on structure

As I grow older, I realize more and more the importance of structure, and how irrelevant it appears to the casual observer. In large part, I think structure is taken for granted. We awake, the paper is there, on our doorstep. We expect the mails. We expect trains to run on time (even if this is a vain hope in Boston). But to simply look at the memnotechnical structure of our days and to believe this an adequate expression of societal order is a mistake. Trains aren't just plunked there, purchased at the local train store by hobbyists. They require rail lines, traffic signals, planing of traffic patterns, material cost outlays for personel and maintenance. They must conform to a gauge, and divers specifications established by various committees facing varying degrees of public oversight. A train, at a station, in some proximity to your house at a (reasonably) proscribed time is, in fact, quite a marvel.

Or take airflight. I was reading, on a whim (thanks to the tender ministrations of the Central Square Salvation Army which had all paperbacks for just 79 cents) the fine, if grotesquely prurient, adventure yarn Alive (also a major motion picture. I'm sure everyone's heard about Alive, since everyone loves canibalism, and everyone loves the particular voyeurism of survival stories (just ask Jon Krakauer who perfectly rode the line between observation and schadenfreude into a brilliant book). Alive is particularly bad in this aspect, as Piers Paul Read painstakingly gives the reader a culinary tour of the thousand ways to canibalize a man (slice up the tendons with a razor blade, let 'em cure in the Andean sun, eat raw like so much beef jerky; braise lightly with a camp stove, eat rare like a good steak; smash skull and evacuate brains with the ostensible goal of harvesting glucose, lightly season with pepper; consume semi-rotten entrails, taking care to avoid stray digestive juices; consume lungs for no particular reason beyond brute extigency; avoid genitals at first, but later eat scrotum; eat liver, early and often, for the minerals and vitamins) and the thousand and one ways to justify such behavior (brute extingency, variously etiolated scholastic arguments about the canibalistic nature of the Eucharist (later officially disavowed), half-mad statements about one-ness and elements of homosocial sacrifice, poorly digested stews of catholic theology filtered through the athletic brain of a playboy rugy team, authentic hunger) all the while insisting on his particular species of journalistic integrity (his own catholicism, his will-to-truth over the material, his bravery in fully recognizing the extingency of survival, the clearing of the air around a (horrid) event, prurient interest and thinly veiled delight in such offbeat gustatory pleasures). The book is an unpleasant masterpiece, a anti-Julia Child, a gastronomical voyage into (fortunately) rarely-charted waters. But, more importantly, the book is also a exegesis on the (banal) failures of poor, barely motivated, third world countries to have effective air command and control situtations, for their pilots to be poorly trained and to lack effective technology, and for stupid navigational mistakes (coupled with idiotic search and rescue strategies). Alive might be a menu masquerading as reportage, but it also unveils the importance of structure.

We should be glad, after all, that we live in America, where nobody eats eachother, not least because of the toxic levels of cholesterol in your average Joe.

On 9/11

I'm not sure, in retrospect, if I was ready for the outpouring of 9/11 coverage over the past couple of weeks. I think I would have largely avoided the TV coverage if not for the girlfriend: it would have been easy enough to not watch that footage again, just watch South Park re-runs and the odd Sox game. I remember that day, five years ago, so vividly. For me, it was the second plane, the second tower, that really hit. The first tower had been hit when I was in class, and although people were milling around Baxter--I remember that the NYTimes' website was down--it was all still very confused: mistake? horrible mistake? accident? And then, with definitive physical certainty, the second plane streaking across the frame, just clearing those few other buildings on the skyline, and then that impact, which you could feel, in the pit of your stomach, standing hundreds of miles away in sun-kissed Williamstown. That's when we all knew: that awful instant, freshly replayed, with the plane, and the flame, and the smoke, and the realization that we weren't invincible, after all.

