Which is why I handed in my journalist badge

I've been accused once again of burying the lede--a valid complaint if I were writing breaking news for the New York Times but I'm not so give me a break.

The lede, for the non-journalists among us, is that all-important first paragraph in a straight news story organized in the inverted pyramid form. The lede succinctly serves up the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of some newsworthy event in words readers can easily digest. I worked as a journalist long enough to master the form and I have the trophies to prove it, but I've always preferred feature writing.

Feature writing tends to be less urgent, less formulaic, and more colorful than straight news, often meandering down a leisurely path and trusting readers to make their way without a road map. Or, to switch metaphors, the feature story doesn't force-feed readers the meat of the story all at once but instead allows them to taste a bit here and a bit there until they've well and truly feasted.

Feature writing is appropriate for stories that are interesting but not especially pressing; straight news serves up facts while features use facts to move toward insight or understanding or, sometimes, amusement. 

I'd be the first to admit that the difficulties I've been facing this year are far from newsworthy to anyone outside my immediate circle. The catastrophic flooding in Nepal makes our little inundation look like the aftermath of a toddler's bathtime, and the other ills that have plagued us (cancer, mold) are common to thousands of people all over the world. So when I write about my experiences, I'm well aware that there's nothing particularly special about what we're going through. This is not front-page news but merely the human condition. Nothing to see here. Move on.

But writing helps me make sense of things and may provide insight or understanding or amusement to others, which is why I keep doing it but also why I don't feel any obligation to follow traditional journalistic conventions. I write for myself and for those few people interested in following me down a meandering path, and sometimes I like to provide some rewards along the way, little nuggets of insight or information buried long past the opening line.

For those readers who can't stick with me past the first paragraph--what are you even doing here? Surely you can find something more newsworthy to peruse.

For the rest, thanks for coming along on the ride. Better buckle up because it's bound to be bumpy.

Bumper sticker befuddlement

I'm getting too old for this, I tell myself, though it's hard to define what this refers to. I'm definitely getting too old to decipher bumper stickers on passing cars, but if I'm so close that I can easily read the words but still can't fathom what they're trying to say, that's a different kind of problem. 

I understand what it means when a pickup truck the size of Nebraska has its backside plastered with the American flag with assault rifles replacing the stripes, and I know what it means when a vanity license plate spelling BEHEMOTH is attached to an SUV so bit it makes me wonder why no auto-makers have manufactured a car by that name. These signs communicate very clearly: I'm a big tough dude who may well be armed--stay out of my way. I am happy to oblige, and kudos for spelling behemoth correctly, but do you know how to pronounce it? 

But then I stand staring at a tiny colorful car sporting a pink bumper sticker that says I got a lobotomy at Claire's, which I kind of understand because the relentless pink glitteriness of Claire's boutiques could make anyone over the age of 12 feel lobotomized, but apparently there's a whole pop-culture thing about getting a lobotomy at Claire's, an online rabbit hole I don't intend to descend.

I'm definitely getting too old for some of the pop-culture references I encounter while out in public, but often I can't even tell if a bit of text is gesturing toward pop culture or simply being silly. We need more zombie baseball: pop culture reference or random words on a bumper sticker? If someone will explain to me what zombie baseball is, I can make an informed decision about whether we need more of it.

I need less confusion in my life and fewer opportunities for annoyance over inept advertising, an epidemic I can't seem to avoid. My ears hurt every time I hear a local radio ad telling me that electronic bikes has raised the bar, but at least the problem is easy to identify: somebody  (copywriter, editor, ad manager, business owner, whatever) can't grasp the concept of subject/verb agreement. I get that, though I worry about how all those people could hear they has without grimacing. 

What I don't get is how a whole host of people could have approved a radio ad for a local flooring company that keeps telling me We want you to be where your feet are. Grammatically correct, yes, but what does it mean? I generally am where my feet are because it was my feet that got me there, and if there's a way for me to be where my feet aren't--short of amputation--I'd like to hear about it. 

Or maybe they want me to lie on the ground hugging my feet? Assuming the fetal position is unlikely to put me in the proper frame of mind to buy flooring--or anything else. I'd like to let my feet take me to whoever wrote that ad and ask a simple question: What were you thinking?

But then maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's just noise intended to get attention or gesture toward some outside reference without making meaning at all. And that, I think, is what I'm getting too old for: maneuvering through a world where the gap between word and meaning sometimes seems unbridgeable.

Digressions toward upliftitudination

I'm standing at the gas station fueling up my salt-encrusted car, relieved that a sudden outbreak of warmth is melting the ice that keeps covering every stinking surface in the county, even the river, which was absolutely gorgeous this morning with that silvery sheen of icemelt shimmering over the frozen expanse--now where was I going with this?

