Lance Mannion

Mad as hatters

There are days when our political class, Democrats as well as Republicans, seems as out of touch with the way most Americans live and what we care about as Marie Antoinette was with the Paris poor.

There are days when it seems they’re not out of touch, they just don’t care.

There are days when they seem overtly hostile, when if they don’t actually hate and despise us, they are sneeringly contemptuous.

But more and more lately it’s seeming that what they really are is out of their fucking minds!

And I’m not just talking about the fools and lunatics in Washington.

Here in New York State we ought to be able to count ourselves lucky we didn’t elect a governor as vile and dangerous a corporate hatchet man as Wiconsin’s Scott Walker or an out and out thief like Rick Scott of Florida or a bully and blowhard like Chris Christie down in New Jersey and John Kasich over in Ohio or a moron like the governor up in Maine, the art critic, Paul LaPage.  We have a brand new governor who no doubt considers himself a good liberal and Democrat, the son of Mario Cuomo no less, and what’s he up to?

Andrew Cuomo can’t pat himself hard enough on the back for writing a budget that, depending on how you look it, is either a gigantic tax hike on the middle class or a huge pay cut.

One way or another, it amounts to sucking gobs and gobs of cash out of our wallets by making us pay more for services that we used to take for granted because we already paid high taxes to cover them.

Whatever we’re not going to be paying more for, we’re not going to get anymore. 

Cuomo’s proud of this.

What’s more, he and a whole bunch of members of the Albany political class, state senators, assemblymen and women, and their staffers, can’t get over themselves because they’re apparently managing to bring this budget in on time.

New York is notorious for not having been able to do this.  This will be the first budget to come in on time in five years!  And that last one was the first to come in on time in years itself.

They not only expect us to be impressed by this.  They expect us to cheer for them like heroes for it.

This wonderful on-time budget, by the way, includes what is essentially tax cuts for millionaires.

Did I mention that Cuomo thinks he’s a liberal like his father?

Out of their fucking minds.

From AlterNet: The 8 Worst Governors in America.  You can see why Cuomo doesn’t stand a chance of making the list.

What, you may wonder, does Strunk and White’s Elements of Style have to do with running a Korean deli?

My father’s rule book when I was growing up was The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, which he gave me a copy of in ninth grade.  Most people think of The Elements of Style as a book about writing, but it’s actually about character---specifically, how to be a crusty old man.  As a teenager, I hated it, of course.  Instead of teaching you to unlock your inner Salinger or Hemingway, it encouraged you to think of writing as a discipline.  Strunk and White saw style as dangerous (“Approach style warily,” they advised, as if it was a recipe for a homemade bomb) and creative writing in general as “the Self escaping into the open.”  Good writing, they argued, must be constrained by values such as modesty (“Place yourself in the background”), consistency (“Hold a steady course”) and respect for tradition (“Prefer the standard to the offbeat”).  To achieve style you first had to achieve control, which specifically meant not unleashing that unruly, appetitive Self.  A good writer did not show off so much as vanish into thin air.---from My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe.

I can’t answer the question I posed in the post title, yet.  I’m still reading the book.  I hope to have an answer by Sunday when I’ll be posting a review.

What we need are cars that run on air

The President wants us to reduce our consumption of foreign oil by a third over the next ten years.  Reuters doubts this’ll happen.

Previous presidents have made similar promises on energy imports that they failed to meet.

Reuters doesn’t tell us which previous Presidents promised this or how they tried and failed to keep their promises.  The best way to do it is to reduce our consumption of all oil.  There’s no mention that under two previous Presidents, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, we actually managed to cut back on the amount of oil we guzzled.

We were forced into it by OPEC but we did it.  We drove less.  We turned down our thermostats.  We insulated our homes.  We started buying Japanese and German cars and that got American car companies to start building cars that got better mileage.  We were doing such a good job of conserving that the price of oil began to plunge, which turned out to be a bad thing, because another President came along who, noting that oil was cheap again, said, “Conservation means being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter,” and gave us permission to go back to guzzling oil to our hearts’ content.

Reuter doesn’t report this.

That President, Ronald Reagan, also thought it was a good idea to save the American auto industry, which was still struggling to make cars as fuel-efficient as the Japanese, by making it possible for Detroit to sell us gussied up pick-up trucks at bargain prices---yep, there was a time when an SUV didn’t cost as much as your parents’ paid for their house--- and suddenly we were on the road again, barreling down the highway at 10 miles per gallon.

Reuters doesn’t report that either.

Anybody know what the ratio of Sububans to Priuses out there?

And Reuters doesn’t report that the last American President’s big idea on how to reduce our consumption of foreign oil was to try to get a large reserve of it reclassified as domestic.

All that oil under Iraq was supposed to become ours.

You probably noticed I skipped over Bill Clinton.

Don’t fret.  I’m backing up.

During the 90s, we started doing a lot of things that should have reduced our consumption of foreign oil.  We built and drove more fuel-efficient cars---although they were hard to see over all the SUVs.  We bought more energy-efficient appliances.  We installed insulation and windows that held the heat in in the winter and held it out in the summer.  We made strides in the use of alternative sources of energy.  Ok, more like baby steps.  And we bought Al Gore's book.

It hardly made a dent, because he’s something else Reuters didn’t report.  The reason we consume so much oil, foreign and domestic, is that our economy and our way of life are based upon cheap gas and cheap oil.

During the 90s the trend that began when the first Model T’s rolled off the assembly line continued and intensified.  Thanks to cars and the cheap gas that powered them Americans could spread out.  We no longer had to live on top of each other in cramped little apartments in cities or shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors in tiny houses in little towns.  We could take advantage of all the open spaces the United States contains from sea to shining sea.  And thanks to cheap oil (and coal and a lot of government-built dams) we could build ourselves little castles and live in them warm and snug all winter long with the lights burning all night and first the radios and then the televisions keeping us company all day.  During the 90s we spread out even farther, we built our castles even bigger.  We put more cars on the road.  And along with our TVs we were now leaving on our computers and video game consoles 24/7.

This is the way we live now.  It’s the way we’ve lived for almost a century now.  It’s the way we want to continue to live.  And we can only to continue to live this way if we can continue to, as Mike the Mad Biologist says, “light things on fire.”

The day when cars run on air and our houses heat, cool, and illuminate themselves entirely by drawing from the earth, sun, and wind is a long way off, as is the day when we’re all riding bikes and taking natural gas powered busses to work.

Reuters didn’t report it and President Obama didn’t say it, because no American President wants to be the one to say it, that, absent the invention of a miracle power source that’s renewable, safe, cheap, and produced in a way that doesn’t require intrusions into anyone’s backyard, the surest way to not just cut back on but eliminate our consumption of foreign oil is to change the way we live so we don’t have continue to light as many things on fire.

This will require a lot more than replacing incandescent light bulbs and remembering to take reusable bags to the grocery store.

It means smaller houses on littler patches of ground closer to where we work and fewer cars traveling fewer miles.

Here’s the thing.

Even if Americans could be persuaded to give up our current suburban idyll en masse, most of us can’t do it or don’t dare.

People can’t sell their houses because they’re not worth what they paid for them or won’t make them as much money on the sale as they’ll need to move.  Even if they can sell their houses at something better than a dead loss, where do they move to?  Closer to her job or his?  Closer to his family or hers?  Whichever job they choose, what’s to say it’s going to be there in a few years or even one?  What’s the sense in moving closer to the office or the factory with the odds being good that the company’s going to go belly up or move its operations overseas before you have to replace the hot water heater or buy a new energy-saving dishwasher?

What are the odds we’re going to get a President with the guts to not only tell the American people, “It’s time to move out of the McMansion in the country to a bungalow on the outskirts of the city” but tell corporations, “No more making obscene profits by screwing your employees every which way and then moving your operations when you can’t make more money by screwing them some more”?

Radically changing the way we live and make money is a moral challenge, as well as a political one, and persuading us to make those changes ought to be the job of priests and preachers as well as politicians.  But over the last forty years the priests and the preachers have been obsessed with sex and working hard to persuade us to a.) have less of it while b.) making more babies.  A. of course doesn’t address the problem except by giving us less reason to go out on the weekends.  B. makes it worse because more babies means, eventually, more cars and more McMansions and more lighting things on fire.

I’m not going to get into how much oil we need to burn to feed ourselves, but more babies means more mouths to feed by lighting things on fire to grow, process, and deliver their food.

We’re not likely to get a President who will tell people to have fewer babies either.

Reuters, being afflicted with the same myopia and parochialism that warps all reporting from Washington these days, can’t help itself from reporting this as a purely political story.  And since all political stories from Washington have to be either about Republicans winning or Democrats losing, the story works its way from being ostensibly about energy to being about President Obama’s poll numbers.  But there wasn’t any real chance that Reuters was going to report the main problem this President has to deal with and all those unnamed Presidents had to deal with when trying to find ways to reduce our consumption of foreign oil.

Us.

We’re just not ready to change the way we live.

Even if we could.

______________________

Over time things might change.  There are signs that they already are.  People have been moving back into cities.  Small towns have been reviving.  Local governments are getting smarter about planning and zoning.  The governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida might hate trains, but there are a lot of people in their states who think they’re nuts and governors in other states happy to take the money they’ve rejected.

And the technology for alternative, renewable forms of energy keeps improving, making them more practical and affordable.  Of course, if they get practical and affordable enough we won’t need to change the way we live all that much, unless it’s for the better.  Nobody’s going to mind making fewer trips to the gas station.

But a revolution in the way we live or in our energy technology or both will take time.  At the moment we have to deal with two big problems.  One is that lighting things on fire is very, very, very bad for the planet.  But that’s too big an issue for me to deal with here.  The other is that it’s just costing us too much to heat and cool our homes and fill our gas tanks.  As I wrote last week, the price of gas is relative.  It’s not whether it costs more or less, it’s whether we can afford it whatever it costs.  Since few of us are about to suddenly start making a lot more money, we need it to cost a lot less.

A good and quick way to do that is for us to reduce the demand for oil ASAP.

Among other things, the President has two ways of doing this in mind that aren’t exactly popular.  Drilling for more natural gas and building more nuclear power plants.

People don’t like the first because it’s caused them to open their faucets and have jets of flame shoot out of them.

People have never been comfortable living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and what’s happened in Japan isn’t reassuring.  In fact, it’s moving people to demand that existing plants be taken offline.

Mike the Mad Biologist argues that not only is this impractical, it’s dangerous, even deadly.

See his posts here and here.

Education Rhee-form

I think this New York Magazine profile of Rightwardly drifting education reformer Michelle Rhee is meant to be admiring, although the reporter, Andrew Rice, seems to have adopted a Missourian’s form of admiration.

“Show me why I think well of you again.”

Though all modern presidents like to think of themselves as leading the national education debate, they rarely are; most important decisions are made at the state, mayoral, or school-board level. But if this decentralized uprising can be said to have a leader, it is the youthful, tough-talking, and telegenic Michelle Rhee. Four years ago, Rhee was chosen to run Washington, D.C.’s troubled school district by a young Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty. She resigned just as abruptly this past fall, after Fenty was thrown out of office. But while Rhee’s head-cracking, heresy-spouting attempt to revamp the school system was a major contributor to Fenty’s electoral defeat, she left in a blaze of martyrdom, reveling in the extravagant admiration of national ­opinion-makers, as well as her commanding role in the polemical pro-charter-school documentary Waiting for “Superman.”

Over the past few months, rather than taking another municipal gig, Rhee has been campaigning through flash-point states, like a sort of wonky Che Guevara, lending celebrity, credibility, and covering fire to political leaders who endorse her vision of school reform.

It may be admiring but it’s not all that flattering.

Rice has her stating again and again in various ways that she’s out to save the children, but he never quotes her saying anything that shows she ever thinks about children as individuals.  No stories.  No examples.  No offhand remarks that show she was ever in a classroom, although she started out her career as a teacher and apparently, after a rough rookie year,  a good one.

Children come across as her cause but not her concern.

Nothing Rice reports her saying shows she’s aware that there are such people called parents either.

And there are no quotes that show that she is either a deep or original thinker on education, on teaching, on politics, even though she has in effect become a politician, or on reform.

She has one idea that has become more of an article of faith with her than anything else.  Our schools are full of bad teachers who must be run out of the profession now.

Who those bad teachers are, what makes them bad, how do we identify them?  Rhee doesn’t seem to feel any need to answer those questions for us.  She’s answered them for herself and that’s enough for us to know.  She knows who they are and she knows what needs to be done and she’s prepared to do whatever it takes to see that it gets done.

Rhee seems to want to set herself up as principal---a very strict principal---for the entire country’s schools.

She says she doesn’t care what kind of schools those schools are, public or private, charter schools or traditional neighborhood schools.  Doesn’t matter. Just as long as they all answer to her, if not directly, then by living up to standards she’s set.

Nothing seems to turn a certain type of  leftist into a Right Winger more effectively than the discovery that the people don’t want to be led by him.  Or her.  Rhee is ostensibly a Democrat and a liberal but she has a pronounced authoritarian streak and I suspect her of being one of those “reformers” who start out on the Left but wind up on the Right as they learn to resent and hate and want to reform the people they’re supposedly championing.

Rhee is mad at teacher unions and appears to be working her way towards hating them.  And one thing about Right Wingers, they make the best haters.

Rice presses the point that Rhee has allies among liberals and conservatives.

But her “liberal” allies all seem to be of the corporate elitist type whose attitude towards democratic government is, “Why don’t you all stand aside and let the smart people handle it?”

And her most prominent conservative allies at the moment are the Right Wing bully boys who occupy the governor’s mansions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and New Jersey.  Rhee has issues with liberals and Democrats, but lately she doesn’t seem to have met a Republican she doesn’t like.

I’m just going by what I read in Rice’s article.  I don’t know Rhee and hadn’t paid much attention to her before this.  And maybe I’m overly impressed by this scene:

Whisking from Fox News to Bloomberg before heading to the Today show, Rhee picks up a copy of the Journal and scans it for a column under her own byline arguing that fiscal crises around the country could usher in “the best of times” for education reformers. By lunchtime, she’s in the back of a Town Car on her way to the Capitol Building in Trenton, to be Christie’s guest of honor at his State of the State address. “No one in America has been more clear that we must change our public-education system from one that caters to the feelings of adults to one that prepares our children for the 21st century,” the governor says as he introduces her to the crammed chamber. “Michelle … I want you to count New Jersey among those who, like you, are finally putting students first.” When he finishes, Christie strides over and wraps Rhee in a bearish hug, and they recede to a closed-door meeting in the governor’s chambers. Then Rhee is speeding back to Cipriani’s on 42nd Street, where Davis Guggenheim, the director of Waiting for “Superman,” is to receive the award for Best Documentary at the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures’ annual gala.