I think, though, that reading 9/11 as "the West's (inevitable) come-uppance" is a huge mistake. After all, that's the Bin Laden-ite party line: 9/11 is the necessary riposte to a pro-Israel foreign policy. I've said for a while that the truth is darker: 9/11 is the totalized, media-age, expression of the barbarian impulse. 9/11 is simply the last salvo in the battle between civilization and barbarism, order and chaos, the Roman and the Pict. With an impressive flourish, the subaltern uses the conqueror's own technology against him, strikes against him with technology of his own design. How else can we read 9/11 but as the ultimate expression of vague rage and impotence: buildings which barbarians could never construct are destroyed with planes barbarians could never design.

That's what I took away, from my 15 minutes in high school at the base of those skyscrapers, impossibly tall, impossibly graceful, the (seemingly) casual expression of commercial and financial dominance, the markers, at the prow of Manhattan of the greatest city in the greatest civilization on Earth. What grace, what elegance, what sheer engineering audacity--110 stories! I felt pride. Pride is what I feel whenever I fly, (well, now, pride maybe mixed with a little trepidation) at the mix of physics and engineering, the (now) casual achievement of launching hundreds of tons of passengers and luggage and carryons and personal items into the sky--the fucking sky--and within hours, halfway across the globe.

I never considered that anyone thought anything else.

I never thought that barbarians felt rage. Hatred. Disgust. How dare planes fly? How dare air travel be inexpensive and over-arching? How dare skyscrapers house thousands productively working, a thousand feet above a bustling city? How dare they can, when we cannot?

I'm sure the Visigoths felt the same way when their filthy toes touched the smooth marbles of the Forum. There's something unseemly, the distance between civilization and barbarism, and there's only one barbarian response: to smash and destroy.

***

2,996 people died five years ago, today. (I'm pretty sure that figure never included the barbarians--and it never should.) We cannot forget that we're fighting for civilization, and against barbarism, and that order, buildings, beauty, airplanes, and all the things we hold dear (civil society, rule of law, all you can eat buffets). We cannot forget that there is no negotiation, no quarter, in this fight. Our barbarian opponents will not rest until they can dip fungal toes in the reflecting pool, will not stop until they can deface Lincoln to fufill their esoteric Islamic prohibitions against graven images, will not cease until they can reduce the rest of the world to the flea-ridden, dusty, entropic mess that is the dearest dream of nomadic tent-dwellers.

Let's Roll, America...Let's Roll!

On books and libraries

I re-organized my library last night. I divided it into a couple major categories: fiction, art and architecture, literary criticism, political theory, and science. I then tried to thematically organize within sections: polemical works like Towards a New Architecture were placed next to works like Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, not next to my biographies of Louis Kahn, Rembrandt, and Da Vinci. I had some trouble grouping Walter Benjamin: architecture or lit crit? I also had difficulties subdividing fiction. Classical lit (Caesar and Thucydides) shouldn't directly abut the modern and post modern (Kafka or Pynchon). I tried to keep the Americans together, Thoreau and Keruoac and McPhee seemingly more aligned than Nabokov or Dostovesky. I think my collection, as I've grown older and moderately more selective, has solidified in some ways. I don't have the broadest net of fiction, for sure. I have authors that I like. I have 2 editions of Gravity's Rainbow, partly because I love it, partly because it is the greatest post-modern novel, partly because I started collecting Pynchon in high school ( Crying of Lot 49 and V and then reading Vineland and Mason & Dixon and sneaking his short stories (especially "Entropy") from the Norton when I was bored during English class). I have most of my history books stored at home: history of the British Empire, Classical and Roman history, considerable survey of the Cold War and Nuclear Doctrine. My newest collective urges are towards memoir (U.S. Grant, W.T. Sherman, E. Shakeleton, C. Darwin, B. Franklin) and late retrospection. I've been dabbling in magical realism (Marquez, is there anyone else?) and memoir, lately, and I have some foreign novels (there's more to the diaspora than Rushdie) and of course a steady diet of Supreme Court decisions (working on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld[.pdf] right now, in fact) but I wouldn't really say I've been reading anything that's grabbed me.

