Tags: daughter, everyday, photography
Current Location: 85704

I was reading Sports Illustrated just now before bed, the Hunger Games soundtrack blasting in the background, when I came across this passage about former Arizona Wildcat Andre Iguodala in a story on this year's Philadelphia 76ers:

Iguodala grew up in Springfield, Ill., at the height of the Bulls dynasty, and patterned himself after Scottie Pippen. He was not the leading scorer at Lanphier High, where he deferred to a gunner named Richard McBride, or at Arizona, where he averaged 12.9 points and set up sniper Salim Stoudamire. "He likes being the guy who does everything else," says Lawrence Thomas, a coach in Springfield who has worked with Iguodala since ninth grade. His road roommate at Arizona was team manager Jack Murphy, and before Iguodala left after his sophomore year, Murphy gave him a copy of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. "I didn't want him to ever think he went unrecognized," says Murphy, now an assistant at Memphis. Iguodala, who churns through three books at a time, had already read it.

Jack was my student in the fall of 2000, but stayed in touch afterwards, stopping by to talk basketball on a regular basis. I treasured those conversations, which taught me a great deal about the game -- not to mention Jack, who was doing a remarkable job of turning personal adversity into the life he had long desired -- and also helped me feel more rooted in a community I was still reluctant to claim membership in.

Years later, after he had finished his undergraduate degree, Jack returned to me while enrolled in a graduate program to ask if I'd be willing to direct him in an independent study on African-American literature. I don't know that he needed much help from me -- Jack was always very inner-directed -- but I do remember talking to him at length about my love for Invisible Man and the excessive length of the chapter I devoted to the novel in my doctoral dissertation. It's a real treat, well over half a decade later, to see evidence of my legacy as a teacher in such an unlikely place.

Tags: autobiograpyhy, sports, teaching
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, travel
Current Location: 10003
Muse: The Oasis - Rainer - Luz de Vida

I had promised Skylar that we would go see a movie last night, as a mutual reward for our having made it through a whole school week with her mother out of town. There were many acceptable options at our disposal, including serious films that were up for Oscars and the latest tween-friendly fare. I was surprised when she insisted that it had to be The Phantom Menace or nothing and even more surprised when she immersed herself in that picture with total abandon.

Mind you, she did have a fixation on Revenge of the Sith when it came out. But that was a long time ago and she is now at an age when I thought the boyishness of the Star Wars series might put her off. On the contrary, she seemed enthralled by the very scenes that captivated my inner ten-year-old and, indeed, identified as strongly with Anakin's character as with the obvious choice of Padmé Amidala.

It may be the case that her recent forays into the world of fan fiction, capped off with an essay for her Literature class on a non-fiction study of the subject, sufficiently interested her in the underlying structure of the Star Wars universe that she was able to see The Phantom Menace in an especially positive light. Or perhaps her experiences with jujitsu and learning to jump horses, together with her teenage attitude, conspired to activate the side of her that has favored tales of epic struggle since her pre-school days.

Either way, she had a great time. And that made me able to enjoy myself to an unusual degree, even though I was tripping out on the fact that my only previous viewing of the film was with her mother and her when she was a baby at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco. I mean, the pod race has to be one of the best chase scenes ever filled, so that was bound to thrill me in 3D. But with all the negative press the film has gotten over the years, it was nice to be able to appreciate its strengths -- great costumes and even better looking cityscapes -- rather than focus on its weaknesses.

Tags: daughter, everyday, film
Current Location: 85704

Because Skylar's mom is away on a trip right now, watching the Oscars tonight began as a father-daughter affair. She and I had seen a number of the nominees together -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II, War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and The Artist -- so I thought the experience would be fun. But somehow the absence of our household's resident film critic dampened the mood sufficiently that Skylar had to be prodded to pay attention.

Luckily, I decided to take her over to my parents' apartment halfway through. The combination of their much bigger television and the festive sense of being engaged in a family ritual drew her into the proceedings, about which she then proceeded to perform an at-times-humorous, at-times-passionate commentary that would have made her mother proud. Skylar even picked a film to get mad at for winning, as Kim traditionally does, Martin Scorsese's Hugo, which she refused to see with us despite the excellent reviews it received.