It’s troubling enough that Rhee sees the recession and the pain it’s causing as an opportunity to inflict more pain in the name of her cause.  But…

Chris Christie?

First, Republicans hate teacher unions for the same reasons they hate all unions.  Unions give workers the strength to stand up to bosses and they help get out the vote for Democrats.

Breaking the teacher unions isn’t about improving the quality of education and it’s not about bringing deficits under control.  Republicans care about education as much as they care about deficits.

This is all about putting Republicans in control of all levels of government so they can do what Republicans believe government is meant to do, help their rich friends and donors make more money.

And for all their talk about merit pay, Republicans clearly think all teachers are overpaid, the good ones as well as the bad ones.  But then they think all American workers, except hedge fund managers and corporate executives, are overpaid.  The money Rhee will need to attract and reward the best and the brightest into teaching and to support them on the job won’t be there if Republicans are running things everywhere.

All the current budget cutting that Rhee sees as an opportunity is resulting in the one sure way to turn good teachers into mediocre ones---overcrowding classrooms.

The Republicans of course have a solution to that problem.  The same solution they offer to any problem that arises from their policies of helping the rich get richer.

The market will sort it out.

We’re talking about opening and, naturally, subsidizing, lots of private schools.

Leaving aside for now those Republicans who hate public schools and are all for vouchers and more private schools so that their children don’t have to mix with THEM or learn things that might have the kids questioning Right Wing Christian beliefs and defying the authority of the preachers, generally what Republicans don’t like about public schools is that they cost a lot of money and yet nobody gets rich off of them.

Republicans see all of life as business.  That is, they think the purpose of life is to make money.  In their eyes, education reform is an opportunity to privatize.

That means turning education into a business.

They don’t really care if a school turns out well-educated future citizens.  Well-educated future citizens are just the product.  The point is to turn a profit while turning out the product.

Now, how many businesses not only fail to turn a profit in their first year or two in operation but out and out fail?

Rhee talks about how the first couple of years of schooling are critical to a child’s intellectual development.  You get only one chance at first grade. 

But what about all those kids who are in first grade when their schools run as businesses are failing?

They go back to underfunded, overcrowded public schools?

Rhee doesn’t show that she’s thought things through that far. 

Again, she doesn’t show that she’s thinking about anything except getting rid of bad teachers.

So, second, there are plenty of bad teachers.  There are plenty of good teachers too.  But what there are a lot more of is teachers in between.

They have their good days and their bad days, good years and bad years.

It’s very easy for a determined principal to make one of those teachers look like a bad teacher.

For that matter, it’s not all that hard for a determined principal to make a good teacher look like a bad teacher.

The unions’ job is to protect those teachers.

Rhee seems to think---echoing the current crop of Republican demagogues’ rhetoric---that unions are all about protecting bad teachers.

Conversely, she seems to think---again echoing current Republican demagoguery---that the unions ought to see it as their job to be concerned with the children and the quality of their education.

But that’s the job of teachers not their unions.  The unions look out for the teachers so the teachers can look out for their students.

And it’s not unions that get in the way of teachers doing their jobs.

It’s administrators, bureaucrats, politicians, and, sadly, all too often, parents.

Sometimes it’s other teachers, which is a whole ‘nother ballgame.

Rhee is furious with the unions but for the time being she is not a union buster.  At least, she doesn’t see herself as one.

But her Right Wing allies are union busters.  And what happens if they succeed?

Besides over-crowded classrooms and lower pay, teachers will get fewer and stingier benefits, same as all other non-unionized American workers. 

Just a reminder, benefits are not party gifts.  They are compensation.  We give teachers good benefits because we can’t pay them the high salaries they deserve.  Without those benefits, it will be harder to attract and keep teachers, any teachers, not just the most talented ones. 

Rhee believes that being a good teacher is a talent not a skill.  You’re born with the gift.  Which I think is true.  But if teachers are like artists and athletes in being born with a gift, they are also like them in that they get better as they gain experience and head into their primes.

Athletes tend to reach their primes in their late twenties and early thirties.  Artists reach theirs later, in their forties and fifties, although for some their primes stretch well into what for the rest of us is old age.  I can’t say for sure when teachers reach theirs.  But I would think it’s probably in their thirties and forties and even early fifties, when they’ve piled up the experience but still have the energy and emotional endurance.

Which means they enter their primes right about the time they are starting their families and continue in their primes through the years when they are buying houses, raising kids and sending them off to college, and, in a good many cases, taking on the care of aging parents.

Their primes, then, coincide with the years when they need more and more money and desperately count on job security and keep themselves going by focusing on consolation that at the end of the day they’re going to have a well-earned comfortable retirement.

And now we’re talking about cutting their pay and reserving the right to take away their jobs at whim?

You bet we are!  And this kind of talk is coming from both Rhee’s supposedly liberal allies as well as her Right Wing bully boy ones.

I’m telling you.  If I was a good teacher in my prime right now, I’d be looking into early retirement or a career change.  And if I was a bright and ambitious young education major I’d be applying to law schools.

Ok.  None of the above is meant to downplay the idea that our schools and our approach to education need to be reformed.

And as it happens I agree with Rhee on some things, particularly in it not mattering---in theory, at least---if a school is public or private, a charter school or a traditional neighborhood school.  I’m a liberal.  That means I’m not in favor of what ought to be.  I’m in favor of what works.  We started our kids off in private school and someday I’ll write about how that didn’t work out and how a charter school saved our lives.  We happen now to live in a district with good public schools but we lucked into it.  There are other districts nearby where the schools are nightmares and I don’t know what we’d have done if we’d found ourselves living in one of them.

But those schools aren’t nightmares because they are full of bad teachers the union won’t let the administrations fire.

They are nightmares for a slew of reasons, not the least of which is that they don’t have enough money.

You want to be a teacher, a good one?  What’s the surest way to guarantee that you will be?

Get yourself hired in an upper middle class suburban school district.

That’s where you’re going to have to deal with the fewest outside problems that get in the way of your doing your job to the best of your ability.

The irony is that Rhee’s best allies in reforming our schools aren’t “liberal” hedge fund managers or conservative politicians on the make.

They are teachers.

To her credit, Rhee does seem to have considered this and she sees her movement’s organization, StudentsFirst, as offering teachers a kind of alternative union.

Of course it’s one run by her rules.

______________________

As I said, nothing in Rice’s article shows that Rhee has thought deeply about what makes a good teacher good.  She uses the same metric to judge good teachers as she uses to judge bad teachers:  How well their students do on standardized tests.

Ask good teachers these days what outside problems get in the way of their doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and one of the things most of them will probably tell you is “Having to teach to the test.”

In other words, Rhee’s preferred method of measuring a teacher’s performance tends to nobble that teacher.

The other problem with relying on standardized tests is that there is a strong temptation to cheat.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of [D.C. public school Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus’] classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

USA TODAY was looking at years when Michelle Rhee was running D.C.’s schools and using test scores to make decisions about which teachers to reward and which to fire.

Read the whole article here.

Hat tips to Tom Watson and Bruce Bernstein.

Photo courtesy of AP by way of USA Today.

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Killing is very, very wrong

An alligator in Florida’s Myakka River State Park, setting for wild sex, murder, and the ingenious use of a tree as a giant bong in Tim Dorsey’s new comic crime novel, Electric Barracuda.  Photo courtesy Florida Park Service.

“I’m unable to get my brain around that level of cruelty.  How can anyone kill another living thing for sport.”

“Well, a lot of reasons,” said Serge.

Jane turned and looked oddly at him.

Serge grinned.  “I mean, a lot of reasons that are very, very wrong.”---from Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey.

A little Serge goes a long way.

I’m talking about for readers of Tim Dorsey’s novels about the vigilante serial killer, Serge Storms.  For characters encountering Serge, a little Serge can be way too much.  Experiencing a little bit of Serge often means dying, usually in an interesting and creatively complicated way.

Serge only kills you if you’ve gotten on his bad side, which means you’ve gotten on the bad side of the human race.

Serge kills people who have worked hard to earn killing.

This usually makes other killers or the otherwise criminally violent his victims.  But the merely obnoxiously anti-social  can also wind up the final step in the Rube Goldberg death machines Serge likes to construct.

This includes people who' get rich by committing theft and murder in legally-sanctioned ways, apparently legitimate citizens whose frauds and schemes don’t draw the proper attention of the police, and people who are guilty of just generally being assholes who make a deliberate habit of ruining other people’s days.

So a pair of skinheads who beat up homeless old men for sport are squeezed to death wrapped in garden hoses Serge has rigged to constrict around them like snakes.

A hit man and the husband who hired him to kill his wife are incinerated together in an explosion triggered by a cap gun.

A couple of a murderous drug dealer’s hired goons are eaten by pigs.  You’ll have to read the book.

A couple more of that drug dealer’s thugs are smothered in blocks of construction sealant.

A crooked garage owner who specializes in bilking customers out of hundreds of dollars for transmission repairs they didn’t need and he didn’t make anyway fries underneath his own car with his nose up against the drip pan of his tranny.

And that’s just in one book, Nuclear Jellyfish.

In Hurricane Punch, a grifter gouging people on the price of bags of ice in the aftermath of a hurricane gets cooked to death inside an industrial-sized picnic cooler.

In Torpedo Juice, a mugger is shot to death from inside his own body, killed by bullets Serge made him swallow and drawn out of him by the magnetic field inside an MRI machine and a shady real estate developer and Ponzi-schemer parasails into a waterspout.

And in Gator A-Go-Go another drug dealer’s enforcer is guillotined by an automatic garage door, a driver who refuses to pull over to let a fire engine pass is sawed in half, and a…well, you get the picture.

All of these murders are diversions for Serge, side-trips from his main order of business which is rescuing some innocent from the clutches of some really, really bad guys and arranging for those really, really bad guys’ just comeuppance, Serge, of course, being the one who gets to decide what counts as just.

Which is why it’s a bit surprising and a little perplexing in Dorsey’s latest Serge adventure in murder and mayhem, Electric Barracuda, when nearly a hundred and fifty pages pass, between Serge’s meeting at a playground with a sexual predator and his encounter in a swamp with an alligator poacher, without Serge killing anybody.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t up to anything reckless, dangerous, or crazy in all that time.  He keeps himself busy.

He blogs.

Serge is a veteran blogger and has kept a running commentary on his career going on the internet in other novels.  But he has a new blog in Electric Barracuda.  This one’s a travel guide for fugitives.

Or for tourists who want to see what Serge regards as the real Florida, which, he believes, is best experienced on the run, since that’s how he’s mainly come to know it himself.

Florida, as Serge explains to his faithful inebriated companion, Coleman, is the fugitive capital of the United States, the perfect place for criminals from all over to come and hide out, and not just because there are lots of out of the way places to hide out in.

Criminals on the lam can easily blend in with Florida’s supposedly law-abiding general population:

“Florida’s the perfect camouflage,” said Serge.  “Up in Middle America, even one of our low-profile whack jobs would stick out like Pamela Anderson bronco-riding a UFO.  A minimum of fifty calls to the cops.  But down here we’re so over-saturated with hard core street freaks that everyone energetically ignores them.  We don’t notice and report each strangeness flare-up, or we’d totally cease to be able to run errands.”

You’ll notice that in that passage Serge seems to include himself among the state’s non-freakazoid residents.

But as an expert fugitive, Serge believes he needs to give his readers an active demonstration of how the tour works.

The reason Serge goes so long without adding to his body count is that he’s busy running from a make-shift posse that includes three agents from the FDLE, Florida’s own version of the FBI, any number of cops, a beautiful mystery woman, and a bounty hunter who is the star of a reality TV series and his entourage.

If the bounty hunter, who as known as the Doberman, reminds you of any actual person with his own TV series, you should know that the Doberman’s show isn’t as popular for the collars he makes as for the injuries he inflicts on himself in pursuit of those collars---

And with a salute into the cameras, the celebrity bounty hunter opened [the throttle on his motorcycle] wide, popped a wheelie and squealed across the parking lot.

“Now that’s a real man,” said [a fan].

The Doberman raced even faster, still balanced on his back tire, preparing to crash through the motel door.  Except he misjudged by half a foot and hit the wall.  The bike flipped, catapulting him into the bushes.  Cameras and lights raced toward thick shrubbery with nothing but cowboy boots sticking out the top.

While Serge is leading his pursuers on a merry chase down Florida’s backroads and through its backwoods, and not incidentally giving readers quick tours of some of Serge’s---and presumably Dorsey’s---favorite off-the-beaten-track bars, restaurants, and nature spots, the murder and mayhem is taken care of in the past, via flashbacks to the 1920s, by members of Al Capone’s gang.

The hiding  and attempted recovery of the contents of Capone’s vault, which Geraldo opened on TV to such disappointment, center the plot, such as it is, of Electric Barracuda.

As I mentioned up top, a little Serge can go a long way with readers.

Actually, he can be hard to take for long stretches.

Actually, he can get annoying.

Serge is crazy, of course, nutty beyond limit, even for a psychopathic mass murderer.  Dorsey keeps us distracted from Serge’s blood-thirstiness by making Serge easily distracted himself.  He’s given Serge a profound case of ADD.  His thoughts and focus waver and jump within sentences.  He’ll fixate on an idea or a course of action for less than a page or two, sometimes less than a line of dialog, and then instantly switch his attention to something else and fixate on that.  Which not only makes it hard to follow Serge’s plans, it can make it hard to follow the plot.

He also has a very idiosyncratic relation with reality, naturally, since thanks to his ADD he tends to experience it in disjointed bits and pieces, and his problems with focus often cause him to act on whatever lunatic thought or impulse passes through his head.  On the Serge lunacy meter, dispensing rough justice to criminals who’ve earned their macabre and gruesome fates clocks in at a fairly low number relative to other acts of craziness he’s moved to do.

And he’s a compulsive talker.  He details all his thoughts in hyper-kinetic monologs that veer wildly from topic to topic and point to point. 

Serge is best appreciated when he’s counterbalanced by other, much more psychologically and emotionally grounded characters who behave relatively sanely or as sanely as a person can behave who’s picked up the company of a vigilante serial killer or attracted the angry attention of the criminals destined to fall prey to Serge’s sense of justice and fair play.

Such a character is definitely not Serge’s regular sidekick, Coleman.

Coleman’s role in Electric Barracuda is the same as in other novels he appears in, to be along for the ride, asking Serge questions that prompt another monolog.  Other than that his job is to be source of drug jokes, drunk jokes, fat slob jokes, drunken and drugged out fat slob in lust jokes, and lots of scatological humor that is occasionally truly funny but is usually just crude and gross.