What's the point of re-organizing a library, then? It lets you know what you have, and what you don't, it lets you see the connections between what you have, it lets you see if you have any obvious holes, it provides a thematic sense of what is valuable and interesting. This is valuable, obviously, because it also forces a confrontation with the physical particularity of the collection, the different sizes and hefts of the books, their distinct smells, memories of reading them, memories of where they used to be, in a book box, or on a different bookshelf, in a different room. Some of the books I have are old posessions: my rather dog-eared copy of Hamlet, which I sourced from The Owl over at Bryn Mawyr back when that Frank Furness mansion was a rare books store, my copy of The Great Gatsby, first read in high school in 1996, copy of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality from my sophomore year, Williams, read formally thrice, sprouting post-its like an old potato, the copy of Gravity's Rainbow that is the same edition as the library copy I read in high school, 1996, even though I bought it in Seattle, used book store right by UW. Some are brand new: I picked up these two superb, economical, essays by the late, great, Susan Sontag, I bought Tom Wolfe's new journalistic take on the psychedlic '60s (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), I'm going to read Daniel Leatherbarrow's work on the importance of siting and construction of dwellings, Uncommon Ground, I want to read Nabokov's short stories, and, well, much more.

When you really get down to it, books make me happy in ways that nothing else does. I enjoy film, to be sure, but it isn't the same. I find television (tee vee) frustrating, empty, and sadly repetitive, the slow parceling of shows between (very) occasional commercial interuptions. TiVo is freeing, insofar as it shows you how swift shows are, purged of commercials, but is also a re-affirmation of the necessity of television. So then there's reading, the active repose, individual and private action in an increasingly hectic world. So I propose to read more, and to write more, and to eschew television, (as much as possible), because television is dull, repetitive, and banal.

Sometimes, though, we feel dull, repetitive, and banal. I'm not self-important enough (although I do have a blog, ha ha, but seriously folks!) to imagine myself immune to this. I just need more time for reflection, time for more honest contemplation (though that is hardly a recipie for anything beyond methane, pace Nietzsche) for more consideration of "we knowers, we ourselves." I ask this question again:

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, we ourselves, to ourselves, and there is a good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves, - so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?

That all may be so. In any case, there's a lot in draft that is heading down the sluicegates. Cancer drug discovery. Adaptive re-use. The questions of balcony decoration in condominiums that are visible from my work. Illness as Metaphor. Some film reviews. Keep reading, then, and I hope there will be something interesting, at least occasionally.

Review: The Break-Up

There comes a time in a man's life when he can watch a movie about a breakup and laugh. And wince. Maybe that point comes when he realizes how much verisimilitude (even if it is slack verisimilitude) a filmic argument can handle: there's a great hyperkinetic 10 opening minutes to this movie: Vince Vaughn, mouth in overdrive, wooing the hell out of an extremely fetching Jennifer Aniston, right in front of her boyfriend, a couple seats down at a Cubs game, cut to credits with a variety of cleverly posted and faked "candid" photos of a couple in love, cut to domestic bliss (or at least a big mortgage payment) and an increasingly heated argument--you bring 3 lemons when the girl asks for 12, and you're going to get it with both barrels, bubb. The argument simmers through a painful dinner with opposing, incompatible, in-laws (if one can truly have in-laws if one cohabits) and then flares up again, over dishes. The bang comes, then, without surprise: Aniston, screaming her head off, delivers the coup de grace--some variation on "I'm not going to spend any more time with you, you selfish, slobbish prick, you prick!"--and then, post door-slam, the camera lingers on the surprisingly neanderthalish expression on Vaughn's face, and the shocked breathlessness of Aniston, perfectly contra-posto, as the realization of what was said, and the implications, sink in.

I recognize that this movie garnered its share of negative reviews, and I'll admit the points of contention are there: Aniston is an extraordinarily toned, blonde, and bronzed body, but beyond aspects of learned helplessness (the writers obviously unwilling to give her character the claws and authentic ruthlessness she might have in real life; she oscillates (rapidly) between scheming to return her man and ways to drive him away) she lacks effective characterization. Vaughn is perhaps implausible as well, a magnificent confidence man, but too emotionally withdrawn to make a relationship work, and sometimes the film feels very Odd Couple, with frightenly little common ground.

(Reviews: Slate, NYTimes, idealistic.)