It was pretty exciting to witness Skylar rooting for Midnight in Paris to win for best screenplay and then see her delight when it won. I'm not the biggest Woody Allen fan, but that film was great fun to see with her. More importantly, he's an excellent role model for someone of her abilities, since she's good at so many different kinds of artistic expression and doesn't want to have to choose to develop one talent at the expense of others. Something clicked for her tonight. She now realizes that she could go into the film industry and be a "creative." As much as I was thrilled by this newly kindled desire on her part, though, I couldn't help but wonder whether the industry as we know it will still exist when it's time for her to try to make a career for herself.

I missed watching The Oscars last year with family, because I was on my way out of Los Angeles after the Pop Conference. I did get to hear and see some of the show at a cozy old-school Mexican restaurant on Melrose and had the surreal experience of watching the "Best Picture" award given out inside the booth at a gas station with the station attendant, an Iraqi immigrant, who was as excited to see who won as I was. Being in the city for Oscar week, I realized how important the show is, not only for the many people who work in the movie industry itself, but all those who benefit economically from its presence.

L.A., especially the portion west of the 5 and north of the 10, is very much a company town. That's why it makes total sense that The Artist took home the major awards, despite being a smallish, mostly silent film made by a bunch of French people. As someone said during the Academy Awards, it was the only one of the nine "Best Picture" nominees made entirely in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In my piece for Souciant from a few weeks ago, I argue that it's the perfect film for Hollywood to celebrate at a time of massive crisis, one that may ultimately turn out to be even bigger than the passage to sound film or the rise of television:

The “creatives” traditionally employed by Hollywood are in danger of losing their livelihoods. It isn’t just that digital distribution and the piracy it enables are having an adverse effect on the industry’s revenue stream, one that is sure to increase over time. It’s that a sizeable portion of the viewing public, particularly young people, no longer feel the need for their spectacles to look spectacular.

This explains why Hollywood has been investing so heavily in 3-D and other technologies meant to make films more impressive, just as it did with Cinemascope and high-fidelity sound in the 1950s, when television was starting to siphon off market share. But the attempt seems more than a little desperate. When even “grown-up” character-driven dramas are being released in 3-D or, more tellingly, re-released in that format, it is clear that the industry is flailing about in a desperate bid for survival.

The Artist is the perfect tale for this “end time” mentality, because it shows us both how a professional is undone by the desire for novelty, and how his career is reborn. To be sure, the conclusion of the film, in which George Valentin gets to star alongside his onetime protégé Peppy Miller, ends ambiguously. We don’t learn whether audiences respond to the humbled star’s return to the screen. But we do at least perceive that he has survived the worst of his depression and the Depression it mirrors.

In other words, The Artist uses its historical setting to allow present-day creatives to come to terms with the crisis they face, while providing them the prospect of a happy ending that is hard to visualize given the trends the industry is facing.

In a world where amateurs desperate to do something that doesn't feel alienating take advantage of technological advances to turn out more and more content for potential public consumption, the professional artist who wants to get paid a decent wage for her or his creative labor is in grave danger of becoming expendable. Even though the Walter Benjamin-style Marxian thinker in me sees the reasons why we should embrace this state of affairs, I care too much about the actually existing artists of today and tomorrow, particularly my daughter, to celebrate the demise of professionalism in another media industry.

Tags: autobiography, daughter, family, film, holiday
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, travel
Current Location: 40208

Yesterday I wrote a short entry about my inability to sleep before flights. As it turned out, I was able to sleep for once -- though I'm feeling behind now as a consequence -- and will probably be better off for it.

Since I will be returning to the conference in Louisville that has been a favorite of mine, both for the way it is run and for the the time I get to spend in that city I've grown to love, I thought I would revisit my entries from the first time I went there, back in February, 2004.

That was the month when I started posting to Live Journal every day and when my readership started to increase after months of being restricted to just a few people. Now that I find myself in a similar position as a result of abandoning my blog, I find it interesting to revisit the sort of material I was posting before worrying about what not to post started to dominate my thoughts.

