When you’re parched and dehydrated and take that first drink of cool water, you can feel it slide down your sandpapered throat like a tingling balm to soothe your thirst. That’s what it felt like to listen to Anathallo’s “All the First Pages” yesterday, a relatively bad day. Fate got fidgety, wanted to spice things up, so it decided to burn me. Literally: my morning coffee in a new thermos dropped not down my throat but onto my tan khakis as I drove to work. Cosmically: I inadvertently parked the car on the wrong side of the street, the ticket-earning side. And relationally: the night before was a bumpy one with my fiancee. Words laid down gently transformed into a landmine. We got through it—we always do—and we’re sitting here this morning enjoying our daily cup of coffee (in mugs). But redemption began with a song.
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No Quarter
The bedroom was barren save some power tools, drywall sheets, and a step stool waiting for the work to begin again. I was home for Easter and my parents were renovating the basement and the basement room I’d called mine when I lived at home. The Cave I called it: in the basement and away from windows it was pitch-black and quiet and cool at night, and I could sleep there much longer than usual if I didn’t set an alarm. That cool and cozy silence induced a sopor my circadian rhythm couldn’t resist.
I was last here over Christmas and everything then was as it had been since high school, it seemed. But now everything was gone. Like the bookshelves. Their books sat in boxes waiting to be sorted, but the shelves had moved on. This disconcerted me most. When perusing my books I rarely considered their keeper, yet where would we be without them? Shelves in any place are prosthetic architecture. Vigilant, sturdy, selfless. Necessary, at times comforting if we regard them at all, but essentially invisible. Now they really were.
Last year I had a dream about this. I dreamt I entered my room to pack things to bring with me on a journey. The floor then turned into dirt and my belongings emerged from the soil as if they were vegetables for the harvest. A week after that dream, I had another one wherein I returned to the room and it was completely empty, along with the rest of the basement and the crawl space where my parents stored the accumulation of our years.
When I had those dreams I’d recently gotten engaged and started a new job. The future, nebulous as always, loomed large. But I’d now arrived in that future, and it looked like a half-dozen boxes of books and bric-a-brac, the props of my distant past, waiting for their sentence.
The sorting began in earnest. “Participant” trophies from youth soccer: toss. A ‘90s-era Brewers pennant: keep. Leftover CDs from my garage band: crawl space. My set of commemorative U.S. state quarters: consider. My grandma, twelve years gone now, got one of these green rigid cardboard display folios for each of my sisters and me. It opened to a vibrant map of the United States, color-coded according to which year each state’s quarter would enter circulation between 1999 and 2008. You’d pop out a quarter-shaped disk and replace it with that state’s shiny new coin as it was released. The United States Mint dropped one every ten weeks, five each year, in the same order the states ratified the Constitution. In 1999 when we first wedged in Delaware’s Caesar Rodney on horseback, Hawaii seemed so far away, and it was. But steadily we accumulated quarters and made our way through history.
The zeal of collecting faded over the years, but the joy of discovery did not. I’d weed through every quarter I could find, eager to see the newest design and see if I could beg, borrow, or steal a new state for the board. They generally fell into two categories. The scenic designs, which featured a key event, figure, or place from the state’s history, were usually better. Like Oregon’s Crater Lake and New Jersey’s Crossing of the Delaware: simple, iconic, and striking. The other kinds I call “greatest hits”; they cobbled together the disparate things you associate with the state into a confused, “floating heads”-style mashup. The pelican-trumpet-Louisiana-Purchase mishmash of Louisiana and cow-cheese-corn combo of my dear alma mater Wisconsin indicate obvious state pride, but they’re too on the nose to be extraordinary.
Whatever the states put forward, the series as a whole hit the jackpot. Bolstered by its “spokesfrog” Kermit the Frog, who did commercials promoting the series, the quarters generated $4.1 billion in revenue and nearly $3 billion in seigniorage (the profit from the difference between the face value of coins and their production costs) to help finance the national debt. Add to that another $136 million in earnings and seigniorage from “numismatic products” like, say, green rigid cardboard display folios. All that to say, they made a lot of these mass-produced tchotchkes, and made a lot from them, so mine wasn’t worth much on the market. But it meant something to me personally.
I pillaged it for laundry fare.
“Grandma would be laughing right now,” Dad said as I plucked the shimmering specie from their snug states. She would be. Do this nice thing for your grandson, a forward-thinking gift that will require of him patience, diligence, and an appreciation of history, then watch from beyond the grave as he pops them out one by one so he can feed them four at a time into a dingy basement washer and dryer. In my defense, she’d seen worse. As the single mother of two unruly sons, she had lots of experience dealing with her boys doing stupid, impulsive shit.
Should I have kept them? They will get me six full loads of laundry with fifty cents to spare, and then I’ll be back to zero. I could have tucked the folio away and forgotten about it for years, unearthing it occasionally to admire the completeness of the enterprise and ponder its market value. But I remembered: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. “But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Sometimes it’s hard to decide how literal we’re meant to take Jesus’s aphorisms, but this one made sense on many levels. I like shiny things. And money’s nice to have if you can get it. But I’m not about an altar to mammon, however well-intentioned.
So I continued sorting. My dreams of room excavation felt more like prophecies as I weeded through the musty relics, plucking out the valuables like I did the quarters and packing them for another migration. A few things I didn’t have space for but didn’t want to throw away I sent to the crawl space, but everything else I either tossed, donated, or brought to my new place, which I’ll share with my soon-to-be wife. We’ve got stuff scattered around our apartment needing a shelf, drawer, or closet to call home.
One artifact that has made the journey is the glass Carlo Rossi wine jug I’ve been sporadically filling with spare change since Grandpa Cy, LaVonne’s husband, cut a slot in the cap, fastened a personalized leather tag to it, and gave it to me who knows how long ago. (My sisters got their own too: such always seemed the way of things.) It’s about half-full right now: the accumulation of the dozens of times over the years when I’ve both had spare change on me and remembered to deposit it. LaVonne and Cy’s humble Madison duplex apartment hosted an unfathomable number of wine jugs and liquor bottles through the years; the ones we got were probably whatever were handy when Cy got decidedly visionary and repurposed some for his grandkids.