I'm going to tell you why this is a great movie, should make you squirm in your seat, and why it really pole-axes you with an unblinking portrayal of how people rip apart, argument by argument, failed reconciliation by failed reconciliation, self-serving statement by self-aggrandizing comment, bad advice by bad advice. This film paints a breakup as a series of cascading bad conversations, with no attempt to repair them with a modicum of kindness or apology. I'll tell you that I see a lot of myself in Vaughn's character: fast-talking, a friend to all but close to few, a facade in need of rooms. I see a lot of myself in this ultimately unhappy relationship, two more or less happy years, based in hard work and an appreciation of the sheer kinetic joy of performance, but a relationship without any real firm mooring in common interest or productive conciliation. I'll tell you that this movie, despite what people say, might well be a great indictment of cohabitation as it leaves lovers with property but without the scheduled, rigorous, commitments of marriage.

But the final reason why this film is magnificent, and uncomfortable, and searing, is that it doesn't blink. Sure, Tom Brady's model-quality looks are used to great effect, and he's a hunk of a prop. Sure, there are the throwaway gags, the strip poker game, the (dreadful) a capella group that could be an aged Octet. The core of this film is a rotting relationship, and two people unwilling to set aside temporary differences and talk, unguardedly. The film keeps tiptoeing around failed reconciliations, until there's nothing to say.

This is brave, it goes without saying, and this is true. And that's the experience of these minutes in the theatre: how you can go from lovers, in a home together, to strangers on the street with nothing to say and no interest to say it, in a hop, skip, and a jump.

Recommended.

In Memoriam, Eric Gregg

Once upon a time, gentle reader, I was a regular church-goer. I was even an acolyte, which is what us (lapsed) Episcopalians called "altar boys." (All the fun of the liturgy without the downside of priestly anal rape, that's the Anglican way.) I suppose that I owe myself (not that I owe you anything, dear reader) a more formal accounting of this (long) chapter in my life, but tonight's not the night. Suffice it to say that I stood there, next to priests wearing frilly lace and embroidered silks, for most of life's major events. Weddings, funerals, easter, christmas, and everything in between. One of the things you realized, in close proximity, was the structure of religion: it isn't theology, it is praxis, the structure of daily (weekly) life. Get up, go to church, listen to the sermon, talk to rich white guys wearing summer suits; lather, rinse, repeat. Christianity, like Judaism, or any religion worth carring about, structures your year, mapping important nodal events (Christmas, Easter, etc.) within an extended narrative context. Every year, more of the same: repetition, structure, certainty. Every year the Jews walk themselves out of Egypt again, celebrate the resistance to dictators again, atone again. Every year Christians birth Christ, walk his career, kill and resurrect him (in the broadest narrative sense; every week Christians ritually kill and consume their God. I mention this only to give context. Regular churchgoing is not an experience of theophanic moments, epiphanies (for lack of a better term), but rather a gradual ritualization of narratological continuity, in which nodal events (such as the death of Christ) are continually rehearsed.

Enough of these generalities. Anglicanism is not authentically American (that honor belongs to the various etiolations of Puritanism and the great, rabid, growth of faith-based permutations of Evangelical religion) but rather imported, whole-cloth, from Britain. It is a religion, formally, of compromise, a via media between the authentic (if increasingly hysterical and abiblical) traditionalism of Roman Catholicism and the new textualism (based in new translations from source languages) of Calvinism. Anglican's, therefore, have the greater textual rigor of Calvinism (you'll find no transubstantiations or Marian apotheosisms in the catechism, for instance) with the liturgical focus (funny outfits on the priests, (occasionally) baroque ritual) of Catholicism. Like any good compromise, though, the Anglicans are accused of being lukewarm, society-based, and lacking true revolutionary fervor. Certainly that's an attraction: I would never want to be part of a church that didn't actively accept the unbelievers (and I'm aware this is a contradiction in terms.) But, as I said before, that's a story for another day.

