Dandelion Wine

The summer of 1971, I was 11 years old.  Sixth grade was behind me.  "Middle school" loomed ahead.  Both parents worked.  I and my two sisters were tended to by a nanny.  Her name was Mary.  Her son's, John and Jerry had been my playmates on and off for years.  I lived To Kill a Mockingbird and I'll Fly Away.

I woke every day that summer by 7:30.  I cooked my own breakfast--cereal, or cinnamon toast, or toasted cheese--and by 9:00 every morning I was in the garden.  I hoed and harvested tomatoes, squash, okra, radish.  With cousins who lived two houses up the road, I built "forts" in the field beside our home--areas where the near-head-high (to an 11-year-old) rabbit tobacco plants were bent down at the end of a maze of an entry path.  I played spin-the-bottle and got into all manner of other trouble with female cousins and neighbors.  (When I consider the freedom we had to wander back then, I consider it a wonder we survived.  Clearly none of us think our own children capable of the same responsibility at such early ages.)

But my favorite memory of that summer consists of the reading I did lying in bed each morning, enjoying that last fleeting hour of coolness before the sweltering southern summer sun turned house and world both into a place where any clothing more than cutoff jeans and a wholly optional tee shirt were too much to bear.  I remember Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles.  And by remember, what I mean is, I remember that I read them, and that I enjoyed the former in particular, tremendously. As for the action of either, I've not a clue.

Fast forward forty years.

Tonight, out walking with the family after dinner, the air was laden with the smells of summer in the country.  I live in the city mind you, or what native Richmonders refer to as "the near west end."  I laugh at that.  Four blocks "nearer" and it would be in The Fan, and no one disputes that as being essentially in the city.  But the alleys here are alive with the smell of flowers, of cut grass, of treated wooden fences, of the dirt beneath your feet, of gardenia, magnolia, and honeysuckle's last gasp.  Rabbits run down the alley before you and squirrels scold from fence top.

And if you close your eyes and take a deep breath, you can travel through time to a summer of lazy mornings, food fresh from the garden, Royal Blue spray paint and fresh bearing grease applied to a boy's bicycle, crawdads snatched from beneath flat rocks in streams about to be dammed to create perfect ponds for skinny-dipping deep in the hollows of grandparent's old homesteads.  You can smell the leather of new wallets perfect for tucking away money earned pricing groceries in a family store--money saved with the object of a new RCA clock radio in mind.

And you can wake again the next day to that clock radio, pull the paperback book from the nightstand, and embrace again a dawning day and the beginnings of a lifelong love of the wonder of the written word.

All in a breath, if the right four-year-old is tugging at your finger to show you the treasure of newly discovered unidentifiable metal plucked from the otherwise inconspicuous dirt of the roadway.

Catharsis

I posted this months ago, but a critical piece of it was misunderstood, and so I took it down.  The misreading behind that should no longer be possible, so, here it is, to stay I hope.

catharsis [(kuh- thahr -suhs)]

An experience of emotional release and purification, often inspired by or through art. In psychoanalysis, catharsis is the release of tension and anxiety that results from bringing repressed feelings and memories into consciousness.

--The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition

Reading The World According to Garp, back in 1981, I reached the point where one of the children loses an eye in an accident. I put the book aside, and it was weeks before I picked it up again.  I thought for years, decades actually, that it was simply that I couldn't stand for bad things to happen to children, even in fiction.  Time has refined the things I understand about myself.  I've realized that what I'm really bothered by is the sacrifice of innocence or beauty to something that is neither innocent nor beautiful.

For about the last 24 hours, I've felt physically ill.  I can't say for certain whether it's something I ate that affected me so, or, more likely, something I read.

My longtime mentor in the world of books gave me one over the holidays.  A book, as he said today, not casually chosen.  Nor am I sorry to have read it.  The book was Laughing Boy, the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winner by Oliver La Farge.*  The climax of the book and the accompanying cathartic moment came barely 30 pages from the end.  The climax: sudden revelation of the truth by an accident of fate, action taken on that truth.  The cathartic moment: the necessity of a choice.  Cathartic because I recognize that having faced the same choice, I lacked the self-awareness of La Farge's protagonist.  I lacked the strength of character.