I'd forgotten that I had posted an entry about how I can almost never sleep before flights eight years ago. Reading it today made me smile at how much I still think and write the same, despite all that has transpired in the intervening eight years:

I leave tomorrow morning for the 20th Century Literature conference in Louisville. But instead of sleeping, I'm up writing an entry about the fact that I never seem able to sleep before a flight. I wait and wait and wait, then finally start packing at the last possible minute.

Even when I was headed to Europe shortly after 9/11, facing a 20+ hour trip from Tucson to Phoenix to Frankfurt to Venice to Klagenfurt (Austria), I still couldn't rest until it was almost to late to get meaningful rest.

That time, I regretted my pre-trip excitement. I vividly recall driving in circles north of Venice, baffled by the Italian system -- or lack of a system -- for numbering local roads, coming to a traffic-filled bridge for a second time, like some mountaineer suddenly realizing that he has walked ten hours in the snow only to come back to the place he started from.

I didn't calm down until I stuck Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One into my rental Fiat's tape player. The surreality of listening to "my" music, music I once listened to with Kim while driving up Highway One in Sonoma County, made me a bridge home.

Still, when I think about the insanity of flying all that way and then driving four hours in a rental car, when I'd never even driven in Europe before, I can't believe that I had the courage. I was so frazzled from the post-9/11 mood, further darkened by the anthrax that was turning up in new locations every hour. At least I had the presence or absence of mine to take pictures while driving in Slovenia

Did I mention that I landed in Venice on our wedding anniversary, which is also Skylar's birthday?

As the plane descended into the Venice airport, I looked out the window to my left and saw how long, skinny, and densely packed the old city was -- so much bigger than the central portions of German towns I'd visited as an exchange student -- how the hazy glare made everything shake and shimmer, I thought, "It's the Manhattan of its era."

Somewhere in my closet is a box full of items I collected to document my trip to Europe. I had grand plans for a piece about my experience. But I can barely lift the lid off the box. It's like there's toxic waste inside.

Those were strange times. Now I can barely fathom driving from Louisville to Lexington. Everything feels harder. Everything feels dangerous. Everything in me has aged.

I still haven't opened that box of items I collected to document my 2001 trip to Europe, though the idea of doing so has occurred to me more frequently now that I have a venue where I can publish pieces without worrying too much about whether they are commercial or political enough, where I am one of the people who have defined the editorial mission, instead of responding to it. I mean Souciant, of course, which has been taking up so much of the time I might have been spending keeping this blog viable over the past year.

I'd love for those of you who are still interested in connecting with me to go check Souciant out, if you haven't already, because it's near and dear to my heart. So is this journal, painful as it became for me at the end of 2010. I still don't know whether it makes sense to continue writing here. But I am kind of hoping that the fact that it no longer does make sense, from the standpoint of Live Journal's standing, will make it easier for me to get back to the lower-pressure productivity that I was building up towards back in February, 2004. I won't make any promises, since that seems to be part of the problem. I'll just post here -- or not -- as the mood strikes.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

Earlier this evening, at a Multiple Sclerosis benefit with which many of my friends and acquaintances were involved, I explained that I almost certainly wouldn't be sleeping tonight. Why? Because I'm flying to Louisville tomorrow and have almost never been able to get shut-eye before air travel.

Someone asked if it was because I get nervous. I explained that it's actually more like excitement and the sense of there being too much to get done. Maybe that is another way of describing nervousness. But if there's anxiety about my means of transportation submerged somewhere within my insomnia, I just can't perceive it. On the contrary, the conscious part of me definitely looks forward to the opportunity to be on a plane. And in airports, for that matter.

Even though I theoretically have a good deal of time to myself these days -- for entirely the wrong reasons -- the reality is that I spend my solitary hours either talking on the phone, texting or waiting for it to make a sound. It's like I'm "on call," in the way that doctors are, never really able to relax. The joy of flying, until they finally finish installing wireless in the coach seats I buy, is that my phone really and truly shuts down for the duration.

You know what? I think I might try to break precedent this time. My flight leaves late enough tomorrow -- out of Phoenix, albeit -- that I can probably sleep until 6am or so without getting too far behind. First, though, I 'll need to get into sleepy mode. I'm hoping that a substantial midnight snack will do the trick. Here goes. . .

Tags: autobiography, everyday, travel
Current Location: 85704

The best strategy I've found for fighting off the frequently overwhelming sense of paralysis that I've been coping with in recent years, particularly since the fall of 2010, is to focus on tasks that I can finish in a day or less. The sense of accomplishment I get from this approach is enough to buoy me on a bad day. Today, for example, after sleeping less than I should have and having to deal with my daughter being home from school and my parents needing me to spend two hours at their apartment, I cleaned out under the front bathroom sink and reorganized its contents so that I could fit a number of items from the back bathroom sink there as well and still have room for extra rolls of toilet paper.

Yes, I still have to clean the front bathroom, as well as the kitchen floor. And my perpetually deferred home office renovation needs to be pulled off very soon or else. But at least I did something useful. My philosophy in tackling household chores right now is to do the sort of laborious work that typically doesn't get tackled in the course of week-to-week maintenance. So far I've greatly the functionality of the storage shelf in the laundry room; cleared away clutter in the corner of the dining room and added extra bookshelf space; arranged the crawlspace above the garage so that more items we don't use often can be stored there while still leaving room to access the air conditioning unit that gave us so much trouble last summer; rationalized several areas in the garage itself, such as the shelf with the camping supplies; and now reorganized this cabinet under the front bathroom sink that hadn't been completely emptied for a decade. I realize this list is kind of absurd, a mock epic if you will, but it beats sitting for hours totally incapable of taking any action at all.

Tags: autobiography, everyday, health, home
Current Location: 85704

I keep finding myself with the urge to follow through on my promise to show up here more, if not with the frequency of old. But I am easily sidetracked by the fact that there's a dearth of things I'm prepared to share. Perhaps more significantly, though, I have been trying to publish a piece for our new venture Souciant on a weekly basis.

As I told my Co-Editor-in-Chief there when we were first building out a schedule, I can turn out many 250-500 word pieces like the proverbial hotcakes, provided that I know readers will understand that quantity takes precedence over quality. Once we settled on plan in which we run one or, at the most, two pieces per day, however, I found my task a lot more daunting. In other words, having to do less increased the pressure I was feeling to perform.

That's why a good number of my pieces from our first months of operation are quite long by internet standards. I'm proud of most of them, particularly the ones I worked hardest on. But I also recognize that their scope makes them ill-suited to casual reading. Not to mention that I sometimes found myself undone by my ambitions, feeling compelled to hold a piece back, even though I had no substitute for it, just because it wasn't quite ready.

That's why I've been making it a point lately to write shorter pieces, ones that take a more impressionistic approach. Somehow I'd drifted away from the hard-won insight of my Bad Subjects years that it's not only alright to leave some ideas in skeletal form, but actually preferable to do so, since the resulting sense of there being more to say gives readers more purchase on one's argument.

Anyway, this long preamble doubles as a way to introduce my latest piece for Souciant, on the much-praised silent film The Artist. I had a great deal that I wanted to say, but ended up holding most of it back. What I did come up with is a concise argument reflecting on what the picture has to tell us about the crisis in Hollywood. Give it a look, if you have the time, and let me know what you think:

Tags: autobiography, blogging, film, new media
Current Location: 85704

I'm not given to make New Year's resolutions. But I do feel a major hole in my life, one that Live Journal used to occupy. I'm going to try, having let this field go fallow, to sow it anew.

Tags: blogging, everyday, holiday
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, holiday, photography
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, holiday, theory
Current Location: 94704

Tags: daughter, holiday, home, music
Current Location: 85704

I've been doing a bad job of commemorating special occasions lately. Or maybe I'm doing a good job of not expending too much energy thinking about the past. Either way, I increasingly find my long-standing tendency not to look very far ahead complemented by a desire not to look very far behind.

But sometimes you just can't ignore the date. The Loma Prieta Quake in 1989 was a very big deal in my life, both because of what didn't happen to me that day and what did over the next two weeks.

Today I'll concentrate on the former. My friend Josh had suggested that we drive down to Jack London Square to watch Game 3 of the Bay Bridge series on the big-screen television there. This was a decade before mobile phones became a part of my world. Making plans was difficult and changing them even harder. I spent an awful lot of time standing at pay phones, typically in BART stations. Even so, things often went awry.