***

Good Shepherd, Rosemont was everything you'd want a high-church Episcopalian outfit to be: stone, historical, well-endowed, featuring relatively high profile but still quiet parishioners, staid, reflexively conservative (but in a banker's sort of nominally republican sort of way), and set on a well-landscaped but hardly outrageously fecund plot of land on the Main Line, prime real-estate on Lancaster Ave between a Ferarri dealership, a Restoration Hardware, a Borders and a couple well-heeled investment banks. Good Shepherd (henceforth GSR) was well-appointed, inside and out, cunningly crafted om a pleasingly grey stone, vaulted with respectably dark wood, pewed with authentically victorian pews, flagstoned with antique, ochre, paving tiles, and even featuring, in the chancel, the bronzed tomb of the foundational donors, continually underfood without the hope of (weekly) resurrection. In the summer, the nave was hot, though fans were in the rafters and the stained glass were opened, allowing the inspired to listen to Philadelphia insect life rustle and bray insectoid mating calls instead of the sermon, usually a dusty and inconsequential affair. Site this scence, then, in the summer, people sitting heavily in pews, sweating a little, women in hats, guys pretending they don't have the short sleeves on under the suitcoat, some of the daring yuppies with khakis, boat shoes, and a muffled polo. The cicadas drone outside, the cars can occasionally be heard in a bit of a woosh, and there's some fan noise, and creaking.

It should come as no surprise that we had a regular pew. I'm enough of a traditionalist (some would say "charmingly inflexible") to prefer assigned seating, and fortunately, the rest of humanity is the same way. We were left, front, about 4 rows back, on the center aisle side of the column. Behind us, to the left, on the other side of the column (side aisle side, row 5), was the Gregg family. And we reach, finally, the point of all this remembering. The Greggs were important. Eric Gregg, after all, was a major league umpire, and he had a wife, and kids, two sons, and a daughter. Eric was rarely there, because of his MLB commitments, but in this day, he's there, rotundedly filling out a suit procured at Big & Tall, sweating a lot, mopping his brow, as he sits next to his wife, and in the same row as the kids, everyone looking a little fatigued in the summer heat. I'll be honest: I don't really remember Eric Gregg as more than just an occasional presence, out of the corner of my eye, summer mornings, maybe the Phillies had the day off, weren't playing till later, bearded, sitting there, just a good guy. And that's all you can say, really, is Eric Gregg was a fundamentally good guy. Sure, he was fat (when he called the World's Series with the Marlins and decided that any pitch Livan Hernandez got within a bus fare of the plate was a strike the announcers kept quipping that "Gregg likes a full plate!") but that hardly mattered, not as much as I knew him, part of the landscape, behind and to the left.

So Eric Gregg is dead. Massive stroke; the battle against the bulge he waged his entire life is over. He was 55. And I knew him, parenthetially, but I knew his kids, and his wife, resolutely polite, often kind. He was a good man, so far as I knew. Made a terrible decision to get fired by MLB, which certainly cost him, personally and professionally, and maybe, just maybe, if he had kept his health in higher mind...but what-ifs are pointless. I'm going to remember Eric Gregg as I knew him, not on TV during the series, jovial, larger than life, defiantly calling it how he saw it, but mopping his brow on a sweaty summer afternoon, performing his religious duty, uncomfortable in a warm woolen suit, but there anyway, gamely participating with his family.

In Memoriam, Eric Gregg, Requiescat in Pacem

On Monday

It goes without saying that the days of the week have their individual, often imputed, characters. I remember the nursery rhyme my Mother would occasionally recite:

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day,
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

This rhyme always seemed to me, anyway, as undoubtedly unfair and perhaps too religiously oriented. Why did Wednesday's child get the (proverbial) shaft? "Full of woe?" Not a way to meet "hump day," eh? And why does the Sunday kid get to be "gay?" I understand this is archaic usage, but still...isn't having a kid on Sunday a violation of the Sabbath work prohibition? Or would that more properly be Saturday?

When I was in college, which seems an increasingly long time ago, the wags and pollywogs that were my friends liked to argue that days of the week were interchangeable, at least in terms of their ability to be drinking days. My senior year the mantra of every tarted-up freshman girl staggering on too-high heels out of (or into) the Purple Pub was "Tuesday is the new Thursday!" From the rhyme, at least, this doesn't make much sense. Far to go is now full of grace? How can Thursday be "far to go" when it is nearly Friday? In any case, Tuesday was the new Thursday and Saturday was the new Sunday and some would even claim that Wednesday was the new Monday, which didn't really make sense either, because how could the week begin twice?