And it’s not Serge’s nemesis, Agent Mahoney, a series regular who is in his way as nuts as Serge.  Agent Mahoney believes himself to be a character in a bad 1950s pulp detective novel and he dresses, speaks, and acts accordingly, a running gag that only works when it is turned against the narrative itself, when Dorsey cheekily makes it clear that what’s happening would make more sense if this was a Mickey Spillane novel where the situation could be sorted out by the likes of Mike Hammer or Mahoney as he believes he is.

But in Electric Barracuda Mahoney is even more literally along for the ride than Coleman and he doesn’t have much to do except explain what for reasons of plot convenience Serge had to leave unexplained a scene or two before.

Usually, then, the role of the sane (relative to Serge, although not necessarily less violent) and sympathetic character is played by the threatened innocent Serge has assigned himself to protect.

In Electric Barracuda the role of threatened innocent is taken by…Serge.

Serge spends most of the novel rescuing himself, after contriving to put himself in imminent danger of capture by the posse.

He does have someone else under his protection.  A little boy he’s told is his illegitimate son, a claim Serge believes because the kid turns out to be something of a chip off the old block. 

Five and a half year old Mikey is as reckless, hyper, and reality-challenged and lacking in impulse control as Serge.  He isn’t a killer though. Yet.

The boy aimed the gun at the two men. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!…You’re dead.  You’re supposed to fall down.”

Serge glanced at Coleman. “Fall down.”

The pair hit the ground.

They faced each other, cheeks to the carpet, hearing little footsteps.

“What’s he doing now?” asked Coleman.

In sequence, they each felt the gun barrel behind their left ear.  “Pow! Pow!…Pow! Pow!”

“Those are double taps to the back of the head for certainty,” said Serge.  “Standard assassination procedure.”

“Wonder where he learned that?”

“Probably in school.  They grow up so much faster these days.”

“Now he’s going through our wallets.”

Serge hopped to his feet.  “All right, playtime’s over.”

So, the sanity in Electric Barracuda---the scenes in which the narrative relaxes and the plot works its way forward cleanly and clearly and characters get to talk, act, and think in ways that resemble the way actual human beings talk, act, and think---gets passed along through the book from supporting character to supporting character.  These include:

Agent Lowe, a Woody Allen-esque would-be supercop who is the only character who takes Mahoney for what Mohoney takes himself to be.

A ranger named Jane who patrols Myakka River State Park and is this book’s sexual interest for Serge---despite or maybe because of his madnesses, Serge is irresistibly attractive to women.

A cheerful pair of biker brothers named Skid Marks and Bacon Strips.

A photographer whose specialty is nude portraits of women who pay him to take their picture.  His nickname is Lucky and he has a real-life counterpart. (NSFW.)

A cohort of aging wiseguys who knew Serge’s gangster grandfather back in the day.

And a moonshine runner named Crazy Murphy who exists in the novel’s Capone-era past and accidentally witnesses the disposal of the contents of Capone’s vault.

Electric Barracuda is something of a bridge novel.  Dorsey’s previous installment in Serge’s saga, Gator A-Go-Go, came to a rousing conclusion that didn’t exactly wrap things up for Serge but felt like what would be if Dorsey was writing a TV series instead of a series of novels a season finale.  In Electric Barracuda, Dorsey seems to be working hard to get the new season underway without yet having decided where to take it. 

I’m not sure readers who are coming new to the series will find it a good place to start.  If you’re looking to get to know Serge, and Dorsey, at their best and funniest, and you don’t want to go all the way back to the very beginning, I recommend starting with Hurricane Punch or Nuclear Jellyfish.  You can jump forward or backward from either of those without having to worry too much about which book follows which.

For readers who are already fans of Serge, Electric Barracuda provides satisfying helpings of the usual mixture of violence, farce, sex, satire, and virtual trips to the bar.

Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey, published by William Morrow, is available from Amazon.

And yes, kids, there is a kindle edition.

The quotable Bob Herbert: On the incorporation of the Amalgamated States of America, Ltd.

Fun.  We live in a country that would prefer to close libraries than ask millionaires to pay a little extra in taxes or multi-billon dollar corporations with whopping big government contracts to pay any taxes at all.

Last chance to quote Herbert as a New York Times columnist.  This is from his final column there:

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Read the whole piece, Losing Our Way.

Velvet

Elizabeth Taylor’s career as a serious actress was well over by the time I became a regular movie-goer.  I grew up knowing her as a celebrity, someone who was famous for playing the female lead in an ongoing real life soap opera.  Which made her something of a joke.

In fact, I probably knew of her mainly through jokes. Her many marriages provided the set-up and punchlines for countless easy laughs on The Tonight Show and when I was a kid staying up late against orders The Tonight Show was where I got all my ideas about what life was like in Hollywood.

Nance makes the point I’m going to try to make better in the first graph of her post, A girl and her bijoux:

Somewhere in the firehose of information that blew past me yesterday — just another day at the office — someone said that Elizabeth Taylor, like Frank Sinatra, was a generational artist. You had to catch her early to consider her an artist at all, because at some point she stopped being an artist, pretty much stopped working at all, and was content to simply be Elizabeth Taylor ™, the brand.

Richard Burton should have been part of the same joke, but I knew him from my parents’ copy of the soundtrack to Camelot, his starring role in one of my favorite war movies, Where Eagles Dare, and his appearances on The Tonight Show---he could always be counted on to tell a great story, and his stories, although the laughs in them were often at his own expense, tended to feature Burton as a swashbuckling rogue of the type that would have made a likeable anti-hero in a movie.  Burton was pretty much done as a movie star by this point too, but in his appearances on The Tonight Show (of which there may have only been one, but it made a big impression on me, as you can tell) he made me see him as a movie star and not just a celebrity famous for being the on-again-off-again Mr Elizabeth Taylor.

If Taylor ever appeared on The Tonight Show, I don’t remember it.  I’m sure if she did she was gracious and charming, but that wouldn’t have impressed me then.  I didn’t know that being gracious and charming was a virtue most celebrities don’t bother to practice.

At any rate, before I was old enough to know what a movie star was or learned to recognize and appreciate good movie acting, I probably saw only two of her movies.  National Velvet and Ivanhoe.  I must have liked her in Ivanhoe because I’ve always rooted for Rebecca over Rowena and have never understood why Ivanhoe chose Rowena and that must have been Taylor’s doing because, as much as I loved the novel, it certainly couldn’t have been Sir Walter Scott’s writing that did it.

And for a long time after I was old enough to know better, I had watched only two more of her films.  Cleopatra and The Taming of the Shrew.  And both of those I saw as costume party episodes in the Liz and Dick soap opera.

I’ve since seen Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff.

I was better able to see her as the characters she plays in those movies, but not to the point of losing sight of the celebrity.

And I watched those three for reasons other than that starred Elizabeth Taylor.

And I wouldn’t have watched them if the main reason to watch them was that they starred Elizabeth Taylor.

I know this because when I set out to watch as many great old movies as I could (when I was eighteen I thought I could do this in a year or two) I deliberately skipped a lot of her movies.  I had sophisticated ambitions but unsophisticated tastes.  She didn’t make any typical westerns, comedies, or war movies.  (Not as an adult movie star.  So I don’t count Life With Father or Father of the Bride.)

She made dramas for grown-ups and I guess I wasn’t grown-up enough to find those interesting.

My point is that while I’m sad she’s gone and I understand and respect the sense of loss her fans are feeling, I’m in the position of a non-sports fan trying to understand what the big deal was that Mickey Mantle died.

I feel bad about this.

But the fortunate difference is that if you didn’t grow up caring about Mickey Mantle you can’t develop a real appreciation for what kind of player he was and what made him great.

I can watch Taylor’s movies.

I’m just not sure where to start.

I put The Comedians, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Butterfield 8 in my Netflix queue this morning.

What else should I add?  Which should I move to the top of the queue?

___________________

Lots of tributes to Taylor on the web.  Wolcott rounded-up a few to begin with, but I don’t think you can do better than starting with Sheila O’Malley’s From Velvet to Helena: A Life of Launching Herself into the Imaginary.

Update: Keep those suggestions coming in, folks.  Right now, M.A. Peel has me convinced The Sandpiper belongs at the top of the queue. See her post, The Shadow of Her Smile.

Liver-eatin’ Mannion

Somebody out there keeps signing me up for newsletters from websites devoted to hunting and guns.

Got one today.

It was Bliss Creek Outfitters alerting me to the fact that the state of Wyoming has held a drawing for elk hunting licenses for non-state residents.

They also want me to know they have only two openings left for their spring bear hunts.

I appreciate the heads up.  Wish I knew who to thank.

I’d like to think it’s some well-wisher who’s intuited my inner Jeremiah Johnson.

But maybe it’s a friend who thinks he’s being funny.

But a friend would know I’d only be mildly perplexed by these sites not amused.  He’d know I have nothing against hunters or hunting (I don’t count drunk amateurs as hunters or what they do as hunting) and I’m not a gun control absolutist.  So he’d know that the joke wouldn’t be on me and he’d know I wouldn’t think it was on the people who visit those websites on purpose.

Well, except maybe this one.

Actually, that one’s a little scary.

So maybe a reader who wanted to warn me about all the nuts with guns who think they’re soldiers who are out there signed me up for that one.

I got Storm Mountain’s newsletter back in December.  It began “Happy Holidays.”

Obviously these nuts with guns are liberals or they’d have written “Merry Christmas.”

I suspect, though, that I’m on these mailing lists thanks to some conservative reader who thinks he’s getting me good.  He’s thinking, “Boy, this one will make that candy-ass liberal Mannion’s head explode!”

I’m pretty sure I know who it is too.  There’s a character who swings by every now and then, skims a sentence or two of a post in which I’ve said something mean about conservatives, blows a fuse, and then gets himself all worked up in comments that I don’t post because, well, they’re usually just nasty.

But from his comments it’s clear he is sure he knows me like a book.

The Communist Manifesto, I think.

What he thinks is that I am his nightmare of a liberal.  The living incarnation of a caricature out of Mallard Fillmore.

I should post a picture of me in my motorcycle leathers.

This guy thinks Nancy Nall is the female counterpart to this caricature which I guess means he thinks she’s gay.  I don’t know what he makes of Nance’s constant references to her husband.

Probably thinks Alan’s a wimp.

Alan should challenge him to a duel.

Weapons of choice:  Power tools.

Whoever does the best job of residing a house in a day wins.

Conservative wuss doesn’t stand a chance.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure this guy doesn’t actually read anything Nance or I write.  He feels he doesn’t have to.  He knows us, knows what we think. When he opens his browser and calls up our webpages, he sees nothing except the caricatures he expects to see.

So, if it is him signing me up for these newsletters, I imagine he’s doing it because he gets a kick out of imagining how I’ll go all woozy and nose-bleedy at the idea of manly men and womanly women and their guns.

Now, liberals can get in the habit of thinking of conservatives and Right Wingers as caricatures too.  The thing is our caricatures of them are actually scary.  We tend to picture mean and angry types, whether they belong to evil corporations or Tea Party mobs, with the power to act on their anger and hatred.  They’ve either got the money to buy and bully the rest of us with or they carry, well, you know, guns.

But their caricatures of us portray us all as essentially weak.

Weak and ineffectual.

This image is so powerful and so persuasive in their own minds that they can look at President Obama, who is responsible for killing lots of the brown-skinned, Allah-praising people they want killed every single day, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and now Libya, and still call him weak and timid.

It’s central to their definition of liberal.  Liberals don’t have the guts to use force.  Hit us and we won’t hit back.  We’ll just curl up in a little ball and sob out an apology for America’s greatness.

So of course the idea of shooting a rifle at Bambi’s going to upset me, right?

I’m a liberal.

Liberals get all squooshy at the the thought of violence of any kind.

But if that’s how we are, if that’s what we are, why do they get so upset at the thought of us?  Why worry about us?  Why get so angry?

What can we do to them?

Sign them up for the Whole Foods newsletter?

It’s like we scare them.

Relax, dude.

I’m a liberal.

Liberals don’t have the guts.

Unless our women nag us into it.

Oh, wait.

I get it now.

You’re scared of our girls.

Double Falsehood, a play by William Shakespeare…or not

Slate Holmgren as the duplicitous but guilt-ridden Henriquez wrestled to the floor by his own conscience in Classic Stage Company’s production of Double Falsehood a play “by” William Shakespeare.

The main reason for either staging or going to see a production of Double Falsehood is that it might have been written by William Shakespeare.

Some of it, at any rate.

The questions of whether or not Shakespeare wrote it and how much of it and what parts of it are distractions.

Sit in the theater listening for Shakespeare and you’ll miss the play. 

But sit in the Classic Stage Company’s theater on East 13th Street in Greenwich Village and pay attention to the main reason to see this particular production of Double Falsehood, Slate Holmgren as the charismatically neurotic villain Henriquez, and you can enjoy the triple treat of fine acting, a psychologically and emotionally tense drawing room drama that very oddly blends Elizabethan and Jacobean prosody with a prescient Edwardian realism, and contact with the ghost of William Shakespeare who seems to not so much at work in Henriquez’s lines of dialog as thinking out loud through Holmgren’s performance.

It’s as if Holmgren is responding on the spot to notes the playwright’s giving in rehearsal.

“Try this.  Imagine that Mercutio isn’t content to make fun of Romeo’s infatuation with Juliet, he sets out to seduce her and steal her away from him.”

Mercutio, by the way, is just one of several Shakespearean characters who keep popping out of Holmgren’s protean Henriquez like new personalities in a severely fractured psyche.

Double Falsehood was written in the early 18th Century by a lawyer named Lewis Theobald who claimed to have adapted it from Cardenio, a supposedly lost play Shakespeare co-wrote at the end of his career with John Fletcher, an up and coming young playwright with whom Shakespeare collaborated on two other late plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsman.

At the time, Double Falsehood was generally dismissed as a put-up job.

Theobald was one of the first professional Shakespeare scholars.  He said he’d found a manuscript version of Cardenio, something that hadn’t been seen for a hundred years, but he refused to show it to the general public.  That manuscript, if it existed, was presumably lost in a fire after Theobald’s death. 

Over the last couple of decades, scholars have concluded that Theobald was probably working from a reliable version of Cardenio, if not from a contemporary manuscript, and they have been able to tease out from Theobald’s play which lines and scenes were likely written by Shakespeare, which by Fletcher, and which by Theobald himself stitching the thing back together after tearing Cardenio to pieces.

Theobald apparently decided that Cardenio as it was wouldn’t play well to an audience that had begun to develop a taste for poems, plays, and those literary upstarts, novels, that more directly and realistically reflected life as it was being lived in 18th Century England.