Oh yes: pumping gas, grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the rear backing-up camera that keeps getting so thoroughly coated with layers of road salt and, now that the ice is melting off my driveway, mud, so filthy that when I back up the camera shows me only vague blotches where the road ought to be, when suddenly I see a big green truck. Meaning I see the truck in the gas station parking lot, not in my mud-covered driveway, which it (the truck) could never reach because even if a semi loaded with soda could cross my bridge without causing a collapse it would probably jackknife on the sharp turn just past the bridge and never make it up the mud-covered hill, which is a good thing because there's no room up there for a semi to turn around so it would be stuck there forever, in my driveway, a big green semi advertising 7UP--and again, I've lost my train of thought.  

I blame the weather, which started the week in single digits, made a brief visit into the low 60s, and now hovers in the 30s, leading to a freeze-melt-refreeze cycle that's driving us all just a little bit crazy, not to mention that the weather inside my building is so miserable that on Monday I had to sit in my office with my coat on even while wearing long-johns and two layers of sweaters.

But I digress. (So does the weather. Repeatedly.) I'm pumping gas when I see this truck, this huge green semi sporting a massive ad for 7UP, a beverage I literally never drink unless I'm at a baby shower or some such celebration where someone makes that super-sweet punch involving 7UP poured over sherbet, and I'm not sure why else 7UP exists except to make that punch, when suddenly (back at the gas station, pumping gas) I notice the words on the side of the big green truck: Be UPtimistic.

And this makes me smile.

Yes: despite the weather, despite the ice that keeps trying to kill me and the mud that makes my car slide all over the driveway, despite all the ways my department and my discipline and, yes, even my entire career are being marginalized and misunderstood and muddled, despite the lack of answers about health problems plaguing my loved ones and lack of certainty about funding for just about everything and the difficulty of getting that one annoying student to understand that the stairwell works both ways and therefore walking straight up the middle disrupts the flow--I mean, despite abundant reasons to be grumpy on a cold wet miserable morning, those two words on the side of a truck make me smile.

Later I look up UPtimistic and discover than in addition to being associated with a Danish electronic band called Laid Back (which ought to be the name of the garage band I'll start in my retirement if I ever get around to learning to play an instrument), the Be UPtimistic ad campaign dates back to 2024, which lets you know just how out of touch I am re: carbonated beverage advertising, and when I look at the rationale for the ad campaign I see that I've missed many opportunities to experience what some no doubt highly paid advertising copywriter chose to call "UPliftment." 

I confess that I felt uplifted when I saw the ad on the side of that big green truck this morning, which accords with 7UP's stated mission to "offer light relief from the mundanities of daily life by bringing moments of UPliftment, positivity and surprise." A little tautological there with the reference to the dailiness of daily life or the mundanities of the mundane, but what do you expect from a company that asserts that this ad campaign "signifies a refreshed strategic and creative north star for the brand that will inform all international programs moving forward"? Frankly, I was not aware that the north star needed refreshing or that it was capable of informing programs, forward-moving or otherwise, but then I'm not raking in the big bucks writing ad copy so what right have I to be critical?

No, today I'm choosing to put my critical tendencies aside and focus on abundant reasons to be UPtimistic, even if I don't drink 7UP and don't intend to start and even if the ice keeps making life treacherous and the mud makes me slide and the atmosphere in academe is as murky as it's ever been. Tomorrow we'll celebrate the College's birthday but today I'll warm up by celebrating a great class discussion in American Lit Survey this morning, a pair of colleagues wearing cheery pink outfits, a couple of writing buddies keeping my fingers on the keyboard, a semi-disastrous attempt to make a pumpkin dump cake that nevertheless resulted in deliciousness (not deliciousment), a warm coat, a good night's sleep, and the opportunity to do it all again tomorrow, only with cupcakes.

So life is rough but I'm UPtimistic. (But I draw the line at UPliftment.) 

Friday poetry challenge: Scarfing up the rhymes

I walked out the door this morning to find my face being pelted by invisible precipitation, sharp little pellets that looked like nothing and sounded like dry rice being poured into a saucepan. What do you call this stuff? Not quite sleet, not quite snow, not quite freezing rain, just one more manifestation of this never-ending winter. When I was halfway to campus it turned to snow, and by the time I'd parked the campus sidewalks, which had only recently been cleared of ice and snow, were once again covered in white.

At least it's not windy, I told myself. At least the temperature is in double digits for a change. At least I'm well bundled up. But now, thanks to the New York Times, I have to think about yet another winter-weather hazard: looking old. Yes: a prominent headline asks "Does Your Winter Scarf Make You Look Old?" Apparently people with way too much time on their hands are out there in the blizzard obsessing over what sorts of scarves people wear and how those scarves are tied. One fashion expert avers that scarves that look "buttoned-up" make people look old while those tied more casually make wearers appear youthful; further, the Scarf Mafia asserts that "it's impossible to make an infinity scarf look relaxed and chill."

Do you know what what else does not look "relaxed and chill"? A person who has slipped on a pile of snow and landed SPLAT on the sidewalk. It happened this morning--not to me, for a change--and the victim, though well buttoned-up, looked neither youthful nor decrepit but simply embarrassed. Good thing the Scarf Mafia wasn't here to offer helpful suggestions: "Here, let me fix your scarf so you'll look more youthful while lying on the ground--or better yet, take advantage of this little hiatus to knit yourself a triangular scarf. So much less stodgy!"

