Crippling the leader

South Carolina has picked the Republican nominee in every primary since the Reagan era began in 1980. It will do so again this year. So we were told by the chairman of the UW Communications (journalism) Department on Wednesday night, in the first of a series of five lectures analyzing the 2012 election campaign.

If so, Mitt Romney's looking good. As of now, at least, he seems to be the obvious front-runner in South Carolina. He also appears to be the best hope for the Republicans in the general election -- a conservative who doesn't make the hair of 70 percent of the voters stand on end, one who can perhaps beguile many moderates and independents into casting their votes for him.

The wild card in South Carolina, however, is a specter from past electoral wars - Newt Gingrich. With millions of dollars in a Super PAC fund, Newt has launched a $3.5 million advertising campaign designed specifically to destroy Romney's viability as a candidate.

By all accounts, the television advertising is devastatingly negative. As Krystal Ball [sic] writes on The Atlantic's website:

Newt hopes to scream at the general election voter that Mitt is such an unbelievably heartless, cold, greedy person that the party that calls ketchup a vegetable and wants to throw people off unemployment during the worst recession since the Great Depression finds him heartless.

Ball labels this advertising barrage as "The Newtron Bomb." She suggests that only Newt Gingrich could get away with such vilification -- any Democrat who made the same arguments would be pilloried as vicious, unfair, and mean-spirited.

Newt's advertising is designed to persuade South Carolina voters that Mitt would be unelectable if nominated; in the process, he may in fact be making him exactly that. Why would Newt -- whose hopes for the nomination must seem remote, even to himself -- do everything possible to cripple the party's front runner? Ball has an answer to that question as well -- Newt's motive is not the good of the country or the success of the Republican party. His motive is, simply, personal revenge.

Early on, Gingrich asked Romney to agree to a campaign free of negative ads. Romney declined. Gingrich got burned by Romney's negative advertising. Gingrich's hostility is now implacable.

A Gingrich TV commercial made available today ties Romney to other Massachusetts public figures -- ones presumably not popular in the Palmetto State. Most devastating of all, the commercial shows clips of both former Democratic candidate John Kerry and Mitt Romney speaking in French. The voice over: "And just like John Kerry -- he speaks French, too." How elitest can a candidate get? How appalling is fluency in French by a presidential candidate in this year of Republican populism?

As a Democratic partisan, I have to admit to a certain pleasure in watching the opposition tear itself apart for as long as possible, and especially in watching Republican attempts to destroy their most potentially successful nominee. On the other hand, it's frightening to watch one of our two major parties systematically eliminate every presidential candidate with any sense of moderation, sophistication, and complexity of thought. After all, the Republicans might always win, even with a pathetic candidate, if the economy stays bad. The normal tendency of the American voter is to blame discontent with the nation's direction on whichever party happens to occupy the White House.

Thus Nixon won in 1968, in voter reaction to the "hippie movement" and anti-war demonstrations. And we all know how that turned out.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Newt Gingrich would never say. Let's hope history does not repeat itself -- not this time.

Indiana boy

Back in 1995, while browsing through magazines at Barnes & Noble, my eye was caught by a magazine I'd never seen before called Strings. On the cover was what appeared to be a teenaged violinist. Not only the cover article (actually, a lengthy, in-depth interview), but the entire magazine looked interesting, and so I bought a copy. Which I still own.

The violinist was not a teenager, however. He was a young man of 27 by the name of Joshua Bell. Today, Bell is perhaps the best known violinist in the United States, if not the world. Last night, I heard him in concert for the second time in my life, this time playing the Bruch Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony.

The Strings article noted:

The identifying traits of Bell's playing are a honeyed yet not overly viscous tone, uncompromising beauty of sound without a favoring of tone quality over musical rhetoric, a keen attention to local detail within a firm sense of overall musical architecture ...

I'm no music critic, obviously, but insofar as I can judge, these remain his characterists today, and were well displayed in his performance of the lush, hyper-Romantic Bruch concerto.

In his Strings interview, Bell sounded American in a way that no performer born in Europe could ever sound. He grew up a Hoosier, the son of an Indiana University professor. He was a fan of tennis and basketball. He rambled on for a paragraph, extolling the joys of golf, which he claimed was "really more than a sport -- it's almost Zenlike, the focus in every shot." And he proudly admitted to ranking fourth in the nation in a computer pinball simulation called Crystal Caliburn. He said he was eager to beat the No. 1 score "which is by some guy from Eugene, Oregon."

Last night, Bell walked onto the stage, dressed informally in black, a mop of dark hair falling down his forehead, and greeted the audience with a seemingly shy smirk. He was called back by thunderous applause for approximately seven bows before finally returning with his violin to play a solo encore. I didn't catch the name of the encore selection, but it was a short piece, well post-Romantic, that revealed the many sounds that Bell can generate from a violin -- and the speedy tempo at which he is capable of bowing.

