“
We took his pickup and rode out of the city on razor-straight roads to the oil fields—an ocean of gray dirt, unmarked, parched, spectacularly monotonous, not a ripple in it except for the occasional sunken spot of a former buffalo wallow, until you get to the edge of the Permian Basin caprock and fall off into the rest of the world. We skirted ranches on which little sprouted except for shrubby mesquite and rows of skeletal pump jacks bobbing for oil, and zigzagged across square miles so wide and empty that, even when we raced along, we seemed to be standing still. It looked like nothing, except that there were millions of dollars underneath us, sacks of money banked in stone.

from Susan Orlean’s “A Place Called Midland” (2000)

Today, while driving, I listened to the audiobook version of a collection that includes this piece. The passage I’ve quoted here jumped out at me. The economy of it struck me as much as anything else. Here, in what turns out to be 122 words, is a convincing, vivid, memorable rendering of a place. Not easy. I just love it.

For those who missed my earlier link, Orlean is teaching a course at NYU right now. The syllabus is here. I’m continuing to fall behind on the reading because I’m doing things like listening to random Orlean pieces instead of reading the stuff she’s assigned to her class. This, I think, is an improvement on my actual college career when I skipped reading assignments so I could have more time to play roller hockey and to um um um … Honestly, I can’t remember how I pissed away the time.

I can’t even blame this amnesia on drugs since I fall into the eccentric category of Berkeley graduates who came and went without ever so much as smoking pot. It’s a good thing, too. I needed to be fanatically attentive during lectures because college exams are rightly cruel to people who skip big chunks of the reading. I wish they’d been even crueler.

Our second dog ate her second book tonight. As she becomes more sure of us and less anxious that we might disappear from her life like her original owners did, we hope our books will be safer. Books aren’t cheap. Luckily, we’ve already read this one many times. Unluckily, we probably would have read it even more. Click for high-res photo

Our second dog ate her second book tonight. As she becomes more sure of us and less anxious that we might disappear from her life like her original owners did, we hope our books will be safer. Books aren’t cheap. Luckily, we’ve already read this one many times. Unluckily, we probably would have read it even more.

“
After my mother died, on Christmas of 2008, near-strangers urged me to learn about “the stages” I would be moving through. Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence.

Meghan O’Rourke in “Good Grief — Is there a better way to be bereaved?” from the Feb. 1 edition of The New Yorker.

I’m having trouble shaking this piece. Big mess of thoughts bumping around my brain.

"a conversation - rather than a shouting match over a canyon"

I just watched about an hour of President Obama taking questions from House Republicans. Not watched, really. Mostly, I listened while I cleaned up the kitchen. Not everyone will have a kitchen to clean or an hour to spare. So let me just tell you why I think this Q&A mattered and why the president and congressional Republicans should literally be in the same room more often. This event amounted to a reality check. We now know either that A) Obama is not the Hitler / Trotsky / Lenin / commie / nazi / whatever caricature that some on the right have doodled up to scare Americans; or B) that congressional Republicans inexplicably face down a Hitler / Trotsky / Lenin /commie/ nazi / whatever by asking him pointed but cordial questions.

It’s probably most obvious why Obama benefits from a televised moment that deflates the notion that he’s some doctrinaire monster out to destroy America. What’s just as true, though, is that any Republicans who are actually interested in legislating and governing stand to gain from a mellowing in the rhetoric. The president pointed this out using less stark language that I’m about to use. But the basic dynamic goes like this: If you go around painting a guy as the devil, then you can’t afford to do any deals with him — no matter how sensible.

I originally saw the video for this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Here’s a bit of Sullivan’s take on why this event was heartening:

… it finally brought us a conversation - rather than a shouting match over a canyon. So much of American politics is debate conducted at a distance, through ads or soundbites or various talking points that never actually engage one another in debate. Reared in the British debate tradition - I debated through high-school and college, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1983 - this has always felt to me like the biggest drawback of the American system. The point of debate is to clarify things, to find where the real points of disagreement are, and to assess them in that context of actual alternatives.

Here’s the video.

Distractions that explain — but do not excuse — me totally neglecting this blog

1) Running. Lots of running. Our new dog — dog number two — is younger, faster, bigger than dog number one. So I’m getting a lot of good exercise. It’s wonderful. Maybe there are ways to blog while you run. I’m not interested in discovering them.

2) I’m 37. I had never read Tolstoy. I tried War and Peace once. I gave up. Blame my slow reading speed. Then, a week or so ago, I found Anna Karenina in iTunes among the audiobooks I’ve bought, downloaded, and ignored. I gave it a try. It’s so different than I expected. The words “compassionate” and “empathetic” keep coming to mind. No character seems to be placed in the book as a joke, a villain, a prop. Tolstoy eventually gets around to rendering everyone in three dimensions. I love the story so much that I even listen to the audiobook while I’m running with the dog. Credit Tolstoy foremost. Credit narrator Davina Porter, too. For now, at least, I would rather listen to Anna Karenina than jog to Jay-Z or write blog posts.

3) If a brilliantly narrated audiobook has an opposite, it is probably the built-in voice on my Mac. The Mac’s speech software is useful, but it lacks a certain soulfulness. So it should really be a kind of torture to be doing what I’m doing: listening to the computer read through the manuscript for my novel. I’m doing this on the theory that it will reveal my most clunky sentences. When I read my own words, my inflection can rescue prose that doesn’t deserve to live. The computer can’t do that. Even if it could, it wouldn’t. It simply doesn’t care about my novel. I do. I’m finding that even a computer voice can’t change the way I feel about what I’ve written. To my biased ears, there’s a freshness to the novel that even a computer voice can’t wilt. Does that sound like bragging? I hope not. I know my novel is not for everyone — probably not even for most people. Still, as the cliche goes, I’ve written the sort of book that I’d want to read. Somewhere in the world there are people who want to read the same sort of book I want to read. Maybe this novel won’t find those people. Maybe it will.

4) Speaking of Macs, my thoughts keep drifting to the new iPad. I woke up Wednesday expecting Apple to introduce a product that would make me regret the Kindle my parents gave me for Christmas. But it didn’t happen. I may blog about the iPad’s flaws and untapped potential later — either here, on HuffPost, or both. But for now, it can be summed up in a couple of Twitter posts. Here, in 140 characters or fewer, is my dig at the iPad’s seeming unwieldiness. Here, in 140 characters or fewer, is the essence of why I think the iPad cannot possibly be the iPod of publishing unless and until there are fundamental changes in the way publishers sell the written word.

5) Susan Orlean is teaching a class at NYU right now. She posted her syllabus here. My attempt to follow along with the class readings is helping to sabotage my blogging. So far, the readings have been: McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia,” an excerpt of Didion’s “Salvador,” Jane Kramer’s “Cowboy,” Joseph Mitchell’s “The Rivermen,” and Orlean’s own unforgettable “The American Man, Age Ten.” This last one is famous as these things go. Especially the first paragraph, which you can read at the bottom of this link to the Esquire site. (Warning: You’ll want to avoid that link if you recoil at the words “load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt.”)

Meanwhile, I’m not keeping up with Orlean’s class. I’ve forsaken reading the Kramer, the Mitchell, and most of the dauntingly-parenthesized Didion excerpt in favor of reading more of Orlean’s work. Because I saw light like this during an especially rainy Hawaiian vacation, I savored this bit from a piece called “The Maui Surfer Girls”: “It was a half-cloudy day with weird light that made the green Hawaiian hills look black and the ocean look like zinc.” In the same piece, I also liked the economy and inarguable truth of Orlean’s observation that “Hana is far away and feels even farther.”

The cumulative effect of reading Orlean and McPhee and a tiny, tiny bit of Didion is to make me seriously miss the best parts of my life as a newspaper reporter. It’s been about seven years since I quit. And this, in Orlean’s words from her introduction to The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, is the essence of what I miss:

The subjects I was drawn to were often completely ordinary, but I was confident that I could find something extraordinary in their ordinariness. I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was.

I posted part of that passage on Facebook last night along with a status update that went like this: “Reading Susan Orlean’s collection of profiles is making me frantic to get back to writing the sort of stuff my extremely indulgent TNT editors used to print under my byline. So you all have my permission to launch your own magazines and hire me.”

It’s a joke, of course. Nobody needs my permission to launch a magazine. Nobody needs my permission to offer to hire me. Not my friends on Facebook. Not anyone who might happen to read this. But just know that you have my blessing to do both.

********************

OK. By blogging about why I’m not blogging, I seem to be blogging. I’m pretty sure that’s why I did this. More to come. First, though, more Anna Karenina. Only about seven hours left.

Click for high-res photo
“
If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

from “Cultivating Failure” in the January issue of The Atlantic.

Caitlin Flanagan might merely have used her Atlantic article to question the educational value of incorporating veggie gardens into the public school curriculum. But no. Alice Waters, renowned chef and leading proponent of the gardens, can’t just be misguided. What would be the fun in that? No, we need hyperbole, folks. Waters and the people of Berkeley, CA aren’t engaged in an ineffectual effort to improve the lives of middle-schoolers. They’re about “bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.”

How does this stuff get published?

Flanagan’s article might even be correct. But it’s sloppy as hell and totally facile, decrying Waters for her lack of data and then approvingly quoting a charter school CEO saying “If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That’s all that matters to me.”

Really? I’m all for Shakespeare. But where’s the data? Do students trained to giggle during the right parts of Measure For Measure automatically kick ass on the math sections of college-admissions tests? Maybe. But Flanagan doesn’t prove it to me. She just gives me polemic and contradictory anecdotes whose contradictions don’t seem to rattle her:

* She writes about her “volunteer job in a Los Angeles food bank, where the clients scoop as many candies out of the basket on my desk as I’ll let them have (if I didn’t set a limit, only the first person would get any) before glumly turning to the matter of filling out their food order form, which offers such basic and unexciting items as tuna, rice, and (yes) fresh fruits and vegetables, often including delicious oranges, pears, and peaches that people with fruit trees donate the day they’re picked.”
* On her field trip to the Superior Super Warehouse in Compton, Flanagan learns that poor people have access to healthy food: “The produce section—packed with large families, most of them Hispanic—was like a dreamscape of strange and wonderful offerings: tomatillos, giant mangoes, cactus leaves, bunches of beets with their leaves on, chayote squash, red yams, yucca root. An entire string section of chiles: serrano, Anaheim, green, red, yellow. All of it was dirt cheap, as were the bulk beans and rice. Small children stood beside shopping carts with the complacent, slightly dazed look of kids whose mothers are taking care of business.”

This begs a question: If the moms shopping, with kids in tow, at a Super Warehouse store seem to be “taking care of business,” is it possible that the moms are, literally, taking care of business? Maybe these moms are shopping for a family restaurant. Maybe they’re buying the fixings for a week of family meals. Maybe they’re nannies and the kids aren’t even their kids. Maybe even though the store is located in the birthplace of N.W.A., the customers do not live in Compton. Maybe they’re not even poor. We don’t know. There’s nothing in the article to suggest that Flanagan spoke with the families. Maybe she did. If so, she should tell readers about it.

No space? Well, ditch the “bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students” sentence. It’s a vicious sentence.

Viciousness is off-putting. It’s distracting. So much bluster leaves the impression that Flanagan really, really, really believes what she’s writing but hasn’t done the reporting to prove it. When I bought the Atlantic, I expected much better.

Contingencies For Revised Edition of "A Happier History of America" by Rudy Giuliani

MEMORANDUM

FROM: Rudy Giuliani, NYC mayor on 9/11/01

TO: Revisionist & Sons Publishing Co.

RE: contingency plans for revised second edition of my forthcoming textbook, A Happier History of America

Dear Sirs:

As we continue to lock in pre-orders from school districts all across the country for the first edition of my uplifting American history textbook, I want to thank you for standing unflinchingly by my side following my Friday appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” For those of you who don’t watch the left-wing media, here’s what happened. I simply went on national television and said, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.” Later in the day, I had the opportunity to talk with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and clarify my earlier remarks with these words: “This is so silly. I did omit the words ‘since Sept. 11.’ I apologize for that. I should have put it in. I do remember Sept. 11. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day.”

Predictably, jackals pounced on my initial statement, joylessly failing to bask in the silliness of what happened. Andrew Sullivan went so far as to claim what I said is part of a “sick syndrome.” Sullivan is so wrong. My ABC and CNN appearances add up to the wave of the future for this grand partnership between myself and Revisionist & Sons Publishing Co. As your own fact-checkers noted several weeks prior to your prudent decision to downsize their entire department, A Happier History of America contains facts that are incompletely factual.

What follows, then, is my contingency plan for the five passages from A Happier History of America that seem most likely to draw challenges from pedants and historical literalists. Any revised second edition should keep things positive. So I don’t want us deleting any of my first-edition text. Rather, a light-hearted parenthetical note should clarify the so-called “historical record.” Here are the passages as they would appear if — and only if — complaints reach a level that threatens future sales and forces us to release a revised second edition.

1) President Abraham Lincoln managed to keep northerners and southerners unified, sparing America from the cataclysm of a civil war. (This is so silly. This textbook’s first edition did omit the words “except from 1861 to 1865.” I apologize for that. I should have put it in. I do remember the Civil War. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day.)

2)  The stock market thrived under President Herbert Hoover. (This is so silly. This textbook’s first edition did omit the words “until October 29, 1929.” I apologize for that. I should have put it in. I do remember the stock market crash known as Black Tuesday. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day.)

3) President Richard Nixon won re-election and served a second term. (This is so silly. This textbook’s first edition did omit the words “until scandal forced his resignation in the summer of 1974.” I apologize for that. I should have put it in. I do remember Watergate. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day.)

4) U.S. and South Vietnamese troops fended off the communist advance. (This is so silly. This textbook’s first edition did omit the words “until April 30, 1975.” I apologize for that. I should have put it in. I do remember the Fall of Saigon. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day.)

5) Thanks to the vision and precision of President Ronald Reagan, the United States never suffered any unintended consequences from equipping, training, and funding the Islamic warriors who ultimately forced the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. (This is so silly. This section of the textbook’s first edition did omit an event that took place at some point between late August 2001 and early October of that same year. I don’t apologize for that omission. Because let’s be real, Wolf. Summer vacation always arrives before school teachers manage to bring their history classes anywhere close to the present day. Extra details here will only exacerbate that problem.)

Finally, while there is still time to make revisions prior to the April 1, 2010 publication of the textbook’s first edition, please add the following sentence to the end of my author bio: “The author is considered the most formidable candidate in the upcoming 2008 presidential election.”

I think that’s the most positive note to end on.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Rudy

Audio Books at Audible.com