   Now I must choose between her and myself.  If I stay with her, I lose myself, really.  I am a man.  I am a warrior.  If I do not give her up, I become something else from what I have always been. . . .
   I must go away.  I cannot stay with her.  She is worth everything in the world, but there is something in me that I have no right to trade for her.  That is what I must do.

What we appreciate about great literature is its ability to put into words what we know but can't express, what we experienced but couldn't recognize for our immersion in the experience itself.  I'm grateful to La Farge and to my friend for both.

*Whatever you do, don't read the grossly inaccurate plot summary of the novel on Wikipedia.  Grossly inaccurate.

Recharging Our Batteries and Our Worldview

As we age, I think we sometimes tend to devalue the philosophers that shaped us.  Having found them in our youth, we may think of them as something we should have outgrown.  We shouldn't.

I could do worse than making a habit of using the shift to and from Daylight Saving Time as a reminder to change the batteries in the smoke alarms and re-read The Prophet.

Here's a thought for today, courtesy of Kahlil Gibran:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

Our Vanishing Americana

If I weren't going to be on a plane when this airs tonight, I'd be watching. I'm consoled by the fact that it'll air twice more in December. And for any who know me personally, feel free to add the book to my Christmas list. ;-)

"Our Vanishing Americana" airs tonight at 8 p.m. on WTVI, with additional airings Thursday at 9 p.m, Dec. 14 at 10 p.m., Dec. 18 at 10 p.m. and Dec. 28 at 9 p.m.

New Audible for Blackberry

Still in Transition

Replacing a Palm with a BlackBerry has at least two distinct aspects--that of abandoning Palm and that of making the jump to BlackBerry.

The first is often motivated by a feeling that Palm abandoned us first. Over the last few years they've done little to suggest anyone was even awake at the company other than introduce a new desktop with fewer features than previous versions and then call it an "upgrade." Admittedly, the launch of the new Pre is getting as much press as each of Britney's releases from rehab, but for many of us, it's just too late.

On the other side of the coin, is the jump to BlackBerry. Hands-down a better communication device than the Palm, it is not, however, a better PDA. Thus, those of us who've made the jump have done so partly based on the faith that the longer BlackBerry outsells Palm, the faster developers will close the application gap to make the BlackBerry what the Palm might have been if they hadn't holed up in Howard Hughes penthouse to live on nothing but ganga weed for the last few years.

Audible for BlackBerry

One of the first shortcomings I noticed in the application department was the BlackBerry application from Audible.com. I prefer to burn my books to CD and use the player in my vehicle to listen, but lately, I've had more trips than time to burn CDs, so I'd taken to using the Palm or BlackBerry player and piping it through the vehicle stereo. That had the added advantage of allowing me to listen on long walks with the dog without having to find my place in two different media. The problem was that the BlackBerry Audible application had more quirks than Carter had pills. So after a couple months of getting by, I decided surely there had been enough complaint and demand for Audible to come up with something better.

They had. Checking for updates, I found version 1.3 for BlackBerry. It's still not perfect, but it seems to be an improvement over version 1.0.whatever-it-was. Unfortunately though, someone appears to have taken a cue from Palm and the newer version is missing a feature I did occasionally use on the old: bookmarks. Still, overall it seems to be a step in the right direction.

Quote for the Day: McCarthy

The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice.

I've always attributed this to Cormac McCarthy, because I first came to it in The Stonemason, but it turns out it may have originated much earlier with a Unitarian Minister named Theodore Parker (see this), and is frequently misattributed to Martin Luther King. I suppose, then, it was appropriate for McCarthy to place the words in the mouth of the gentle, faithful, black, master mason (more operative than speculative) grandfather in his play.

Thoughts for the Day: Bach and Hammarskjöld

First, a correction. I had narrowed the author of the quote I had in mind on Monday to two people--vastly different people, but either capable of the quote I was remembering. I guessed wrong. It was Richard Bach, writing in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, who said:

Live
never to be
ashamed if anything you do
     or say is published
      around the world--
  even if
what is published
is not true.

But my own book of markings, which borrows even its title from Hammarskjöld, is filled with his writings, and among them, one seems particularly apt today:

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

I pray never to forget that.