Joshua Bell is now 44. He's the father of a four-year-old son, but still looks like a kid from Indiana himself. His name is known to anyone with the slightest interest in symphonic music.¹ Since 1995, I've collected most of the CD's featuring his playing, including all of the major violin concertos. Despite obvious sophistication, he still looks like a guy who, when he gets the time, shoots a few hoops and challenges a few unsuspecting victims to on-line pinball. And probably lets out a whoop when he wins.

One post a year about a concert is probably all most readers can tolerate. My apologies for two of them in one week, but last night's concert was an exceptional event.
--------------------------

¹But in a famous experiment in 2007, he spent 45 minutes playing six Bach pieces unannounced in the Washington, D.C., subway. Video cameras caught 1,097 riders walking past him. Seven stopped to listen, and only one recognized him. He collected a total of $32.17 from 27 passers-by. Two days earlier, concert-goers had spent an average of $100 each to hear him play in a sold-out Boston concert.

Peeping early from its bower

Thy smiles I note, sweet early Flower,
That peeping from thy rustic bower
The festive news to earth dost bring,
A fragrant messenger of Spring.
--Coleridge, "To a Primrose"

"Sweet early flower," indeed. The primrose each year is one of the earliest of blooms. Its English name itself means "first rose." (Its Latin name, less poetically, is Primula vulgaris.)

A few primroses dwell in my front yard, resident there since time immemorial. They make their usual appearance in early to mid February, providing me the first reassurance that winter lasts not forever -- that the sun already hasteneth his way northwards. That Spring is on her way.

Today is only January 9, and yet my young primroses already are in bloom. Three flowers fully open: deep purple with yellow centers. Three more peeping forth as purple buds, flowers inchoate. Mine are Primula vulgaris sibthorpii (native to the Balkans and southwest Asia), distinguished by their purple color from the yellow and, well, more vulgar Primula vulgaris vulgaris (native to western and southern Europe). Like Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans, in 2012 my primroses seem to have tripped all over themselves, in their impatient eagerness to rush the season.

Why so early? Mildness of weather? We haven't had many sub-freezing temperatures this year, but the weather's been otherwise -- as usual -- cold and wet. Have my primroses been prematurely aroused by the strength of the political winds? Or are my plants eager to stage one final show for my benefit, saddened with foreknowledge that this coming December brings to an end the Mayan world cycle?

Who knows what's in their pretty little heads? But their arrival is welcome. And if their arrival should augur an early end to winter, I'm all for it. I'm all for it, even should their appearance -- like melting glaciers and overheated polar bears -- be but additional evidence of global warming, that bête noir of my political adversaries.

The primrose was Prime Minister Disraeli's favorite flower. It is the county flower of Devon. It is edible. Its leaves can be used to make tea, and its flowers to make primrose wine. It's a loveable flower, and I do love it. I greet with warmth its early appearance.

Welcome again for yet another year, O Primula vulgaris . Bring us peace in our time, an early spring, and a Happy New Year.

Music from Trinity

I'd never heard of John Adams. No, not the president from Quincy, Massachusetts. I'm talking about the composer from Worcester, Massachusetts.

At least, I didn't think I'd ever heard of him until last night, but now I see that he's famous for his 1987 opera Nixon in China, which I guess I have heard of at one time or another. But certainly never seen.

Anyway, last night the Seattle Symphony concluded the evening's program with the Doctor Atomic Symphony, orchestral music adapted from John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. The program notes admonish me that Adams is "widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation." So, there you are, my own ignorance notwithstanding.

Despite the extreme conservatism of my musical tastes, I found the symphony -- maybe more a tone poem than a symphony: a single movement, 23 minutes in length -- to be dramatic and gripping and worth my attention. The score was loud and dissonant and heavy on the percussion, as one would expect from a modern work, but also rich in melody in the woodwinds and brass. The conductor -- a visiting conductor from the St. Louis Symphony -- gave us a short and witty pre-performance synopsis of the opera's plot, and explained how the symphony tracks that plot and introduces the major musical themes of the opera.

The opera takes place in 1945 -- the first act occuring shortly before the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., and the second act immediately before detonation of the Hiroshima bomb. The focus is on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, whose ambivalence about what he was creating -- and later, what he had created -- eventually led to the government's yanking of his security clearance.

Oppenheimer was a poet as well as a theoretical physicist. It was he who famously recalled his feelings while observing the initial bomb test in New Mexico with a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He gave the code name of "Trinity" to the Alamogordo test site, after his favorite sonnet by John Donne: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

Oppenheimer, the "Dr. Atomic" of the opera's title, has always fascinated and impressed me. At one time, back when I had personal heroes, I guess I considered him as such.

The symphonic derivative of the opera that we heard last night combined breathtaking musical elements of fear, anticipation, and explosive violence, with an overall sense of poetry and awe. It was not "easy listening," compared with the Mozart piano concerto that had immediately preceded it, but it was moving and thought-provoking.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, I might actually persuade myself to attend John Adams's opera itself -- just out of curiosity and, perhaps, as my own personal tribute to the life of Dr. Oppenheimer.

