Born Free.

Green Ink.

2011-10-19T14:37:00.000-06:00

Dude came to BYU last week and told us Pablo Neruda used to always write in green ink. Why? I don't know. I buy these 4-color pens all the time and the one color that never runs out before I get tired of them is green. It's hard to confront the reality that in at least one respect, I'll never be like Pablo Neruda. I'll recover.

I'm trying to learn Portuguese. I guess it's impossible to prove that it's the most beautiful possible assembly of mortal syllables. But I have faith that such is the case. It's beautiful even if you don't know what it means, or whether it means anything. Like whalesong. But like whalesong, if you want to be able to produce it, so you gotta know the rules behind it. So I'm learning Portuguese in the hopes that I can someday hear Portuguese coming out of my own astonished and delighted mouth.

Olfactory redux.

2011-07-18T06:49:00.000-06:00

In winter in this city, the weird and multifarious smells from outside my body sink into my clothes faster than I can sweat my own smell into them.

Eleanor Rigby.

2011-07-14T05:12:00.000-06:00

Have you heard Aretha's cover of Eleanor Rigby? Hear it. This is what was playing in my head as I ran around this morning.

I ran! I got up before the sun and pounded the city's dark streets sans headphones. I talked to a friend yesterday who's been living in Seattle and doing that, and I think that's what finally helped me get up the gumption to wake up. That, and what my old mission president told me about how Russell M. Nelson, after having become the world's greatest heart surgeon at age 22 or something like that, taught himself Spanish, Portuguese, and the piano just by waking up early. "Turn off the TV," he also said.

I don't want to cry over spilt milk, but I should have been doing this sooner. It's awesome. One of the main things I've done in this town has been to just walk around and explore, and when you're running you cover a lot more ground. Of course it's not the same before dawn as during the day, or at night -- there's something particular to be gotten out of aimless wandering at each time of day, I think. But I discovered a couple museums I might have taken a long time to find otherwise. And anyway, I feel great; I've always loved the seeming paradox that running in the morning makes me less tired throughout the day. I mean we're talking 20 minutes, half-hour tops. I brought along these running shoes and I'm paying slightly exorbitant rent to live in a safe part of town; I might as well get my money's worth. Also, look, I'm up this early. Yesterday I got out of bed at about this time. Today I have a run, a shower, and blog post under my belt. Ha! Nothing to dissipate stagnation like a brisk morning jog. It wasn't even cold out.

Idea #236

2011-07-10T23:01:00.000-06:00

This enormous, incomprehensible, inexplicable, frustrating, overpowering, living, throbbing, bleeding city, I'm seeing it as a metaphor for God's love.

Haunted Library.

2011-07-05T19:12:00.000-06:00

There are 26 public libraries scattered around the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, I learned. I learned that because the one I visited happened to be the central one that coordinates all the others: Biblioteca Ricardo Güiraldes. I googled "Biblioteca Buenos Aires" and it was one of the first ones that came up (along with a really cool, kind of useful site that allows you to explore the library in 360 degrees. I think those things are a little creepy because the perspective is always a little off, so it's like seeing the photorealistic world through a cubist lens. Maybe Picasso saw the whole world like this.) that was close to my house.

IT'S COOL. It's in this old building, from the 30's or 40's, according to Jorge. Jorge was one of the guys in a little office off of the black-and-white tiled entry hall where I was mostly ignored when I walked in. I asked What's the Deal With This Library, and was ushered into that little office where Jorge, Lito, Ana, and a businesslike guy who's name I didn't get were shooting the breeze. I asked them if I could get some kind of library card or something, and since I don't have an Argentine ID document and since I'm only renting, the answer was no. So I asked if I could just sit and read, and they said Sure, but it's 6:15 and you have to leave by 6:50 at the latest. (I swear the website said they were open until 8:00) Do you know the word "mezquino"? That's a great word in Spanish for something we have a great word for in English: stingy. Libraries are supposed to be refuges against the stinginess of the world. But don't worry, it turns out this one was, even though they didn't give me a library card.

I went up the marble staircase with the wood balustrade to the 1st floor, which houses the reading room. I don't know how to describe it; it felt like a room in Hogwarts. It's just this very old stately building squashed into the confines of a modern reality, it's really wonderful, and its proportions are so weird and charming. It goes up four stories. There are colorful glass windows.

On the 1st floor reading room is the kids' section. The kids' section is a room about 20 feet by 10, with shelves that go up way higher than my reach, much less a kid's. This library isn't really designed as one of those that you browse around. You come and ask for a book, and they bring it to you, and you sit in the reading room and read it. The National Library, which I also went to, is on the same system. The library loses a lot of its romance that way. But I suppose real estate is expensive.