How Beowulf Should Have Ended

(Teaser: Funny video at the end of the post.)

We're wrapping up another semester in the world of college academics, and yesterday, my last day of regular classes at The Citadel as a visiting professor, was bittersweet. I still have essays to grade (the ill effect of caving to four sections' pleas to move due dates ever closer to the semester's end) and final exams to administer, but those are quiet times--brief instructions at the outset, the slam of a stapler and a quiet handshake at the end, and sometimes not even that if I've stepped from the room. Yesterday was my last few hours here "on stage," more or less--a whirlwind review of an entire semester's guided tour through British Literature from Beowulf to Samuel Johnson. (I say "an entire semester" as if that's a long time to spend on nearly a millennium's worth of literature, all the while remembering that in grad school we would frequently spend an entire semester on one author, and sometimes, one book. Different goals.)

I think people doubt me when I tell them I usually learn as much from my students as they from me, but I mean that. The lessons I take from this year will be the fodder of other blog posts yet to come.

This one, though, is dedicated to a little bit of fun that wrapped up the semester in my final class in my final day in class here. I wish I'd know about it the hour before. As we opened our review with the text that opened our semester, Beowulf, one of the cadets asked if I'd seen, "How Beowulf Should Have Ended," on YouTube. I confessed I'd not, and then we agreed to return to it if there was time at the end of the hour. There was just enough time. It was fun--an entertaining note to end on.

The Beowulf it addresses in this case is the most recent film version rather than the poem, but that is, after all, the version most likely familiar to the greatest number (as even those who've read the poem have likely seen the movie since and now have some conflated version of the tale in their heads). If you've only read the poem, this won't be quite as funny, and the "Did you kill Grendel's mother?" bit won't make sense, but if you've seen the movie, this should get at least an amused chuckle. Enjoy.

Of Gamblers, Foxes, and the Wind in the Wheat

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

"Please, tame me!" he said.

What would it look like? That alternate universe where instead of fearing the happiness we were offered by Fate along the way, we reached out and took it, believed we deserved it, clung to it as if to the razor edge of life itself. What if, at any of those moments when the sheer beauty of love blinded us, caught us all unprepared and unawares, what if instead of running, what if we simply stood tall and let our arms fall to our sides with our palms forward and let it take us, fearless? What if we took a chance? What if we saw? What if we set it free? What if we let it shine? What if we embraced our taming?

Into the Wild

Let me say up front, I can't speak for the book (I haven't read it), but the movie was easily one of the three best I saw last year.

But I'm not here to review either. This post is about my brush with that world. On the way from Charleston, SC, to Cumming, GA, last Friday, I stopped for gas in Columbia. As I filled the Jeep's tank, I noticed four young people sitting on the curb of the gas station. I think I knew without being told that they were looking for a ride. The next time I glanced at them, the sign you'll see in the photo below was obvious. I was already considering giving them a ride when Susie made eye contact. "Are you headed west on I-26?"

Whether by necessity or purely by choice, as in the case of Christopher McCandless, the four of them are living the life that movie dramatizes. It was an interesting couple of hours. I took the photo when I let them out just before the I-26/I-385 split and sent them on their way with a little green to buy dinner. They were on their way from Savannah, where they'd joined the biggest St. Patrick's Day celebration in the US, to Asheville.

The story deserves better telling than the short shrift I'm giving it here, but hey, I'm doing some traveling of my own--in the space of ten seconds earlier today, I crossed from Colorado, to Utah, to Arizona, to New Mexico about three times each.


I did not stop to set my watch going in and out of Arizona.

He's Just Not That Into You

It's Valentine's Day. My Valentine and I celebrated by picking up burgers and fries at Five Guys in Cumming, Georgia, (I swear--it's the name of the town--I'm not making it up) and driving out to the base of Buford Dam to eat them sitting on the tailgate of the Jeep, watching the ducks bobbing for lunch, and the fly fishermen killing time while Etta James crooned from the stereo.

But this post is really about what came next. By now, those of you who are regular reviewers here should know enough to know whether or not to trust my taste in movies. Mostly, I'll just comment on whether a movie is worth your ten bucks and two hours or not. But occasionally, I'll feel strongly enough about one to actually say that you shouldn't miss it. Reign Over Me was like that. So was Once. At the other end of the spectrum was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which is the only movie I can remember seeing in the last decade that made me seriously want to kill myself.

Today's topic is in the first category, the do not miss this category. After a pseudo-picnic--the best we could do for a cloudy February day in North Georgia--we went to a movie.

Don Anderson likes to say that the measure of good writing is when you say, "I wish I'd written that." Well, this movie passes that test with flying colors. Great acting, great casting, and possibly the best script of its sort that I've ever seen. They so nailed it. All of it. Any book or film would be doing well to tackle the dynamics of any of the relationships in this movie and do it with fidelity to life. To tackle them all--the singles that don't want to be, the players, the committed unmarried, the faithful married and the cheating spouse, the mistress, the uninterested, the interested only for sex, the used and cast off, the list goes on. It would be an ambitious project just to sit around one night with friends and try to list all the various roles one might encounter in the world of relationships one decade into the 21st century. Listing them would be ambitious enough. To work them all into a single movie would seem over-ambitious. To work them all into a single movie with the honesty and fidelity which this movie does is, from my point of view, the work of gods and goddesses. It's based on the book by the same title

It is like Shakespeare's As You Like It, in that the right couples end up together in the end, and the right people end up . . . alone. It is better than entertaining. It's real. It's true. It's cathartic. It's the movie I'm most likely to remember from this year. It's the one, like Once and Reign Over Me, that I'd be willing to offer a money-back guarantee on. See it with someone you love or someone you want to love. See it with your best friend. Whoever you are, you will see people in it that you recognize, and you will be amazed at how well they capture them, their motivations, their emotions, their souls.

Grade: A+

On Climatological and Intellectual Tipping Points

The genesis of this post was a conversation taking place in the comments thread of Tuesday's post that tied together a Hulu Super Bowl commercial and Susan Jacoby's, The Age of American Unreason. I realized, as the conversation progressed, that I may have given the wrong impression of my overall view of Jacoby's thesis. And so, I said this:

I need to be fair here. Though I'm eventually going to take Jacoby to task for a couple of things where she misses the mark in a bad way--namely, e-mail and blogs--I think she's dead on in her indictment of the dumbing down of America and the role of TV, video games, and to a lesser extent, the internet, in that dumbing down. That commercial only appears to be tongue-in-cheek. In reality, it's pretty dead on. Making hyperbolic fun of something that's actually happening as if it's no big deal is a tried and true distraction technique. It doesn't change the fact that it's happening. What it does is try to make you feel silly for worrying about it.

Jacoby's book, flaws on those two counts above aside, is frightening, and, I'm afraid, largely accurate.

Overall, I think Jacoby is mostly right in both her analysis of our current intellectual climate and direction as a nation (although, along with every other weight unfairly hoisted onto the shoulders of our nation's new president, I think many are hoping his election indicates a potential shift in this arena as well) and the route by which we arrived in this pickle. Of course, it's no secret to most who read this blog that I'm also a firm believer that the earth is currently warming, that it is doing so because of human activity, and that if we don't alter course soon, it may be too late.

That said, I was struck by a parallel between these two topics: the concept of the tipping point. (For a good discussion of the concept in a climatological sense, you'll find the Wikipedia entry at the preceding link helpful.) Recent news reports on a just out NOAA study suggest that we may be closer to a climatological tipping point that previously believed, or perhaps, even beyond it. A pdf of the entire NOAA report can be had here, but for now, here is the abstract:

The severity of damaging human-induced climate change depends not only on the magnitude of the change but also on the potential for irreversibility. This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. Following cessation of emissions, removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases radiative forcing, but is largely compensated by slower loss of heat to the ocean, so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years. Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450–600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise. Thermal expansion of the warming ocean provides a conservative lower limit to irreversible global average sea level rise of at least 0.4–1.0 m if 21st century CO₂ concentrations exceed 600 ppmv and 0.6–1.9 m for peak CO₂ concentrations exceeding ≈1,000 ppmv. Additional contributions from glaciers and ice sheet contributions to future sea level rise are uncertain but may equal or exceed several meters over the next millennium or longer.

Of course, last I'd heard, Rush was busy assuring us all that none of this was our fault and all of it beyond our control. Right. I used to enjoy him before the Oxycontin destroyed the half of his brain that wasn't tied behind his back.

But the phrase has sociological denotations as well, and it's that meaning that I think Jacoby has in mind when she says in her conclusion:

It is possible that nothing will help. The nation's memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America's best minds. I too am nibbling at the edges by talking about the need for political leaders who address Americans as thinking adults; for intellectuals willing to step up and bring their knowledge, instead of a lust for power, to the public square; for educators devoted to teaching and learning rather than to the latest fads in pop psychology. None of these suggestions addresses the core problem created by the media--the pacifiers of the mind that permeate our homes, schools, and politics. There is little evidence to indicate that Americans have either the desire or the will to lessen their dependency on the easy satisfactions held out by the video and digital world . . . . (315)

I doubt, though, that it will ever be entirely too late. There will always be intelligent and deeply thoughtful people out there, the question will be how they are valued by society at large. In the time of Thomas Jefferson, we revered them. But in the time of Galileo, we placed them under house arrest. Perhaps this, like all things, is cyclical. Let us hope so. Idiocracy wasn't a movie I enjoyed.

All of the above I wrote more than two days ago now. How apropos then, that in a segment on The Daily Show last night, Lewis Black took some members of Congress to task for their efforts to avail themselves of a not-so-new-any-more medium in the form of YouTube. Idiocracy may be closer than we think.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Back in Black - Congress on YouTube

Daily Show Full Episodes
Funny Political Videos

Important Things With Demetri Martin
More Funny Videos

Super Bowl Ads

Okay, two things at once here.

First, for years, the Super Bowl has been the one television event I know of for which I didn't mute the commercials. Rather, during the Super Bowl, many of us tend to go for snacks during the game, but sit riveted during the commercials. There are no instant replays on the commercials, but anything worth seeing in the game will be the topic of endless highlight reels.

Well these days, I have no TV. Well, I have a TV, it's just not connected to a signal source other than my DVD player. But, have no fear, at this site, you'll find, collected in a single place for your alphabetical viewing pleasure, the entire collection of commercial spots from this past weekend's Super Bowl. I've no idea how long it will remain up and running--perhaps forever, perhaps only for days--but for now, you'll need a chunk of time if you want to watch them all. Or, if you had a favorite that you need to show someone, look no further.

Second, I've been meaning for some time to post comments about a book I read over the Christmas break: Susan Jacoby's, The Age of American Unreason. I've lots more to say about this book, but for now, I'll simply assert that if Jacoby--for whom I think it's fair to say, video, in all its incarnations, amounts to the technological Anti-Christ heralding intellectual Armageddon--were watching when the commercial below came on, I would have loved to have been there to watch her. "That's it!" I imagine her saying excitedly, "That's exactly what it does! Exactly! You think he's kidding, making fun of my views as extreme and ridiculous, but really, that's what videotainment does to your brain!" More on Jacoby's heavy-handed indictment of technology later, but for now, enjoy:

"Who is John Galt?"

Ayn Rand is one of the few authors whose works can make something by Leon Uris look like a quick read. On my bookshelf, few works other than Boswell's, Life of Johnson can compete with hers for the breadth of their spine. I was, until sometime in 2003, what Stephen Moore calls below, a "virgin." That was the year that a friend recommended Rand to me. He would have been one of those who responded to the Library of Congress survey that her work had changed his life. He is, unless I'm mistaken, a subscriber to this blog, though he has never left a comment.

I must confess though, that my reaction to her work was likely colored by the lenses of an English professor. Her characters are all types. So much so that she almost may as well have given them names like those of Bunyan and just made it an allegory outright. As I remember it, the absolute purity with which each character represented his or her philosophical ideal frequently made the willing suspension of disbelief more challenging than necessary.

And yet, I also remember agreeing with the philosophy itself, with the ideas that Rand set out to expound. But I had forgotten how apt they were to our current times. It took Stephen Moore, writing in The Wall Street Journal, to remind me of that:

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a "virgin." Being conversant in Ayn Rand's classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated "Atlas" as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas, explains that "the older the book gets, the more timely its message." He tells me that there are plans to make "Atlas Shrugged" into a major motion picture -- it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. "We don't need to make a movie out of the book," Mr. Kelley jokes. "We are living it right now."

As always, the whole essay by Moore ("Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years") is worth the read.

One cannot but wonder who will be our John Galt.

Hat tip: JPL

Quote for the Day: Barbara Kingsolver

Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly you will blame yourself. . . . Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen; and if you are bad, you can still be lucky. --Barbara Kingsolver

I recognize that even the premise of the first sentence will offend the righteous, believing there can be no such place, but putting that aside, I like this. Nothing new about the sentiment, but I like the arrangement of the words. I'm listening to The Poisonwood Bible at the moment, so if the punctuation isn't right, please forgive. Beautiful book. I'll warn you though, it is as much a woman's book as Blood Meridian is a man's (and if that distinction doesn't make sense to you, read the two and you will never need to ask again).

A Conversation: "Where More Credit Is Due"

Over at The Archer Pelican, blog buddy Phil posted the following thought provoking proposition three days ago under the title, "Where More Credit is Due":

An emerging thought:

In America it seems to me that we often give too little respect to how hard things can be: whether the length of time it takes to mourn a lost relative, or how difficult it is to find the courage to apologize, or how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship.

That said, it also seems that we have to little faith in how strong we can be: whether in the ability to keep functioning while taking the time to cry, or the resolve to push our way through to saying what needs to be said, or the will to walk out a door and to keep walking while everything tries to pull you back.

I could be wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.

To which, a couple days later, I mustered the following response:

Phil, I'm gonna object to just one thing here. Well, not "object" so much as "recast." Among the things you think people don't credit the difficulty of is how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship. You're right, those things are scary, and sometimes one needs to summon the courage to do just that: leave. However . . .

A worse thing, I think (and recent experience of course makes this personal) is the corollary of that failure to respect the difficulty of a thing, i.e., the expectation people have that something should require little effort in the first place. This applies especially to relationships. If I understand you, you are saying that, in this country, we expect everything to come easily. And worse yet, we expect those things to be perfect. A good relationship is almost always the result of hard work, and even the best relationship is never perfect. Some relationships need to end, and the worst ones often take the most courage to leave. But our failure to respect the difficulty and complexity of human relationships sometimes means that people bail without really trying.

And trying to endure is not the same as trying to make a thing better. Better to bail than throw up one's hands and embrace martyrdom. But that false expectation of ease, I think, too often leads people to the martyr label before they have made an effort to make a thing better. Be it job or relationship. Again, some things are unfixable. I know that. But a corollary of your observation is that too many people don't think they should need to try.

I offer both here as an example of the reason I write or read blogs at all. They are, the ones I treasure most, like an ongoing seminar with people who are not only smart, they're my friends. When Susan Jacoby indicts blogs on the whole as anonymous venting by semi-literate, anti-rationalists in her book The Age of American Unreason (which I finished over the holidays and will have more to say about later and elsewhere), I can't help but think she lives in a different blogosphere than I.

Quotes for the Day: Chödrön and McCarthy

From: Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion, by Pema Chödrön; from #104 "Reversing the Wheel of Samsara":

Every act counts. Every thought and emotion counts too. This moment is all the path we have. This moment is where we apply the teachings. Life is short. Even if we live to be 108, life will still be too short for witnessing all its wonders. The dharma is each act, each thought, each word we speak.

From: Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy:

The smallest crumb can devour us.

Dogs

Back in August, when I was making the trip across the country to my new post at the Citadel, I was reading The Art of Racing in the Rain, on the trip. Consequently, I associate the book and passages in it with portions of the landscape between Colorado Springs, CO, and Charleston, SC. It was a beautiful book. It was recommended by a good friend. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it to any of you who share your lives with a dog or dogs.

This afternoon, I went to a movie, Marley and Me. As the movie is based on a book I've never read, I can't comment on it with respect to how well or poorly it captures the spirit of its print precursor. But I can tell you I enjoyed the movie. I did make the mistake of going expecting a comedy though. And while the movie has funny moments, I don't think it can really be called a comedy at heart. What it is, is a movie about life, and especially about married life, and about the choices that we make when we agree to share life with other souls, be they a dog, a spouse, or children. I think the thing I liked best about this movie, is that, like the movie Once, this is a movie in which people make the right choices in hard circumstances. Or better yet, they make the right choices in circumstances that can't even be called hard--they are simply the normal circumstances that most of us find ourselves in, in the ordinary course of living our lives.

So, I recommend the movie. I can especially recommend it as one to see with the children. I'll warn you though, take tissue. We couldn't help but wonder today if perhaps the two young children behind us, around seven or eight I'm guessing, hadn't lost a beloved dog at some point. They were quietly sobbing by the time it was over. I have to confess, I came near to joining them.

My own dog is over ten years old now. She came into my life eight years ago this week. She was and remains an astonishingly beautiful dog with a luxurious coat and piercing blue eyes. And like Marley, she began her first night with my family alone in the garage of friends we were visiting in Oceanside, CA. Her howling didn't earn her a ticket into the house, but it did result in my spending the night on a couch in the garage, with her on the carpet by my side, snuggled up with a tee I'd worn most of the day. Once upon a time, she would go on runs with me and pull me along for a couple of miles before she would tire enough to merely keep up. These days, she can just keep up, and that for less than half a mile. Beyond that, I wouldn't even ask her to do more than walk. In people years, she is, after all, over 70.

If you share your life with a dog or dogs, go enjoy the movie. I don't think you'll regret it. And here's a tip: swallow and blink--it'll staunch those tears. Just try it sometime.

And by the way, Happy New Year.

Audible: Jim Dale reads Harry Potter

One more quick note about listening to books. This one especially for parents of children of the age to read the Harry Potter series.

My oldest daughter began the series when it first came out. She was all of 11, maybe 12. Only a short way into the first book, she proclaimed, "Daddy, you really should read this. It's great!" Well, it was, if nothing else, a phenomenon. I was resuming teaching duties as an assistant professor of English, after a five year hiatus, first as Federation Liaison to the Klingon Empire at Camp Pendleton, California, then as a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. I didn't have a lot of time for leisure reading. But I do believe in staying involved in my children's intellectual lives, and I did know about Books on Tape (these were my pre-Palm, pre-Audible days). So, I gave the first book a listen.

Whatever objective judgment I might ever have made about the "literary" qualities of J. K. Rowling's work were lost in the delight of Jim Dale's ability to breathe life into every character and scene. I was hooked. I've listened to every book in the series. I have, officially, bought for myself, more of these books on CD than DVD's of movies, of any sort, ever. My daughter would read the books, and then listen to the CDs. Sometimes more than once. We would listen to them as a family on long road trips.

Jim Dale has won just about every award there is for his work on this series, and he has deserved each and every one.

Bottom line: if you have children reading these books, you owe it to yourself to enter their world and share it with them, and there is no better way than through the audible versions and the phenomenal work of Jim Dale.

For those who might be interested, I am currently listening to the second book of the Twilight series because my youngest daughter is a fan of that. Listening to it simultaneously with The Age of American Unreason. Now there's a contrast. You may also be interested to know that within the college English department where I used to teach, there were at least half a dozen of us who were fans of Rowling's work, including at least one I can think of with no children at all.

Audible.com II

It's II because I did a post on this topic back in February of last year. (I swear I don't get kickbacks for this.)

As an English professor, I read a lot. More importantly, an important part of my job, is to at least attempt to make "lifelong readers" of my students. As with so many other aspects of our lives, technology is changing the definition of "reading." I'll be teaching All the Pretty Horses later in the spring semester, so early in the term, I'll introduce the class to the book by playing the first few pages via my Audible account, either over my Treo, or from a CD I've burned. About the time we're going on spring break will be about the time they'll need to begin the novel in earnest. I've no doubt that a few will choose to listen to it as they drive wherever. I have fond memories of listening to it as I drove along Highway 53 in Virginia during my time there. Of course, I'd already read it in print twice by then.

That was fun, but little has ever compared to listening to The Road as I traveled the route more than a year ago.

My point before I got distracted was going to be this: if you think you don't have time to read, you need to get hooked up with Audible, or Books on Tape, or Recorded Books more than anyone. Do you commute? Run? Iron or fold clothes? Rake leaves? Wash your car? Ride a bike, stationary or otherwise? If you do, then you have time to read.