Didion at 75

The first time I read an essay by Joan Didion, one published in a weekly magazine, I was dazzled. In a few paragraphs, she said everything I had been feeling about generational differences (in her case, between "silent" and "hippie" generations) in how people dealt with life and with politics. She threw in thoughts about growing older, and about whether it was possible, or even worthwhile, for groups of citizens to effect societal change through angry demonstrations.

I later read more of her writing, and was especially impressed by her two early books of essays, books about which it has been written:

Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

--Me, actually, in my 2009 posting "Slouching towards darkness".

(In that 2009 post, I reviewed a dramatization of Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Imagine my discomfort today, therefore, when I read Caitlin Flanagan's essay, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," in the February issue of The Atlantic. Flanagan's essay, which purports to review Didion's latest book, Blue Nights, proclaims that Didion is a writer for girls, especially young girls "on the cusp of womanhood." Flanagan herself recalls -- and much of the review is devoted to Flanagan's memories of her own childhood at Berkeley, where her father, as an English professor, gave Flanagan the chance to meet the young Didion -- how her father exclaimed one night, "There's something weird going on with Joan Didion and women."

So ... what? So, I've been in love with chick lit all these years? But I don't watch vampire movies. While Jane Austen's ok, I don't moon over it. I don't grow faint reading of tender virgins finding themselves clasped in the strong arms of a manly embrace. Why Didion?

Flanagan points out that no real gal can resist Didion's allusions to "the smell of jasmine," or the "packing list" Didion allegedly kept by her suitcase. Huh? Didion, Flanagan contends, knows how to describe her own wardrobe and that of others in detail. She knows the differences in styles of flatware. She knows about good and bad floor plans for houses. She [gasp!] writes about hanging "yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better."

Us guys, on the other hand, we don't care about all that stuff. We want to read about getting high with Hunter Thompson, while speeding on a highway somewhere out of Barstow. Says Flanagan.

Flanagan -- and maybe millions of women, as she suggests -- apparently read Didion differently from the way I do. I'm sure the yellow silk, the flatware, the crepe-de-chine wraps, and [sigh] the jasmine are all there in Didion's writing. I'm willing to admit that her attention to such feminine details may be an attractive feature to many. But to me, the essence of Didion's appeal -- in her essays, which are the concern of both Flanagan and myself -- has been her ability to see the world from a different angle: to see the normal, routine world with which we are all familiar through a broken or distorting mirror, revealing a scary image of things flying out of control.

The title to her first book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, calls to mind words from Yeats's poem that seem to inform all of her essays.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...

Didion's essays repeatedly show worlds spinning apart -- her personal grip on her own life, and our civilization's grip on civilization.

As an example of Didion's acute sensitivity to female concerns(according to Flanagan) -- Didion understood that the traditional governor's mansion in Sacramento was superior to Ronald Reagan's new mansion "because it had big, airy bedrooms" in which one could spend time reading, or writing, or "closing the door and crying until dinner." No wonder girls loved Didion! But that 1977 essay was only superficially about the livability of the Reagan mansion. She saw the Reagans and their nouveau mansion as representing an unfortunate, and already passé, 1950s-ish interlude between two eras -- the old rural Californa of orange groves and quiet good taste and a coming post-70's California of austerity and simplicity, represented by the then governor, Jerry Brown. Brown was famous for his monastic lifestyle, for sleeping on a futon on the floor of his apartment, for refusing to live in the Reagans' overbuilt governor's mansion.

One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

--Didion, The White Album.

Ultimately, after talking about her own childhood and Didion's appeal to the female gender, Flanagan's review gets around to its nominal subject, Blue Nights. She regrets that it is not a good book. The language is clichéd, Didion's thoughts are no longer original, her insight is lacking. In summary, Didion's problem is that, at 75, "she got old."

Blue Nights deals with Didion's parallel concerns: the death of her daughter, and her own aging and eventual death. As would any grieving mother, she lingers repeatedly over memories of her daughter throughout the young woman's short life: happy times, sad times, puzzling times, disheartening times. To Flanagan, it's clear that Didion just can't read between the lines. Didion can't see that many of her daughter's problems resulted from the way her parents reared her, from their overriding concerns with their own careers, from their selfish narcissism.

My freshman English teacher wrote a warning on one of my early essays: Be cautious in believing that you understand an author's writing better than he does himself. To me, reading Blue Nights before I read Flanagan's review, it was clear that Didion was all too aware of how her own "weaknesses" as a parent affected her daughter. These weaknesses, many of which were unavoidable considering the careers pursued by Didion and her husband, are set forth clearly in the book, and her "where did I go wrong" questions are rhetorical. Didion did not do a clinical self-analysis, it's true; she left it to the reader to connect the dots. But Joan Didion, whatever her age, is never clueless.

Rearing a child, watching the child grow into independence, growing older oneself, losing one's loved ones, and facing one's own eventual death are all part of the human predicament. They are neither male nor female concerns alone. Joan Didion has been thinking and writing of these problems, among many others, throughout her writing career. Her writing may have had a special appeal for young girls, but she's never been a "women's writer." She may now be aging, but she has not lost her sharpness of thought, her turn of phrase, or her ability to see the "strange" in what others find commonplace.

Blue Nights is worth reading.