One of the real changes I've had to make in the post-student world is getting used to the kinds of days. In college, there were "weekends" and "monday-wednesday-fridays" and "tuesday-thursdays." That's three kinds of days, and they had different properties. For me, TRs were history/art history/reading type class days, and MWFs were science classes. So that's how my week set up, with Sunday being the real work day, always the goal to get most of the reading for the week done. But then, when I graduated, there were suddenly only 2 kinds of day: "weekends" and "weekdays." And there wasn't much variation in what exactly a "weekday" entailed. Sure, Monday had lab meeting, which was usually painfully early, and Tuesday had the standing Broad meeting, and at least in the Navy Yard the middle weekdays (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) featured free cookies (not so hot for the waistline) and Friday featured free beer at Beer O'Clock (or, for the more sloganeering, at Miller Time.) But, I guess that's not too unusual, for the real world and all...

I close with another nursery rhyme, with which I was not familiar, and I just found, via google searching for "days of the week rhymes."

Monday alone,
Tuesday together,
Wednesday we walk
When i's fine weather,
Thursday we kiss,
Friday we cry,
Saturday's hours
seem almost to fly.
But of all the days in the week, we will call
Sunday the rest day, the best day of all.

I find this, in some ways, a preferable rhyme. For one, it is couched in more amenable terms: that of human relationship. I'm not sure if I fully embrace the ex cathedra folklore of birth-day determinism (not anymore than I support birth-order determinism, but that's another story) and so I rather enjoy the more relaxed progression of days as enjoyed contextually, as a couple. Solitude, togetherness, physical affection, tears, time passing slowly, time passing in communal activity (flaneurship?), a Sunday seen as a day of rest and not as a day of religious obligation: these are something I can relate to, as I grow older, and potentially even wiser in the ways of human relationships.

In any case, Monday's just one of those days. I think you're more likely to have a heart attack, a stroke, a fatal car accident, et cetera on Monday than on other days. That's nice. Monday's also the day with the largest distance to "your time," if indeed you can call the weekend "your time" (or if it isn't raining). But these are well established facts and opinions, and my analysis adds nothing.

I'm not sure what I prefer: Monday alone, or "fair of face." I guess you'd have to be beautiful to be born on Monday, fighting the ol' uphill battle, being born on a day that (kind of) sucks for everyone. But what do I know? For the record, I'm a Wednesday kid. Goes to show you how predictive the rhymist is. Not bloody much!

On Purpose

I've been thinking about this question for quite some time, so I appologize in advance if this seems disjointed, incoherent, and maybe more than slightly self-serving: what is a good life?

Is it, pace Conan to revel in death and destruction and the Governership of California?

Is it, pace Monty Python a nice house with a white picket fence and a shrubbery?

Is it, pace John Hinckley, some variety of infamy, to become a durable footnote?

I feel that this question tends to hinge on the definition, slippery though it may be, of "vocation" versus "job." "Profession" versus "occupation."

The simplest example, I'd think, would be "I work at Walmart" versus "I used to be an investment banker but now I'm Secretary of the Treasury"

But that's simple. I don't think "purpose," variously defined, is confined to resume-enhancing postions (the infamous unpaid internships, etc.) or exalted positions richly redolent of prestige. Purpose can be quieter, a silent resolve to pick up trash when encountered, or to volunteer, or to do God's work, quietly, by making the rich richer. Purpose is simply another name for the grim determination that drives people (not so for the lazily complacent pot-heads that float, listlessly, through life on their opiated lily-pads) towards their goals, no matter how small or inane: painting stamps for the post office, wood carving, stamp collecting, mistress collecting, art collecting, organization-founding, robber-baroning, shipping magnating, et cetera.

Purpose is another name for grit, which is another name for stubbornness, which is another name for crazy.

And we should all be a little crazy.