Daniela, the kids' section librarian, who is here on tuesdays and thursdays in the evening, was awesome. Germán's daughter Agustina is going to turn 12 while I'm here, so I want to get her a book. I have zero confidence in my ability to pick out clothes for any girl of any age, and I thought about getting a toy, but what kind of toy do you get a 12-year-old? So it's got to be a book. I asked Daniela for some recommendations, and she told me about some authors she likes, including Graciela Montes, some books of whose I found on the shelf and they are really charming. So I also asked Daniela for some recommendations on fun things to do in the city and she told me about all these plays her friends are in. Stay tuned.

I asked her if I could play the piano in the reading room, and she said yes. No one ever lets you play a piano anywhere, much less in a library. See how copada Daniela is? See how great this library is? It gets better. As I was playing, Jorge came up the stairs with kind of a confidential giggle. It was a very disarming way of telling me to stop playing the piano. I've got to tell you about Jorge, he's probably about 50, and he has this very common, almost archetypal look of Argentine man-boy, like he's doing his best to be a responsible adult but it's clear he keeps his mischievous side in good shape. He's got a goatee and mustache and great hair, graying but pretty long, I mean down to maybe his jaw or something, and he pulls it off the way only latin guys can. I mean he's wearing a sweater and a jacket and everything; he's a sharp guy; but he still has a lot of fun. When I told him I was from Utah, he and Lito (who had also come up the stairs) started talking about old westerns and Bonanza and and Dakota del Norte and Dakota del Sur. I about died when they said Wyoming. As I was leaving I mentioned how beautiful the building is and Jorge said, "Yeah, it's gorgeous, but . . . do you believe in ghosts?" He proceeded to tell me about how one time a security guard quit because he heard weird noises walking around and night. And Jorge didn't believe it, because he's an atheist and does't believe in nothing, but sometimes he has to stay after everyone else has gone, up in his office on the top floor. And one time out on the balcony that looks out over the inner courtyard he heard footsteps . . . . walking past the door . . . and he went out onto the balcony to listen, and suddenly from three floor below he heard a loud WHAM, from the floor of the reading room. "Hey Ghost, I think you dropped something!" he yelled out into the courtyard. "I always throw out some joke, you know, to keep me from getting scared. People say it's just the wood creaking, and that's fine but wood doesn't creak . . . tak, tak, tak . . . like footsteps."

It was incredible. Jorge and Lito said come back soon, we'll sit out here on the patio and tomar mate. I said, I can't wait. It's pretty close to my house too. Well, 18 blocks. But they're 18 very pretty blocks and I walked them tonight. I'll be back, especially if they get the wifi fixed.

I smell.

2011-07-03T19:54:00.001-06:00

When you live in a big city, there are just a lot of weird smells to deal with; there's no getting around it. I suspect this is why city-dwellers have more trouble dealing with stress.

They're not all bad smells. The subway line A today had the exact same smell as the last time I smelt a deep early-morning fog, managing to somehow evoke a burnt smell and a cold smell and a humid smell all at the same time. It is a cousin of the smell of when they put a humidifier in your room. THAT was what I smelled every time the doors opened all along South America's oldest subway line today. And I don't remember it from before, and it wasn't happening on the other lines, and it wasn't foggy. But the smell is incredible.

The dogs of Eduardo Guzmán, on the other hand, smell exactly as disgusting as always. He has at least 5 or 6, and probably more, some of which are tied to the wall in the living room and the rest of which (at least, of the visible ones) live in the patio outside and in the bathroom on the other side of it. Eduardo, who's 54 years old but seems much younger and is one of those people whose corpulence seems to signal not sloth but strength, grabs the two most excitable of the patio dogs by the scruff of the neck (collars? please.) while I cross over to the bathroom, shoo the dogs out, and hold my nose while I pee because those dogs smell awful. Most smells of decay I would define as gradual; their stink is more broad than acute. But these dogs have an urgency to their rottenness, as if this pungency, like something yellow and living and malignant, were an assault developed over the evolutionary eons to startle primordial man into washing his dog.

Yeah, there are a lot of smells, and you can almost tell how far out you are in the city by what smells surround you. All kinds of transport smells, all the different vehicles' kinds of smoke and fuel. All kinds of food smells, predominated by pizza and empanadas. That weird moldy must in the staircase of my hostel that I remembered from some of the apartments I lived in as a missionary. Unknown (and best left unguessed) smells. Dust. And of course the smells of every kind of people -- you're familiar with the pastime of people-watching, but stuffing yourself into a full train forces upon you the singular experience of people-smelling, which can be almost as fascinating, if less pleasant (I make no pretense at being a wonderful subject for this activity. I did laundry for the first time yesterday. I've been busy, okay? I bought some mints.) How do my synapses deal with all this unexpected information arriving from sense receptors that aren't used to this volume of activity? I tell you, the human brain is a marvel, and so is the human city. Let's not forget the nose either.