Dealing with abstractions

Last night was a bad night in the Rainier96 household. It started out nicely enough, watching a bowl game that was being played well by both sides. It ended, however, in tears. And in screams, thrown objects, and bewildered cats scrambling for cover.

My team lost, of course. Lost by a missed field goal, a seemingly easy kick by a seemingly competent (albeit freshman) kicker, with two seconds left on the clock.

A good night's sleep, followed by a vigorous piano lesson this morning, restored my will to live. But my volcanically emotional reaction interests me. Why did I care so much? I don't know anyone currently in school at Stanford, my alma mater. And I certainly don't know anyone at Oklahoma State.

And yet, for an hour or so, I felt devastated, as though my own personal worth had been cheapened, my character attacked, my entire way of life insulted. I found myself hating the entire state of Oklahoma and all its inhabitants -- even though a quick glance at the faces of the school's players and student body made it obvious that they were every bit as wholesome, exuberant, playful, and good-natured as their opposites from my own school -- or rather as their opposites from my school had been, up until two seconds before the end of regulation play.

Competitive sports everywhere is based on the fans' willingness and ability to identify with an entity -- a school, a club, a professional team. Thus, I "love" the Seahawks; I "hate" U.S.C. But "Seahawks" and "Trojans" are just abstract entities. The players on those teams and their coaches, change constantly. The U.S.C. of today is composed of an entirely different cast of characters from that of ten years ago. I'm loving or hating a fictitious entity that is incapable of loving or hating me in return.

Sports fans are merely a less virulent version of a nation's "true patriots." When an American says (as they often do) that he despises Iran (or France), it's difficult logically to understand what he means. He may, of course, simply mean that he strongly disagrees with the policies pursued by that nation's government. But when the words "hate" or "despise" are used, the user generally has passed beyond logic. Despite not knowing a single person living in Iran (or France), he sincerely feels hatred and contempt for an entire nation, a nation that has no idea that he even exists. Iranians are "evil and barbaric fanatics." French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." These patriots' own America, on the other hand, is "a shining city on a hill," a "beacon of freedom," and an "exception" amongst nations.

My short-lived emotions following the bowl game remind me of a dialogue between two infantrymen that I read in a novel a long time ago. I suspect the book was Remarque's All's Quiet on the Western Front, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. One soldier asks another (all quotes are paraphrases from my memory): "Why are we fighting, anyway?" The other replies that they are fighting because another country had insulted theirs. The first asks in reply, quite sensibly, how one country can possibly "insult" another. "How can we be killing and getting killed for such an "insult"?" he asks. "Do you feel insulted? I certainly don't feel insulted."

Our minds seems hardwired to use such abstractions when we think. But as I watched the faces last night of the winning Oklahoma State players and students, it was obvious that they were no different from players and students at my own school. I obviously didn't hate them, anymore than I actually felt that my own school's victory or defeat would be a personal victory or defeat for myself. It was just a game, as our parents used to remind us.

When I visited Iran last spring, I looked at the faces of the Iranian people, the Iranian children. In all but superficial respects they seemed pretty much like Americans. However irresponsible their government's conduct might have seemed to me, I didn't "hate" the Iranian people, or wish them harm. And I feel no desire now to "punish" them by backing sanctions that would cause more harm to them in their daily lives than could be justified by any effect the sanctions might have in persuading the Iranian government to modify its policies. Nor, more profoundly, can I support an actual attack on them by our government's military forces. I certainly won't support "bombing them back to the stone age."

Foreign affairs is not "just a game." Affairs between nations affect real people, people who rarely have much control over those affairs. I take the conduct of foreign policy seriously. But I won't "hate" people in other countries, laugh at their customs or religious beliefs, disrespect their natural love for their own country, or remain indifferent to the effects of my own government's conduct upon their lives.

I'd recovered from my temporary insanity by this morning, no harm having been done to anyone, including my cats. Let's hope our government can handle in a rational manner the challenges posed in dealing with Iran, realizing fully and at all times that however much Americans oppose certain policies by the Iranian government, we recognize our brotherhood and common humanity with the people of Iran.

As for Stanford's football team -- well, there's always next year

Driving onwards

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. ... As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
--E. B. White

As we arise from the muddy ditch that was 2011, may the skies that lie ahead in 2012 shine brightly about us. May we find ourselves headed in the right direction, whatever that right direction might be and wherever it may lead us.

Happy New Year!

Suffer the little children ...

Two New York Times stories out of Illinois, this week.

The first story is that of Lamar West. Lamar was taken from his birth parents, for reasons related to drug abuse, when he was four. He was adopted by Frankie Lee West when he was five. His birth records were changed to show his adoption. His surname was changed to that of his adoptive mother. He became part of a large family, some adopted and some the natural children of his new mother.

From what I can glean from the story, he lived a normal childhood. At age 17, he moved out of the house for a few months, because of over-crowding, but kept in regular contact with his mom. He then returned to his house. It was empty. As Lamar puts it, his mother had "upped and went."