He also seems to have thought that his audience would be more open to a “new” play by Shakespeare if it was more like the plays they already liked best, Othello and Hamlet and Julius Caesar, than like the later romances Cardenio followed and presumably resembled.  He cut out the more outrageous Jacobean plot contrivances and characters and pared things down to something much more realistic, intimate, and character-driven (as opposed to plot-driven) problem play.

The result is a drama that seems to look forward to the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde (Think Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Ideal Husband, though, not The Importance of Being Earnest) as much as backwards to Shakespeare and his Jacobean colleagues and rivals.

This effect is heightened by director Brian Kulick’s understated staging and the handsome Edwardian costume designs by Oana Botez-Ban. 

Double Falsehood is Shakespearean in a number of ways, not necessarily chiefly but definitely most obviously in its resemblance to one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, The Two Gentleman of Verona.

Herniquez, a young nobleman, is engaged to Violante (MacKenizie Meehan), who is noble of heart and soul but of common birth.  Her lowly social status doesn’t bother Henriquez, but it allows him to presume. 

He doesn’t feel compelled to wait for the wedding night.

He rapes her.

Immediately he is overcome by guilt and self-loathing that take hold of him like a violent illness and literally prostrate him. 

As dynamically played by Holmgren, Henriquez’ hyper-aggressive conscience is visceral.  It doesn’t speak to him through his heart or his head.  It works reflexively through his gut and lungs and muscles and nerves to punish him physically.  It takes his breath, doubles him up with nausea, and drops him to the floor paralyzed with pain.

Naturally, he blames Violante, both for her own rape and his guilt.

His conscience decides to punish him for his hypocrisy too.

Meanwhile, Henriquez has already developed an infatuation with his friend Julio’s (Clayton Apgar) fiancee, Leonora (Hayley Treider), and has begun plotting to steal her away from him.

Henriquez has an advantage over Julio.  Leonora’s father, Don Bernardo, has forbidden her to marry Julio, basically on the grounds that Julio reminds him too much of himself as a young man.  Gruffly and amiably played by Jon DeVries, looking like a retired sea captain made permanently squink-eyed by staring too long and too hard at stormy horizons, Don Bernardo bullies the good-hearted Julio from his house and orders Leonora to marry Henriquez, switching her affections accordingly.

He doesn’t seem to notice what a vain and twisted renegade Henriquez is.  He just sees him as the sort of rich and handsome and charming man his late, beloved wife should have married. 

For some reason he can’t articulate to Leonora, he has come to think that his wife made a mistake that he’s determined his daughter won’t repeat.

Or it may be that, remembering his wife’s love for him, he’s afraid that Leonora will love Julio just as completely, leaving him cut out of her life.

Or both.

The working out of this set-up requires Julio to go mad and wander the wilderness in his underwear, Leonora to seek sanctuary in a convent, and Violante to dress up as a boy and go to work as a shepherd.

Did I say that Theobald cut out the outrageous aspects that characterized Shakespeare’s late romances?

All that passes by in a rush in the second act.

The plot of Double Falsehood is driven by Henriquez’ and Don Bernardo’s hypocrisies and perverse betrayals of self and friends and families.

Obviously Double Falsehood is not like The Two Gentleman of Verona in being a comedy.  It’s enough like it, though, to be taken as a revisiting and a revision, something like what Woody Allen has done recently, using Cassandra’s Dream to re-examine points he glossed over in Crimes and Misdemeanors and reimagining Interiors as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

Too bad this wasn’t Shakespeare’s doing.

What Theobald has given us is an idea of where Shakespeare might have gone if he hadn’t retired to Stratford (and if the theatrical conventions of the times had allowed) which is satisfying to contemplate if you’re not a fan of the romances, which I’m not, not even of The Tempest.  It annoys the hell out of me.  When Miranda declares O brave new word that has such people in it, I want to shout at her, But there are no people here.  You’re all just mouthpieces for conventions that were hackneyed years before Shakespeare wrote you!  You’re a bunch of toys he’s using to play verbal games with.

Double Falsehood is peopled.  They aren’t necessarily new people but they’re intriguing variations.

If these characters are Shakespeare’s (or more his than they are Fletcher’s or Theobald’s), they are driven in a way few of his past characters were, by personal psychological forces rather than dramatic necessity.

Everything that happens to Hamlet happens because his uncle murdered his father and married his mother. All his complex psychological motivations, whatever the actor playing him has decided they are, are revealed under stress caused by the fact of that event over which he had no control.  Like Romeo, and a host of other characters, Hamlet is fortune’s fool.

Shakespeare’s villains are able to kick a plot into action. But they do it consciously and deliberately.  Richard III, Iago, and Edmund decide to “play the villain.”  They don’t have to though.  They are coolly in command of their own bad behavior.  But Henriquez is carried away by himself.  And he’s not the only one.

As I said, Don Bernardo acts out of a combination of self-loathing and jealousy.  He appears to know it, too, or at least have an inkling that there’s something not quite right in his stated reasons for forbidding Leonora to marry Julio.  He knows he’s making his daughter unhappy and he doesn’t want to, but he does it anyway.

And for her part, Leonora, who appears to have freedoms not usually granted to marriageable daughters in conventional 16th and 17th Century plays, gives in to her father’s wishes in a way that suggests she’s not being obedient so much as masochistic.

With her big round eyes and pouty little bow mouth, Hayley Treider has the look of a petulant kewpie doll who may have to accept being taken home by a stranger as a prize at the fair but is determined to show she doesn’t have to like it.  Her father may think he has a right to give her away, Henriquez may think he’s won her, but she’s going to show the both of them that she is her own person by surrendering herself to their wills and whims.

Treider’s Leonora is feistier, more self-reliant, more active, and sexier than most of Shakespeare’s ingenues (which makes me think she’s more Fletcher’s creation than his).  She and Julio are as much in lust as in love and, although out of maidenly modesty she resists some of his more forward displays of affection, she is quite as equally aroused and gives clear signals that Julio’s going to get as good as he gives once the vows are formally exchanged.  Theirs is a healthy and loving sort of lust, too, and you can see it mellowing over the years into the kind of pleasant middle-aged affectionateness that carries a good and happily married couple through a long life together.  Which makes her acquiescence in the imposition of her own unhappiness all the more strange and perverse.

When she finally begins to stand up for herself, it’s not a clear-minded act of self-assertion.  It’s more the case that she’s overwhelmed by revulsion towards Henriquez, and the source of that revulsion may actually be her attraction to him.

Meanwhile, Julio goes mad not merely because the playwrights need him to in order to open up the play and take the action outside where there’s more room for melodrama and romance.  He falls apart on his own because he’s not up to the demands of being a hero.  He takes to the hills the way a frightened and overwhelmed little boy would hide in a closet with his favorite blanket.

And Violante sets out to punish Henriquez by making him marry her, which, considering she knows exactly what he is and how much his love his worth, is effectively a form of self-punishment as well, almost as if she agrees with him that what he did to her was her fault.

All this perversity and emotional masochism gives Double Falsehood its very modern feel. 

The production is saved from being either a set of psychological case studies or an academic exercise by the directness and freshness of the performances.

Holmgren is the star here but he doesn’t steal the show.  Along with the very likeable presences of DeVries and Treider, we have Apgar as Julio giving strength and sympathy to a character who could have been nothing more than a passive dope and Meehan who makes Violante the most healthy-minded and well-adjusted person on stage despite her bizarre mission to marry her rapist.

And taking on a number of roles each, Bryce Gill and Philip Goodwin provide lively, cheerful and cheering, and intelligent counterbalances to the neuroses and weird self-entanglements of the major characters.

Still, Holmgren’s performance centers the production.  I was a little disappointed as the show was getting underway and I realized that I was about to see a play by two outsized playwrights whose most famous collaboration resulted in burning down the Globe Theater thanks to a special effect going awry done as essentially a chamber piece with a small cast working on virtually no set with minimal props.

I expect crowds and spectacle with my Shakespeare.

But Holmgren is a crowd and a spectacle all by himself.

I mentioned that there’s a touch of Mercutio in Henriquez.  Mainly it’s in his volatility and changeableness.  Henriquez has little of Mercutio’s wit.  But he’s also a dramatic brother to King Lear’s Edmund, Cymbelline’s Iachimo, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Bertram of All’s Well That Ends Well, and Iago.  Not to mention the deceitful Proteus in Two Gentleman of Verona.  And Holmgren takes us through scene work for all those villains and anti-heroes, as if demonstrating how he might go about playing each in productions of their respective plays. 

That’s a side-effect though.  Those characters are brought onstage by family resemblance, the way one of a group of brothers carries with him vivid reminders of all the others to the point of it being nearly impossible to see him for himself by himself.

Which is a way of saying that Holmgren is one actor giving us five actors’ worth of a performance.

Double Falsehood directed by Brian Kulick runs through April 3rd at Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, New York, NY.  Click here for tickets.

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Classic Stage Company.

Gassy

You’re running on fumes.

You pull into a station on your way home from work.

It’s near the end of the week.  Paycheck’s almost spent before the weekend’s underway.

Three seventy a gallon tonight.  Fill up’s going to cost what?  Around fifty-five bucks?  What are you going to do?

Put it on the card, hope you got enough to cover it when the bill comes?

Pay cash?

There goes your night out at the movies.  That or you do a smaller shop at the grocery store, put off paying the phone bill again.

I got it!

Sell the car right now.  Trade it in on a hybrid.  Walk away from the mortgage.  Move to a progressive urban area where there’s reliable mass transit.  Find a house or an apartment, someplace with a small carbon footprint, on a high speed rail line.  And maybe it’s time to start that new career, go back to school, get a degree in bio-engineering, find a green job close to home, buy a new bike, learn to love to walk everywhere again, cut up that Exxon card at last!

Or, you know, fill the tank halfway and have tuna casserole again tonight.

Stop whining about the price of gas?

Really, Treehugger?  You want to go there?

A good liberal ought to think twice---three times---before writing something like this:

I've written before about how we really should be paying much more at the pump, for a number of reasons. But that certainly doesn't seem to be the conventional wisdom these days -- Sarah Palin is outraged that gas prices are pushing $4 a gallon, and she's blaming Obama. Others are calling for the president to tap into our emergency oil reserves, because hitting $4 a gallon would surely derail our economy. But everyone really needs to chill the $#@% out -- $4 a gallon is really, really cheap. Like, the cheapest in the world, among industrialized nations.

Ok, the direction of a post depends on your audience, and apparently Brian Merchant assumes his audience doesn’t include people trying to raise a family on less than 45 grand a year.

But the fact is the price of gas isn’t cheap.  It isn’t expensive either.  It’s relative.

It’s relative to how much you can afford to spend on filling up your tank.

Merchant treats it as relative to what people pay in Germany and Australia and Canada and the Netherlands.

Let’s leave Australia and Canada out of it for a minute.

Right Wingers think they’ve thoroughly refuted a progressive argument for a societal or economic good that Europeans enjoy and we don’t just by saying, “We’re not Europe.”

That’s plain demagoguery.  Harshing on Europe has been a staple of American self-congratulatory complacency since the Revolution.   But we aren’t Europe!

Europe is a little place.

Relatively.

If your average European had to drive as far as most Americans have to drive to pick up a gallon of milk they’d be in another country.

All right.  Exaggeration for emphasis.

Barely.

Lichtenstein can fit in my backyard.

We have a lot more livable space here.  And we’ve arranged to occupy our livable space in a very different way than the Europeans have theirs---and the Australians and the Canadians too, for that matter.

You think a drive across Nebraska is lonely?

Try driving across Manitoba.

We’ve put a lot more distance between ourselves and other people, between us and our neighbors, between us and even our closest relatives, between us and the people we work for and work with, between us and people we need to buy goods and services from.  We were able to do that, spread out, give ourselves all this elbow room, give ourselves all this privacy, and all this freedom, because cars were cheap to own and run.

This has turned out not to be such a good thing, mainly because it has encouraged what we flatter ourselves is self-reliance but in practice turns out to be indifference to the needs and concerns of people who live out of our immediate sight.

But it’s also turned out not to be such a good thing because internal combustion engines have turned out not to be the boons they were invented to be and that’s mainly due to the rising cost of gas.

And heating oil.

Those big houses we’ve built because we had the room to build them are expensive to heat and cool, light and power.

Cars also kill a lot of people and foul the air, killing more people that way.

But put affordable electric cars in every garage (and free-range chickens in every pot), go solar, harness the wind, tap into the geo-thermal, and guess what?

The way most Americans live now suddenly starts looking again like the ideal and idyll our grandparents thought it was.

Maybe you think that should change.

I do.

I think the suburban way of life most Americans have adopted makes us miserable.  It’s lonely, frustrating, full of headaches we don’t need, problems that don’t satisfy us to solve because the problem---like a dead patch in the lawn or driveway that needs repaving---are meaningless.  Plus I like to drive but all those SUVs going to and from the mall have crowded the roads with morons and idiots and I have to go a long way through heavy traffic to find open highway.

I’m part of the problem.

It should change, but it’s not going to change overnight.

Or over a decade.

It took us close to half a century to arrange it.  We’ve lived with it and in it fifty-odd years more.  Old habits die hard even if there are reasonable---and affordable---alternatives already in place, which at the moment there aren’t.

We could and should raise taxes on gas and as Merchant urges use the money to repair and replace our crumbling infrastructure.  Be we can’t bring ourselves to do it because gas taxes are regressive, so good liberals resist them, while conservatives think they’re not regressive enough.  If they find a way to make sure that no rich people have to pay them, Republicans will be all for them.

Unless they suspect, as they would have good reason to, that liberals are supporting raising gasoline taxes in order to discourage people from using gasoline.

Besides its taking money out of the wallets of oil company executives, if raising taxes on gasoline encourages people to get out of their cars by moving out of the suburbs into cities or other suburbs that are more like cities where they will be dependent on public services provided by progressive governments, like trains, Republicans will lose votes.

The price of gas is relative, even in Europe.  Europeans can afford to pay five and seven dollars for a gallon of gas because they don’t have to buy as much gas, they have trains, they live a lot closer to each other, and they don’t have to pay for or pay a lot for things like medical care and college educations and broadband.

Raise gasoline taxes and Americans might start expecting those taxes to pay for other things besides filling pot holes and shoring up bridges.

We might forget we’re not like the Europeans.

Now, again like me, you may think things need to change.  But you’re not going to persuade people who are counting the bills in their wallet before deciding how much gas to pump that they should be more like Europeans and be glad to pay more for gas by telling them to stop whining about how much gas is costing them at the moment.

It’s pretty much a rule of thumb on our side of the bandwidth that if Sarah Palin says it, it’s a lie.