I love my current winter scarf, a soft red wool with white and gold accents, but I wear it not to appear chill but to stay warm, or at least warmer than I would be without it. I have colleagues who strap spikes onto their shoes to walk to campus and others so bundled up that they I can't tell who they are when they greet me, but I'm not making any judgments about their winter-weather attire. I'm just hoping they remain upright in the middle of whatever you want to call this slippery mess. 

We've had snow and sleet and freezing rain,
and then we've had them all again,
along with wind and winter chill
and ice and slush. It's quite a thrill
to drive or walk to get to class
in this persistent Arctic blast.
But I can't ponder, in this cold,
whether my scarf makes me look old.
As long as I stay on my feet,
who cares if scarves don't look so neat
the way I tie them. I confess:
my winter garb appears a mess;
I may look old and tired too-- 
at least my lips aren't turning blue.
But if my scarf offends, I'll turn
the other cheek. (It's got windburn.)

 

Now your turn: let the weather do its worse--and put your efforts into verse. 

 

My cozy red scarf

 

Updating, infinitely

My classroom computer greets me with the Spinning Circle of Doom and a message saying Updating--please wait, so I wait, because what else can I do? But while I'm waiting I zone out and let my mind wander and I wonder why I can't have an Updating message pop up on my forehead when I'm trying to process new information--in fact, why can't we all take time for Updating, especially in the middle of trying times when we could use a little hiatus to bite our tongue and think before spouting off something we'll later regret.

The enforced stillness while Updating is a good time to ruminate, to slow down the flow of repartee until our brain cells can catch up to our emotions. I know some people who ought to deploy the Updating tactic instead of heading straight for the nuclear option, and if everyone would occasionally take a few moments for Updating, maybe some of the quiet voices in the back would have a chance to be heard.

Of course problems might arise if people get stuck in an Updating loop, shutting down all communications while a glitchy system doubles back on itself infinitely. But that's a risk I'd be willing to take if it would encourage everyone to listen more carefully, ruminate deeply, and measure words carefully before spouting off. 

Now someone just needs to invent the app.  

And in other news....

Because it's Friday and I need a break between cleaning guest rooms to prepare for grandkids and clearing EVERY SINGLE STINKING THING out of the bathroom to prepare for demolition day, here are some news items you may have overlooked: 

According to the History Blog, some folks were digging at the site of a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall and unearthed "Footwear of unusual size." (No word on whether any rodents of unusual size were skulking thereabouts.) How unusual? Men's size 13, which suggests that if my son had been living in Northumberland 2000 years ago, he'd have found appropriate footwear. This "honker of a leather sole," as the article calls it, "may be the largest one in the Vindolanda Trust's collection of more than 5,000 shoes." I'll be Imelda Marcos is green with envy.

Meanwhile in Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer informs us that some local dude was just driving down the road minding his own business when a cicada flew in an open window, startling the driver. His frantic attempts to remove the cicada led him to lose control, veer off the road, and hit a pole. According to the police, "the suspect fled the scene." 

I've endured mice and spiders in my car without catastrophe but I'm not sure how I would respond to a cicada. A rare Antarctic squid would be another matter entirely: National Geographic reports that a three-foot-long very colorful squid never before seen alive swam into a submersible's camera range around 7000 feet below sea level. The "elusive cephalopod" was previously known only from bits that got snagged in fishermen's nets, and squids are, in general, not known to sit for photos: "Deep-sea squids have good eyesight and usually avoid the lights of a research vessel," reports NatGeo, and one scientist added, "'We want to see them, but they probably don't want to see us most of the time.'" 

I don't know about you, but I could watch the video of that "elusive cephalopod" all day long--certainly more fun than clearing out all the miscellaneous items that have accumulated under our bathroom sink for the past two decades. (Have you had a good look under your bathroom sink lately? Yuck.) 

Also, The Elusive Cephalopod would be a great name for a garage band.

Why cry over spilt quilts? Or: another day, another cancelled grant

Every day in my newsfeed I see something that makes me want to shout or scream or cry, but instead I turn my head away and go back to my work feeling helpless. This story, though, stopped me in my tracks: "Canceled federal grant may mean 1,500 historic quilts won't be preserved," by Chloe Veltman on NPR. Of all the horrors filling the airwaves, why cry over quilts?

Quilts are utilitarian: Scraps of fabric are recycled, pieced together, and sandwiched into layers to keep a family warm at night. 

Quilts are history: Fragments of worn-out clothes get preserved in the pieced-together quilt top. In Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," treasured family quilts contain "scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty or more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell's paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War."

Quilts are art: Over the centuries thousands of quilters--mostly women--devoted precious time and skill to bringing a measure of beauty and color into their households. A well-pieced an intricately stitched Lone Star pattern doesn't warm the body any better than would a mishmash of scraps, but its beauty warms the heart.

Quilting is democratic: Anyone with access to fabric scraps, needle, thread, and patience can put a quilt together, although having a quilt frame and a group of friends to help with the hard parts can be a boon. Quilting thrives within a community where the elders pass their acquired knowledge down to the rising generation.