A bit ironic, right? I rather flippantly disabused the state quarters of their hallowed status, despite the possibility they could grow in value as a complete set—all the while adding at a slow drip to the unassuming wine jug’s interest-free account. Maybe that’s why I’ve kept it around. The jug doesn’t demand attention. It isn’t frozen in time or tender. It’s never complete; it contains multitudes. The jug abides. And boy, the years it has seen. While the quarters languished in the darkness of my former room’s closet, the jug sat in the corner between a bookshelf and the out-of-service brick fireplace and bore witness to my adolescence and early adulthood. Given the glacial rate of my deposits, it’ll witness still more.
My older sister, who had a longer and much deeper relationship with Cy, she said she’ll never spend the money she’s put into her jug because she put it in there while Cy was still around. Me? I’ll spend it. If it takes another twenty years to fill up the other half, I’ll be pushing fifty with a few kids and more stories to tell, God willing. Memories make us rich, not money. So I’ll fill the jug as high as I can, and on that day I’ll upend it into a bag, bring it to a bank, and watch the sum of my decades-long depositing transform into a slim stack of leathery bills. Then maybe I’ll get some ice cream, or put it towards a trip, or give it to the first person who asks for some spare change.
And then I’ll start it over. My wife, my kids, we’ll drop whatever remains in our pockets and purses into the clear glass chamber and hear the sharp ping of possibility every time we do. Those first few coins to hit the bottom will be there for the long haul. Imagine what they will see.
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H is for Hawk
David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens gazing upon the back of Amy’s blond head. Her husband Nick, in voice-over: “The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” I thought of this while reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, when Macdonald’s gaze tried to penetrate the machinations of the goshawk, the notoriously difficult and lethal bird of prey she set about training:
I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder.
The relationship Macdonald fostered with her baby goshawk, which she named Mabel, often seemed as shifty and tenuous as the marriage in Gone Girl: begotten in a joyful serendipity but then marked by tumult and grief. Macdonald’s grief came from her falconer father’s sudden death, which inspired her, a falconer herself, to try for the goshawk. She deftly weaves details of this process with those of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King, whose own inner turmoil compelled him to train a goshawk; his journals from the experience became his 1951 book The Goshawk.
I enjoyed the book for another, more pedantic reason: the author’s judicial deployment of the em dash. It’s a pet (peeve) issue of mine, how some writers whip out the em dash willy-nilly as an all-purpose intensifier—often where there’s nothing to dramatize. Or they use them—in lieu of commas or parentheses—to offset a parenthetical phrase. Macdonald’s Hemingwayan restraint and terse simplicity of prose befitted her subject, an animal with (literally) sharp features and ruthless killing efficiency. Both styles, of the writing and the hawk, come through in this passage describing Mabel’s first kill and the revelation it conjured for Macdonald:
Time stretches as slows. There’s a sense of panic at this point, a little buffet of fear that’s about annihilation and my place in the world. But then the pheasant is flushed, a pale and burring chunk of muscle and feathers, and the hawk crashes from the hedge towards it. And all the lines that connect heart and head and future possibilities, those lines that also connect me with the hawk and the pheasant and with life and death, suddenly become safe, become tied together in a small muddle of feathers and gripping talons that stand in mud in the middle of a small field in the middle of a small county in a small country on the edge of winter.
I stare at the hawk as she grips the dead pheasant, and her mad eyes stare right back at me. I’m amazed. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Bloodlust? Brutality? No. Nothing like that…. I look at the hawk, the pheasant, the hawk. And everything changes. The hawk stops being a thing of violent death. She becomes a child. It shakes me to the core. She is a child. A baby hawk that’s just worked out who she is. What she’s for.
Once a child obsessed with hawks, Macdonald was now the parent of one. And like any parent-child relationship the battle of wills, triumphant victories, discouraging setbacks, and sleepless nights would come to form Mabel and Macdonald in unexpected ways. I greatly enjoyed reading about them.
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Every Book Its Clean Reader
I was ready to scoff at the makers of Clean Reader, an app that blocks swear words from being seen on ebooks. Jared and Kirsten Maughan offered rationale for their app in the FAQ:
The number one argument against Clean Reader is essentially that an author is an artist and they put specific words in specific places for a reason. Therefore we as the consumers of this “art” should consume it exactly as it was presented by the author/artist.
I suppose these same people would hate going to dinner with me at a restaurant. I’m not a fan of blue cheese. Some friends of mine love it. I’ve tried to learn to like it, tasted it several times in several different settings and dishes. To me it tastes like furniture lacquer. When I get a salad at a restaurant and the chef thinks the salad is best served with blue cheese on it, I will spend a significant amount of time trying to find and remove every piece of blue cheese. Then I’m able to enjoy the salad. In the restaurant world the chef is the artist. He has spent his entire professional life trying to create masterful pieces of art to be served on a dish or in a bowl. Is the chef offended when I don’t eat the blue cheese? Perhaps. Do I care? Nope. I payed [sic] good money for the food and if I want to consume only part of it then I have that right.
So many things going on here: authorial intent, censorship, intellectual freedom and the freedom to read… But the strangest thing is that I kinda agree with the Maughans.
I believe in authorial intent (which we can extend to creator’s intent) inasmuch as I recognize an author typically has an intention for her writing and interpretation of it. But as it pertains to the reader’s or consumer’s experience with the creation, it matters not at all. It sits entirely outside the bounds of the creation, and it can’t go home again. Authors do not have the right to be right. They don’t even have the right to be read.
Can you imagine if restaurants no longer allowed substitutions or omissions of dish elements? Or if CDs didn’t allow you to skip tracks? I suppose they could, but as a customer I’d feel mighty condescended to, as if the artist’s interpretation were the only valid one and that we all needed to shove it down, no questions asked, no matter how gross it tastes. You can’t read at whim and for pleasure with your nose plugged.