Dream.

2011-07-02T23:00:00.000-06:00

I'm living in a place where the river of myth empties into the sea of reality, diluting and replenishing it. I know, I know, I'm reading Gabriel García Márquez and you can tell, but it's an apt place and time for me to be reading him. I will tell you more about it later. I need to go to bed so I can have some more dreams that will become indistinguishable from my waking hours.

I will tell you that last night I dreamt I was Guybrush Threepwood in a huge mansion being attacked by zombies.

Foux du fa fa.

2011-06-29T19:54:00.001-06:00

The last time I went to another country was about a year ago, when I went to Europe with Annie and Nate. That trip was 3 weeks long, which felt like just the right amount of time. But I've been here in Argentina for a week already and I feel like I haven't done hardly anything. If I applied the amount of time I've been in Argentina to my Europe trip, I would already have come and gone from London, and made it halfway across southern Germany. So please bear with me while I pause, take inventory, and try to figure out what happened to the first week (of only ten) of my life in Argentina.

Une. The Europe trip was considerably better planned. This spring I've been neck-deep in math and unable to spend much time planning what my trip would look like. That was a conscious decision I made, and I'm okay with it. I was going to come here and figure out how to live. It's just been a tiny bit more taxing and taken a bit longer than I expected.

Deux. As a result of (une), the Europe trip had more limited expectations. I knew I'd be there for a short time, so I made decisions beforehand, whereas this trip carries on its shoulders five years' worth of hopes and ambitions, accumulated since at least the first day I set foot in Argentina. Of course I'm not going to be able to do everything I want to before I have to go home. I'll convince myself that's fine.

Trois. I actually have done a lot. I've had to find a place to live (I have! More on that later), I've had to buy a cellphone, buy fingernail clippers (I can't go on any trip without losing something, and I got started quick this time. The pouch with fingernail clippers also had the tylenol and, gulp, my retainers. So I hope Continental responds to my lost item notice.) and shampoo, call BYU's financial aid office, learn how to type Spanish accents on my keyboard, and more. I'm talking about the boring accoutrements of survival. And in spite of them, I've still managed to go to church in one of my old wards, meet up with a number of old friends, including my mission president, make some new friends, go to a concert, go to the library, eat things, and just do a lot of old-fashioned walking around the city. As you well know, these are all things I crave and value dearly, but none really qualify as "productive." I'm learning to reconcile the discontinuity in my ambitions between the drive toward productivity and the drive toward a-productivity (as opposed to unproductivity). Between the economist in me and the, ahem, poet. Sure, we'll call him that.

Trois (a): What do I even mean by "productive"? Carrying out an experiment, writing about it, and publishing it, sure. Maybe learning French. Maybe reading Gabriel García Marquez. Signing up for and studying for the GRE, that would be real productive. But these are not the only important things, nor are they the only things I'm here for. The trick is that a lot of the things I am here for are difficult to quantify, which is gorgeous, and I like being okay with things that are difficult to quantify; but if one of you is going to sit down and build a tower, aren't you going to count first to make sure you have enough to finish it with? I feel like God keeps sending me hints about how Planning is Important, so I'm trying to figure out how to Plan for important things that I'm more used to trusting to the realm of Serendipity. Did you know those were all proper nouns? Or proper verbs? Yep, that's a thing. All right, tangent over.

Quatre. I really spent a lot of time going around to see different apartments, trying to find one that was Just Right. Which was multitasking, since I also got to see a lot of the city, which was and is a high priority, and think, which is also a high priority. Look at me be productive. (Just Right is a proper adjective.)

Don't let me down.