In "Everyday Use" Walker introduces a mother of two daughters with very different attitudes toward the family's quilts. The educated, sophisticated daughter, Dee, wants to nab the family's quilts and hang them on her walls to bolster her authenticity and impress her friends, but her damaged and backward sister, Maggie, wants the quilts to keep her and her future husband warm at night. However, Maggie is willing to surrender the quilts because, as she says, "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts"--and besides, she knows how to quilt. She can always make more.

Walker allows Maggie to win the argument, keeping the quilts for everyday use. This may feel like a travesty, because, as Dee reminds us, using the quilts will only destroy them, and they would be far more valuable hanging on a museum's wall. But throughout the story Walker distinguishes between the outsiders, who plunder a community's items of worth and beauty, and the insiders who keep folk-art practices alive by passing their skills down to the next generation. Walker's sympathies lie with the quilters more than the quilts.

But those quilts! What happens to old quilts when the quilters have died off?

"Because quilts are for everyday use and stored in people's homes," writes NPR's Veltman, "they're easily exposed to mold, insects and other destructive elements that cause the fabric to degrade over time."

To counter this degradation, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is putting its stellar collection of historic quilts through a complex and expensive process. Many of the 3000 irreplaceable quilts created by African American quilters, some dating back to the 1860s, must be carefully cleaned, disinfected, and stored or displayed, a preservation process involving "treating them with carbon dioxide gas for about a five to seven week period" 

This process will cost $1.6 million, but it will safely preserve the quilts for future study and display. BAMPFA received federal grants totaling $460,000 and had already treated about half of the quilts before the grant was terminated. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which administers the grant and has been gutted by recent government cuts, wrote that "your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency's priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and IMLS programs." 

And what are those interests? I'll let Veltman explain:

An IMLS statement said the agency is redirecting funding toward programs that "serve as a symbol to their communities of American greatness, ones that spark the imagination of children and provide an outlet for younger generations to immerse themselves in the inspirational story of our founding, ones that impart a renewed sense of pride and inspire the virtues of patriotic citizenship..."

I don't know about you, but a collection of beautiful quilts attesting to the tireless efforts and skills of often unknown and marginalized quilters would serve well as a symbol of American greatness, and perhaps it would even spark children to imagine how they could use their own skills and resources to beautify their communities. 

But that kind of inspiration no longer "serves the interest of the United States," apparently. What does? More statues? More exaltation of loud and powerful men while other quiet contributions to culture go unremarked?

I am reminded of the collection of embroidered shawls stashed away in a trunk in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame. While powerful men in the novel take violent action cement their power in the new nation of Pakistan--or Peccavistan, as it sometimes appears in the novel--one marginalized woman sits silently embroidering the stories of the men's perfidy on fifteen shawls. No one fears or respects a powerless woman who simply sits embroidering shawls, but she observes the men and records their deeds in a history that remains hidden at the end of the book.

But what if someday someone were to open the trunk? The shawls are still there waiting to reveal another side of the nation's story.

And that's how I view these historic quilts. They tell stories too long overlooked of hard-working people who pulled together scraps and fragments to surround all of us with warmth, truth, and beauty. If that's not a foundational American virtue, what is? 

Chernobyl, engineering, and imagining the unimaginable

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away--scratch that. Back in the 1980s, a time my students consider concurrent with the Jurassic Era, my father was a safety and reliability consultant doing work for NASA and several U.S. government agencies. He couldn't tell us much about his work, but I do recall that he analyzed the safety hazards inherent in training firefighters to fight fires within airplanes and nuclear submarines. He was an expert at predicting every possible source of catastrophe and failure and uncovering all the ways whatever you were doing could damage, maim, or kill you. He was good at what he did, and many people valued his expertise.

But when Russia--then the USSR--came calling, he always said no. I don't know what he told his potential clients when he turned them down, but I distinctly recall what he told his family. First, because of some family history, he was afraid that if he went to the USSR they wouldn't let him come home. (Paranoid, maybe, but those were the times we were living in.) And second, he was dedicated to upholding strict standards of safety, but he had no confidence that the Soviets were similarly committed. "Look at Chernobyl," he said. "That's just the tip of the iceberg."

I thought of his words this morning when I read an article in the New York Times about the recent drone strike that cut a hole in the protective shell over the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "For people of a certain age," says the article, "the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares."

Indeed it was--and, for some of us, still is. But what struck me most about the article is this paragraph:

"We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen," said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. "We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn't consider acts of war."

And there, in a nutshell, we see the problem inherent in the pursuit of safety. Even if you put the best minds in the world behind the task of predicting every imaginable problem, they're not going to be able to protect against the unimaginable ones.

Who imagines that any good can come from attacking a defunct and decaying nuclear plant? Where are the safety and reliability experts who could warn against such a rash act? Dad could drive me crazy sometimes with his detailed explanations about how every choice I made was bound to end in disaster, but if we don't have people like him taking the time to analyze potential hazards, who can we count on to keep the rest of us safe?