Lamar was abandoned one month before he turned 18. Eighteen is the age when adoptive parents in Illinois stop receiving state assistance. Lamar is now 20. He's had one brief phone call with his mother. She did not invite him back. He has since married and has a child of his own. He still misses the family in which he was raised.

The NYT writer points out that this is a common problem in Illinois. Abandoned children over 18 are adults. The state has no further responsibility for them, financial or otherwise. Many end up on the street, homeless.

"D.C.F.S. is aware that not all placements are perfect matches", the article notes.

The second article, also in the New York Times, reports that the Catholic bishops of Illinois have closed down most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in Illinois. Catholic Charities is one of the largest social service organizations in the nation, providing services to poor persons of all faiths. Sixty percent of its income is from government programs. Three percent comes from diocesan and parish funds. The rest comes from charitable contributions and investments.

Among the services provided by Catholic Charities in Illinois is arrangement of adoptions. Last summer, Illinois's attorney general told the organization that it must henceforth comply with the state's anti-discrimination laws. Therefore, in determinating suitability of adoptive parents, it could no longer consider whether the parents were of the same or opposite sexes.

Rather than permit Catholic Charities to place children with same-sex parents, the Illinois bishops have shut down the entire organization within Illinois.

The bishops feel their religious freedom is being attacked. "In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill.

A teacher from Marion, Ill., Tim Kee, and his long time partner, Rick Wade, both Catholic, tried to adopt through Catholic Charities. They were turned down.

I'm not sure what lesson, if any, can be drawn from considering these two stories together. Certainly, churches should not be forced to act against their principles. But what if the church were one that had religious objections to mixed marriages? How should the state react to a religious organization that refused, on principle, to allow a white male and African-American female (or vice versa), to adopt a child of any race?

Illinois is seeing skyrocketing numbers of "failed adoptions," as kids who were adopted 15 years or so ago are now turning 18. The motive for many of those adoptions, it now seems, was financial. "Not all placements are perfect matches," as the the NYT article summarizes the state's position. At the same time, the state has been providing over sixty percent of the operating budgets of an agency -- unquestionably an excellent and highly responsible provider of services -- that won't permit a school teacher and his long time partner to adopt a child -- for no reason other than that they are not of opposite sexes.

The bishops of Illinois have thus made the decision that it is preferable to allow the state's bureaucratic placement of a child with a single parent whose only motive is to receive state assistance payments -- or to allow the child to grow to maturity living in an orphanage -- rather than itself place the child with two men or women who -- presumably -- would raise the child in a loving and stable environment.

Maybe they are correct. They no doubt are acting in accord with their sincere convictions. But maybe, with a little thought and a little prayer, they could figure out a course of action that considers the immediate impact of their actions upon the lives of others, not merely their actions' conformity with abstract principles.

Knocking off No. 7

On December 24, the afternoon before Christmas, I was doing last minute shopping at a mini-mall in the town of Big Bear Lake, California. I would have felt less tired -- less stressed, perhaps -- if I'd known what a home town boy from Big Bear Lake was doing at the same moment.

In May 2010, I wrote a post praising the accomplishments of 13-year-old Jordan Romero, the boy who'd just become the youngest person ever to climb Everest. At the age of 10, when he climbed Africa's Kilimanjaro, Jordan decided to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Everest was number six; only Antarctica remained. He hoped to climb the Vinson Massif the following December.

His climb was delayed for a year, but on December 24, 2011, he completed the climb. At the age of 15 years, 5 months and 12 days, he was the youngest person to ever climb the "Seven Summits." According to Wikipedia, China has now joined Nepal in prohibiting climbs of Everest by persons under 16. Jordan's record therefore looks pretty safe for the foreseeable future.

The young man's steadfast determination over the past five years -- not only to complete each grueling climb, but to persist in the training required before and between climbs -- is inspiring. He demonstrates that our frequent stereotype of his age group -- a bunch of lazy kids playing with their electronic toys -- is only a stereotype. Not many young people will accomplish this much, this early -- but many of them are following their own stars, whether athletic, academic, entrepreneurial, with dedication and enthusiasm.

I haven't bothered checking the on-line comments about Jordan's latest achievement by the commentators who I found so irritating in my earlier post, but I assume they're still there, still criticizing and scoffing at anyone who dares to accomplish anything they can't or won't. The ranks of this on-line chorus have been described as bitter young adults, unemployed and wedded to their computers while living in their parents' basement. Another unfair stereotype, probably, but I can live with it.

Again, my congratulations to Jordan Romero, and to his parents who supported him so strongly in his efforts (and to Jordan's father, especially, who joined his son in making each climb).

Christmas chiaroscuro

Not a crock pot.

At least, I don't think so. The doubt I suggested earlier -- whether my new Kindle would turn out to be one of those gadgets that, once purchased, I would consign to a dark corner of the basement, never to be seen again -- was apparently unfounded.