2011-06-24T20:52:00.000-06:00

So I come out of the mall – yes, I went to the mall in Argentina, but there was a good reason and I’ll tell you about it later—and there, stopped at a light, is a bus #152, just the bus I need. So I knock on the door, but the guy just shakes his finger at me; turns out the stop is half a block behind. Bad luck, right? No. Good luck. Because the next bus that comes is the one I get on. As I put my peso veinticinco into the slot, strains of music waft across the bus to my unsuspecting ears. Actually, music might be too strong a term: a guy, probably somewhere in his thirties, is wearing a fedora, strumming a guitar, and belting out the words to While My Guitar Gently Weeps, unabashed as you please, just as if he were practicing in his own room. Actually it’s probably more like the kind of singing most of us would be doing only if we were riding a motorcycle or mowing the lawn or doing the dishes with the disposal running the whole time. I have to say, the words he has down pat. I find myself singing along in my head and trying to remember the next line, and even where I fail, Juan Lennon here has them all. But the chords come from another planet, and I don’t think it’s a planet where they play guitar. They have nothing, nothing to do with the melody he’s yowling. However, that doesn’t stop him from laboring over them, pausing every few bars to search for the next set of frets while he holds out whatever word he’s on. It’s so bad I consider just asking him, “Hey man, can I give it a shot?” out of courtesy to the rest of the people on the bus. See, I’m sitting there thinking, “I can handle this because I’m adjustable, and he’s funny, but these crusty porteños must be pissed as all hell. They must hate this guy.” Finally the dude finishes his long, torturous rendition of Gently Weeps and puts his guitar back in its case, and I breath a sigh of relief that no one seems to have been hurt. Then a lady stands up to get off the bus – 40, 50 years old – and Dude yells to her, “Hey, Divina, jou rheady to rhan? Jou rheady to fly?” She ignores him and moves to the door at the back of the bus, and I start to wonder if the guy might be more of a bother not singing than singing.

But I don’t have long to think about it, because right around the time we cross Avenida 9 de Julio, he gets out the old guitar again and starts playing Don’t Let Me Down. That is, he starts singing Don’t Let Me Down – I still have no idea what he’s playing. “Nobahhdy everr lawvmi laik she daaws . . . Uushi daaws . . . Yeshi daaws.” It’s getting pretty good. Then he gets to the chorus and yells out “All together now!” and I think, “Oh geez,” – but in the refrain I swear I hear other voices, improbably, mixing in with Che’s baritone honk. I turn around and see two girls on the back of the bus, grinning like to break their faces off. So on the next chorus I join in too, and pretty soon, I kid you not, the whole bus is smiling and singing along. When the dude looks at me with pure grateful joy and sings “And from de fihrst tain that she rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreally dawn me,” rolling that rr for about 3 seconds, I think to myself, Yeah, this is what I came here for.

10 points for the not-so-crusty porteños. 10 points for the boys from Liverpool. And a hundred points for that dude in a fedora, singing like his life depended upon it on the 152.

Soul Parking.

2011-06-23T21:19:00.000-06:00

Here are some good t-shirts I saw today:

"Please recycle my brother"

"Madonna breaks all the guys. Please help her!"

Also: I have this theory that almost everyone I meet here has a counterpart from my Northern Hemisphere life. With most people I can't quite place it, but I'll have this sensation like, You remind me of . . . someone. As soon as I figure some of these out I'll tell you and you'll have a great idea of what these people are like. I'm mainly talking about the people I work with, but the other day I saw Davey Morisson's doppelganger step off the subway. That was pretty cool. And it makes sense, I mean, if you've got to make 7 billion people in the world, you throw in some duplicates, scatter them to different parts of the globe, and no one's the wiser.

I don't actually think that. In fact I believe so emphatically in everyone's uniqueness that I felt compelled to put this corny and unnecessary disclaimer. Yay snowflakes.

I'm pretty close to getting a house to rent. Once I get a house then I feel like I'll be able to settle down my mind and have some more interesting ideas. The title of this post comes from an actual parking garage I saw in Palermo, but it's kind of a nice serendipitous description for what I'm looking for right now. Trying to figure out what's the ideal mix of things I value in a house: proximity to my work, price, security, charm (house), charm (neighborhood), proximity to the library, personality of the people who live there, nationality of the people who live there, height, presence of an ice cream shop on the block, smell, presence of a bidet, proximity to the subway, size of kitchen. Those are pretty much the things I care about, some more than others. Trying to decide between two houses right now, each of which beats the other in about half of those categories. They're both great though. What do you value most in a home away from home?

Speaking of snowflakes, I think there are lead ones hanging from every one of my eyelashes. Good night.
Love.

It's a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.