This, too, is the stuff of nightmares.  

Peddling influence

I've been haunted by a disturbing article in the New York Times about parents who post their children's photos online and then attract sexual predators, which is appalling enough, but the detail I can't get out of my head is the claim that one-third of preteen girls want to pursue careers as online influencers.

I have questions! Most of them, though, place me firmly in the Old Fuddy-Duddy category, like "How do preteen girls even know what an online influencer is? Aren't their parents monitoring their internet usage?" But no, the article points out that at least some parents encourage their children's online presence, seeking to open doors to careers in modeling or acting or influencing.

But how can so many kids think online influencer is a viable career goal? It's like a pyramid scheme: the more influencers, the fewer people available to be influenced. And why don't the children aspire to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers?

All those careers can lead to immense influence. I mean, how many of us can point to a particular book that changed the way we think about the world, or a particular teacher who encouraged us to pursue a field of study? How many people my age watched the moon landing and were inspired to pursue careers in math or science? Maybe they didn't all become astronauts, but they may have learned a thing or two along the way and developed the skills to contribute something meaningful to society.

What will a child learn by pursuing a dream of being an online influencer? Maybe some marketing skills or effective camera angles? Help me out here! Is there really a crying need in our culture for even more young people excelling at the fine art of self-promotion?

I confess that I would like to have more influence than I do. If I could encourage more students to care deeply about the power of storytelling or the cultural value of poetry or even the effective use of the semicolon, I would feel that I've contributed something that might bear fruit long after I'm gone. But if online influencers keep influencing young girls to pursue careers as online influencers, we'll soon be so up to our eyeballs in influencers that we'll have no one left to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers.

But then I am an Old Fuddy-Duddy. Maybe someone can explain to me how to solve this problem, because I don't think I'm the right person to influence the influencers.

How do you put handcuffs on a Watusi bull?

I had no idea how badly I needed to see the news story about this guy in Nebraska who adapted his car to allow his pet Watusi bull to ride shotgun. 

The Watusi bull is described as "a breed of cattle famous in Africa with gigantic horns," and the photograph confirms that it is the bull and not Africa that has gigantic horns. The car itself is equipped with horns less gigantic than the bull's but still impressive, but if you consider the Horn of Africa, then we're in a whole different realm of size re: horns.

The bull's name is Howdy Doody, despite the lack of rosy cheeks and buckteeth. The Watusi bull looks pretty sedate, but I wouldn't want to be the puppet-master trying to stick my arm up inside his innards to make him talk.

A police officer alerted to the presence of a Watusi bull riding shotgun in Nebraska found that while "there were some citable issues with that situation," the best thing to do was to issue a warning and ask Lee Meyer, the bull's chauffeur, to take the bull home, which he promptly did. I'm a little disappointed that this decision robbed viewers of the opportunity to see troopers wrestling the bull to the ground and snapping on the cuffs while the bull loudly claimed Sovereign Citizen status. Is a little mayhem too much to ask?

Howdy Doody had no comment on the situation.

Ahem:

There once was a Watusi bull
who made Meyer's car mighty full.
On the passenger side
Howdy Doody would ride,
but his presence was deemed citable.

Cheesy with a chance of Sleestaks

I may have reached a new low yesterday when I showed my upper-level literature students a clip from the 1970s Saturday-morning children's show Land of the Lost. One moment we're engaging in deep philosophical discussion of solipsism and whether unmediated experience exists, and the next we're watching Will and Holly encountering Chaka for the first time. How many Saturday mornings did I spend slavering over those cheesy special effects and terrible actors? And I wasn't even a child at the time--the show debuted when I was 13. It was kind of embarrassing to admit to my students how much I loved Land of the Lost even after I was old enough to know better, but at least there were no Sleestaks involved. I draw the line at Sleestaks in the classroom.

My special topics class Between Fact and Fiction is nearing the end--finally!--of the book that never ends: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. They found the book amusing and engaging at first but they've reached the point when the narrator is just annoying, which prompts the question: why would he portray himself as annoying when he could have assumed a more heroic persona? Or is his willingness to portray his own annoyingness somehow heroic in itself? 

Yesterday we tried to unravel the process Eggers experiences (or says he experiences) while his friend John (not his real name) is admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. John is in the next room getting his stomach pumped while Dave agonizes over how best to turn his close friend's pain into narrative:

So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes--as enrichment--and above all the recognition of the value of the friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder for experimental short story or passage in novel, not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen....So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I'll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can't be articulated.  

It's kind of a lot to unpack, as you would expect from a book trying to articulate what can't be articulate, narrate what most resists narrative, eff the ineffable. In the end we agree that the book (novel/memoir/experimental whatever-it-is) is a self-consuming black hole, a monument to solipsism consuming itself and everything it encounters--but not before we've had a chance to visit the Land of the Lost so my students can understand just one in a vast array of allusions to works outside their awareness. One of my students informed me that the TV show was made into a film starring Will Ferrell in the early 2000s, and all I can do is be thankful at having escaped that particular echo.