Josh was supposed to pick me up on Bancroft, in front of Eshleman Hall, around 4:30pm. Earlier that day, however, I'd committed to put flyers up for the organization Let's Elect the Chancellor. I believed in the cause, certainly. But I probably wouldn't have been so actively involved if Annalee and her partner David were not members of the organization. Although we'd broken up in June, while spending three week staying at my parents' house in Maryland, I was slow to find new housing. We still got along well enough as friends, so living together in her Berkeley apartment over the summer was't a total disaster.

It wasn't easy, though. She was starting to get involved with David, a friend of Josh's whom I'm had been hanging out with regularly for the past year. The situation was awkward. Because we were all pretty broke, though, and enjoyed each other's company, the three of us ended up spending a lot of time together engaged in an activity we collectively referred to as, "scraping the screen of life." Sometimes I had the impression that David wanted me around, whether because he wasn't sure he desired a relationship with Annalee or because he had sympathy for my plight, since I was obviously still in love with her.

Even after I moved out in August, I spent a lot of my time with Annalee. When David expressed interest in Physics professor Charlie Schwartz's cause -- he was always trying to get the Chancellor elected -- she eagerly joined him and I started tagging along. I'm sure she would rather have had me keep a wider berth, but I was thinking with my heart. Soon I found myself trying to prove how committed I was to the cause in order to impress David. It was an odd dynamic, to say the least.

At any rate, when we met in the middle of the day on October 17th to divide up the labor of promoting and organizing our next general meeting, I volunteered to put up flyers despite the fact that I had class that afternoon and was then supposed to meet up with Josh. So I decided to skip class. But instead of actually putting up the flyers, I sat around brooding about my unrequited love until I'd worked up a mental lather worthy of Werther.

By the time I collected myself, it was nearly 5pm. That, not coincidentally, was the time when Annalee's Early American Literature class let out. I'd known all along that she would probably be walking with a bunch of her classmates to hang out at Kip's. Rather oddly, David and I had taken to crashing this grad-school party together every week, soaking up the intellectual energy even as we wryly commented on our exclusion from the club. The only member of the class who made the two of us feel welcome, aside from Annalee, was the older guy in the Giants hat who seemed to revel in being a regular guy.

I decided, for reasons both selfish and stupid, to intercept Annalee during the post-class stroll across Sproul Plaza and ask for her help in putting up the flyers I had volunteered to distribute all by myself. Understandably, though, when I approached her amid the plane trees between Sproul and Bancroft, she was annoyed at me for intruding. I pressed the point for a minute, but then thought better of it and headed down the steps towards Lower Sproul.

I knew Josh would be waiting for me, yet opted to enter Eshleman so that I could at least claim to have done some of the flyering I'd promised to finish. If I'd had a mobile phone, I would have texted him to say I was running late. But because I had no way of contacting him, I just hoped that he wouldn't drive off.

That's why I was on the sixth floor of Eshleman, where all the left-wing groups were housed, when the earthquake struck. I was walking down the hall in the direction of the Bay. There was a non-structural sheet rock wall on my left and a much harder exterior wall on my right. At first the floor and windows started shaking as they had during the 5-something San José quake I'd experienced that spring. But then the whole building pitched so violently to the left that I literally fell into that interior wall. Luckily, by the time the building headed back to the right I'd collected my wits sufficiently to brace my fall -- there is no other way to describe it -- into the exterior wall with my hand.

Although I'd never been out on the high seas, I knew, instinctively, that this was what it must have felt like to traverse them in a large sailing vessel. And then I thought, "Buildings shouldn't act like boats; the whole thing is going to collapse." As it turns out, I was dead wrong. Architects want tall buildings to act like boats during an earthquake. Everything was happening according to plan. For a few seconds, though, I was trying to calculate whether it would be better or worse for me to be on the next-to-top floor in the event of Eshleman's destruction.

Once the shaking stopped, I exited via the stairway -- somehow, I remembered that elevators were a bad idea in case of emergency -- and found myself spilling out onto Lower Sproul, where a crowd was gazing westward, mouth agape, at the giant plate glass windows that fronted Zellerbach Hall. I asked someone what they were looking at. He turned to me stunned. "The windows were billowing like sails," he effused, "but they didn't break!"