I’m a librarian who firmly believes in openness and intellectual freedom. I get it: this reeks of censorship and nannyism and is symptomatic of the pervasive “trigger warning” epidemic. That’s why I’ll never use the app. (I’m also an adult without kids who doesn’t mind a few well-placed swears in my reading.) Most libraries have content blockers installed on the kids’ computers. Is that censorship? Definitely, but a kind most people are OK with, and for good reason.
The computers for adults are another story. Many libraries, like the ones I work at, have no restricting software on the computers but reserve the right to expel a patron for viewing explicit content; others install the blockers everywhere and take a hardline approach to internet viewing.
However…
What’s on the naughty list? The software libraries have allows for blocking specific domains, certain keyword searches, and really any site it deems inappropriate according to the code of conduct established by the administration and approved by the library board of trustees. Clean Reader is just two people, free to define for themselves what “clean” means. And they do:
The “Clean” setting only blocks major swear words from display. This includes all uses of the F-word we could find. The “Cleaner” setting blocks everything that “Clean” blocks plus more. “Squeaky Clean” is the most restrictive setting and will block the most profanity from a book including some hurtful racial terms.
Pretty opaque. A Washington Post story about the app says it “automatically obscures the F-word and all its remarkable permutations, along with the S-word, different names for deity, racial slurs and, Jared says, ‘anatomical terms that can be a little racy.’”Add to this the execution of the app, which covers curses with a grey box and a blue dot. Tap on the dot and the app reveals a sanitized alternative: heck for hell, dang for damn, etc.
They’re having it both ways. They say “no changes are made to the original book the user downloads when they buy a book,” but by inserting the Maughan-approved words into the narrative, even indirectly, they are altering the work. That’s a no-no, even in the name of shielding Little Maughan from words she’s gonna hear eventually.
And there, as they say, is the rub. Unless I knew my artistic sensibilities were identical to one Mormon couple from Idaho, why should I trust them to decide which words and phrases are kosher and which aren’t? Since the app was founded upon the belief in individual choice, shouldn’t users get to choose what makes their blocked list? Heck, make some money off it: charge a buck for access to the Master List and a few more for editing powers. Even if the ability to modify the list isn’t possible, a better understanding of what qualifies as Clean, Cleaner, and Squeaky Clean is.
Update: Cory Doctorow wrote about Clean Reader a few weeks ago. I’m glad I didn’t read it before writing this because I would have just linked to his post:
It’s a truism of free expression that if you only defend speech you agree with, you don’t believe in free expression. That doesn’t mean you have to defend the content of the expression: it means you have to support the right of people to say stupid, awful things. You can and should criticize the stupid, awful things [like Clean Reader]. It’s the distinction between the right to express a stupid idea, and the stupidity of the idea itself.
Hat-tip to the five laws of library science for the post title.
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How I Got to Now: A Librarian Year
This week I celebrated my one-year anniversary of librarianship. In my application essay for library school I wrote that I’d been a frequent library user for most of my life, yet had never considered working in one until recent epiphanies changed my outlook. Perhaps I thought of it like working at a movie theater—another regular haunt of mine—in that the prospect of seeing movies for free belied the much less glamorous reality of terrible hours, meager pay, and lots of cleaning. I simply never imagined myself on the other side of the reference desk or at the helm of a book cart. I didn’t lack imagination; I merely had, as Steven Johnson put it in How We Got to Now, a “slow hunch” that gestated for years and then illuminated only once the conditions were ripe.
My “plan” entering college was to become a high-school history teacher. I loved history and thought I might be a good teacher, so abracadabra: that’s what I’d do. History major, education minor, future set. But that first fall semester I took a writing class and wrote a few pieces for the school newspaper. That I could write about music, film, and essentially anything else I could conjure and get it printed in ink with my name attached to it for campus-wide distribution was a stunning revelation, and a disruptive one. This new storyline challenged the vocational narrative I’d slapped together to have something to tell people who asked at my high-school graduation party what I’d do with my life. But before winter break I’d changed majors to English (with an emphasis in journalism) and bumped history down to a minor (because you can’t have just one economically unviable field on your diploma). I never regretted the decision, nor did I forget the privilege of being able to make it at all thanks to scholarships and financial aid.
And yet, four years later, clad in a black gown I’d never wear again, holding a diploma I think I maybe know the current whereabouts of, I wondered what was next. As a newly christened liberal arts degree-holding humanities major—Oh great, another one—my skills and knowledge base were just unspecific enough to ensure that my first few jobs would have little to do with what I learned in college. But long-term planning has never been my thing. I have no idea what I’m having for lunch today, let alone where I’d like to be in five years. My strategy has been akin to what Anne Lamott describes in Traveling Mercies, how when her pastor prays for direction, “one spot of illumination always appears just beyond her feet, a circle of light into which she can step.” Life has felt more like that to me than following a line or climbing a ladder: hopping from one bright spot to the next and hoping for illumination. Hop, then hope, ad infinitum.
My post-graduation bright spot appeared after I’d spent a few months abroad and came home broke. One rent check away from having literally zero dollars, I worked as a cashier for a few months, which gave me much-needed income for the price of my soul, and then started part-time at Barnes & Noble as a bookseller. (That remains an all-time favorite job.) I would’ve stayed at Barnes & Noble indefinitely had another bright spot not appeared. A college friend of mine who’d taken a job at a university had entered its library and information science program and was telling me over and over how much I’d like it, that I should look into it. Who works in a library? I thought. But I looked into the program and realized, Oh, I would work in a library. Classes in archives (where my interests strongly laid at the time) coupled with a field that emphasized organization, books, cultural fluency, and intellectual freedom? Are you kidding me? That “circle of light” was blinding, so I leapt into it with a smile.