During my train trip last week -- to Los Angeles, to join family for Christmas -- between my eating in the diner, drinking in the club car, talking to relatives who joined the train mid-journey in the Bay Area, and simply staring out the window and daydreaming -- I managed to read, in its entirety, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Once I arrived at our rented cabin at Big Bear Lake -- between my eating incessantly, drinking when not eating, talking to relatives who descended on Big Bear from all over the West Coast, and simply staring out the window at the snow, the trees and the deep blue sky -- I managed to read, in its entirety, Blue Nights, by Joan Didion.

My Kindle proved as helpful and as easy to use as I'd hoped. The two books I chose to read were well-written, fascinating, and possibly worthy of a future blog or two in their own right. Extremely Loud is about death, loss of loved ones, and the inability to know the ones you love even while they still live, told against a backdrop of (to some extent) the firebombing of Dresden and (to a significant extent) the catastrophe of Nine-Eleven in New York City. Blue Nights is about death, loss of loved ones, and the inability to know the ones you love even while they still live, told against a backdrop of the apprehension by its 75-year-old author that she not only was no longer a kid, but was, in fact, showing obvious and disturbing signs of mortality.

Ho ho ho! And a Merry Christmas to you all, boys and girls!

But like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the tombstone etched with Ebeneezer's own name, my Kindle reading projected merely a dark background, against which the joyful revels of Christmas were rendered even sharper and more colorful -- a sense of temporality that caused one to welcome even more the warm company of close family, the renewal of acquaintance with distant family, and casual conversations with interesting family friends I'd never before met.

I'd hardly claim as an original observation that awareness of life's shortness often intensifies one's enjoyment of life's presence. Luckily for the progress of mankind, knowledge of our mortality isn't usually a debilitating depressant.

So I had a great time at Big Bear, despite (or because of) writings on my Kindle cautioning me to enjoy the present while it's still here to be enjoyed -- to shoo away the ghosts of the future, and join the guests celebrating at the banquet table of Christmas Present.

I'll have one more plate of turkey, Bob Cratchit, if I might? And God bless us, every one!

South by rail

Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.¹


Some of my earliest hazy memories are of riding on overnight trains from Portland down the Willamette Valley, to visit my great grandparents on a farm. And slightly later, I have a much clearer recollection of traveling by sleeper with my mother and brother to Sacramento, where an aunt picked us up and drove us up to Donner Lake, near Lake Tahoe.

These early experiences -- memories dimmed by the swirling fogs of very early childhood -- may have exerted a permanent impact on my brain's later development, because I can't remember a time during my life that I haven't loved train travel. As a 14-year-old, I took the Empire Builder back to Chicago -- three days and two nights all by myself, sitting and sleeping in a coach seat -- to visit a former school friend. During college, I made three round trips a year between my home in Washington and school in California. Overseas for my university's "study abroad" program, I traveled all over Europe during school breaks -- always by train.

Nowadays, it's much faster, simpler, and usually cheaper to fly than it is to ride by train. Nevertheless, tomorrow at 9:45 a.m., I'll find myself boarding Amtrak's Coast Starlight, bound for Southern California, where I'll join family for Christmas. I'll arrive at Burbank -- the last stop before Los Angeles -- at 8:15 p.m. Thursday night. No longer a starving, penniless student -- carefully avoiding the expense of European hotels by sitting up overnight in a second class compartment -- I now allow myself the luxury of splurging on a roomette in a sleeping car.

But coach or sleeper, the basic attractions are the same. For 35 hours, I'll be isolated from the "real" world. No chores to do. Nothing expected of me. I can read in comfort for uninterrupted hours, or stare blankly out the window, hypnotized by the blur of scenery rushing past. If I feel restless, I can walk to one of the lounge cars, have a beer, and meet or observe other travelers. If I chose -- which I don't -- I could spend much of the trip staring at screens in a darkened room devoted to arcade games. Some long distance trains -- I'm not sure about the Coast Starlight -- even show movies in a small theater.

The sweet tedium of the day is broken regularly by meals in the diner -- meals that, for sleeping car passengers, are included in the fare. These meals, for the first few years after Amtrak took over from Southern Pacific, were barely edible at best, but they are now surprisingly good. Perhaps not the same haute cuisine that luxury trains like the AT&SF's Super Chief are said to have offered before World War II, during the glory days of train travel, but they're a notch above those offered by casual chain restaurants.

The seats of the roomette convert to a bed with linen, blankets and pillows at night. I find them extremely comfortable, and the rocking and swaying of the railway car conducive to a very relaxing sleep. Of course, I've always slept happily sitting up in coach, as well, so maybe you shouldn't rely on my recommendation!

I've found that mankind can be divided into two groups: those who love train travel, and those who wonder why anyone would waste 35 hours of his life to travel a distance he could reach in a little over two hours by plane. It's these little differences between people that make life interesting, right? Anyway, I'm pleased to fall into the first category.

"Coast Starlight, now boarding on Track Three, bound for Tacoma, Olympia, Centralia, Kelso-Longview, Vancouver, Portland, .... and Los Angeles. All Aboard!"

See you folks after Christmas!
------------------------------------
¹Steve Goodman, "City of New Orleans."

Sail on, Gray Lady, sail on by

Yahoo News seems to be the first on the internet with the news that Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times, is resigning at the end of the month. Her departure is attributed to shareholder discontent with share value, resulting from inadequate revenue from subscriptions and advertising.