Inhabiting an unimaginable future; or, why I can't stop watching rug-cleaning videos

In all those childhood hours I spent glued to the television to absorb Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future on the original Star Trek, I never once saw Kirk or Spock or Dr. McCoy use their sleek hand-held devices to watch videos of total strangers cleaning nasty dirty rugs, and neither would I have imagined rug-cleaning videos playing any part in my own future. And yet here I am all these years later scrolling through social media and getting transfixed by videos of faceless men scrubbing filthy rugs.

In general I have a well-developed resistance to clickbait. I can scroll past all manner of enticing posts without a qualm, and those online ads for arthritis medications, incontinence products, and "fashions for the mature woman" only make me want to run to wherever the immature women are doing their shopping. But show me a video of some random dude shampooing a rug so dirty you can't tell what color it's supposed to be and I'm enthralled.

I don't like cleaning my own rugs and I don't own the kind of equipment these guys use to clean their filthy rugs--and when the rug's true colors finally come to light, I often find them garish or unappealing. Many of these rugs are pulled out of landfills or other unsavory places and then cleaned up to be donated to charity, but if someone tried to give one to me, my immediate impulse would be to burn it. 

But I watch anyway! Can't seem to stop myself, in fact. What is wrong with me?

Recently I realized that I have a very specific anxiety surrounding the prospect of death. I don't fear suffering or death itself, but I am terrified of leaving behind a mess that others will have to clean up. This explains why I've recently updated my will and worked so hard to pay off my debts and why I make regular trips to donate old stuff to the Goodwill. I don't want to involve other people in my messes and I don't want to get involved in other people's messes, so why am I unable to resist watching these filthy rugs getting cleaned?

First I'm lured by the soothing visuals--the rhythmic sweeping and spraying and shampooing, the washing away of layers of grime--and then the suspense as the rug's true colors are slowly revealed. But I think what most satisfies me is the knowledge that even an irredeemably dirty rug can become new again, all its pollution washed down the drain. In the midst of an increasingly messy world, I find hope in rug-cleaning videos.

That's one theory. It's also possible that I have completely lost my mind. But if that's the case, how would I know?

Silence as privilege

I was snapping photos of pretty flowers on campus today while feeling guilty about snapping photos of pretty flowers. How can I be looking at pansies when our world seems to be falling apart?! No one wants to look at photos of flowers when racism is rampant and people are dying on the street! How can I be so frivolous?

It strikes me that one sign of privilege is the ability to remain silent, to sit back and look at pretty flowers until all the fuss dies down. Plenty of others are writing impassioned pleas for social justice or marching with the oppressed or posting emotional memes on Facebook, so no one will notice if I just remain silent and wait for everything to return to normal.

But here's the thing: I don't want everything to return to normal. If normal means people of color can be attacked and killed and treated like threats with impunity, even by those who ought to be protecting them, then who wants to live in that kind of world? Time to make a new one!

But new worlds are not constructed by people who observe events from a safe distance while sitting on a cozy couch with their feet propped up on the coffee table; in fact, the very idea that the privileged can separate ourselves from the forces roiling our world is an illusion, as Dr. King reminds us in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

So it's time to be up and doing, standing alongside those who are trying to change the world (while wearing masks and practicing social distancing!). But I hope no one minds if I take some stops along the way to look at the pretty flowers.

Eating together, separately

The other day I baked a cake from a box  in the pantry, just so we could enjoy some cake while watching our grand-daughter eat her birthday cake via Zoom. Her cake looked amazing and they say it tasted great too; mine tasted like it came out of a box, but it felt good to be eating together, at a distance. This morning I had a brief Zoom appointment with a colleague who always shares her oranges with me, and I peeled and ate an orange while we talked just so it would feel like we were eating together even if we couldn't be in the same room or even the same county.

I've been impressed with the many ways people are doing things together while maintaining social distance. Here are a few examples:

• Members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra play Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring together, separately (click here).
• People everywhere are figuring out how to play board games online with friends (click here). 
• Miss choir practice? Sing along with a virtual choir online (here or here or just Google "online virtual choir"). 

Most of the things I do for fun don't lend themselves to online sharing. (Want to go on a hike in the woods with me? Fine--just stay six feet away.) But singing or playing or sharing a meal with others even if we're not in the same house feels viscerally satisfying: even a cake that came out of a box tastes better when we share it with people we love. 

Mmm, chocolate. Here, have a bite. 

The way my mind works now

Is there a word to describe an irrational fear of grocery shopping? Better ask Google: officinaphobia, from the Latin officina, a shop.

Under current conditions, is officinaphobia really all that irrational? Asking for a friend.

In a time a social distancing, how do pickpockets earn a living? Can they apply for unemployment benefits? Or have they all moved indoors to become Zoom-bombers? 

Zoom-bombers sounds like people so disgusted with how they look on the screen that they firebomb their own home offices, which would have the added benefit of injecting a little variety into the working-from-home situation, but no: Zoom-bombers exploit features of Zoom to force participants to view offensive content, like porn or racist rants. (Read it here.) The existence of Zoom-bombing provides further evidence, in case we needed it, that despicable people will find a way to act despicably in any situation.

Funny how everything on the syllabus right now seems to have some relevance to current conditions, from George Saunders's portrayal of characters trying to profit from the suffering of others (in "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline") to W.S. Merwin's poem "Rain Light," which shows how comfort can continue "even thought the whole world is burning." Next week my Colson Whitehead students will start reading Zone One, a zombie novel examining the various ways humanity responds after a global pandemic. Some suffer severe officinaphobia while others act despicably by seeking to profit from the disaster, but my favorite character rearranges debris to create art that will last long enough to convey meaning into the future. 

I want to be that person, but instead I'm sitting at home obsessing over how I can avoid looking like an idiot on Zoom and wondering how long I can put off grocery shopping.

Taking the funhouse tour

If my father's house could comment on its own appearance on the realtor's web site, it might ask, "Does this terazzo make me look fat?"

I don't know if the realtor used a distorting lens or did some creative photoshopping, but the online images reflect a funhouse view of my old Florida home. The text is bad enough, touting a "HUGE two-car garage" that barely had room for Dad's Buick Behemoth and a "pleasant screen enclosed porch" described as "great for entertaining." I do recall a time I entertained four of my closest friends on that porch after my ninth-grade class held a mock presidential debate in 1976. (I played the role of Gerald Ford and my dear friend played Jimmy Carter, who lost the election in our school if not in real life.) For years now, though, that "pleasant screen enclosed porch" has entertained only legions of lizards.

The photos, though! The house looks like it's been stretched, every room appearing about double actual size. Rooms look sparkling clean but lifeless, denuded of warmth and hospitality, partly because all the carpets have been removed to reveal the stark terazzo floors underneath. Nothing scrams of a desperate need for redecorating like terazzo. 

That dark paneling in my brothers' room! Who thought that was a great idea? And then I see those drapes that I sewed for their giant windows, and I'm not sure what amazes me more: the fact that I was able to sew serviceable and attractive drapes for my brothers' room as a 14-year-old kid or the fact that they're still hanging there doing their duty. They don't look bad in the photos but I'll bet they're ready to fall to pieces.

Further, of the more than 20 photos on the realtor's web site, not a single one shows the cracks in several walls caused by the slumping of one corner of the foundation, evidence of the need for the purchaser to invest a pile of money in repairs.

But that's not likely to happen. The best thing about that house has always been its location, in a quiet neighborhood half a block from one of the best high schools in Florida and a mile from great shopping and medical care. All through that neighborhood developers have been buying up old Granny houses, gutting them, and replacing them with McMansions, which will no doubt happen to Dad's house as soon as it sells.

Rumor has it that the host of a reality home-improvement television show is interested in Dad's house, and wouldn't it be great to see total strangers mocking my parents' aesthetic choices on national television? It would almost be worth it to see them take a sledge-hammer to that oven, something I've wanted to do for years. But at this point I can't even see it as my home anymore because everything that made it mine is gone while everything that remains has been squeezed through the realtor's image-making machine to create sparkling photos that feel entirely unfamiliar.

My old house is gone, its shell a collection of funhouse images, its warmth reduced to bare terazzo, but the memories? Still warm, colorful, and alive as long as my brothers and I remain above ground.

 

When a train of thought takes a detour

I drove five miles in the wrong direction this morning before I remembered that my polling place had been moved, and I briefly thought about not voting at all. What's on my ballot anyway? Exactly two contested races--township trustee and school board. My vote is unlikely to make a difference, but nevertheless I turned around and drove to the polling place to cast my vote, which was more difficult than usual because the machines were acting wonky so anyone who had a job to get to was urged to use paper ballots instead. Then of course I was way behind my usual commuting schedule so I drove through two 20-mph school zones and got stuck--twice!--behind school buses loading passengers. But hey--at least I had some extra time to charge up my phone.

Oh, what a fragmented morning! Papers to grade and classes to prep, but my brain is going in a million different directions:

How would you like to be interviewed by a bot? Inside Higher Ed ran a story about companies using Artificial Intelligence to conduct initial interviews with job applicants, which is supposed to counteract bias based on appearance because the AI relies on an algorithm instead of a human being's gut reaction. However, human beings write the algorithms, which remain relatively opaque to the uninitiated, so there's no telling what kinds of preferences may be programmed in to the AI: smiling too much or not enough, gesturing or not gesturing, code words that can either improve or sink a candidate's chances. My feeling is that AI interviews will select for candidates who are good at communicating with AI bots, and if that's the kind of workforce we need, then we're all set.

Every interview is an opportunity to hone and share the story of ourselves, just as every court case requires a transformation of fact into narrative. Before I left the house this morning I was reading a fascinating article in PMLA by Peter Brooks called "The Facts on the Ground," in which he examines the importance of how facts are framed in court cases. "The facts on the ground may not themselves be malleable," he writes, "but once they are narrativized--as they must be if they are to be intelligible--their shape may prove protean." How we tell the story is sometimes a matter of life and death, which is why the human ability to create stories will never go out of style.

