalism. But of course, it is also a human tragedy really (from many, many angles), and the passing of a great artist. I remember distinctly going to summer camp as a kid (this would have been '84, '85), and meeting new kids and figuring each others' likes and dislikes out. The consensus usually emerged that you really liked Jackson's music but were a bit creeped out by the guy himself. My generation had to grow up with an innate sense of awareness about how you compartmentalize culture. The music was ubiquitous, and legitimately brilliant, but it felt like it had been around forever to us -- he was already in the same category as Sinatra or the Beatles, which seemed to mean that he could be taken for granted. And "Jacko" himself was so hard to understand, and therefore so easy to mock. Of course, as the years went by, he just got harder to understand. And his sudden but perfectly predictable death just leaves a ton of questions we'll no doubt have decades to pick through. For example, I've always wondered who are all these people screaming and crying during his press conferences and outside the courthouses? What do they do with the rest of their time? And as much as I hate to say it, Al Sharpton made a good point Thursday (repeatedly, across many different media platforms, naturally) about how tons of people would put out statements about his passing, but where were all those people the day before? Indeed, that's what has been the most disturbing part of his ridiculous efforts to rehabilitate his image over the past 17 years. Was there no one to stop and tell him, "Wait a sec. This looks crazy!" Janet? Quincy? Elizabeth? Anyone? And these ill-conceived ideas were wildly compounded by the gleeful willingness of the media to go along with the circus, because freak-shows are terrific ratings. And what's worse, knowing his family and the ranks of sketchy hangers-on, it is perfectly clear that this is going to go on for a long time. The closest analogy has to be Elvis -- a historic early career, an embarrassing end, and decades of sordid gossip. But as with any pop cultural turning point, there is more to this than the cheap spectacle, something at the root that is very important and true. One afternoon in 1996 (or '97), I was hanging out at my favorite coffeeshop in Philadelphia with two close friends, talking about music. These guys were black, natives of Philly, and had an honest sense of patience and humor about race, and taught me an awful lot about black life and culture which I only learned about before through a mediated distance. But when I made a joke about Jackson -- something perfectly common about how weird and possibly criminal he was -- their faces went blank, and an actual chill seemed to come over them as they asked why I thought that was funny. I think that was the one time I can recall stumbling upon a racially awkward moment that I completely couldn't have foreseen. They explained to me about how they listened to their Jackson Five records until the grooves wore out, and about how much they meant to them and their parents and their families. They were aware of his substantial flaws, but regarded them with the resigned patience of a wayward family member. They then spent a long time reliving their favorites in earnest falsettoes, and joyfully imitating dance moves from the early days. So, I'll just think about that day as Michael Jackson's sad, contested legend continues. Now, what were we talking about a day ago? (Iran, I mean Iran. Not Jon and Kate, whoever they are.)

Happy Bloomsday!

Here's my 2006 editorial for the Eagle about our favorite literary holiday.

Iran's moment

Watching what is happening now in Iran is quite frustrating, because you realize the deep unknowability of what is happening there. Our current media environment is both very broad and very shallow, and presents the dangerous impression that we know what is happening, when in fact we don't. I often think about this in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The other day, I had occasion to spend some time at Sawyer Library reading through the 1991 run of The New Republic. What's left of the historian in me loves spending time this way, and I always marvel at how things have changed. The first thing that struck me is the amount of writing about what was happening in Russia. There were detailed observations about changes in state news telecasts, about the ominous violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, about price changes in the markets and the splits between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the dissident community. The coverage was extensive and informed, and overall pretty good and insightful. And yet, it was slightly off. Throughout the spring, writers frequently referred to "glasnost" in the past tense. There was a tenor that Gorbachev was pulling back from reform, as demonstrated by the growing number of perceived hardliners he was putting in place in the Kremlin. Of course, those reactionaries would lead a coup against him that August, whose failure sealed the fate of the Soviet Union once and for all. But no one could accurately see the ways that Gorbachev was being pressured from within, or just how dramatically the Russian people had moved away from the regime. These are the moments that force everything out into the open, and time will tell what the current unrest in Tehran says about the regime and its relationship with the people. From what I've read so far -- and I'm by no means an expert -- we've been hearing in the media for a long while about the Westernizing, reform-minded, young generation in Iran, and that demographics and political pressure suggested change was in the air. But what seemed to happen in the election is that the conservative "silent majority," with an assist from the authorities, have stepped in. It remains to be seen if this is going to be more like the August Coup or Tiananmen Square.

Stamp collecting

No matter how many times I go through it, no matter how many new holographic stickers my passport picks up, it seems I can't go through the process of getting a Russian visa without some sort of drama. This year's adventure is particularly painful: once we'd mapped out our summer plans, I managed to misread the (vaguely-worded) fine print about timing options, which caused a few days of real stress and turmoil around here. I think we survived this time -- but one is never certain you've succeeded until the landing-gear goes up on your return flight. Folks unfamiliar with the details of traveling to Russia are often astonished about what it takes. For example, no, as a matter of fact, being married to Russian citizen has not changed a single friggin' thing about our visa options. Even though we scaled the bureaucratic equivalent of Mount Everest by getting hitched in an official Russian ceremony, I still have to drudge through the visa regime like anyone else. And the tough part is that I, raised in full American "Don't Tread on Me" libertarian bliss, am incredibly bad at sorting through fearsome state structures. I decidedly lack what I call the "bureaucratic imagination," a set of skills most Russians learn and hone from birth. It is a kind of attention to detail and ruthless persistence in the face frustration, rudeness, and hopelessness that is the only way to get the right stamp on your passport, or get your kids into the right school, or to make sure local authorities can't sweep you aside. It is the cynical -- though perfectly frank -- admission that there is a vast system out there that does not exist to make things easier for you, and the ability to creatively imagine the ways that it is going to beat and crush you if you aren't careful. It is something that our soft consumer society has lost. But, as wife would surely note, 'tis my own damned fault. I should have just called about the visa a month ago. I swear I'll remember next time.

That kind of year...

The day the Pulitzers are announced is usually a chance for the staffs of the handful of newspapers still in a position to win such things to pat themselves on the back. But there's always at least one out of nowhere, feel-good surprise. This year, it's editorial page editor Mark Mahoney of the Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY. "This is for all the small newspapers out there that never got to play in the game," said Post-Star editor Ken Tingley. But being 2009, of course one of the winners had already been laid-off from his job late last year. But Paul Giblen and his editor and a few other laid-off staffers from the East Valley Tribune have started their own online news outlet. I hope it works out.

Hillsborough

“I was still on the road when the match began, and after two minutes the radio commentator said that something was wrong. There was trouble on the terraces behind the Liverpool goal. There was a sad, not-this-again feeling in his voice, a quality of resignation, that the supporters, especially those from Liverpool, were sacrificing a game of football to pursue their own violent entertainment: again.. The play continued, but you could tell that the commentator was not watching it, that he was trying to figure out what was happening on the terraces. He couldn’t definitely say that it was crowd trouble, but it was something serious, and the police were gathering near the spot. And then, in an instant, that was it: the game was over. The referee had been told by the police to stop play. That was about the time I arrived home. The stadium was about to become the most famous in the world.” -- Bill Buford’s description in his 1990 book Among the Thugs of hearing about the Hillsborough stadium disaster, twenty years ago last Wednesday, in which 96 fans were killed.

There were lots of opportunities to think about what sports means last week. Wednesday marked the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death as an FA Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest got underway. There are many layers to what happened, particularly about tragedy and memory, but also about sports' changing place in society. There are many interesting things about how the 96 victims are remembered. In many ways it fits in with how other major public tragedies are remembered -- particularly the emphasis on ritually reading aloud the names of the victims, which you see in memorials to Sept. 11, and the Vietnam war. There is also an active and vibrant set of conspiracy theories that abound, and the belief that justice has not yet been served. And the the tragedy's legacy includes many unique quirks, such as the way that the Sun newspaper remains hated in much of Liverpool to this day due to its lurid and unfounded allegations of Liverpool hooliganism at the tragedy. But at the same time, the entire event seems tinged with a bit of self-pity -- 1989 was the absolute low ebb of English football. It was serving out a ban from European competition at the time as punishment for the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, in which Liverpool fans played an unfortunate role. But unlike too many tragedies, this one’s long-term legacy is positive: the investigation into what happened, the Taylor Report, produced a list of recommendations that essentially gave football a chance to start over. They recommended such things that seem so obvious -– like having seats in stadiums, instead of just pushing people into terraces which, as Buford notes, police actually referred to with the same language as moving herds of cattle: “pens,” “cages,” etc. It marked the start of the modern game: a big-money generating, largely respectable, family-friendly form of entertainment. It is a little ironic that the anniversary –- widely noted in Europe but ignored here in the States -– came just as the New York Yankees inaugurated their current fortress of capitalist bounty: its new $1.5 billion, taxpayer-supported stadium whose most expensive seats are $2,500 and have teak armrests. All this points out the strange paradoxes of sports, that is at the same time nothing more than and much much more than watching grown men play childrens' games. What it all means, and who cares about it, is always subject to change and cycles. English football changed dramatically one afternoon in 1989 – but even so, a 2007 poll found an overwhelming majority of fans want standing terraces to return. And here already, the new Yankee stadium is a monument to another era -– of leveraged capital projects, unchecked greed, and blissfully entertaining unreality. Yet another of the fascinating things about this economic crisis is to see what role sports will play in society at the other end.