2011-06-22T22:24:00.000-06:00

One of the best things about the Argentine football league is that no one's place is secure. Today Club Atlético River Plate played against some club from Córdoba called Belgrano to avoid descent from the top league into the second echelon: "la B". This would be like, I don't know, one of the very most venerable teams in the NBA, like the Celtics, having to fight from being sent down into the D-league. AWESOME. The best part is: River CHOKED. Of course, it's a two-game series, and this game was played in Córdoba, and the next is played in River's home stadium in Buenos Aires. But Córdoba beat them 2-0, meaning River will have to win very soundly to end up winning the series and staying in the top division. In more than a hundred years of history, they've never been relegated to anything besides the top division. HA! River's mascot is the hen, and toward the end of the game some Cordobes fans were stringing up rubber chickens by the neck. Oh, and right after half time started, some River fans tore a hole in the chain link fence separating the fans from the field and ran up to their own players to push them and tell them to "ponerle huevo," that is, to really give it more, um, gumption. So the game was delayed 20 minutes while they brought in the police in full riot gear, I kid you not, to stand in front of the holes in the chain link fence. THIS IS SOCCER.

The best part, actually, was that I was watching it with people I love. Alejandro is this big lovable Viking who loves Incubus and his wife Sabrina just seems to have it all together, and she speaks great English and puts up with Alejandro's video games, but not too much. They live in Ciudad Evita, a suburb an hour from the downtown that actually feels like a town, and actually has houses that are shaped more or less like the ones I'm used to. I mean a lot of them even have yards. There is this very strong sense of community there. It was Sabrina's birthday, so a bunch of friends came over, some of who I knew and some not, but they were all super nice and talked to me nonetheless. We drank pop and ate salty crunchy things of all shapes and sizes and watched the game and I just felt great. They are just good people and it feels awesome to be loved by good people.

So that's the marrow of my story for today: my brain's message of hope from my future self to my present self was true. People are good, life is abundant, God is merciful, and you sometimes don't even have to wait more half a day to be reminded of it. I slept great, got up and bought some shampoo, and found the little bag of chargers and things which I'd thought I had lost. I think that means I have lost my bag of tylenol and nail clippers. Which is fine. Oh, here's a deceptively non-peripheral part of the story: I started my internship today. It's scrappy, and I think that's great about it. I had a good long chat with Celeste about what I'm going to be doing and all the questions I have, and I'll dedicate a subsequent post to that. Everyone welcomed me with open arms -- or at least, they seemed to be about as welcoming as one could expect, given that EVERY SINGLE OTHER VOLUNTEER in that NGO is FRENCH. Yeah! Make of that what you will. The paid (barely) employees are non-French. But all the volunteers are French and hearing someone speak Spanish with a French accent is actually really hilarious; I recommend it.

100 años de soledad.

2011-06-21T23:06:00.001-06:00

I'm positing that the human brain has almost unlimited potential to absorb and assimilate changes in environment, but that it requires sleep in order to do it. I'll test that hypothesis as soon as I write this.

Yeah, I'm here. I'm here! But it was a weird day! But it was a good day. I want to assiduously avoid making this into an itinerary-based traveblogue, but I might include a lot of boring details today just because I feel like I need to desahogar. What a great word from Spanish: undrown myself. I've just gotta unload, vent: undrown myself.

Here's my first point of advice: don't ever travel alone when you can travel with someone you love, or even like. That option wasn't really available, so I'm trying the lone wolf thing. I thought I would love it. And I don't, or at least not yet. I recognize that the main component of any place's meaning is the people in it, but if I were better at creating connections with strangers, this would be a lot more fun. I should just learn to do that, huh?

Okay, let me step back and mold these scatterlings and orphanages into some semblance of narrative. Brief semblance of narrative. I slept a bunch on the plane, spent most of the day getting into my hostel and buying maps and a phone, then looking up more permanent housing situations on the internet. I know I've told you a million times how much I love big cities, and I do, but man they can alienate you if you're not careful. I know I mentioned this above, but I feel like my brain has just been overloaded with more input than it can take without one night of sleep to process everything and put it somewhere. I have a hard enough time molding my life into a directional narrative in Provo, Utah, the most familiar town in the entire world. And suddenly I've pulled a switch on my brain, altering every environmental variable possible. Of course it's going to freak out. It felt a little bit like the first day of my mission, with less magnitude: culture shock lite. I wasn't expecting that. But really, I never really had the chance to get used to the particular iteration of Argentine culture I'm immersed in now, since my mission was all in the less densely populated, more neighborhoodsy suburbs. So today, the crowds and the buildings and the solo lunch of empanadas at a Chinese-run buffet restaurant and the administrative tasks of Just Living, I kind of saw them through lenses the color of existential ennui. I felt, a few times, like all these people were incomprehensible to me, and they cared about different things than I do, and what if anything do I really care about anyway, and real connection with these people or anyone was just a pie in the sky. And the rational part of my brain is able to recognize that this feeling always passes and is replaced once again with exultant, glorious joy at God's creation. But today felt weird.