I might have used this news as a springboard for discussing the woes that confront print journalism nationwide, as newspapers find themselves faced with ever-increasing competition from free on-line news sites and blogs, at the time of a poor national economy.

Instead, I choose to note the almost universal chortling of joy expressed in anonymous on-line comments to the article, declaring the Gray Lady to be a worthless liberal rag, good only for lining bird cages. The sooner she dies the better.

I have a lifelong friend, a passionate conservative, who proudly declares that he never reads the NYT -- wouldn't allow the filthy propaganda sheet in his house. As a liberal who regularly reads the Fox News website, just to see what arguments are coming from the other side, I find this attitude hard to understand.

Newspapers offer readers a continuum of quality. There are terrible British newspapers -- many of them -- that I'd never bother reading, not so much because I disagree with their editorial policy as because they're full of sensationalistic nonsense. But there are few American papers, at least ones with a national following, that arouse that response in me. Right wing, left wing, or moderate -- most papers try to walk the perilous tightrope of bringing legitimate news to the community while still making a profit for their owners or shareholders.

But they do differ in quality. If an apolitical alien dropped down from Outer Space, and did his best to expunge every iota of bias from Fox News and the New York Times -- an impossible task, apart from the opinion page, since every decision selecting stories for publication rests on the editor's subjective sense of what he considers "important" and "newsworthy" -- the disparity between the two would be obvious and dramatic. Fox News would then be seen as combining many features of USA Today with certain features of People magazine. With even a dash of seasoning, perhaps, from National Enquirer.

The NYT, on the other hand, would still come close to justifying its somewhat overstated claim of being "America's Newspaper of Record." In the Times, you find in-depth reporting of international and national news that you simply can't find elsewhere in a newspaper format. But political news is only a fraction of what you get for your two bucks at the news stand -- over a week's time, you also receive detailed news -- by writers with expertise in their fields -- of music, arts, popular culture, books, fashion, business, sports. If I were totally uninterested in politics and international relations, I'd still subscribe to the NYT for its daily reporting of those other areas of life in which I did have an interest.

I'm not sure, on the other hand, that any of my right wing friends would bother to click on Fox News (or watch it on TV) if it weren't for the political slanting that the site offers.

The New York Times is not going to die, despite the fervent wishes of on-line commentators, any more than the Wall Street Journal will die, despite my own occasional raised eyebrows with respect to its editorial policy. Both newspapers are major assets in the world of American (and world) journalism. We would be a more poorly informed nation without them.

Requiem for a refuge

Yesterday, George Whitman, 98, died in Paris. The New York Times notes that he had owned his bookstore overlooking the Seine, Shakespeare & Company, since 1951. His store, named Le Mistral until 1964, was a mecca and refuge for the post-World War II generation of American expatriate writers, and the spiritual heir of the original Shakespeare & Company, run by Sylvia Beach during the 1920's.

His death occurred, ironically, on the same date as my post announcing that I had purchased a Kindle.

These two events were on my mind today, as I walked out of Barnes & Noble in University Village. For several months, I'd been noticing that the shelves had grown smaller and smaller, and spaced farther and farther apart. I'd been worrying that B&N was focusing its attention excessively on Nook, its own version of Kindle, rather than on promoting the sale of physical books. Today I learned the worst possible news -- the Village's B&N is closing its doors at the end of this month.

My readers are undoubtedly familiar with Barnes & Noble. The Village store is a massive yet warm and welcoming establishment. Two expansive floors, which, for years, were packed densely with books covering every possible subject matter. Alcoves with easy chairs and library tables -- one of the alcoves upstairs graced with a gas fireplace. A large recordings department, carrying an impressive inventory of classical CDs. Areas where authors were invited to give readings. A mezzanine Starbucks where you could linger over the books you'd just purchased -- or might still decide to purchase.

I often spent an entire afternoon at Barnes & Noble, browsing and reading books (books that I sometimes purchased, although not often enough, it seems), ending my visit by dallying for a half hour over latte, surrounded by poster caricatures of famous authors, while watching customers wander about the first floor below. Students would crowd tables doing homework, researching from books from the store's shelves. No one was hurried or asked to leave. As did Shakespeare & Company itself, the store offered a haven, at least for the day, to anyone with time on his hands and a love of books in his heart. The store's ambience was as much library as bookstore, but a library that was far cozier and less institutional than our downtown public library.

Halcyon bygone days. Wandering about the maze-like stacks of the Village store came close to matching my own personalized image of heaven. One of those joys you never quite appreciate, unfortunately, until you lose it.

Barnes & Noble still has a large store downtown that I often visit. That outlet is a fine place to shop around and buy a book -- but it's crowded with shoppers and it's bustling. Intentionally or not, it doesn't encourage idle shoppers to linger for hours, reading books without necessarily paying for them. It's not "cozy."

With the downtown Borders having shut down earlier this year when its parent company went bankrupt, and with the closing now of the Village B&N, I wonder if it's only a matter of time until all large bookstores shut their doors.