Confirmation came quickly. Library school, in my experience at least, was where being a nerd was nearly a prerequisite, introverts were abundant, and the male-to-female ratio was very much in my favor. (Exhibit A: Meeting my future wife in my first class.) But I was starting from 000. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in class who had never worked in a library. Lucky for me this was a built-in expectation: Because there is no bachelor’s degree in library science, everyone in some sense was starting from scratch. The learning curve was steeper for me, but that made things more fun. I wasn’t that long-time library worker grudgingly returning to school to sit through classes I could teach myself to get that expensive piece of paper that shattered the glass ceiling of professional certification and magically allowed me to earn more money; I was a guy who accidentally made a great candidate for librarianship and happened to like it too. Because I loved history most of my 36 credit hours trended toward archival work, but I also enjoyed classes on storytelling, metadata, bookbinding, and digital libraries. In this new world everything I looked at was a delicious possibility. I felt like a kid with a golden ticket bouncing around Willy Wonka’s sugary wonderland, except the edible mushrooms were finding aids and the chocolate river was the archives/cultural heritage track of my MLIS.
The river brought me past a few archival internships and volunteer gigs during school, which I parlayed into a (paid!) summer internship at a large corporate archives. But after such a wonderful opportunity, and the apex of my library school adventure, in the fall of 2013 I was back in the dark. The doldrums of unemployment followed, which I dotted with odd jobs, some freelance archiving, and intermittent despair, until I got a kinda-sorta-library-related warehouse job I was, two months later, summarily laid off from.
Things were dim. But then, another circle of light: an interview, then a second, and then a job offer. Time to hop again. I was a librarian. (Part-time, anyway. Though now I’ve started another part-time librarian position so I figure that equals one full-time job, minus health care.) Yet even after I said yes, I felt ill-equipped. I’d taken the wrong classes and banked the wrong type of internships to feel fully qualified for the position. But I’d learned a valuable lesson about hiring in my previous lives as an RA and housing coordinator: credentials do not (necessarily) a qualified candidate make. The letters after your name can get you a meeting, but they aren’t magic. You gotta hope the people in charge can work a crystal ball, and can see a résumé as a blueprint to build from and not a final product. I hopped, then I hoped.
My idea of the perfect job is a role that hits the sweet spot in the middle of the Venn diagram of one’s skills, interests, and passions. Being a librarian does that for me. I’m a reader and culture omnivore; I’m good at making complicated things understandable and enjoy seeing people succeed; and I ardently believe—personally and professionally—in what libraries do. I’m also only a year into this thing. The tectonic plates beneath the crust of the library world are grinding and shifting, and I don’t know what the occupational earthquakes will do to it. But I’ll be along for the ride, probably off in the 900s looking for my next presidential biography. Jean Edward Smith’s Grant has been whispering sweet nothings to me…
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The Meal
Back in 2007, the Iraq War was experiencing a “surge” courtesy of the U.S. military and I was a college student sitting at a dining hall table, wondering how I could capture the political debate of the day in metaphor through a short film script. Thus, the following piece of trenchant political satire was born. The three characters in it—George, Harry, and John, creatively representing George W. Bush, Harry Reid, and John McCain—I recast as students at a dining hall table stuck in a debate that seemed quite similar to the one occurring at the same time in Washington. I recently found this in my files and just had to let the world see its genius. Get your popcorn out for:
THE MEAL
INT. CAFETERIA – DAY
Three guys are sitting at a table eating lunch. The conversation is pretty heated.
(more…)
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I Ran Here for the Sunrise
A poem
I ran here for the sunrise.
I ran here straight down a concrete corridor, a road
slippened by snow,
past a corner store where coffee and pie
rise to life in manifest alchemy.
With my breath steaming in locomotion
I approach the boulderow, a stone sluice
of Sisyphean resolve—bulwark against the lacustrine,
but this morn
like poppy seed cupcakes: ice-glazed
but dangerous.My feet wedged, bracing and expectant,
I behold the firmament: a mailslot in the sky
flooding upward with milky amber-beams.
An atoll of ice-chunks,
particles scattered and fractal
from the shoreline, reflect the nascent dawn—a chessboard
—king’s to me today.
A man with a coffee mug and no gloves
comes beside me with a camera to capture the departing show.
‘I’ve been all over the world,’ he says, ‘and
this is right in our backyard.’
Revelers, we. Comrades in delight.
We drink our daily cup: mine today
is atmospheric.A mighty evergreen near us guards the shore,
still wearing its Christmas lights.
Pales.
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Irregardless Is A Word, But A Bad One
Ta-Nehisi Coates went all TNC the other night on Twitter (which is just plain fun to watch) to address the evergreen “___ isn’t a word” debate, a favorite parlor game of pedantic English majors everywhere. Addressing whether irregardless should be sanctioned as a real word when regardless was already acceptable, he ventured: “Worst argument is that there should be no words that already mean the same thing as other words. … Get rid of ‘beautiful’ because we already have ‘lovely.’ Lose ‘unattractive’ since we have ‘unappealing.’”
Except that that’s not the issue with irregardless. Irregardless is not a synonym of regardless; it’s a verbal typo of it. It’s most likely an accidental portmanteau of irrespective and regardless, both of which are “real” words. Beautiful is a synonym of lovely, but they each have unique definitions and etymologies and uses. People who say irregardless most likely mean to say regardless but have adopted the aberrational version of it. It would be like someone saying “beautilul” when they meant “beautiful.” If someone wants to give beautilul meaning as something other than a typo or mispronunciation of beautiful, great. I love making up new words. But absent that, beautilul is indeed a word in the strictest sense, but not as an acceptable synonym of beautiful.
This doesn’t mean irregardless isn’t word. As the OED’s Jesse Sheidlower said in an interview with TNC, “of course it’s a word.” It’s a thing said by people, so of course it’s a word. The question in this debate is whether it’s an appropriate word for the circumstances. I share TNC’s distaste of grammar fascists trotting out “That’s not a word” whenever someone deviates from the grade-school grammar line; however, I also share Alan Jacobs’ skepticism (contra Stefan Fatsis at The New Yorker) of the pure, unchecked descriptivist approach some dictionaries take with gate-keeping, or lack thereof. Not everything—word choice included—is always permissible, even in an instant-gratification culture where inconvenience is anathema and your right to be right is sacrosanct.