There more things to tell you about, but I'm literally falling asleep at the keyboard and I literally promised to try and make this brief. I'll wrap up with 3 tender mercies, connexions from my old life to the current one which which put a dab of hope onto my angsty existential oatmeal.

Church. My search for an apartment took longer than expected, but at the end of the day on my way to the last apartment appointment, I was surprised to find myself walking past a Mormon chapel with a guy about to go in. So I yelled him down and told him how great it was to just see a mormon; turns out he's the institute director, and I thought to myself, Institute! That'll be great! (this is the only time I've ever thought that). Kind guy.
University. The Belgrano institute is in the neighborhood of Universidad de Belgrano, so I ducked in and spent about a half hour just reveling in the warmth of those books. I bought a replica of a first-edition 100 años de soledad and saw a lot of South American books I recognized or had heard about. So that felt great. College bookstores are always going to feel comforting.
People. Specifically, the lady showing me this flat. It's her own flat, and the rooms are a little pitiful. But she, Angelica, is great. 72 years old, which she never gets tired of reminding me. She just welcomed me in and sat me down and started talking to me. I heard about her time living in La Jolla, California, and about what made her decide to be a teacher. She had a lot to say, but you could tell when this lady was in her prime she was a really irresistible fireball. She was a real sweetheart to me, even walking me to the train station on my way back to the hostel. I wish I could tell you more about her, you would like her.

I've read that in scary or stressful times our brain lays down more densely packed memories and that's why time seems to pass more slowly. Well let me tell you my brain was just packing them in today. It felt like about three days.

Angels.

2011-06-02T07:38:00.000-06:00

Remember how I like running in the hills? I know this is all I ever write about anymore. Just let me enjoy it while it lasts.

The grass, thanks to the rain, is tall and healthy-looking right now. And when I stand on a rock or some promontory, all I see is the wind shaking the green grass in these uniform waves that catch the nascent sunlight as they undulate across the field, looking for all the world like some tranquil bay in a grass ocean I never knew existed.

The grass is so tall that it hides the paths traversing it. The deer (I assume they're deer) are uncanny at finding the flattest and stablest ways of moving across the hill, and over the course of months or weeks their light but steady plod beats worn trails. These trails are the best to run on. But they're usually not more than about 6 inches wide, and unless I happen across one or see it from just the right angle, I'm oblivious to its existence. Luckily there are a lot of them and they meet up with one another. This is one of the metaphors I'm holding onto right now.

Rain.

2011-05-24T08:20:00.003-06:00

I’ve been meaning to write about how the degree of control I feel over my life is directly correlated with how regularly I floss. Maybe I still will. But for now it may seem a little less pathetic, and equally accurate, to substitute the word “run” for “floss.” I’m kind of a black sheep in a family with a pretty strong running culture; I have trouble getting into it. Even though its positive effect on me is immediately palpable. I mean I presume, and fervently hope, it’s reaming out my arteries of all the saturated fat and cholesterol I put into them. And it’s definitely doing the same thing with my brain. (What’s the cerebral equivalent of cholesterol? TV? Melancholy?) As can be attested by the disproportionate number of my blog posts that mention me running, it clears my mind and gets me in a healthy, meditative, writey mood. It is wasabi to the nasal cavity of my life.

Clarification: I’m talking fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. I don’t even want to tell you how many miles that means. The intrinsic reward of running for its own sake is a level of sanctification I haven’t attained, so I look for other little things to motivate me. And it’s been easy lately because every day I wake up to this ridiculous lush dewy marvel of a rainy world. The air is wet. When is the last time you felt like this in Utah?

Folks, the world is transformed. It’s been, what, two or three weeks of really consistently rainy weather, and a lot of people are sick of the rain. I’m not. These wise, mischeivous, persistent clouds are a direct and forceful challenge to the notion, foisted on us by advertisers and publicists, that the ideal life is one in which the sun is always shining on everyone’s blond hair and shiny cars. Which I abhor. (Also it sticks in my craw that this life gets marketed as California, which ignores that the most beautiful part of California is its rocky central coast on a windy, overcast day.)

This morning I took off through the hills. As I think I have mentioned before, I love the hills and I happen to live right next to them, so I ran down the street to where I could just wander and explore the hills. It wasn’t raining, but the grass was holding so much water that my shoes were soaked within seconds; I might as well have been wading a stream. I keep on expecting the weather to dry up, the rains to get bored and seek more receptive climes. But they keep on, insistent and imperturbable as God’s grace. This rainy spring will end, and pass into myth, and be forgotten. But it’ll happen again, and the world is breathtaking. It breathtakes.

Foothills.