Still jittery and not yet feeling wired with adrenaline as I would be a little later, I drifted into the Bear's Lair with a notion to watch the World Series. I'd completely forgotten about Josh at this point. Oddly, with the regulars sitting in their usual spots, the watering hole seemed surprisingly normal. I ordered a beer and sat down in front of the biggest television, still showing Candlestick Park. Then the soon-to-be-famous footage of the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Structure came on the screen, with Al Michaels doing voiceover, and I realized that there wasn't going to be a baseball game.

I wandered out of the Bear's Lair only to find Annalee and David, who had gone to meet her at Kip's, standing along Bancroft with my friend Leanne. We exchanged a few words, collectively achieving what I would later identify as "post-disaster rush". And then Josh walked up, chiding me for standing him up. He'd parked the car a block away, after waiting quite a while for me, deciding that he didn't want to go to Jack London Square by himself.

Only later did I realize that my tardiness might have saved us from harm. Not having a car, I didn't know the Bay Area's freeway system very well. But when I looked at a map of the damage two days later, I realized that Josh and I would most likely have been on the Cypress Structure at 5:04pm had I gone straight to meet him instead of waiting to intercept Annalee. To be honest, though, this didn't feel like a brush with death so much as a brush with excitement.

In the weeks following the quake I found myself flooded with boundless energy and a willingness to take risks that was definitely out of character. Indeed, I was still riding the wave of post-quake adrenaline when I met my future partner on October 30th. I'm sure it was an important factor in moving me to respond to her flirtation instead of pretending that I hadn't noticed. And I know that it played a role in leading me to ignore everything I'd been taught about safe sex. But that's a tale for another day. . .

Tags: autobiography, bay area, berkeley, holiday, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Forget You - Cee Lo Green - The Lady Killer

I've been scarce of late, I know, for a variety of reasons. But I'm still reading those of you who post here and am gearing up to share more myself. Part of the reason I've been parsimonious with my blogging is that my writing and editing time is taken up by the new publishing venture Souciant that I began with Joel Schalit, Jennifer Crakow and Rich Jensen this past spring.

Lately, I've been contributing pieces of my own every other week, though I hope to get back into a weekly groove soon. My piece for today reflects on the newly reissued film 1991: The Year Punk Broke, which documents a European tour by Sonic Youth -- one of my all-time favorite bands -- and Nirvana, right before the release of Nevermind, which is celebrating its twentieth-anniversary this week.



I'm fairly pleased with my work this time, which is saying something, considering how hard on myself I've been lately. Please go go check it out, if you have time, and also take the time, when you're able, to peruse Souciant's other offerings. I think we're building it into a really interesting place to visit.

Tags: clips, music
Current Location: 85704

Skylar was given the assignment, on short notice, to write a "list" poem for her Literature class. Because it's due tomorrow and she has already been working on her other homework for hours, I read her the opening lines of Christopher Smart's eighteenth-century tribute to his cat Jeoffry from Jubilate Agno, which Annalee Newitz and I used to enjoy reading aloud.

Skylar was inspired to attempt her own version, dedicated to her feline. I left her for a few minutes to use the bathroom -- we're hanging out at the Barnes & Noble Café in Foothills Mall -- and returned to find that she had already completed the assignment. I was glad, since I had feared that she would labor over the task as someone of her creative bent is inclined to do and was worried that she would run out of energy before her homework was completed. But when I saw what she'd come up with, my happiness magnified a hundred fold:

For I will consider my cat Punka
For her eyes burn brighter than all the tigers in the forests of the night.
For her robe of charcoal sweeps to her dainty toes.
For her tail is a plume.
For her eyebrows were singed away by the flame of Satan.
For she views food as a primitive curiosity beneath her contempt.
For she does not need solid fuel to feed her wild soul.
For she is smarter than my father.
For she counts the rows of helpless, neon mice and minces them with her claws.
For she is the predator.
For she regards her siblings as lower forms of life that God created for her prey.
For she leaps upon them from the night of the ceiling, sinking her teeth into their fur with a hiss.
For satisfying her bloodthirsty jaws, she squashes the black beetles from the cracks in the walls and eats the remains.
For she sleeps in the sink to block her servants from tentatively attempting to brush their teeth.
For she is irresistible when her motor rumbles.
For she is the love of the life of the universe and all its inhabitants.
For she is the bear.

This is a grand imitation of Smart's style. But the scary thing is that I read Skylar only a small portion of Smart's original and not the best parts -- and the ones that her lines evoke most strongly -- which come later on.

Tags: daughter, nostalgia, poetry
Current Location: 85741

Just now I was thinking about what I should do in the thirty minutes I have before I take my mom to another doctor's appointment and wandered into my office to look at the bookshelves there. I pulled my German paperback edition of the first volume of Capital down, since I mean to at least partially reread it soon. But it was clearly too intense for such a short window of opportunity.

While I was retrieving it, I glanced over at the adjoining bookshelf that holds much of my collection in twentieth-century leftist thought. I saw books by Rudolph Rocker, Antonio Gramsci and, my personal favorite, Walter Benjamin. While I'd rather read them, especially in English, than tackle the small print and yellowed paper of my German edition of Marx's masterpiece, it felt like a betrayal and, what is more, one consistent with a disturbing tendency in post-1960s theory circles, where primary sources are neglected in favor of books kinda-sorta about them.

So I held on to the Marx and made it out into the kitchen when my thoughts drifted to Lord of the Rings, which I began rereading as part of a contest with my twelve-year-old. Given how little time I have, I told myself, it would make more sense to make a little headway in The Two Towers and return to Marx under more favorable circumstances. But then that plan also flooded me with guilt, since I would clearly be taking the easy way out.

Stumped, I decided that I should at least try to think about J.R.R. Tolkien in relation to Marxism before sitting down to read them. That got me thinking that I should try to read fantasy literature that directly influenced Tolkien, maybe something by George Macdonald, so that I could compare an approach to counter-factual worlds produced in a Victorian context to the one that Tolkien took with the Great Depression and World War II as a backdrop.

From there I started pondering the modernity of Lord of the Rings, the fact that, even though it's a deeply melancholic story that celebrates what is lost with Max Weber's Entzauberung der Welt, the prose is decidedly modern in feel, particularly when juxtaposed with The Silmarillion, where Tolkien was striving for lexical and syntactical "antiquing" akin to the sort Edmund Spenser deployed in The Faerie Queen.

And then I remembered Walter Benjamin, who was deeply preoccupied with our relation to the recent past and, in particular, the ways in which modernity can make less then a century's remove seem vaster somehow than the twenty-five hundred years that separate us from the pinnacle of classical Greek culture. In Lord of the Rings, I realized, the distant past is more present for the elves than what happened relatively recently.

Focusing on Tolkien's elves then reminded me of the insight that the genius of his fantasy world lies in the way it treats time, the fact that each species has a different lifespan and a concomitant idiosyncrasy of perception. If elves, dwarves, humans and hobbits and humans all lived more or less the same number of years, almost everything that is interesting in his work would disappear. In other words, to put this realization into language appropriate for someone of Tolkien's generation, the strength of his storytelling is a function of the relativity he introduces into the experience of time.

That brought me back to Benjamin, whose interest in the recent past went hand in hand with a mission to liberate leftist thinking from linear chronology and the unimaginative teleology to which it has unfortunately led. And then I had a flash of inspiration: both Benjamin and Tolkien were born in 1892. Surely, their interest in time and the way they thought about it had a lot to do with the period in which they grew up, when so many technological advances were radically transforming the texture of everyday life.

FInally, that realization made me think about how and why I am drawn to the work produced by intellectuals of their generation, those born sometime between the late 1880s and early 1900s. My father's parents were also born in the 1890s. And my paternal grandfather, like Tolkien and, in a different sense, Benjamin, was profoundly affected by World War I and its immediate aftermath. Could it be that my attraction to this period and the people who lived through it is bound up with an identification that, like genetic traits, skipped a generation?

Well, my time is up. Now I'm not going to read Marx, Tolkien or Benjamin until later in the day at the very earliest. But at least I got something written, which has been hard for me to do recently. It's a good exercise, reconstructing a train of thought in this manner, even if there's a danger that the mental associations that made it possible will be cauterized by the effort to capture them in words.

Tags: autobiography, family, fantasy, literature, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704