But that’s not right.

It’s more the case that if she says it, half of it or at least some not insignificant percentage of it is true.

The effectiveness of Right Wing demagoguery is due to Right Wing demagogues being very good at identifying a problem.  People listening nod along and say to each other, That’s true, because it is.

The perniciousness lies in who and what they then blame for the problem.  Liberals, unions, teachers, immigrants, the poor, THEM!

And in their proposed solutions.  Solution, singular.  It’s always the same solution.  Let the Rich handle it, they know best.

Palin is right.  The price of gas is too damn high, for most people.

But she won’t say why it’s too damn high.

Because most people don’t have enough money because they aren’t paid enough.

This is a result of our having left it up to the rich to handle everything, and, here’s a shocker.  The rich have handled it in ways that benefit them.

Wages haven’t stagnated.  They’ve been deliberately and ruthlessly repressed.  Good paying jobs have been shipped overseas.  Whole industries have been deliberately dismantled.  “Productivity” has been an excuse to lay off armies of workers.  There aren’t enough good jobs to go around.  People feel lucky to have any job and they get up every day and go to bed every night worried that the job they are lucky enough to have will be snatched away from them in a blink.

So they take what they can get, keep their heads down and their mouths shut, and try to shrug it off when another year goes by with the bills piling up and the same amount of money coming in.

The problem isn’t the price of gas at the moment.  That’s a Republican demagogic distraction.  The problem is that the price of gas is relative.

If people had better jobs, if there were more jobs, if American workers were paid what they should be paid and not as little as the corporate elites think they can get away with paying them, gas could be priced at five and seven dollars a gallon and it would be cheap.

But at the moment---at the moment!---this is how to look at the price of gas.

Over the last month or so the price of gas has risen almost a dollar a gallon and for a lot of Americans that means that over the last month they’ve paid a hundred dollars or so more to get themselves to and from work, to and from the grocery store, to and from their kids’ concerts and games and lessons.

And over the last month, how many Americans do you think got a hundred dollar raise?

Link to Treehugger via AlterNet.

Ladder 3

Young Ken Mannion went with me to the play Sunday.  We parked in a garage on East 13th, across the street from a firehouse.  One of their ladder trucks was out front.

Don’t know what they were up to---sorry, couldn’t resist.  Don’t know what they were doing, but it reminded Ken and I both of the scene in the movie Roxanne when the company of inept volunteer firefighters forgets to put the ladder down on their way home from a fire.  Steve Martin as their chief, C.D. Bales, chases the truck back to the firehouse and finds it half in and half out the bay and the ladder sticking out of an upstairs window.

Ken and I stood there for a little while, cracking ourselves up remembering scenes and lines from the movie before we headed off to find a hot dog vendor and have lunch in Union Square Park.

Our favorite line is when C.D., trying to get his company to shape up, says to them, “I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, ‘Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!’”

When it was near showtime and we headed back to the theater, we passed the firehouse again.  The truck had been put away or gone out on a call and the bay door was down.  That’s when we noticed them, the six plaques on the facade to the left of the bay door.

Then it dawned on us.

We weren’t that far away.

They’d have gone out on the call.

You don’t need me to tell you what date is on all six plaques.

Dinner before the show

Well, lunch, actually.  Hot dog vendor.  East 14th Street, across from Union Square Park.  Around one, yesterday afternoon.  Sunday. March 20, 2011.

I love the theater, but I never come late. That’s why the blogger is a tramp.

Off to review Double Falsehood at the Classic Stage Company this afternoon.

As I’ve said, I’m planning on making play reviews a regular feature on the blog.  Means more trips to and from NYC, so if you can help make this happen by kicking in a small donation for gas and parking, I’d be much obliged.

Portrait of the memoirist as a failed revolutionary

Revised again, Sunday night, thanks to Ken MacLeod.

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, by Deb Olin Unferth, is a lively, funny, lyrical, often poignant memoir that I kept trying to read as a novel.

In Revolution, Unferth is telling the story of a year she spent traveling in Central America with her college boyfriend George.  The year was 1987.  The Death Squads were making nightmares of El Salvador and Guatemala, but the Sandinistas were still ascendant in Nicaragua.  The Contras seemed somehow proof of their permanent triumph.   Not just Deb and George, but idealists all over the world believed something tremendous was happening in Central America and they flocked there to be part of it, without a clear idea of what that tremendous thing was, how it was coming about, or what part in it they would play.

The ones with skills made themselves useful as nurses, doctors, teachers, mechanics, engineers.  The ones with money enjoyed the revolution as a combination party and spectacle.  The ones with enough ego and vanity made it all about them.

Deb and George had no skills, and in Deb’s case not even the skill to learn a skill.  They have some money but none to spare and then they keep getting robbed along the way and, more frustrating to Deb, George makes a practice of giving it away.  As for ego, Deb’s problem, the reason she’s there, is that she doesn’t have an ego, while George is as self-effacing and self-denying as a saint.

They are college students but, as Unferth presents her young self, Deb is as emotionally and psychologically unformed as a freshman in high school.  She hasn’t much sense of how the world actually works, hasn’t much sense of how other people think or function, and hasn’t any clear idea of who she is and what she wants to be.  All she knows is that she’s in love with George.  And she doesn’t know how to be in love.  She thinks the way to love George is to be like George.

Even before they begin their trip, Deb has turned herself into George’s shadow and echo.  The trip will teach her that she is and has to be a separate person in her own right, but not in the expected way of her learning important lessons about self and self-respect through experiences that open her heart and her mind coupled with clear-eyed thought and introspection.

What George thinks of Deb, what he expects of her, why he loves her and wants her as his companion not just on this trip but through life---they get engaged early in their travels, a move that’s as much a practical necessity as a romantic impulse---isn’t clear.  Deb can’t see herself through George’s eyes.  She can’t get inside George’s head.

When she looks to George for reassurance that he loves her, which is a way of looking for herself as someone who matters, she doesn’t see anybody worth his time and trouble.

That he devotes much time and trouble to taking care of her only confuses her.

George is inscrutable.  He reveals nothing of his inner life to Deb.  His motives for making the trip seem too obvious and too idealistic to be real.  There must be more to it than politics but he doesn’t let on.

He doesn’t talk about himself or his feelings.    He doesn’t come across as secretive, merely as maddeningly self-contained.

This frustrates Deb terrifically.  She needs to see inside him to see herself outside him, and he just won’t let her in.  What this means for us as readers is that George is entirely an observed character.  He can’t be understood, only interpreted, and this is why I reflexively began to read Revolution as a novel.

George is like one of Joseph Conrad’s observed heroes, a cousin to Lord Jim.

He is the first character Unferth introduces us to who seems to belong in a novel.

There are many more to come.

The bitter and despairing American George and Deb meet in Costa Rica, who may be a former spy, seems to have drifted away from the crowds of cynical spies and journalists in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously .

The detached and disinterested priest they meet in San Salvador who seems more political than spiritual and who is later murdered by a death squad (two years after George and Deb have gone home) has more than one brother in Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise.

The evangelical missionaries they fall in with early on might have been sent by the missionaries in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.  George himself sometimes seems as mad and unwittingly destructive as Father and a journey by boat, Deb and George’s escape, recalls the last trip down the river the family take at the end of that novel.

These accidental allusions and cross-overs aren’t a problem or a flaw.  They’re the natural effect upon a reader who has read those novels and who tends to prefer fiction to memoir.  Unferth is exploring the same literary geography that’s the background of those novels, hot countries distressed by political upheavals and patrolled by men with guns.  But she is also travelling the same thematic terrain, and since she allows her political and moral themes to work themselves out dramatically through the actions and words of her characters rather than within the digressions of her narration and her prose is more poetic than discursive and she prefers to work in scenes and not in exposition and anecdotes her book reads like a novel.

I don’t mean that it comes across as made-up or untrue.

Good novels don’t come across as made-up or untrue.

As far as I’m concerned, good novels come across as less made-up and more true than most memoirs.

I am suspicious of memoirs.

A novelist starts off sharing a reasonable premise with her readers.  “Let’s pretend for the time it takes to read this book that this is the way life is.”

A memorist starts off promising, “This is the way it was.”

Then she says quickly and in a low, almost apologetic voice, “To the best of my recollection.”

Of course this raises the question, “And how well do you recollect it?”

And there are follow-up questions.

How much of what you recollect are you giving us?  What are you holding back and why?  How honest are you?

The best memories are unreliable.  What else are you relying on besides what you remember?

Deb kept a journal during the trip, but Unferth tells us that it’s fairly useless as a record of Deb and George’s adventures or as a self-portrait:

I don’t recognize the person who wrote those journals.  She sounds like she’s quoting someone or practicing what she wants to say, lifting phrases from another’s tongue…I get exasperated with her, furious.  I want to reach through the murk and shake her…

It turns out that Unferth is drawing from the drafts of stories and novels she tried to write after the trip.  In other words, her memoir is based upon various attempts over the course of years to turn the factual into the fictional, to turn memories into something else, something more solid, more reliable because it has the virtue of being made up.  The fiction writer can know her world and her characters in a way the memorist can’t.

There’s an interesting paradox at work here.

The accuracy of Unferth’s memoir depends on the degree she failed in her past attempts to turn facts into fiction.

So, as with all memorists, Unferth has to be granted some artistic license, room in which to make things up---not for effect or fill pages, however; to invent a plausible truth.

A memoir isn't a documentary film recovered and restored. It's a painting done in the present.  The memorist needs to be able to get away with saying, “This may not be what actually happened. But it's what I see when I look back and try to remember what it was like.  What I was like.

“If things didn’t happen exactly as I’ve put them down, then something very close to them did.  If a person didn’t actually exist as I’ve described them, then someone very much like them did.”

This is very close to realistic fiction’s apology for itself.

And it’s why I generally prefer novels to memoirs.  But it’s not why I almost wish Revolution was a novel.

This is due to Unferth’s success in turning a portrait of her remembered self into a character in her own right.

The young Deb, despite her insecurities and immaturities, is lively and sympathetic.  She may not see herself as having much of a self, but she still manages to impress herself on the imagination.

Of the portrait she’s painted of herself as a young woman in love, Unferth could say, “If this isn’t exactly the way I was, I was somebody very much like this.”

But she could also say, “If this young woman didn’t exist, someone very much like her did.”  Exactly what a novelist can say.

But for me, as a reader, it isn’t the case that someone like the young Deb Olin Unferth might have existed.  It’s that this Deb, the one brought to life in the pages of Unferth’s book, does exist.

She exists for me the way Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet exist.

She feels real.  She feels true, if not necessarily true to life, to Unferth’s life, that is.

She might not have a strong sense of self or self-worth, but she has a person-hood all her own.  And that’s how I prefer to think of her, as a person---well, a character---in her own right, with her own history and her own future apart from her creator’s.  A future not yet mapped out, either.  I prefer to think of her as she is, in 1987, not as she will be in 2011 or any year in between.  Like a character in a novel she doesn’t have to live on past the end of her story.

That’s a matter of taste not a principle of literary criticism.

Deb’s story, no matter whether it’s fact of fiction, is a compelling one.  It’s the story of a naive young woman’s journey into selfhood.  But, as I said, it doesn’t take the usual form of an intellectual or spiritual awakening.

Very shortly after they cross their first border, Deb realizes she needs to separate herself from George.

Actually, she realizes she should do that literally and leave him and go home, but she can’t, partly because she loves him too much, partly because home isn’t the most attractive place at the moment---she and her family have issues---but mainly because she is pretty close to helpless without George.

She can’t leave George without George’s help.

She stays with him, but she tries, fitfully and awkwardly and mostly ineffectively to carve out an identity of her own.  She doesn’t have any good ideas about how to go about this.  Her one sustained, conscious attempt to turn herself into somebody who is other than and more than George’s girlfriend involves turning herself into the mini-me of a thirty-seven year old feminist from South Africa---she’s one of the ones who has come to make the revolution about herself---

We stayed late that night, me sitting beside Sammy.  The cicadas were so loud I couldn’t her my own “s” sound when I spoke.  My “s”’s were the same pitch as the sound of the insects, so my “s” was drwoned out.  Sammy talked about apartheid and Nelson Mandela:  “The desire to stop apartheid is really a desire for socialism,” she said. “It has nothing to do with racism.”  She told me about her job as a schoolteacher, about her walk to school.  She talked about lost love, all the men she’d left, and how the love  she’d had for these men didn’t seem lost anymore, it seemed cast off, discarded and forgotten, which I thought was tragic---to have loved and then to have no longer loved.  She shrugged.  “I have other things in life.”

It was the first time I could imagine myself without George…

The trouble is that in turning herself into a version of Sammy, Deb turns Sammy into a version of herself, and any version of Deb is bound to be as deeply in love with George as the original version of Deb.

Deb becomes terrified that Sammy is going to take George away from her.

What finally brings about a break from George is that her body, not her spirit, insists upon its separateness.

She gets sick.

It’s a hellacious trip.

They are hot.  They’re dirty. They go hungry. They go without sleep. Deb is almost raped, twice. She gets sick. He gets sick. They are both sick. Almost constantly.

Then for twenty-four hours I had no thoughts, could not speak, I was a body, nothing more. George took the towels and soaked them and threw them over my body again and again while I let out gasps of suffering and relief.  He tipped my head to drink, pushed pills between my lips, wrung the towels out over my arms and face.

Illness isolates you within your own body.  Unferth writes that she remembers her worst bout of fever as good times for her and George. “That’s when I knew I loved him most, when I needed him to pour water on my face.”  But she the fever taking her and then breaking is the last scene before she begins to wrap up the story of their travels together.  What comes next is the news of their broken engagement and their sudden rush to get back to the United States.  Then the story jumps forward in time fifteen years.  Unferth is back in Nicaragua, middle-aged, single, with a past that the trip with George is only a small piece of.  Unferth blames her journals for opening up a distance between them, a distance that kept growing until they couldn’t reach across it or stopped trying to.  But dramatically, narratively, symbolically, it’s the fever.  Isolated within her own body, Deb has to accept her separate self-ness.  She still doesn’t know who that self is but, ironically, her relishing her complete physical dependence on George is a reaction to her having gotten through the worst of it alone and on her own.  Alone and on its own is pretty much the fate of a body progressing through life, carrying the soul trapped inside it along.

From here on out, Revolution is a series of leave-takings, final visits, and goodbyes.  Chapter after chapter.  (Short chapters.  Revolutions is a shortish book.  If it was a novel, it would only just barely not be a novella.)  Goodbyes, farewells, but no amens.  No real ending.  This is a story without an end.  A memoir of the making of a self can’t end because the end of that story means there’s no memoirist to write it.

Unferth is content to leave off.  She wraps up but she doesn’t conclude her story.  There’s a passage that could be read as a conclusion, or a moral, although it comes a long way before the book’s final pages:

This is the year I learned how to get a visa.  How to pack a backpack, when to catch the night bus.  The year I mad iodine water for the first time and the year I nearly gave us iodine poisoning.  The year I learned where to get a free room, how to save a wet watch.  It was the first time I dried clothes on a line, interviewed a politician, the first time I searched for food, the right road, the right bus.  First year I cursed at a doctor.  This is the year a stranger crawled into our bed in the middle of the night while George was out, the year I hit a stranger over the head with a glass bottle.  The first and only year I was an Internacionalista.  The first year I was willing to run away with someone, the first year I began to look back, just a bit, became just a teensy bit more disentangled from him each day.  The first time I found a revolution, first time I left one, first time I wanted to go home.

But only a couple pages earlier Unferth has this:

Nineteen eighty-seven is the year I did nothing.  The year I fought in no war, contributed to no cause, didn’t get shot, jailed, or injured.  George and I lost the tapes with interviews on them---or at least I don’t know what became of them.  We didn’t starve, didn’t die, didn’t save anyone either.  Didn’t change anyone’s mind for the better, or the worse.  Didn’t make any civil pronouncements or public promises we kept (or private ones either).  We had absolutely no effect on anything that happened,  The only thing that changed as a result of our presence was us.

Nearly coupled as they are, the two passages read like the pro and con of an ongoing debate Unferth has been having with herself for the twenty-odd years since that trip.

___________________

Photo from Deb Olin Unferth’s gallery at Macmillan.

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War is available from Amazon.  Yes, there's a kindle edition too.

Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth (book trailer) from Beacon Projects on Vimeo.

They neglected us to warn us how they intended to grow up to be sociopaths and thieves

Obviously, the corporate elites who run the country and their bought and paid for flunkeys of both parties in the federal and state governments and their media toadies think all of us who don’t make a million bucks a year are chumps and losers who deserve the screwing we’re getting from the economy they’ve wrecked.

The thing is we shouldn’t be surprised.

After all, we knew them when.

Back in high school and college.  While the rest of us were planning to become teachers and doctors and nurses and cops and librarians and firefighters and artists and musicians and scientists and small business owners and pastry chefs and architects and carpenters and car mechanics and engineers and rabbis and ministers and airline pilots and soldiers and sailors and Marines and other useful sorts of citizens, they were dreaming of the day when they would own lots of toys and sneer openly at people who did the real work of keeping the country running and afloat.

If only they had mentioned this.

They could have told us, “Yes, we look like a bunch of sly and selfish and arrogant jerks, but that’s only because we know we’re going to own this country soon and when we do we’re going to make sure that as much of its wealth, the wealth you produce, winds up in our pockets.  We’re going to wreck whole industries and ship those jobs oversees to be done by children at slave wages.  We’re going to fix the tax codes so that more and more money flows into fewer and fewer hands.  We’re going to pump up our own stock portfolios by creating not one but two ridiculous bubbles and when the second one bursts and the entire economy seems headed for the dumper we’ll get our paid flunkeys in Congress to pick up the tab with no strings and no promises that we won’t do it all over again.  We’ll freeze your wages, threaten to take away your jobs, begrudge you benefits and use every opportunity we get to take them away from you, and make you so afraid of losing everything that you’ll not just take whatever crap we dish out, not just thank us for it, you’ll admire us for it and think how smart and awesome we are and how stupid and useless you are.  And then we’ll use our bought and paid for media toadies to tell you that it’s all the fault of people who have it worse off than you, and guess what?  Enough of you will believe it that you will vote to send more of our bought and paid for politicians to Congress where they can cut more of our taxes and more of your benefits and all the while boast how they’re doing the good work you want them to do!”

I don’t know what we could have done if they had told us.

Not made the mistake of embarking on careers that didn’t pay us big bucks to screw around with other people’s money, maybe.

Given them all the tar and featherings they’ve all since earned a dozen times over?

Paid more attention to what they were up to and not fallen into their traps.

Noticed when their influence in Washington and the state capitals began to result in more laws and tax breaks that penalized us and rewarded them and nipped it in the bud by not voting for their bought and paid for political flunkeys?

Well, a lot of us did try that last one.  We just didn’t catch on that they had bought politicians on both sides of the aisle.

I don’t know what we could have done or would have done.

But maybe they did tell us.  And maybe we just didn’t believe that anybody that young and otherwise so like us could be planning to live their lives as vultures and jackals.

Or maybe we just didn’t believe that jerks that obvious and that greedy and that sociopathic and selfish would get through their twenties without winding up in jail or in pieces in landfills.

Maybe in a conversation in line in the cafeteria or at a bar after showing our fake IDs we said something like, “When I graduate I’m going to become a teacher and dedicate my life to helping kids from disadvantaged backgrounds develop the skills they need to work their way up into the middle class.”

And they said, “When we graduate we’re going to go into the business of tricking your former students into taking out booby-trapped mortgages and make our fortunes off of playing around with those mortgages and too bad for the suckers who fell for our tricks.”

And maybe they added, “And by the way, when all our scheming results in all fifty states collapsing in financial disarray, we’re going to see to it that you get royally fucked.”

And we replied, “Ha ha, very funny, asshole,” and walked away and forgot about them.

Why I prefer the company of Elizabeth Bennet to that of Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre in an all too characteristic mood, pose, scene, and moment in the new film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, when I was spending lots of time in the company of aspiring artists and intellectuals of various types and kinds, it often seemed to me that I was doing a lot of bouncing back and forth between two worlds.

The worlds contained many of the same people and often actually occupied the same places in space and time, and in fact it was possible to visit both worlds simultaneously and without leaving the room or getting up off the couch.

It depended on who was seated next to you and what personal drama you were being dragged into.

Events and casts of characters crossed over and looking back at the end of the evening, which was often dawn, it was sometimes hard to say which world you had been visiting.

Sometimes.  But not usually.

The worlds were different in tone and shading of emotion and, for want of a better word, style, as in artistic and literary style not fashions.

In the first world, the rooms were clean and bright.  The people were generally cheerful, busy, sociable, and friendly.  They got together in groups to do things.  Not always big things and not always things that took them out of the house.  They got together in somebody’s apartment to share a meal, watch TV, play games, and talk. 

Talking was important and it was often the most fun they had together.

Romances bloomed, casual love affairs kept things interesting, sex was a given.  If you were sleeping alone tonight it was only because you happened not to be involved at the moment or because the person you were involved with had too much work to get done by morning or the evening had just worked out that way, you’d all been having too much fun or doing too much work together for there to have been time for serious seductions.  Tomorrow night, though, might be very different…

People looked forward to tomorrow.  They looked forward, generally, and optimistically.  They were vague about what exactly was going to happen in the future but they were confident it was going to be interesting and fun, that is, they were fairly sure that when their future became their past they would look back on it with pleasure and a sense of satisfaction.

Consequently, just about everything they did, they saw as taking them forward, as part of their future.   The effect of this was that when things didn’t work out, when something longed for didn’t arrive, when life took one of its inevitable bad turns, when mistakes were made and hearts were broken and disasters occurred, people tended not to despair.

You could be unbearably sad, but you knew, deep down, the sadness wouldn’t last.

This may not get better.  But there will be something else.

All this is to say that the people who lived in this world saw life as fundamentally comic.

This doesn’t mean that people in the other world saw life as tragic.

They didn’t look at life with enough objectivity for that.

They didn’t look at life, period. 

They looked at their lives.

And they didn’t much like what they saw.

Their point of view wasn’t comic or tragic.  It was neurotic.

The rooms in this other world were stuffy, clammy, and cold or overheated.  There must have been kitchens and tables and chairs but I don’t see any in my memories.  It’s as if all the apartments were cramped and underfurnished studios or one bedrooms with an unmade bed in the corner or glimpsed through an open door and that bed never looked inviting, not as a soft place to crash even if you were exhausted, and certainly not as any where you wanted to end up with another person, no matter how much you thought on your way here you wanted to see that person naked.

People in both worlds smoked and naturally they smelled of cigarettes.  Cigarettes and herbal shampoo was the perfume of choice.  But the smokers in the second world reeked.  And they looked dirty and sweaty as if it had been a while since they’d showered and a longer while since they’d had change for the laundromat.

This wasn’t due to a habitual neglect of hygiene and grooming.  It was because they hadn’t had time.  They been too…involved.

When people gathered in these rooms they didn’t form groups.  They formed triangles, or battle lines, or points on a circle radiating out from one central unhappy fact, something that was upsetting to everyone there, often a shared emotion, usually, though, a person determined to inflict his or her discontent on everyone else.

Even would-be lovers stood in opposition, their mutual attraction a source of contention and resentment.  They didn’t flirt, they fenced, buttons off, and you could hear them thinking.

If you really want it, you make the first move.

I hate feeling like this!  How did you do this to me?

What’s wrong with you that you want me?

What’s wrong with me that I want to be wanted by you?

Like I said, sex and romance were givens in the first world.  Falling in love was like everything else, just life happening to you.  You worked, you played, and somehow but naturally you fell in love along the way and being in love became part of the work.

If a couple disappeared you knew the next time you saw them they’d be smiling, radiant, full of laughter, bursting to tell.

In the second world, couples tended not to disappear.  You just knew you had to leave them alone.  When you saw them again, they might appear cheerful, good humored, even, fitfully, happy.  But still.  There’d be a look of worry or an air of distraction or maybe even simmering hostility, one or the other or both looking for for an opening to start a fight or run crying from the room.

In the first world, a pair of lovers could be cheating on partners without guilt, the wrong of what they were doing adding to the fun and to the sexual thrill.  In the second world, soulmates destined to spend the rest of their lives together could still give you the sense that they felt as though they’d cheated on themselves.  Couples whose match seemed made in heaven acted as if they were in if not hell then Purgatory and they didn’t fall easily into each other’s arms.  They collapsed into them after an intense struggle in which they each tried to push the other other away, one shoving with all their might this way, the other shoving with all their might that way, until both got tired at the same time and their suddenly unresisted forward momentum slammed them together at last.

It wasn’t all sweetness and light in the first world.  Not everybody was good and kind.  The good and the kind weren’t good or kind all the time.  There were villains and bad actors, people who set out to cause mischief and cause trouble.  Often the best-intentioned and kindest-hearted gave in to temptations or surrendered to feelings and found themselves in the position of villain or trouble-maker.  Sometimes they found themselves in that position when they were in fact doing the right thing.

In the second world, people tended to be their own worst enemies.  Trouble and mischief were often the results of perversity, a basically decent person determined for some reason, conscious or unconscious, to do the opposite of what they knew was the right thing.

In the first world, doing wrong, causing harm required either an act of will or a failure to exercise willpower, which left room for self-correction.  In the second world, wrong and harm seemed compulsive.  Willing yourself not to do it only increased the energy and force of whatever demons were driving you to do it.

You had to guard against someone from the second world who wanted to do you a good turn because the odds were they would drag you into their personal drama by doing it.

Personal dramas defined the second world, as work and play defined the first. 

If the first world was about working towards the rewards of a hopeful future, the second world was about working out the mistakes and failures of the immediate and already regretted past.  The present was that past continued, the future would arrive only when the problems and issues troubling the present were resolved, which it seemed they never would be.

You could go back and forth between the two worlds, and I did, but if you lived in the first world you usually didn’t visit the second on purpose.

You were dragged in, sucked in, seduced into it.  And once you were there it felt as though you would never get out, that you were trapped in a permanent, repeating, unresolvably problem-filled now.

You could also build the second world up around you all on your own and consign yourself to living there.

Alone.

Brooding.

With no real company except a symbolic madwoman in your internal attic.

And have you ever noticed that Jane doesn’t actually rescue Rochester from his self-created second world?  She condemns herself to living there with him?

Ever since I first read it, back in ninth grade, Jane Eyre has always seemed to me a manual for masochists in love.

The effect I’ve been trying to describe, of going back and forth between those two worlds, is the same as if you had spent the night reading, but going back and forth between two books with the same theme or subject by two different writers with very different sensibilities.

At the time I might have said it was the difference between Dickens and Dostoevsky.

As you can tell, however, these days or today at any rate I’m saying it’s the difference between Jane Austen and either of the two major Brontes, particularly, at the moment, Charlotte.

That’s because I’m trying to decide if I want to see the new film adaptation of Jane Eyre.

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott gave it a glowing review.  But this follow up piece by Charles McGrath, while increasing my interest in seeing the movie, brought me up short with this:

In the case of “Jane Eyre,” as Alison Owen, who was the producer and driving force behind the new one, pointed out recently, there is also a simple, pragmatic reason [for making yet another Jane Eyre]: As period costume dramas go, “Jane” is relatively cheap to make.

“It’s set in a house in the middle of a moor,” she explained. “Jane Austen can be quite expensive. You need horses, carriages, houses, gowns. But on the whole ‘Jane Eyre’ is much more starkly peopled than most period movies. You don’t need swaths of costumes. And scenery costs nothing. Point a camera at those moors, and it looks like a David Lean film.”

Exactly!

Empty moors!  “Starkly peopled.”

It’s a trip back to that second world.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet has some good reasons, besides pride---or is hers the prejudice? I go back and forth.---for breaking it off with Mr Darcy before things even really begin, but her best and last one is that she suspects that he imagines their future together as husband and wife will be very much like that of Jane Eyre and Rochester’s, the two of them holed up together, more or less alone, in a big, empty house, their marriage defined entirely by their exclusive relationship with each other.

It’s not until he understands, accepts, and even takes some pleasure in the idea that in marrying Elizabeth he’s marrying a family and by extension a whole little society---that is to say, that his world is going to expand---that she gives in.

It’s easy to imagine the future Mr and Mrs Darcy growing old together over the course of years.  They have a future to make together.

Jane and Rochester, though, have only the present and their future happiness lies in the fact that they are fictional characters who are obliterated as soon as Jane writes the words, “Reader, I married him.”

Like the princesses in the fairy tales she descends from directly, Jane will live happily ever after only because she will cease to exist when her story concludes.

Which is what makes Jane Eyre a second world novel.  It is about a present that is all about resolving the issues and problems of the immediate past.  The future arrives, that is, time ends, when those issues and problems are resolved.

Pride and Prejudice, however, is about people hard at work at building their futures.  It is the first of the first world novels.  Austen didn’t invent it, Smollett and Fielding got there first, but she refined it to near perfection.  I’m talking about the tradition of the social and sociable English novels that runs from her through Dickens, Trollope, Thackaray, and Eliot (and ends rather glumly with Thomas Hardy).

Technically Austen isn’t a Victorian and the Brontes are, but I see Austen as being ahead of her times and the Brontes as being not exactly behind, possibly a little ahead---there’s a Modernist sensibility or neurotic point of view that prefigures Virginia Woolf---but definitely apart.

And being apart is a key to the second world.

My time of living among artists and intellectuals, and going back and forth between the two worlds, ended when I finished graduate school and left Iowa for Indiana.

At the time there were compelling emotional and professional reasons for staying in Iowa and I was truly torn over whether or not to leave.

Not many people these days see the future in Indiana.  But I had a sense that if I stuck around Iowa City I would be drawn into full-time residency in the second world.

The New York Times wants you to read Lance Mannion

Sunday’s Arts and Leisure section had a story about the resurgence of interest in the life and work of the ten-years-dead artist and illustrator Edward Gorey, Nightshade Is Growing Like Weeds.

Reporter Mark Dery has a nice line about Gorey having been “born to be posthumous.”

And this bit is fun, if you’re a fan of Lemony Snicket, which we are here in Mannionville:

…until the last few years true Gorey devotees were a secret society, wearing Gorey-philia like a Masonic ring. Now, however, their numbers have swelled. The writer Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, said, “When I was first writing ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’ I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ Now, everyone says, ‘That’s right, you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey.’ ”

But this was the kicker for me.

Attendance has been climbing steadily at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Mass…

Ha!  Been there, done that, didn’t buy any t-shirts, but did pick up a few post cards.

Me, back in July: Notes from Edward Gorey’s Elephant House.

Also in Arts and Leisure, Dave Kehr notes, without tears, the end of video stores, and foresees the coming obsolescence of DVDs.

THAT distant rumble you hear is the sound of yet another approaching cultural shift, accompanied by all the shouts of joy and gnashing of teeth that come with such upheaval.

The DVD isn’t dead yet, but it’s definitely looking a little peaked, at least in the eyes of the home-video industry. Sales continue to decline (volume is down about 40 percent from this time last year for the Top 20 titles, according to Home Media Magazine), the formerly ubiquitous neighborhood rental shops have all but vanished (Blockbuster, once the dominant franchise, has plunged into bankruptcy), and the major studios have drastically cut back on full-scale releases of library titles.

All is not necessarily for the good in our many days and nights of streaming to come, says Kehr in Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.

Ok, I wasn’t exactly there first, but it’s still related.

Me, on the end of A clean, well-lighted video store.

Yes, I know, I’m reaching.  I’ve got nothing today.  I’m working up my notes from the Iowa trip into posts for later in the week and I’m grinding out on post for tomorrow on a subject I know you’ve all been dying for me to weigh in on---what makes Jane Austen more of a barrel of laughs than any of the Brontes.  So, in the meantime, I’m vamping.  But, still, please follow the links.

The Gorey story particularly. It comes with a nice slide show.

Image via the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust.

Dad vs. Batman

On the way home from the bookstore yesterday, I ruined a nice morning out with the Mannion guys by going to town on Batman, comic books, comic book writers, and the readers of comic books who are not my sons.

Young Ken and Oliver were discussing one of the Dark Knight’s adventures in which he went up against a villain named Shiva and defeated him with true Caped Crusader awesomeness.

Except Shiva isn’t a him.

I heard them talking and assumed Shiva was based on the Hindu god, the destroyer of worlds.  That’d be one tough villain for Batman to take on.

Turns out her name is Lady Shiva.

She’s a ninja assassin. 

She’s also one of the martial arts experts who trained the troubled and questing young Bruce Wayne.

She and Batman know each other’s moves.

She’s big trouble.

Usually.

In this particular adventure, Batman takes her down with a single punch while he and Superman are fighting off a gang of super-opponents.

Like I said, true Caped Crusader awesomeness.

But when I heard this, I erupted.

“Batman’s beating up women?”

“Dad, he had to.  It was self-defense!”

“He didn’t have to punch her.  That’s what his utility belt is for.  He has his bat-rope.  He has his bat-gas pellets.”

“She’s the ultimate ninja, Dad.  She’s too quick for him to use those things.  He had no choice!”

“No,” I agreed. “He didn’t.  Because he’s a character in a comic book!  He does whatever the writers and artists want him to do.  They have a choice.  And they chose to have him punch a woman.”

“You’re taking this too seriously.”

“Yeah, it’s just a comic book.”

“We know not to hit women.”

“I’d rather you didn’t hit anybody.  But that’s not the point.  I mean, it’s a point.  But it’s part of a larger point.”

Ok, I knew I was losing them.  I could feel it.  But sometimes---all right, a lot of times---once I get started I can’t stop.

“You have to remember who comic books are written for these days.”

“Lots of people read them,” I was informed in a grumble.

“I know lots of people read them.  But not all of them are the target audience.  The target audience is young men in their teens and twenties, not kids, men.  Think about that.  Think about what most young men in their twenties are doing.  They’re going to college, they’re getting jobs, they’re getting married and starting families.  How much time do you think they have to spend reading comic books?”

“They read them for fun, Dad.”

“The ones who read them for fun aren’t the target audience,” I said.  “The target audience are the ones who take them seriously.  We’re talking about men who haven’t grown up yet.  And what I want you to notice and think about when you’re reading comic books---“

“Which we do for fun.”

“I know that.”

“We don’t take them seriously.”

“I’m not saying you do.  But that doesn’t mean that certain things aren’t getting through.  When the writers and artists write and draw for their target audience they are writing and drawing things that are meant to appeal to the fantasies of adults with immature attitudes about---“

I went on a little more in this vein but I could feel the sullenness in the back seat.  I had a lot more to say about the way comic books portray women, about attitudes towards sex and violence and how the two are entwined.

I wanted to tell them that the world is full of young men who are afraid of everything.  They are afraid of women, of sex, of their own urges and desires.  They are afraid of other men.  They are afraid of what they might be themselves.  They are afraid they are weak, useless, powerless.  And when people who are this afraid dream, they dream of not being afraid, but their dreams aren’t of achieving self-command and of gaining mastery of over their fears.  Their dreams are of instilling fear.  They dream of gaining power over what makes them afraid.

I wanted to warn my sons that a lot of what’s going on in comic books is indulging the fantasies of these weak and frightened men.  The stories that are aimed at this audience are not stories of heroism and noble deeds, romance and adventure.  They are fantasies of power and dominance. 

I didn’t know where to begin with the issues of masochism, guilt, and self-loathing that also suffuse these stories as complements to the sadism, anger, and narcissistic contempt for the inferior other the stories inspire and exploit.

I stopped myself.

I stopped mainly because the guys were making it clear I was being a spoilsport and a bore. 

But I stopped for a couple of other reasons as well.

The first of these being that I realized I didn’t really know all this about comic books.

This is stuff I suspect, have inferred, have read about, have been told, and, mostly, worry is true.

But I don’t know it because I don’t read their comic books.

All I know is what I glean from what the guys tell me or tell each other when I’m within earshot and the panels they got a kick out of and show me and the important scenes they hand to me to read without the expectation that I’ll go on and read the whole book.

I only know what they’ve liked or disliked about particular stories, and neither seems to include the stuff I worry about.

Their favorite scenes seem to be ones in which the heroes are joking around with each other.

They especially like it when one hero gets off a good zinger at another hero’s expense.

But the point is that I don’t know, at least I don’t know enough, and I shut up when I realized that.

Not because I felt bad for spouting off about things I didn’t know, though.

Because I suddenly felt out of touch.

When Ken and Oliver were younger, I could join in their enjoyment of certain books and TV shows and games and comic books because I had enjoyed the same books and shows and games and comic books (or ones very similar) when I was their age and I remembered what it was like to be a little kid descending into the Batcave or taking a station on the bridge of the Enterprise for the first time.

But I didn’t read comic books when I was in high school.  There were no comic books for high school kids to read.  Sorry.  No graphic novels.  Not that I knew of, at any rate.  Comic books were strictly for little kids.  I’d given them up even before I gave up collecting baseball cards.

I didn’t read the sort of fantasy and adventure novels the guys prefer either.  My favorite writers were Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain.  They think of Twain as homework and Vonnegut as some boring writer their father likes and has a lot of books by, which, believe it or not, is pretty much how I felt about John Updike.

I can’t tell you who their favorite writers are.

Besides Terry Pratchett.

What I’m getting at is that there is a large part of my sons’ imaginative lives that I am completely cut off from.

Now, given their ages and the way life goes, that’s as it should be.  And it doesn’t---or shouldn’t---surprise me.

It’s just that the feeling that shut me up yesterday on the ride home was a foretaste of the feeling I expect to knock me off my feet some day in the not as distant as I wish it was future when I come home from a wedding or a college graduation and find a Star Wars action figure on the floor of an empty bedroom.

There is one more thing that did it, made me shut up and drive the rest of the way keeping my thoughts to myself.

Like I said, I don’t know that any of that stuff I worry is there is actually there.

But I don’t believe it is.

At least I don’t believe it’s as prevalent as I worry it might be.

If I did believe it, I’d have banned comic books long ago.

The reason I don’t believe it’s there is that I trust Oliver and Ken.

If comic books were only what I sometimes worry they are, Ken and Oliver wouldn’t read them.

They wouldn’t like them.

I think.

I hope.

No, wait.  I’m sure.

Pretty sure.

At one point in the conversation, before I realized I was being a pompous old fuddy-duddy and put a lid on it, Ken asked, “Dad, you don’t think we’re like those guys, do you?”

“No,” I was quick to reply, which was easy, because I don’t.

“You think we’re going to turn into them just from reading comic books?”

I wasn’t as quick to reply to this one.

“No, but…”

But there is no but. 

It’s not up to me anymore.

The blonde and I did what we could to mould their tastes.  We tried to teach them to recognize and reject junk.  When it came to art and culture, we weren’t of the No Sugar For You school, but we never let them gorge on potato chips and candy washed down with Jolt!  We worked to offer a happy medium that involved lots of fun ways to enjoy vegetables.

But we no longer control the whole menu.

There are still things we won’t let in the house.  There are places on the Internet that if we catch them visiting will get the computer taken away.  There are words and ideas we better not hear coming out of their mouths.

But our ability to police their thinking and their dreaming, which has always been more limited than parents like to believe, has shrunk and is still shrinking.

They aren’t like those young men, but they are young men.

Their intellectual and imaginative lives are their own to shape now.  Even if they were reading nothing but Twain and Vonnegut I’d have to trust that they were getting the right things out of Huckleberry Finn and Slaughterhouse Five.

Batman, the guys assure me, doesn’t make a practice of beating up women.  That’s good to know.  But what does he do?  What does he stand for?  What kind of man and hero is he these days? 

What does he symbolize?

Where does he fit in their senses of who they are and how the world is?

What does Batman mean?

That’s all up to them to figure out.

They’ve grown up and left me behind.

I’m stuck in time, way back here---

Why I love Smallville

The respect the show gives to all the past Supermen.

We’ve been catching up on Season 9.  In the episode we watched tonight, Clark is trying to explain to Chloe how he surprised himself by giving in to an urge to kiss Lois Lane.

Chloe says she’s not surprised.

“You’ve had feelings for Lois since, like, the 1930s.”

 

Tread onto others before they can tread onto you

Don’t Tread on Me, the old American battle cry, is supposed to express some sort of great national virtue.

Pretty much, though, those who’ve adopted it as their creed seem to think they have no neighbors to whom they owe any consideration and for them Don’t Tread On Me means simply I Get To Do Whatever I Want to Do and Goddamn Anybody Who Tries To Tell Me Different.

I think it was John Cole who noted the absurdity that here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century the Republican Party has decided to mount the barricades to defend a piece of 19th Century technology.

The incandescent light bulb.

The charge is being led by Congressman Joe Barton.  You remember him.  He’s the corporate toady who apologized to BP because the President was making them pay for the damage their negligence and incompetence caused.

Barton is a Republican politician from Texas which makes him by definition a Big Oil stooge.  Everything the man says from Good morning to Good night translates as God bless Our Addiction to Fossil Fuels.

Naturally he hates and despises any and every conservation measure that results in the nation’s burning less oil to heat, cool, and power itself. 

A drop of oil saved is money stolen right out of the pockets of his Big Oil bosses.

Every word that comes out of Barton’s mouth should be treated as a paid advertisement for ExxonMobil.  But the country and in particular his Party is full of Don’t Tread On Me Types who like to hear politicians tell them how right and brave and patriotic they are to be childishly selfish and self-centered and they are flattered beyond all get-out by boilerplate like this from Barton:

“From the health insurance you’re allowed to have, to the car you can drive, to the light bulbs you can buy, Washington is making too many decisions that are better left to you and your family,” Mr. Barton said when he introduced his bill in January.

Ok, let’s quickly get past the fact that nobody’s being told what health insurance they’re allowed to have, they’re being told they have to have some kind or pay a fine and nobody’s being told what kind of car they have to buy, auto companies are being encouraged to start building cars that don’t need to burn as much gas as cars do now, which sometime in the hopefully not too distant future might mean that anybody buying a new car will be forced to buy a car that gets more than fifty miles a gallon, which I don’t think many people will think of as a hardship.

Think about the attitude Barton’s appealing to and trying to exploit here.

I’m not an enthusiastic fan of florescent bulbs, by the way, and I feel the pain of the Easy Bake Oven folks.  But I’m definitely not a fan of high electric bills and forty-five dollar fill-ups at the gas pump, and it’s hard for me to imagine anybody else is.

But, while unrestrained selfishness as a social good has always been the fundamental principle of Republican politics, the rise of the Tea Party has turned it into the be-all and end-all.

It’s been said that the Tea Party has put the whole country at the mercy of a group of angry, misinformed old people.

But, really, what’s happened is that we are at the mercy of a group of angry, misinformed adolescents with gray hair.

They are people who, like spoiled teenagers, think the world was created to revolve around them and exists to serve their needs and, like teenagers whining about parents making them do chores and clean-up their rooms, regard any attempt to make them think about other people for a change as not just an infringement on their freedom but an assault on their very identity.

The Tea Partiers don’t have a coherent platform or agenda.  They often contradict each other and themselves.  But there is one thing on which they are in consistent agreement.

They see themselves as having no responsibilities as citizens of the United States.

For them, being a citizen means chiefly the right to tell other people to go to hell.

How dare the government tell me I can’t go out and get hit by a bus and then expect the government to pick up the tab for my medical bills!

How dare the government tell me what kind of big metal box I can put on government built roads and  send flying down the highway aimed at other people riding in big metal boxes they’ve sent flying down those government built highways!

How dare the government tell me how much oil I can burn and how much of the resulting poisons I can pump up my chimney to foul the air my neighbors have to breathe!

How dare the government expect me to pay taxes to build schools, maintain roads, repair bridges, muster an army!

How dare the government tell me I have to help pay the cops who patrol my streets, the firefighters who will risk their lives to save my burning house, the teachers who prepare the future generation to be good citizens and productive workers so that I can spend my old age in a caring and prosperous society a decent wage for their time and trouble!

How dare the government tell me I owe anybody any respect, aid, or consideration!

Don’t tread on me!

Now stand still while I tread all over you.

A step closer

Out in Iowa, I met a writer, Joe Blair, whose thirteen year old son Michael is autistic.  Michael has just learned to choose.

He makes his wants known by choosing between offered options. 

Before, if you asked him if he wanted a hamburger or a hot dog, he would respond, “Hamburgerhotdog, hamburgerhotdog!”  You could tell by his enthusiasm and his smile that he wanted one or the other, maybe both, but you had to guess which.

Now, when you show him a small set of choices, he can move through the options, narrowing things down until he arrives at what he really wants.

Seems a simple thing.

Babies learn to do this early.  Dog can be taught it.  And once upon a time and still in too many places non-autistic people---the neurotypical---would (and do) think about this in terms of babies and dogs, as a first, infantile step, as a clever trick.

They would (and do) think of the autist as having learned that there are choices, that this is different from that and one might be preferable to the other.  Another small, rudimentary skill that makes life for the autists and those who care for them a little bit more manageable.

And their thinking about what it means stops there.

But that’s not it at all.

Autists like Michael make choices all the time.

In their heads.

They know, have known perhaps since infancy, that this is different from that and not only that one may be preferable to the other but which they actually prefer and why.

They make choices.

They can’t make their choices known.

Their eyes don’t aim at the chosen item.  Their fingers shoot out to point…in the wrong direction.  Their feet walk away with them leaving the already chosen and desperately preferred thing behind.  They will make sounds that are meant to sound like This not that but those sounds come out as No no no or as grunts or shrieks or nonsense or as nothing at all.

Autism was---and still is---seen as a form of mental retardation and autists have been given up on from the beginning as hopelessly lost within their own very narrow and simple inner worlds.  They weren’t taught, they were trained, and trained to not be trouble. 

But autism, as more and more autists have learned to be able to tell us themselves, isn’t a deficiency, it’s a disconnect.  Brain and body can’t communicate.

Autists’ brains send out signals to their bodies and those signals never arrive or the arrive garbled or they are delivered to the wrong muscle or limb.

Signals get sent that the autists’ didn’t mean to send, that they aren’t even aware of sending.

One of the most heartbreaking---and frightening---moments in the movie Wretches & Jabberers is when a journalist asks Tracy Thresher, one of the two autists whose travels around the world are chronicled in the film, what it means to him to be autistic.

Tracy, whose only education when he was a child was to be left by himself to do puzzles all day, who did not speak until he was in his thirties, and who now “talks” by typing, says that it’s being “trapped inside a body that doesn’t work right.”

Trapped.

Asked a similar question, Larry Bissonette, who grew up in an institution, who was not taught but trained and that training accomplished by force and abuse, who like Tracy didn’t talk until he was middle-aged and who now “talks” by typing, says it’s like being trapped in a cage with a wild beast, which is even scarier.

It suggests that the autist can see what other people are seeing when they look at him.

It suggests a constant, terrible struggle against a second, monstrous self.

It suggests fear, pain, and despair.

But what both men’s answers don’t just suggest, they declare, is that there is a consciousness inside there, an awareness, a person who knows himself and knows what is happening to him, inside and outside.  A someone! 

Someone with needs and wants and thoughts and feelings all his own.  Which is what loving relatives and caring friends know.

They know because from time to time they’ve seen that person.

There have been moments of calm, of stillness, of quiet, when their eyes have met and locked and they’ve seen!

Someone is looking back.

Some one.

There’s somebody there trying to reach out to them, somebody they desperately want to reach, take hold of, pull free, save.

But they’ve been told by professionals this is wishful thinking.

Now, think about this.

The autist learns how to make choices.

How to make his choices known.

He chooses a hot dog not a hamburger.

He chooses mustard instead of relative.

He chooses French fries over cole slaw.

Simple choices, but he is telling you something complex about himself.  He is this person not that one.  He is not simply hungry, he is hungry for the things he likes.

This is a conversation.

Perhaps your first real one with him.

The choices can get more complicated, more interesting over time.  The lists you move through together can get longer. 

There’s more to hope for too.

These choices can’t get made, these conversations can’t happen, unless the autist has mastered some self-control.

He has found a way to force the right signals to get through.

For autists like Michael and for their families and caregivers, being able to choose, to focus, control their motions, stay still just long enough to make a choice known, to say by a set of actions “I am the person who prefers this to that” isn’t a baby step forward.

It’s a step closer.

_____________________

Joe and his wife Deb have recently moved their family back to Iowa after a what proved to be a temporary relocation to Massachusetts.  Joe wrote about their reason for the move for the New York Times.

In the piece he talks about their reasons for the move, but he also quotes Deb trying to explain to Michael’s twin sister, who was worried that her new teachers would think she was like him, how it is to be Michael:

One evening Michael’s twin sister, Lucy, said to Deb and me: “The teachers will think I’m stupid. Like Mike.”

“Mike is not stupid,” Deb said.

“Mom,” Lucy said, patiently. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Deb said. “I know what you mean. But you’ve got to know what I mean, too. Imagine if you found yourself in the middle of China somewhere. And everyone was trying to talk to you. But you couldn’t understand them. And everyone thought you were stupid. But you were still just like you are. How would you feel?”

Read the whole essay, For the Boy Who Makes Waves.

And this past January Joe wrote a piece for Salon about Michael’s habit of running away and one of his recent “escapes,” My autistic son vanishes (again).

You’ll note that one of the Blairs’ neighbors identifies Michael as their “mentally retarded kid.”

Memory drift

Sunday night, after I got into Iowa City, I went out for dinner with a writer-engineer, a lawyer-poet, a poet-professor-disabilities advocate, a college dean-movie producer, an Oscar Winning documentary director, her editor and assistant, and various friends and relations.  We ate at a bar called Micky’s.

My kind of place.

Knowing I hadn’t been back to Iowa City in the hundred years since I finished grad school, someone asked me if I remembered Micky’s.

“It wasn’t here,” I said.

“Sure it was,” someone else said.

“Couldn’t have been.  If it had been here, I’d have lived here.”

“It was here.”

“Not like this.”

“Exactly like this.”

“Nothing like this.  I’m telling you.  I was desperate for a place like this back then.  This place couldn’t have been a place like this.  It must have been a place like some other place.  Maybe it was a frat bar or a sports bar or a fern bar.  It was the Eighties.  The country was lousy with fern bars.”

“It wasn’t a frat bar or a sports bar or a fern bar.  It was this bar.”

“I’m telling you I walked this way all the time.  I’d have noticed it.”

“You walked this way all the time?”

“On my way to the public library.  Went right past here.”

“The library’s on Linn Street.”

“Right.”

“This is Dubuque.”

“But the bookstore’s on this block.”

“So.”

“I passed the bookstore on my way to the library.  Who moved the bookstore to Dubuque?”

“Nobody.  It’s always been here.”

“Then how could I pass it on my way to the library?”

“You must have come this way.”

“But then I’d have passed by Micky’s.”

“Correct.”

“But I never saw Micky’s.  As far as I knew, there was no such place as Micky’s.”

“You mean as far as you remember.”

“Right.  And I remember…”

I stopped to think about this.  I went over my mental map of Iowa City.  In order to have walked by the bookstore from my apartment on my way to the library I would have had to have gone two blocks out of my way.

Someone asked me where I did my drinking back then if it wasn’t at Micky’s.  I mentioned the names of a couple of places.  There was shock at the last name.

“The Fox Head?”

“Yes, what about it?”

“That scuzzy dive that smells of urinal cakes across from John’s Grocery.”

“It wasn’t a scuzzy dive and it smelled of beer and cigarette smoke.  And it wasn’t across from John’s Grocery.  It was over on Bloomington.”

“Then you’re not thinking of the Fox Head.”

“I am thinking of the Fox Head.  It was in a little brown house.  One room.  A bunch of beat up booths, a pool table, and a collection of clocks behind the bar.  One time a friend from the Workshop who’d never been in there before went up to the bar and ordered a white wine.  The bartender looked her dead in the eye and said, ‘This is a beer and highball place.’  The Fox Head.  On Bloomington.”

“The Fox Head is on Market. Across from John’s.”

“Maybe I’m thinking of a different Fox Head.”

“There’s only one.”

“It’s not near John’s.”

The next morning, on the bus ride into town, we passed John’s Grocery.  There was the Foxhead.  Right across from John’s.  It looked scuzzy and like it smelled of urinal cakes.

The bus stopped in front of the Old Capital.

“We get off here.”

“I thought we were going to the EPB.”

“We are.  This is the stop.”

“But we’re blocks away.”

“No.”

We got off.  I looked down the street.  There was the University Library.

“That’s the University Library.”

“Right.”

“It’s in the wrong place.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s too close.  It’s supposed to be way down by the river.  We have to walk down a steep hill.”

“There’s the hill.”

“A much steeper hill.”

“And there’s the river.”

“When did it change course?”

“Let’s go.”

“Wait.  If that’s the library, where’s the EPB? The English-Philosophy Building, where’d it go?”

“Behind the library.”

“No, the EPB is directly across from the library entrance.  I used to walk out the doors of the EPB, cross the drive, and walk right into the library.”

“You were the only one.”

We walked down the not steep hill, continued on behind the library not across from it, and found the EPB.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“Hmmm what?”

“Hmmm I guess I couldn’t have walked out the doors of the EPB and right into the library.”

“Nope.”

“So…the river hasn’t changed course, the EPB is behind the library, the library isn’t a long way down a steep hill from the Old Capital, the Fox Head is across from John’s, I didn’t walk past the bookstore on my way to the public library, and Micky’s is where it always was and was always the kind of place it is and not a frat bar or sports bar or a fern bar?”

“That about sums it up.”

“Did I actually go to school here?”

“I remember you being here.”

“I remember you too, but based on the way I’m remembering everything else, I might be remembering somebody else.”

“I’ve always been me.”

“Apparently you can’t prove that by me.  I’m experiencing profound memory drift.”

“Memory drift?”

“My mental map of Iowa City re-arranged itself while I wasn’t looking.”

“It’ll come back to you.”

“Or it’ll keep drifting.  This is weird.”

“How so?”

“This part of campus is where I spent most of my time.  But it’s a lot more compact than I remember it.  It’s like going back to your old grade school as an adult and being surprised at how narrow the hallways are.”

We went inside and made our way up to the room where I was to give my talk.  We were early.  I had time to do some brooding.  I felt sad.  I’d had a good time in grad school and now it was turning out that I didn’t really remember it, not as clearly and as accurately as I’d assumed.

I paced to the window and looked out at the river. 

It looked familiar.

So did the railroad trestle.

Train tracks run through the campus at this point.  Long freight trains made up of tanker car after tanker car full of corn syrup would rumble across the river and pass more or less overhead as I walked over from the student union to the EPB along a path that wound along the river bank and under the trestle.

The first time I made that walk I was feeling a little homesick.  Then I saw some graffiti on the wall of the underpass.  Just before leaving for graduate school I had watched the BBC adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The graffiti artist has sprayed:

FORD PREFECT FOR PRESIDENT.

I was thrilled.

I’ve come to the right place, I told myself.

At the window, I turned my head and looked down to where the trestle crossed the river in my memory.

There it was, crossing the river before my eyes in exactly the spot where it I remembered it.

First chance I had to re-visit the student union I set out from it to follow my old path back to the EPB.

There was trestle again, right where it ought to have been.  There was the underpass.

FORD PREFECT FOR PRESIDENT had long since been washed away or painted over.

But it was still there for me anyway.  I could see clearly it in my mind’s eye.

And suddenly my mental map rearranged itself again.  Everything was where it ought to have been, where it was, where it is. 

Mental maps aren’t drawn according to compass points.  Places on them aren’t oriented in relation to each other.

Mental maps are maps of self more than maps of place.

They’re drawn around an experience in lines colored by the attendant emotions.

Find the experience, recapture the emotions, and you’ve found the key to the map.

If I’d had a can of spray paint I’d have been tempted to write on the now clean, white wall of the underpass.

LANCE MANNION WAS HERE!

And add FORD PREFECT FOR PRESIDENT!

Citation needed

Updated. Thursday, March 10, 2011.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia spoke on campus tonight.  I’m sure the gist of his speech has already been edited into and out of his Wikipedia entry several times already since he wrapped up.

Update.  I moved the notes I made on Twitter Tuesday night to their own page.

Wretches & Jabberers continued

Updated Thursday, March 10, 2011.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher are answering questions about their trip chronicled in the film Wretches & Jabberers.  Follow me on Twitter to follow them now.

Updated: I moved the notes I made on Twitter to their own page.

What he said I said

I was thinking I might Twitter my own presentation yesterday afternoon, the way James Franco Twittered his hosting gig on the Academy Awards, but unlike Franco I actually got caught up in what I was doing and kept forgetting to reach for my iPhone which I don’t have one of anyway.

So my next plan was to write a blog post summing up, but I forgot.

I was talking about blogging, right?  So who do you figure’s going to be in the audience?

Bloggers.

And bloggers gotta do what bloggers gotta do.

At least one blogger, at any rate.

Geoff G. of Text and Hubris.

I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion/presentation by Lance Mannion with occasional comments from Stephen Kuusisto titled Literary Writing in the Second Digital Age. In it they discussed whether blogs deserve their still often-maligned status as the creation of narcissists screaming into the echo chamber or whether they were something more?

Read all of Geoff’s post Literary Blogging and the Author’s Journal.

And then check out what else is going on at Text and Hubris.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two events to attend today.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher, the two stars of Wretches & Jabberers are heading a panel discussion on the film this morning at ten o’clock central time.  If you’re here in Iowa City it’s being held in the Illinois Room in the Student Union.

And this afternoon, this:

A dramatic reading of Finding Our Voices by writers with autism will be held at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 8, in the Rembolt Room of the Center for Disabilities and Development. Finding Our Voices, compiled and edited by Grinnell [High School] senior DJ Savarese, is a 25-minute collage of prose and poems by autists who type to communicate. The script, solicited by drama teacher Liz Hansen for the Iowa Large Group Speech competition, is read and performed by eight of DJ’s peers.

The reading will include writings by Tracy and Larrry. DJ Saverese, the producer and director, has just been accepted into Oberlin College, the first non-speaking autist to be accepted at Oberlin, according to his father, writer Ralph Savarese.