2011-05-14T13:50:00.001-06:00

I love the hills, and I am drawn to them like a salmon to wherever it is they're all going in such a hurry. I have this consistent urge -- I think it's inborn -- to climb on them. The hills, not the salmon. I don't think what I have is the same as the mountaineer's itch: I'm not that attracted to mountains. I mean I love them; I stand in awe of them as godlike matriarchal creatures of unthinkable wisdom and beauty. But that very air of incomprehensible ampleness, of perfection by sheer volume, gives them a certain distance. Especially the tops of them, which seem very far away, and tricky, and rocky. Maybe my relative reluctance to mountaineer is a product of my short attention span, I'm willing to concede that likelihood. And I've bagged a few peaks in my day; not many, but I like a long hike to the top of a reasonably tall mountain once in a while. I wouldn't call it an insatiable drive of mine. Duncan's dad is a mountain climber. I'm not, at least not yet.

Nor am I much of a rock climber. Wussy forearms.

For me it's hills; on them I clamber. They're just so accessible, or at least they seem to be. They usually take longer to scale than I expect, which I think is a part of their charm. Maybe the biggest hill I've climbed is Big Baldy, that mass jutting out to the southwest of Timpanogos near Lindon, looking like the knee the mountain would would rest its banjo on if it played one. That hike took 4 hours or more, longer than Squaw Peak. But I still classify it as a hill because it gets so dwarfed by the massive lady behind it. Illusion or no, there was a long time when anytime I'd look up at it, I'd think, "It's just right there. I could just walk up it." Which I eventually did last summer with some friends and it was a very rewarding experience. I recommend it. Near the top you get to this big green meadow where we played a kind of rock baseball Nate made up.

That's the thing though, or at least part of the thing: they're just right there. They're so inviting, nonthreatening, accepting. Overlooked, even, living in the shadow of these ponderous majesties. Every time I drive up the canyon, at the point where the buildings finally get out of the way and I can look at Timpanogos from head to toe -- they have lately been green like Wales -- I want to get up onto those low rolling foothills and just gambol around like a big gazelle on the moon or something, bounding from one to the next. Maybe I was Welsh in a former life. Consonants consonant consonant consonant consonant.

The backyard of my Grandma's cabin in the south fork of Provo Canyon is a steep hillside, and I recently realized that I've never climbed it. One weekend last month I was staying up there with Nate and Clark and Duncan, and on Saturday morning I got up early to climb. I mean it's a steep hill, and thickly wooded, matted, I should say, with small trees, so it was hard to tell how near I was to the top. I had to bushwhack since there was no path, and there were still big patches of deep snow. It only took me about an hour to get to where I was headed, but it gave me a disproportionate sense of accomplishment. And it is gorgeous to see South Fork from the top. At the top of the ridge I found some deer antlers from a five-point buck. I saw that what had seemed like the top of the hill wasn't really the top of the hill at all, but just a kind of level ridge that sloped up to the north. This is one of the hazards and joys of hiking in the foothills: summits are relative, fleeting, and ever-receding. The perspective from each one is different. I decided to leave the next hill for another day and circled around to come down the dry gully southward (which, weeks later, gushed with spring runoff so that we had to scramble to deepen the streambed and throw up a laughably inadequate levee of cinderblocks to try and keep the ad hoc stream within its banks). Incidentally at that very moment back at the cabin Clark and Duncan were trying to coax a live raven out of the wood-burning stove. There are a lot of stories involving the cabin.

Last night I went out to my car to get something, but a warm midnight wind was blowing and instead I walked down the street to where a path between the houses leads up to a swath of bare hillside -- this is one of the many perks of living in the Tree Streets. It's remarkable how much more you can see with just a five-minute walk upward. I looked out at the whole valley, with the lake and the mountain luminescing in the moon's supernatural light. Halfway up the hill was a big square rock, taller than me, looking for all the world like an altar. I stood on it and glorified God.

I read slow.

2011-05-10T00:42:00.002-06:00

I do. I’ve been trying to decide how urgent I should feel about remedying this. For now I’m letting my decision be constrained by the fact that I hardly have any time to read at all, much less learn how to read fast. Maybe the logic on that is backwards. Maybe necessity is the mother of invention and I’ll start reading fast as soon as I want to read as bad as you wanted air that time when I plunged your head unexpectedly into the Mediterranean and held it there until you went blue, young grasshopper.