I left the store this afternoon, picturing that moment a couple of weeks from now when the last customer walks out the door, the last latte is pulled, the gas fireplace is extinguished for good, the remaining inventory is boxed up and returned to the publishers. The sky seemed grayer, the drizzle more drizzly, as I walked away.

Is it all Kindle from now on? George Whitman may have sensed that now was a good time to quietly depart the scene.

Kindling my desire

A month ago, I penned (keyboarded) a hymn to the printed page. Books were my life, I declared piously.

Today, I stand shamefaced before you and announce: "I've bought myself a Kindle."

Why would I do such a thing, you ask. I guess the proximate cause for my downfall was my experience while on trek in October. Pascal, my travel buddy, brought his Kindle in place of the paperbacks he lugged around on past trips. The device was attractive, slim, easy to hold in one hand; its screen was incredibly easy to read. He electronically bookmarked pages he found interesting, and highlighted passages, just like a college student. He instantaneously checked an internal dictionary for words whose meaning escaped him. He announced -- at least daily(!) -- the exact percentage still to go of the book he was reading. Had he needed new reading material, he would have had immediate digital access to Amazon's inventory. He even -- and this is amazing, although of questionable utility -- was able to beckon the book to read aloud to him.

I know. The decadence is breathtaking.

Of course, I had to get one. Whatever longwinded justifications I might offer you now, we all know the real reason. The Kindle was just too cool for me to resist.

I've downloaded one book from Amazon -- it cost me about $10. I've read a few pages, just to savor the experience, but I'm really saving my first "Kindle experience" for a lengthy train trip I'll be taking next week. It's while I travel that I expect Kindle to be so worthwhile and convenient. Here at home, on the other hand, I'm about half way through the new George Kennan biography -- a dense, heavy, hardback volume that I balance precariously and uncomfortably on one knee while my two cats face off for possession of the other.

The Kennan bio is a serious book, and its size and weight confirm its seriousness. It's a satisfying book to pick up and hold with both hands. I find myself constantly turning back to past chapters, confirming my recall of what I'd read earlier. The book, in all its physicality, will be a permanent addition to my library, a valuable resource to which I'll undoubtedly refer in the future.

A landmark biography of a renowned diplomat and framer of foreign policy requires shelf space. It's just not appropriate Kindle fodder.

But I think Kindle will be well adapted to reading fiction. I generally read novels straight though, without doing much searching back to re-read earlier portions. Once I've read a novel, moreover, I generally shelve it, never to be looked at again. I'll be adding fewer new works of fiction to shelves from now on, but I won't miss them.

And, of course -- (did I mention?) -- my totally awesome Kindle can store about 3,000 books: my once-read novels will all be there should I actually ever need them again.

I know it's not obvious, but I'm kind of excited, behind my calm and equable exterior. Kindle will be a new and powerful tool, and a supplement to my library of printed volumes. It unleashes all the dynamism of the future.

Unless, of course, it turns out to be no more than 2011's version of the 1970's crock pot -- an item everyone just had to own -- and one that's been tucked away, unused and out of sight, during the decades since it was purchased.

Tickling the ivories

As promised in my last posting, I won't describe my own performance at today's piano recital. Except to say that I was able to complete my piece without collapsing or requiring resuscitation.

But the recital experience itself -- my first since I was maybe 12 or 13 -- is worth a brief mention.

Ten pianists besides myself performed. They ranged in age from an unbelievably tiny young man of perhaps three, up to a boy and girl who appeared to be in their early teens. Eight of the performers were of Asian background. I mention this as but one more piece of evidence -- in one more area of life -- that Asian-American kids are positioning themselves to outshine their peers from other ethnic groups in tomorrow's America.

In the audience, besides those of us waiting to perform (or slowly reviving from our completed performance), were parents, siblings, and other proud relatives; our piano teacher herself; and an administrator from the music school who was taking photos of each cute child (and me, I presume) at the piano. In other words, it was a small audience, and not at all intimidating -- parents were all holding their breath through their own offspring's playing, and responding with appreciative applause to the performances of others.

The music ranged from Skateboard Doodle by a little tyke who obviously wished he were elsewhere, to rather sophisticated pieces by Mozart and Shostakovich by the two teenagers. I enjoyed it all: the serious efforts by the smallest kids, the stumblings by a boy about 12 who obviously hadn't practiced and was playing under protest, and the accomplished playing of familiar classical or semi-classical pieces (some in simplified arrangements) by the older half of the cast.

Here we were, two weeks before Christmas, with feverish shopping to be done. NFL games were on TV. It was a cold night, and the church in which the recital took place was also cold. But a little gathering of young people and their moms and dads made room in their lives to celebrate modest musical accomplishments. In a world of electronics and rock and roll and obsession with professional sports, parents implicitly acknowledged that the best gift and best educational experience they could give their kids was to willingly attend, listen to their children and others play, and show appreciation for their efforts by applause and hugs.

For a short time, playing the piano -- an ancient form of mastery that served as a goal for generations of kids before computer games came along -- was the most important fact in the universe.

It was nice.