Some things aren’t and can’t be descriptivist, Jacobs writes:
This is reasonable in part because the relation between world and word is not unidirectional. People don’t use dictionaries only to discover the meanings of words they have encountered elsewhere; sometimes by browsing through dictionaries we discover that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our philosophies.
How beautilul.
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Here, Rodgers & Pencils
1) Here by Richard McGuire
I was not a comic-book kid and I don’t know why. I had tailor-made qualities for it—tendency toward nerdery, introversion, being in band—yet I’ve only recently scratched the surface of recent popular graphic novels. One I heard about from the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast was Richard McGuire’s Here, which plants itself in the space of one living room and hops into a time machine. It’s almost entirely visual and plotless; life and death play out through time, forward and backward, by inches and by millennia—yet all within the contained space of one living room. Moments from 1995, 1879, 2113, or 110,000 BC come and go, overlap, talk to each other. Ingenious, profound, and peppered with soupçons of sly meta-wit (in one frame overlaying 1941 a character from 1990 says, “I took a nap. And when I woke I didn’t know where I was.”), Here is like McGuire’s cover version of The Tree of Life, or if someone hit shuffle in the Interstellar tesseract.2) Aaron Rodgers winning MVP again
Though if he only wins for seasons when the Packers lose heartbreakers in the playoffs, then I hope he never wins one again.3) Sharpening pencils
I’m a mechanical pencil man myself, but I get a strange thrill out of sharpening pencils to see their dull tips become pointed again.
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DDC 440-449: Foux Du Fa French
A Teach Me How To Dewey production
This Is How We Dewey:
- 440 Romance languages; French
- 441 French writing system & phonology
- 442 French etymology
- 443 French dictionaries
- 444 Not assigned or no longer used
- 445 French grammar
- 446 Not assigned or no longer used
- 447 French language variations
- 448 Standard French usage
- 449 Provençal & Catalan
You thinking what I’m thinking? I hope so. Like it or not that’s what I think of when trying to speak fake French. That guttural huh huh huh is probably what the French hate the most about the French stereotype, though I don’t know any French people so I’m just gonna assume that’s true without confirming like a good cultured-enough American. #patriotism
I kid. I’d love to visit France one day, and if I do get that chance I’d likely bone up on the language beforehand using these books:
The Dew3:
Les Bons Mots: How to Amaze “tout Le Monde” With Everyday French
By Eugene Ehrlich
Dewey: 443.21
Random Sentence: “Ferme ta gueule! (shut your trap!)”Say Chic: A Collection of French Words We Can’t Live Without
By Françoise Blanchard
Dewey: 448.2421
Random Sentence: “One suspects that the valiant Crusaders would not have been pleased.”The Story of French
By Jean-Benoit Nadeau
Dewey: 440.9
Random Sentence: “Merchants in Sudbury still hesitate to put simple signs saying Bonjour on their doors.”
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How We Got to Now
I couldn’t put down How We Got To Now, Steven Johnson’s six-part book on “innovations that made the modern world.” The book is an exposition on the theory of the “hummingbird effect,” which occurs when “an innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” The theory is so named because of how hummingbirds evolved a new way to float midair while extracting nectar from flowers, thus having one phenomena (plant reproduction) effect change in another seemingly unrelated one (bird anatomy).
Johnson illustrates this theme in six realms: Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, and Light. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with pictures of inventors, innovators, and their creations—famous and obscure—whose intuitive leaps of imagination and engineering influenced the world in ways they could never foresee. Fifteenth-century Italian glassmakers displaced by the fall of Constantinople experimented with new kinds of glass, which found use as proto-lenses for scribes in monasteries (their lentil-like shape inspiring the name lens, from the Latin lentes for lentil), which, along with Gutenberg’s printing press allowing for cheaper and portable books, contributed to the rise in overall literacy, which exposed the farsightedness of these new readers, who suddenly realized they needed lenses to read, thus creating a new market for eyeglasses. As Johnson points out, Gutenberg didn’t set out to create a new market for eyewear: the hummingbird effect simply made it happen step by step.
It’s more complicated than that, and Johnson takes care to paint a much richer and fascinating portrait of this phenomenon in action over centuries. I had a lot of fun reading How We Got to Now because Johnson lays out a continuous string of tasty knowledge nuggets from beginning to end. On every page I learned something that I wanted to write down and share with others. We’re living in a big, beautiful, deep world that has a great story to tell. How We Got to Now helps explain why.
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Favorite Books of 2014
My favorite books from 2014 are all nonfiction, a thoroughly unsurprising result of it being way easier for me to get through a 700-page historical tome than a 200-page novel. Sorry, novels: this year it was especially true that the truth is stranger and more fascinating than fiction.
Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves by James Nestor
I wrote about Deep before and will keep writing about it to get people to read it. Despite submerging to depths few humans can withstand, Nestor only breaks the surface of what there is to know about the ocean and the people who explore it. He nimbly interweaves his experience learning how to freedive, which is like scuba diving sans equipment, with science of the deep and what we’ve yet to illuminate about the dark depths of our world.
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris
Good to see this getting love from other year-end lists. The adept synthesizing Harris did in his first book, Pictures at a Revolution, shows up again in Five Came Back, which follows five top Hollywood directors through their unique wartime experiences. They encountered nearly every major part of the war, at home and abroad, and bring back hard-won lessons and personal experience that inform and mold their postwar work.
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr
Wrote about this in October. It’s important to convey that Carr doesn’t think automation is bad (Alan Jacobs makes this clear in his review at Books & Culture), only that we have to make sure that it doesn’t make us worse off. Because there’s so much automation can do for us, it’s easy to start ceding other things to it without considering the consequences. Carr provides a good foundation for that consideration.
The Hard Way on Purpose: Dispatches from the Rust Belt by David Giffels
A series of essays on living in Akron, heart of the Rust Belt and perpetual underdog. Giffels writes about LeBron James, the Cleveland Browns, Chuck Taylor, about watching all his friends leave and the travails of Ohio living. Midwesterners who have seen their town, however big or small, decay amidst the wreckage of industrialization and unforgiving weather will find something familiar and bittersweet in Giffels’ writing.
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
I just got this at a used bookstore because I couldn’t resist. It’ll also give me a chance to better absorb the wonderfully rendered comic scenarios and Munroe’s dry humor, which I first devoured in one sybaritic sitting. Never before had I considered what would happen if someone tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light, but thanks to this book I now know. Great fodder for book groups and coffee tables of nerds.
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Favorite Films of 2014
Because synchronicity has been on my mind recently, I wondered while considering my favorite films of 2014 if any of them were thematically aligned, explicitly or otherwise. Turns out they are. The ten-ish films that lodged themselves into my brain this year naturally arranged themselves into pairs or groups—some odd ones, to be sure, but nevertheless interesting. I landed on four categories, some of which could easily describe many of the listed films but felt like the right headings for the films they contain. Keeping in mind the usual disclaimer that I’ve yet to see a number of 2014 films I suspect would make this list, here are the ones that made movies fun this year. (Spoilers aplenty ahead.)
LOOKING CLOSER
Boyhood, directed by Richard Linklater
Life Itself, directed by Steve JamesI preemptively connected these two films in my review of Boyhood, but time has revealed even more. Both films concern themselves with telling the unvarnished truth: in Boyhood it’s via the yearly check-ins with Mason & Co and the focus on quotidian moments over Kodak ones, and in Life Itself it’s via the camera’s unblinking view of Roger Ebert’s sad yet dignified decline. The march of time, which these two films concern themselves with greatly, is relentless and revelatory. Its power is best seen at the extremes: zoomed in to the micro, the everyday details we can see only on foot, and zoomed out to the macro, where the cosmic, birds-eye view of things looks oddly like the micro. Isn’t it funny how images from a telescope can look like something captured from a petri dish (e.g. Hubble’s picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, not-so-ironically dubbed “Pillars of Creation”). Set up a double feature, rename them The Beginning and The End, and you’ve got an amazing portrait of life, to name-check another fine movie, rendered in the spectacular now.
A RECKONING
Calvary, directed by John Michael McDonough
Ida, directed by Paweł PawlikowskiLet loose into their outside worlds, the Catholic priest of Calvary and the novice nun of Ida encounter the hostile brokenness of laypeople who either don’t see the need for the Church or resent it outright. These ecclesiastics—one in postwar Communist Poland and the other in modern Ireland—are spurred out from their cloistered lives by a similar commission: Get your life in order. They face a reckoning with their calling, one last chance to ponder the consequences of their decisions and make things right before destiny calls. Yet despite the gravity of their pilgrimage among the people, they mostly just listen. They absorb the pain and bitterness around them while trying to reconcile their vocation with their tempestuous milieus and arrive at peace. Can it be done? Good question.
LET’S GO EXPLORING
Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan
The LEGO Movie, directed by Chris Miller and Phil LordMultiple dimensions. New worlds. A hero destined to save mankind. Travels through black holes and time portals. An old sage with questionable tactics. Love conquering all. I wasn’t expecting two of my favorite movies of the year to have so much in common while also being essentially polar-opposite in their style and audience, and yet here we are. Who is Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar if not the Master Builder reluctantly fulfilling his destiny to save the universe through ingenuity and love? And what are The Lego Movie’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and other worlds if not the mystery planets the Interstellar crew sought for salvation? Even the final twists echo each other: Interstellar’s time-hopping tesseract and The Lego Movie’s portal to human Earth reveal the handiwork of an extra-dimensional Creator and redefine everything we’d seen before. Never was I in awful wonder more this year than during these two films.
MAN ON A MISSION
Locke, directed by Steven Knight
Whiplash, directed by Damien Chazelle
Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky
Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-hoWhat are you prepared to do? (I can’t help imagining that line being said in an intense Scottish accent.) The protagonists here have a mission and will not stop until it is accomplished. Locke’s Ivan and the Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic set a course and stick to it, come personal hell and high water—even while their worlds crumble around him and their decisions inflict suffering upon innocents. In Whiplash, Andrew’s steely determination to succeed as a jazz drummer draws blood and fractures his psyche. And Curtis, the reluctant leader of the train-bound proletariat uprising in Snowpiercer, forges forward for answers, making brutal personal sacrifices along the way. Is all this carnage worth it? Results vary, but all four of these films’ endings seem to have a similar answer.
JUST BECAUSE (Bonus)
They Came Together, directed by David WainBecause this made me laugh so hard.
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Breaking Newsies
My betrothed and I caught the penultimate performance of Newsies: The Musical in Chicago on Saturday night. We’d been watching prices on StubHub for a while and finally jumped on them Saturday morning for the 8 PM showing. So glad it worked out because I’ve been excited to see it since its announcement years ago.
I went with “Breaking Newsies” because of the pun, obviously, but also because to make this show they had to break the original Newsies movie and rebuild it into something way better. I’m not exactly sure why I so love the original movie, which is—let’s be honest—a mediocre camp-fest meant primarily for kids, a la High School Musical (which is fitting given the two movies share a director.) But I watched it in high school with some friends who were strangely enthusiastic about it and found myself enjoying the music, which isn’t surprising given that it was wrought by Disney musical maven Alan Menken. “Seize the Day” is my go-to pump-up song, and what I listen to on repeat when I’m having a good day and want to keep it good.
Christian Bale famously disdains the 1992 movie he helmed, which makes no sense. If you turn off your left brain and remember its audience, the movie is quite fun, though about halfway through it dips considerably in quality. Once the strike is on and the “Seize the Day” a cappella chorale passes, it loses charm for the sake of plot and message—and who wants that in a silly musical made for kids?
This was what I worried most about in the musical. How would they fix the movie’s terrible excuse for a love story, honor the politics, and raise the stakes for everyone? No spoilers here, but I thought the adjustments they made to characters and motivations were savvy and ameliorative. The new songs, too, were welcome additions to the Newsies cult canon. They ditched weak songs (peace out “High Times, Hard Times”) and moved some existing songs around, but in a way that tightened the story and made it more cohesive.
What else should I have expected from a Tony Award-winning Broadway show based on a Disney property? The dancing was top-notch and remains my favorite element of stage shows in general. I’m always impressed by what these performers can do so well and so seemingly easily. We saw the penultimate performance in the Chicago run and yet the energy level seemed just as high as an opening night. I greatly admire what these professionals can do. I only wish from our nosebleed seats we could have seen the performances up closer.
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So Runs the Man Away or (The Unexpected Virtue of Synchronicity)
The theme that has defined my 2014, I only now realize, is synchronicity. That Jungian concept (“the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related”) bubbled up several times this year, especially in what I was reading, watching, or listening to concurrently. For instance:
- Seeing Interstellar as I worked my way through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein;
- Nicolas Carr’s The Glass Cage manifesting itself in my library work;
- The fascinating freedivers in James Nestor’s Deep swimming in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu;
- Marilyn Manson lending some insight into John McDonaugh’s wonderful 2014 film Calvary;
- Disparate writings from N.D. Wilson, Francis Spufford, and Wendell Berry saying pretty similar things;
- and seeing the Dorothy Day in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own pop up in the bombastic yet beautifully rendered Noah
To name only the ones I blogged about. But I’d like to add one last synchronous moment to this list, which arrived courtesy of John Wilkes Booth and an avalanche.
In Force Majeure, the new film from Ruben Östlund, a Swedish family vacationing at a French ski resort eats lunch in an outdoor restaurant flanking the majestic, snow-laden mountains. The resort performs routine controlled avalanches to regulate the snow’s movement and safeguard against a truly deadly avalanche, and the lunchgoers witness one while they eat. Except this one careens right toward them. The father, initially wowed by the view, suddenly senses danger and ditches his wife and two children for cover (after making sure to take his phone). Turns out it was just the snow-dust that crashed into them, not the avalanche itself, so everyone returns to their tables, including Tomas, the father who just abandoned his post—literally and figuratively. The rest of the film documents the unraveling from this moment, which each character remembers differently yet causes shared emotional upheaval and provokes a deep and unsettling reconsideration of masculinity, human nature, and the incumbent expectations of gender.
I watched this movie while in the midst of James Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. It’s a gripping if a bit overheated retelling of the Lincoln assassination and aftermath, which indeed is stranger than any fiction. The moment of synchronicity here occurred during the assassination itself, when Booth shot Lincoln in the Ford’s Theatre presidential box and leapt onto the stage. Harry Hawk was the lone actor on stage at that moment and got an up-close view of Booth’s famous cry “Sic semper tyrannis!” and “The South is avenged!” Then, the key moment, recounted by Hawk himself in a letter to his parents written soon after:
[Booth] ran toward me, and I, seeing the knife, thought I was the one he was after, ran off the stage and up a flight of stairs. He made his escape out of a door, directly in the rear of the theatre, mounted a horse and rode off. The above all occurred in the space of a quarter of a minute, and at the time I did not know that the President was shot; although, if I had tried to stop him, he would have stabbed me.
In Manhunt, Swanson subtly criticizes Hawk for turning and running, linking his supposed moment of cowardice to one at the end of the chase for Booth, when John Garrett, owner of the barn that housed an armed Booth in a standoff with the cavalry, fled from the barn after thinking Booth was going to shoot him.
All of these moments might provoke some knee-jerk judgments but beg the same question: What are you prepared to do? Harry Hawk was not prepared to fight an armed assassin after the shock of that moment. But should he have anyway? Other times in Manhunt, men show courage in moments of terror and some pay the price for it in blood. Tomas in Force Majeure had time to take his family to shelter or at least shield them. But why didn’t he? He pays the price later on: not in blood like the people in Manhunt, but in self-esteem and dignity.
It’s easy as a viewer or future observer to question the decisions these men made or didn’t make. It’s not so easy to make them ourselves in real life, man or woman. What are you prepared to do? What cost are you willing to pay?
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The Simba Life, Thrice
The third issue of my culture magazine The Simba Life is now live. Check out the full PDF, or peruse individual articles. There’s a listacular retrospective, an artistic rediscovery, a debate over which Relient K album is best, a coming-out story you probably have never heard before, and more.
Below is the briefing I wrote to set the stage for the issue’s theme, which was “what I learned this year.”
This year, I learned at least three things.
I learned (1) to be less skeptical of poetry, that sometimes writing a poem is the best and only way to embody a feeling, thought, or moment. I learned (2) that I love the little things at the library as much as the big ones: sharpening dull pencils at the desk; discovering stray receipts from 2012 in shelved books; picking up scraps with call numbers on them and wondering which book they led the patrons to; and returning abandoned books to the snug vacancy on the shelf they call home.
And I learned (3) that I could have died in fifth grade. I stood in my friend’s front yard in a sleepy suburb playing nonchalantly with a BB rifle as a police car pulled into the driveway, and the officer could have jumped out of his car and shot me dead because he felt threatened by the gun I had, however non-lethal it turned out to be. But I didn’t die. I received a stern warning, and I went home and cried about it when my mom got a call from my friend’s mom explaining what had happened. And then I forgot about it, until my sister reminded me of that incident after Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy playing with an airsoft gun in a Cleveland park, was gunned down on November 22 by an unqualified policeman responding to a call about someone pretending to shoot people driving by.
Did Tamir die because he was black? Because of the aptitude of the officer he encountered? Because the airsoft gun he wielded (stunningly similar to one I owned at that age) that a friend had just given him had its orange tip removed? All I know is Tamir is dead and I am not. The why is too sad to confront and too pressing to ignore.
There’s a fourth thing I learned this year, but it’s really the only thing: I know that I don’t know anything. What better time, then, here at the End of All Things 2014, to wrestle with the Simba Life creed—Run from it or learn from it—in the third issue of the Simba Life magazine, along with this issue’s contributors. What did we learn this year? Put on a pot of coffee and let’s find out together.
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The Relient Case for MMHMM
Mmhmm is Relient K’s best album. I thought so when it was released ten years ago and I think so still today.
I was in high school when it dropped, on Election Day 2004. The version of Mmhmm I listened to back then, over and over again, still lays calcified somewhere in my subconscious. So baked in it was to my adolescence that it’s hard to render an unbiased verdict on the album’s legacy these ten years later. (Add to this that I was in a band that held up Relient K as the paragon of pop-punk.) And yet, I’ve revived its musical bones since then. Mmhmm is not frozen in time and perspective like other albums that stick to us simply because we were young and impressionable; it’s alive and wriggling for me even today.
The first of Mmhmm’s two exemplary qualities is its diverse timbre. Whereas Mmhmm’s predecessors (2001’s The Anatomy of Tongue in Cheek and 2003’s Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right…but Three Do) felt like self-contained musical ecosystems, sonically and lyrically, Mmhmm expanded Relient K into a greater realm, a confederacy of sounds living and interacting in the same world but nevertheless on their own adventures. I imagine it as a map of Middle-earth, with the cheery “High of 75” in place of Hobbiton, the doleful “Life After Death and Taxes” overlaying Minas Morgul, and the plaintive “The One I’m Waiting For” in Gondor’s stead. (Want a Cliff Notes viewing of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? Just listen to Mmhmm.)
I like albums with a tightly cohesive sound, like they came from one of those domains, but sometimes I like touring the whole land, as it were. This is what we get to do with Mmhmm. It’s all still Relient K, and it’s all still pop-punk to an extent, but stretched to the boundaries.
But Mmhmm shines above all in its eloquence. This is the key difference between Mmhmm and its predecessors. Gone are the pink tuxedos, chapped lips, and literal gibberish of Two Lefts that charmed me as a fifteen year old but don’t hold the same sway now. The silly, pop culture-obsessed outlook of the band’s first three albums gives way, in Mmhmm, to a lyrical bravura that would also infuse the group’s subsequent albums, especially 2007’s Five Score and Seven Years Ago.
My favorite song on the album (though it’s hard to choose) is “I So Hate Consequences,” a rueful lament of the futility of running from our mistakes: “And after all of my alibis desert me / I just want to get by / I don’t want nothing to hurt me / I had no idea where my head was at / But if my heart says I’m sorry can we leave it at that?” It’s also the first instance in RK’s oeuvre of the screamo effect—an apt use given the song’s pent-up frustration, and the subsequent release of it in the tender coda.
Mmhmm is not without some random, manic fun. The flash-bang “The Only Thing Worse Than Beating a Dead Horse is Betting On It” speaks the truth: “Opinions are immunity to being told you’re wrong / Paper, rock, and scissors / They all have their pros and cons.” As does the buoyant, very danceable “My Girl’s Ex-Boyfriend,” which could be sung by any dude in the throes of a rosy romance.
Even the track titles tell their own song’s stories. “Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been,” “This Week the Trend,” “Which to Bury; Us or the Hatchet,” and “When I Go Down” synecdochically capture the guilt and frustration of failure, while “Be My Escape” and “More Than Useless” allude to the aspirational longing that pervades this record as much as RK’s later ones.
But the cornerstone of the album is the lyrical leitmotif: You took my heavy heart and made it light. That simple line appears in slightly different forms in “High of 75,” “Let It All Out,” and “When I Go Down,” which constitute the beginning, middle, and end of the record. It’s the through line frontman and lyricist Matthew Thiessen uses to join disparate songs together as a cohesive whole. It’s also emblematic of Thiessen’s great ability, one that all great songwriters have, to give words to feelings in a vulnerable and plainspoken way.
That line is also the reason why I’ve stuck with Mmhmm all these years later. I’ve drifted away from other music I liked as an adolescent, or revisit it only in bouts of nostalgia, but Mmhmm continues to speak to me. I’ve changed a lot over the last ten years. I’ve accumulated regrets, succumbed to identity crises, and struggled to reconcile who I want to be with who I’ve actually been. The emo-tinged power chords and piano-driven introspection of Mmhmm has been the perfect partner in that journey through young adulthood and beyond, and from darkness to light.
Originally published at The Simba Life.
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Jasper Adalmorn Maltby
Part of the Cool Civil War Names series.
“A friend of Grant’s is a friend of mine,” said Abraham Lincoln, probably. This quote (were it real) holds true today as we consider Jasper Maltby, an Ohio boy who like 99.9% of the Civil War upper echelon served in the Mexican War in the 1840s, and then moved to Galena, the stomping grounds of pre-glory Ulysses Grant. The Civil War erupted while working there as a gunsmith, leading him to join the 45th Illinois Volunteers, aka the “Washburn Lead Mine Regiment.” He was immediately bumped up from private to lieutenant colonel, which seems like a huge jump. Was Maltby really that awesome, or did they just throw out commissions like hardtack back then?
Regardless, Maltby fought with the 45th at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vickburg, accumulating promotions and wounds concurrently. Also happening concurrently was the service of Jasper’s younger brother, William, who was a Confederate captain and prisoner of war. In one of those meta “civil war within the Civil War” situations, when Jasper found out his brother was imprisoned, he arranged for him to be brought to the newly conquered Vicksburg and placed under his charge. “Love you bro, so much so that I get to order you around again!”
Jasper served out the war in Vicksburg and remained there postbellum as the military mayor until he died in 1867 from yellow fever or cardiac arrest, or from having a too-massive beard. Seriously, look at that thing!
Up next on CCWN, the flip-flopping Amos T. Akerman.