But there are perks to reading slow. I’m thinking of this because I’m ruminating (a welcome byproduct of slow reading; some books, I feel, need to suffuse the pot roast in my mind over a long time. To marinate my brain to tender, succulent perfection. For the zombies.) on how long it’s taking me to read the book I’m in, which is fine because I’ll be a little sorry when I finish it. I will read it again sometime, but there is magic in first discovery. It’s a collection of essays - Leaping - by Brian Doyle. Max got me into Brian Doyle, and Pat Madden got him into him, and I tried to get my friend’s mother into him but she was unimpressed; she said she’s already read these ideas before, at this point in her life she needs to read something new. She mainly seems to like books about divorce and infidelity and homosexuality. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

And maybe when I’m her age I will also be bored by the wide-eyed, full-throated abundant roar of vitality that is Brian Doyle’s Catholic prose, but I sure hope not. I hope will never get tired of hearing that basic and simple refrain God is good, day after day, raucous loud and ardent soft, through the voices of ten thousand of His flawed and gorgeous kids. That flawless and gorgeous one, too.

Mystery.

2011-04-19T00:36:00.001-06:00

Here is a direct quote from my textbook:

Much mystery surrounds perfect numbers. Are there any odd perfect numbers? No one knows. Are there infinitely many even perfect numbers? No one knows that either.

Which reminds me: if you haven't seen Look Around You yet, see it. Amy is the one who told me about this. For a long time Todd was in her phone as CLASSIFIED Man A, etc. Maybe he still is. If that's not true love, I'm a pink leather piñata.

I like the math department at BYU. Do you know why? They're always talking about how math is creative. Convincingly. They make some very dope posters. There was one for a lecture about The Math of Music that was just visually stunning. Also one announcing when the New York Times data visualization specialist was giving a lecture, which I found out about the day after it happened. They have a big campaign where they use Einstein's live-traced face over the words BE CREATIVE. BYU MATH. They designed these dope t-shirts for pi day; I bet you've seen them. Baby blue with the first few thousand digits of pi in the shape of the Americas. I signed up to volunteer at the pi day activities just to get one. Yeah, that's right: pi day activities. They were fun. It was a gorgeous spring day. I'm telling you, those math people are creative. And the humanities and advertising people they've got doing their PR are also top-notch. I'm not just being snarky; I'm serious about both of the things I just said.

A math guy, I read in the New York Times recently, modeled how human language spread from Africa to the rest of the globe based on how many different sounds languages have. I mean I'm glad we can know this stuff. And we can know it thanks to math. Or maths. What I'm driving at is that math IS creative. You have to be innovative to find ways to answer the questions that interest you in a world that sometimes seems already to have been gone over with several fine-toothed combs. I mean of course for all this nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things. As Hopkins put it. But math and linguistics? I mean guys, this is to extend the frontiers of mortal knowledge. This is human ingenuity at its most elegant.

Are you worried this blog is turning into some kind of serial love paean to Math? Relax; it could be worse. I will tell you that I took my final today and felt pretty fine about it. Remember what I said about math tests? They can be so satisfying.

Stanley Steamer.

2011-04-10T23:02:00.002-06:00

I’ve got to stop taking such long showers.

But I move slowly in the morning, and I got up at six. I had to go to bed at ten to do it. But I got up at six. I’m counting this as a victory.

Also, my best ideas come in the shower. Have you ever read The Soul of a New Machine? One of the main computer builders in that book felt the same way. So if I take long showers it’s partly to maximize my time in the hot cloud of inspiration vapor.

Ready for a hot cloud of inspiration vapor? Here’s why I love writing. Wait, you didn’t know that? Yeah, I love writing. But (surprise) I have trouble finding time to do it, and I suppose I haven’t decided if I love it more than anything else in the world--I mean if it's what I want to spend all my time on. I know all you real writers out there are shaking your heads and clucking, Well, if you don’t by now have this overpowering urge to write stronger than your urge to breathe, you’ll never be a writer-- and you’re right. You’re right! I know! But I like writing and I also like a heck of a lot of other things, and I told this to Charles Swift one time and he told me to just set aside an hour a day and write. That was probably two and a half years ago.

I don’t mean to put words in the mouths (fingertips?) of you real writers out there. I mean there are probably some of you who feel the above-described way, and as I have mentioned, I think you’re right. But there have to be some out there too who have a more inclusive and meandering ideal of what a writer can be, and I hope you’re right too. At the very least I know Kim Johnson regards writing as a craft that can be learned, and while I don’t equate the craft of writing with the art of writing, I think taking some distinct and measurable steps toward craftsmanship would be a good thing for me. I'm saying she gives me hope. So does Wallace Stevens. I'm not trying to sound pretensions. I'm sure I have pretensions but I'm not sure what they are.

My mother is a brilliant and gorgeous poet.

My sociology teacher wrote on my paper, 'Whatever you end up doing, you should figure out how to incorporate writing.' