Life after napalm

It was with profound, profound interest that I read Jack Shafer's story in Slate about great moments from journalists on the way out of newsrooms (such a rich topic, it managed a part two). A few years ago, I had my big bridge-burning moment, with a letter that I still think about a lot, and which might be some of my best work -- I didn't even have to resort to profanity. What's surprised me most, is how long after the fires have died and been forgotten by everyone else, I still can't make peace with it all.

I should say from the start that I have never, not for a moment, regretted what I did. I wrote the truth, to the correct person, with the precise amount of force the situation warranted. It got me out of a very crumby situation, and perhaps for a few moments forces another human mind to think with a little more depth about a situation and the choices they made. It also forced me not to settle for easy decisions, and though it is the most transient and base aspect of all this, it made me feel better after months of feeling helpless.

But eventually, the very brutal reality set in: it didn't accomplish anything. This effort, this sacrifice, didn't change anything for anyone except me (and my family, for better and for worse). It's a terrible irritant: the story here that resonates the most with real life, alas, is Ron Rosenbaum's famous departure from the Voice ("Who was that?").

While Shafer pokes fun at the idea of the journalist that "works through his anger by killing chipmunks and other small game," I'm not sure there is a lot to laugh at. Journalism, or "Journalism" if you must, is suffering because of those "paper-pushers" and "quacking mallards," though maybe that's easy to forget when you have a steady paycheck from the Washington Post Company. And of course, if you look at the state of late-model, corporate capitalism, it is pretty clear that every line of work is being debased by this new feudalism of a handful of wealthy bosses and a vast army of peons. Only difference, perhaps, is that journalists are usually better writers.

There is a pattern to the lives of journalists. The thing that has dismayed me the most about the business, the point at which the high-minded rhetoric of J-school is in too stark contrast with the reality of the newsroom, is how... well, meek working journalists can be. Oddly, people who have no trouble asking the grieving mother how she "feels," who can shout embarassing questions at a press conference about a congressman's privates, who can shrug off any number of nasty arrows and cheap-shots from Internet trolls, seem unable to constructively engage with the reality of how little control they have over their own careers. And the methods for dealing with it are pathological. In the day to day, it looks like this: Bitch bitch moan complain bitch complain and bitch some more. Some decide to carry on and get by, others quietly slip away (hopefully to something more lucrative), but for whatever reason, I didn't care for either option. And when that happens, things catch fire.

Obviously, I could write about this all day, even though I realized long ago, consciously at least, that madness lies in that direction. Whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to shrug and make a small joke and try to signal that I've moved on. But really, I haven't as much as I would have liked. And the fact that I'm still mad this made me mad makes me mad.

There is wisdom out there though. I'll refer to Joseph Brodsky's Michigan speech, which I wrote about last month, and which had an interesting take on the angle of forgiving and forgetting:

"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those -- in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists... By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time that it took for it to occur." 

Great advice. Very hard to live by.

At Play in the Fields of the Word

Perhaps best not to ask why, but I spent a little while this afternoon reading Rhoda Koenig's lengthy feature in New York magazine about the PEN conference Norman Mailer organized in January 1986. It was a bonfire of the vanities, with every big name in literature showing up to make a point, shake their head, or simply cut a dashing figure through the proceedings.

They argued about politics, oppression, the writer's duty. About sex and gender and alienation and censorship. There were public arguments, bitter recriminations, hurt feelings, frighteningly hilarious anecdotes about Albert Speer, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. John Updike makes a fool of himself, Saul Bellow confirms his reputation as a difficult person.

The observations along the way are fascinating -- Susan Sontag's tweed trousers, Isabel Allende's paisley shawl, Czeslaw Milosz's eyebrows, Danilo Kis' pointedly casual homophobia. All this plays out against the reliable baseline of Norman Mailer's more than ample ego. I'm convinced that time will be kind to Mailer's legacy, especially considering that his ample faults leave us something like this ("Mailer was laughing with a couple of reporters, saying that he got the bruise under his right eye 'sparring,' and telling one journalist not to ask him general questions. 'You should say, 'What do you think of Susan Sontag's remark that Norman Mailer is a mean-spirited dog?'")

At some point, some of the attendees complain that there was too much talk about politics and not enough about books and literature. But you know, I'd take that. What do we have today? Jonathan Franzen mooning over his new BlackBerry, that's what. 

A Russian commencement address

I've long had a fascination with commencement speeches as a kind of debased literary genre. I think it goes back to the crummy one I had to sit through on the baking astroturf of my own commencement, when Bill Cosby scolded me for not appreciating all the "opportunities" that he imagined had been dumped at my feet.

So around this time of year, I always feel a strange longing to search for better, paternal advice. And I sincerely wonder if there is out there some combination of words uttered by a successful person that could sum things up better, help one live a better life. I've long since concluded that when you are 21 and in the moment you can't even hear it. Is it even possible for such words to reach a young person, nervous and excited in what may be the first conscious Incredibly Important moment of their lives, a little frightened at the real world, rather sad that everything they've known is vanishing, suffering a hangover and wearing a ridiculous costume?

This month, purely by accident, I happened to come across the speech Joseph Brodsky gave at the University of Michigan in 1988, which is in his anthology On Grief and Reason.

It gets off to a rollicking start. "Life is a game with many rules but no referee," he said. "One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose."

Well then. One knows from the start not to expect platitudes congratulating the graduates on all they've accomplished (which really, isn't much, to be honest) and how limitless and brilliant each and every one of their futures' is certain to be.

Brodsky was a remarkably complicated guy and doesn't fit nicely into expectations. He has different reputations here in the U.S., his adopted home, and Russia, which he left in the early 1970s (Soviet authorities were mercifully through with gulags and summary executions by then, content to call him a "social parasite" and just toss him out).

To Russians, he is known as an outstanding poet, and more than that -- as the true heir to the great unbroken thread of Russian poetry, the chosen heir of the Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak (who despite Zhivago, Russians often think first as a poet). To Americans, he was best known as an essayist, frequently appearing in the New York Review of Books, writing thoughtful and grand essays about literature and the Life of the Mind befitting a major public intellectual (the kind that would never slum around with Tina Brown, or appear on cable television shout shows. In other words, the kind that doesn't seem to really exist anymore).

But Brodsky's life is full of incompleteness and sadness. For a great Russian poet, he spent much of his adult life after age 32 in the United States, in exile, where he died young of heart disease at age 55. And for a man who prized the precision and clarity of language and thought, even he admitted that he felt awkward writing in English. There are many striking thoughts and beautiful moments in his essays, but they are sometimes glib and digressive and it feels like he is flopping around in a way that must have been painful for him.

To the graduating Michigan students, he offered a few suggestions for life. "Ignore them if you wish, doubt them if you must, forget them if you can't help it: there is nothing imperative about them," he said. "Should some of it now or in the time to be come in handy to you, I'll be glad. If not, my wrath won't reach you."

There is something fatalistic about these, which I think sums up in large part the blunt, honest part of the fabled "Russian soul" that I admire.

They are pretty self-explanatory. "It will pay for you to zero in on being precise with your language," is the first. Then, "try to be kind to your parents." Sensible advice. But the whole thing drips with the conviction that the world kinda sucks, so find a way to make do.

"The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be," he said. "The only thing that's going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you've elected will promise to cut the pie, it won't grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that -- or, rather, in dark of that -- you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves -- at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius." 

And a few more bits, culled from a youth avoiding the wrath of arbitrary authorities, a senseless persecution, and an adulthood of radical acclaim. "Try not to stand out, try to be modest," he suggests, explaining that seeking to thrust yourself into the limelight, or assuming a superior air over your neighbors, "testifies to the failure of your imagination, to your disbelief in -- or ignorance of -- reality's unlimited potential."

He also doesn't want any whiners. "At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim," he said. This perhaps, cuts right to it: "Try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships too," he said. "They are a part of the game, and what's good about a hardship is that it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the verge of despair or in despair, remember: that's life speaking to you in the only language it knows well."

Brodsky makes what might be a half-hearted effort to wrap it up in a hopeful bow at the end, talking about his love for Ann Arbor and the important place Michigan holds in his heart (it was his first home in the West when he was booted). He wishes them luck, acknowledging it is the kind of thing that exists and that you actually need to succeed in the world.

All in all, this is emphatically not the kind of speech your usual CEO or television anchorman would dare to give. It is positively unAmerican. Where are the self-deprecating jokes? the homilies about the unquestioned, solitary virtue of Hard Work? the cheap instructions to be a massively productive worker while taking the time to sniff the flowers and raise your kids?

The first time I read it, I was astonished at how grim and bleak it was, and how I would have left that ceremony blinking and confused and sad. But reading it again, I realize that yeah, I wish I'd heard that. 

Passing on The Office (U.S. version)

I feel that I am demographically, generationally duty-bound to enjoy the American version of the sitcom The Office. And yet, I don't. In fact, I'm amazed there aren't more people like me -- who think the original British Office is brilliant in its cringe-inducing, acidic way, and think the American version is just more corporate entertainment trash. As Special Guest Star Will Ferrell once said in another role, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I think this goes deeper than a simple prejudice against American network programming, whose highest cultural achievement in recent memory as been Three Two and a Half Men. It has to do with the pale comparison the American version is to its source material. And yes, I know that Ricky Gervais produces the American version, but frankly, there's just too much money here for him not to.

To be fair, I actually do think the show is funny, even though I haven't seen too much of it. Like other shows of this ilk, 30 Rock in particular, there are too many funny people and funny perspectives involved not to get the set-pieces and one-liners right. Doesn't mean that it matters, though.

My first big problem with the American version is its rampant crimes against narrative order. The Office U.K. had a beginning, a middle and an end, as do most television productions in the rest of the world. But the American model, honed by our unique brand of consumer capitalism, is to take anything successful and run it until people stop watching and it stops making money. Along the way, in the painful decline of the show, all sorts of reliable cheap story tricks are pulled out of the bag -- a wedding! a baby! special guest stars! a major character's departure! Each of these can be spread over multiple episodes, and each will be familiar to any regular Office viewer.

But there's another, far more important concern I have. The original Office was harsh. The laughs came with cringes, and you were never allowed to forget that this was a show about the bleakness and despair of labor in the modern economy. It didn't flinch, and it hurt, and perhaps it made you think a little bit more about your life, and the options you might have to make it a little better for yourself and others. It was challenging.

The American Office, however, levels everything down to a simplified narrative that everyone is alright once you get to know them beyond their personality quirks. Boredom, even of the terminal, soul-crushing sort, is just something to lightly complain about. The ultimate lesson is that you don't have to change your crappy situation, just your crappy attitude and realize how good you got it, presumably because even after a miserable day, you still have your merry television friends to entertain you. This is narcotizing.

And it begins its eighth season this fall.

Hawaii

Hanauma Bay

Since we returned from our trip to Hawaii last month, I've been thinking about becoming one of those guys who says "mahalo" or "brah" without irony. I don't think I've ever been to a place that has chiseled itself so neatly into my head, even as I was aware of its famous propensity for doing so. The way its native patois pops up in the strangest places, how it remains a shortened euphemism for "paradise" in the American mind. But having been there, it all makes sense, it is all fair, and isn't a simulacrum or a discourse or whatever.

So many of the amazing things you hear are actually, seriously true. It is a natural marvel. We spent three different days at Hanauma Bay, Olga and I taking turns snorkeling while Mila played in the sand and learned how to paddle along. On two occasions, I found myself out on the reef, face to face with a very large sea turtle. One time, I watched him (from a respectful distance! I paid attention during the film they make you watch about reef safety and manners) have his lunch and float around. Thinking back on it, I think to myself, really? I saw that? not in a movie?

And even the bona fide touristy stuff has a kind of earnest shamelessness about it that makes it pleasant. The few times we went to Waikiki (we did a pretty good job of going as authentically 'native' as we could) I enjoyed visiting the markets, with their stacks and stacks of tikis and surfboard wall-clocks. I even picked up a tiny statue of Lono, the harvest god, for my desk. I remained self-aware enough to resist buying an aloha shirt, which would become instantly unwearable back in New England. 

And beyond the things you see, there were the people, that famous "aloha spirit" that actually seems to exist. We stayed with our friends at their house on the eastern end of Honolulu, and to get to their house from almost anywhere, we had to take the main east-west high. From the beach or the store, you had to merge onto the road, and then in the space of two long blocks had to cross three lanes of significant traffic to make a left turn onto their street. I can't conceive of making this maneuver in much of Massachusetts without a fit of curses, rude gestures, honking horns and angry glares. But I swear, we did this everyday in Hawaii and it was never a problem. Cars would slow down, wave you along, take their time. You just had to hit the blinker and wave thanks and the entire universe seemed to be on your side. Paradise.

The singular alignment of so many different cultures there has a lot to do with it. It is a wonderful thing, and a hopeful picture of what this nation can be. We ate a ton of magnificent Asian food -- sushi, noodles, anything that was more colorful than the pale imitation we find back home. It was amazing how many different kinds of people you saw there -- Chinese, Japanese, Portugese, different kinds of white people from the mainland. They were there for awhile, or they were passing through. We were amazed at the number of Japanese visitors we saw, even though the drop-off in arrivals from the country since the earthquake was a cause for major concern. Waikiki feels almost like a distant neighborhood of Tokyo. This kind of mix is something that you can be of two minds about. I remember the story Sarah Palin's dad told about his daughter's abortive college career at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and Hawaii Pacific University. She left, he said, because she got freaked out by the ethnic diversity and eventually found a happy home in Idaho. So you can think of it that way, or you can think that this is what a healthy future looks like.

Of course, not everything is all rainbows (although, I've never seen so many in my life before. Every afternoon it seemed, one or sometimes two over the mountains. Absurd). One thing I wish I had learned more about is the role of native culture. Much is made about showing proper respect and deference for Native Hawaiians, in place names, ceremonial matters, and the like. But to phrase it carefully, I'd wonder how much of this is real and living and how much a created tradition adapted for current conditions. The Hawaiians themselves famously broke their own tabus in 1819, and were quick to embrace the various kinds of Christian that showed up on their shores. So what can we make of current efforts to make these traditions alive again? I suppose that's one for the anthropologists.

And of course, staying with a local family -- my old college friends -- showed us that even though it is paradise, people still lead lives that are recognizable as belonging in the early 21st century. Our friends are a doctor and a lawyer, they work very hard, worry about daycare and schools, and have remarkably familiar problems for a young family. Only difference is they don't have to have winter coats in their house.

Another thought that often occurred to me is how there are dark undercurrents there. For a place without snakes, or bandits, or dangerous extremes of cold or heat, an astonishing number of visitors don't leave the islands alive. Every beach and park features signs that are brutally frank in what you can and can't do, and while it seems almost quaint and overcautious -- like those airline safety cards -- they really mean it. I subscribed to various Hawaiian news twitter feeds, and there are an amazing number of stories about tourists drowning, or falling off something, or getting lost somewhere, or just plain vanishing. So even at the best of times, under the best of circumstances, reality can get you. Maybe even more so because you let your guard down.

Hawaii is going to stay with us for a very long time. I can't remember the last time I came back from a big trip relaxed and ready to face life again. It seems, strange to say without being ironic, that I learned some things. And now I frequently find myself staring at the map in our house, looking at those little specks in the middle of vast nowhere of the Pacific, wondering, just how are we going to get back there?

The abundant waters of March in Concord

Last weekend, the family and I went out east for a visit, and stopped by the Concord battlefield on Saturday. The photo above shows the "trail" that leads from the Old North Bridge and the famous Minuteman monument to the rest of the park. Obviously, the Concord River had some other ideas.

Looking down, the waters were well above their designated channels.

Living with a novel

Yesterday I finally finished Norman Mailer's enormous historical novel about the CIA, Harlot's Ghost. I'm a good reader, so I'm ashamed about how long it took me to finish the thing. And now, I feel like I just threw out of my house an 80-year-old distant uncle who spent several weeks on my couch spouting dirty stories, conspiracy theories about Sam Giancana, and pseudo-Freudian nonsense. Glad he's gone, but kinda miss him already. 

Abstract Expressionism in context at MoMA

A big part of Abstract Expresssionism, if we get right down to it, was to push art out of context. So yea, I appreciate it's a bit ironic for me to say that a current retrospective of the movement lacks context. The current big show at the Museum of Modern Art is really just that -- out of time, at sea, and serving purposes that are hard to grasp at first glance.

This show is something that has been on my radar for a long time, and since I live far from the city, getting there requires a bit of planning. I have been a big fan since high school, and i wrote my thesis in college about Frank O'Hara, the poet, man-about-town, and associate curator of painting at MoMA who was close to the movement.

MoMA's show pulls together a large number of highlights from the movement -- much from the museum's own collection. It is a greatest hits collection, but one that lacks a sense of nostalgia, passion or affection for the work. I've been struggling to find the right word for how all that feels -- not elegiac, nor like an obituary. It isn't a tombstone, but more of a cenotaph. At the same time, the show seems to be missing the sort of intellectual heft you'd expect from one of these once-in-a-generation reassessments. It is almost taxonomical -- this is what Abstract Expressionism is, this is who did, here are the best examples of it. It feels like the first draft of an art history textbook for high school students.

But the question of context is always right there, because it is a tricky issue when it comes to this work. Group shows about Abstract Expressionism in general seem to fail, because they don't make coherent points with each other as much as they do with themselves. Solo shows of particular artists can be brilliant. I have distinct, happy memories of shows devoted to Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, and my personal favorite, Barnett Newman. The MoMA show seems somewhat aware of this, and does a good job of tracing the development of Pollock from the student of Thomas Hart Benson to "Jack the Dripper." But everyone else seems to suffer from a selective approach.

And yet, even though Abstract Expressionism is so often a punch-line, (for the record, why do people still insist on dismissing AbEx by saying that "any four-year-old could do it?" I spend a lot of time painting with a four-year-old, and I tell you, she never does anything like this), the show was packed. Part of that is because New York museums are always packed (sorry, I'm desensitized to Berkshire museum going, which is usually blissfully quiet and solitary in the winter). So it hard to avoid the idea that this show was a crowd-pleaser, MoMA making its once-in-a-generation effort to present a comprehensive show about a movement that is intimately bound up in their own history. It is a reminder that this happened.

'God's empty chair'

I can't be the only one who first heard about George Shearing, who died this week at 91, in Jack Kerouac's On the Road...

Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat., his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said.

'Winning' the Space Race

Look, I like to mock the former half-term governor of Alaska as much as anyone, but her recent comments about the "Space Race" prove the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day (if only for a few glancing nanoseconds, and it doesn't realize why it is right).

America's chest-beating about "winning" the Cold War is so profound and pointless, it makes us merrily buy into the Tom Hanks version of a heroic, patriotic victory for our side.

Folks that I ordinarily agree with have been jumping to the safe conclusion...

Yes, the Soviet Union won many of the early contests in the space race (including putting the first man in orbit, which may have been what Palin meant by "race to space"). But it was the U.S. that walked away with the biggest trophy in the space race when it put a man on the moon.

But here's another take... the Soviets jumped out to a huge lead with Sputnik and manned flight, and then they kept it.

While America chose to believe it had launched into some kind of sci-tech rodeo contest, the Soviets were actually doing science. I'll make the bold assertion that the work Soviet engineers and cosmonauts did on long-term space flight will prove far, far more useful in the long-run than the explorations by American astronauts of how far you can hit a golf-ball on the moon.

And the fact that future crews going up to the ISS will be launched from Baikonur for the foreseeable future -- not Cape Canaveral -- seems to suggest the final outcome could at best be called a draw.