And sometimes storytelling can give us a whole new window into history. I'm a little behind on my podcast listening by the other day I heard the Code Switch episode called "A Strange and Bitter Crop," a fabulous feat of storytelling dealing with the lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida, 85 years ago. Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which I'll be teaching next semester, is based on events in a fictionalized Marianna, so the podcast deepened my understanding of the area's troubled history, but it's also sobering to recall that lynching is not ancient history and to consider the different ways Claude Neal's story has been framed in the past 85 years. How we tell the story makes a huge difference, but sometimes so does who gets to tell the story, especially when the facts have been intentionally obscured.

Looking at the past can make me wonder whether we're as advanced as we think we are, while looking at the future makes me wonder what sort of world we're creating for our children. Maybe I'm not the only one driving the wrong way! My unintentional detour this morning may not have given me much of a story to tell, but sitting behind a school bus gave me time to think and muse and simply be, a commodity in dreadfully short supply.

 

(My) names in the news

I don't know what other people think of when they hear the name of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but I think, My people, my people! I don't know how many times I got called Zelensky in my youth, and I don't know what compels so many people to insist on inserting a superfluous n in Zelesky, but it happened ALL. THE. TIME. Zelesky, Zelensky, Zaleski, and other variants of the name are common in Eastern Europe, but growing up, I never met a Zelesky who wasn't a blood relative, so it's kind of fun to hear the name all over the airwaves, even for a bizarre reason.

And speaking of names in the news, this morning I heard the regional NPR station's newsreader mangle the name of a former college classmate of mine, Greg VanTatenhove, who is now a federal judge in Kentucky. The name is not that difficult if you take it slowly, but the newsreader charged at it all at once and fell on his face.

Also this morning I found a familiar photograph in the Marietta Times, accompanying an article about declines in bird populations. The reporter called yesterday to ask some questions, but I was at first reluctant to respond because the local rag has a reputation for mangling quotes; however, she wanted to ask me why I love birds, which I'm usually happier to talk about than others are to listening. The article got the quotes mostly correct, and I was delighted about the photo because it brings back memories of chasing yellow-rumped warblers around a local wetland.

And you know what else? She spelled my name right, and she even pronounced it correctly when she called. (You don't want to know how many horrible ways there are to mispronounce Hogue.)

A modest proposal for improving the sanity of the general populace

First, eliminate televisions from all waiting areas: airport terminals, dentist's offices, car repair shops, wherever. It's impossible to select a show that will please everyone in the room, so someone is bound to be disappointed or offended, which increases the general stress level in the room.

And if we must have televisions in waiting areas where captive audiences can't get away from them, then require that they be tuned to something innocuous. Last time I got my car serviced, the television in the waiting area showed a steady stream of home improvement shows. Perfect: nothing is more soothing than watching someone else solve a home improvement problem that costs me no time, stress, or money.

Today was a different story. I don't know which of a dozen previous customers was responsible for selecting the channel and I didn't want to confront them because they were all large, heavily bearded men, but no one should be forced to wait for a car repair while listening to William Shatner solemnly speculating about the possible existence of Mothman. By the time I heard the phrase "ancient astronaut theorists," I wanted to run screaming from the room. I don't want to know what ancient astronaut theorists have to say about anything, but I especially don't want to be stuck in a waiting room with a bunch of large, bearded men earnestly nodding over bizarre conspiracy theories guaranteed to lower the collective IQ by a dozen points at least.

Who will decide which shows are innocuous enough to merit public viewing in waiting rooms? Easy: I will. Problem solved.

Finally, if it is impossible to eliminate public televisions or regulate their content, then I propose that every establishment that has a waiting-room television be required to provide noise-cancelling earphones to anyone who requests them. You can make me sit and wait while you drill my teeth or change the oil in my car, but if you want me to remain sane during the waiting period, then you'd better give me a mute button.

Don't shrug at the shrub (or chew its bark)

Inside Higher Ed has a kind of amazing story today about some professors at Miami University who wanted to grow a replacement for a rare plant that was dying in their conservatory and so they propagated seedlings and then gave the extra seedlings away to students, as is their usual practice, except in this case it caused a problem because the plant, a rare African shrub named iboga, produces root bark that can be processed into a psychoactive substance.

The DEA got involved and things got complicated, and now some profs may be out of a job. I'm not qualified to comment on the merits of the case, but I was tickled to find that the three men most intimately involved with the plant are named Gladish, Cinnamon, and Grubb. Ahem:

A biology prof (name of Gladish)
could grow anything--not just radish
but rarest iboga
(not as calming as yoga)
with results that have left him most saddish.

His friend, Cinnamon, studies bark
that Gabonians chew, and then--hark!
Psychedelic illusions
overwhelm and confuse 'em.
(With results that could be rather stark.)

Mr. Grubb grubs around in the soil
keeping things running smoothly. His foil:
an African shrub,
which has left Mr. Grubb
out of work. How his temper must boil!

Now when Cinnamon, Gladish, and Grubb
propagated that African shrub
and gave away seedlings,
who knew they'd be needing
attorneys? (The iboga just shrugs.)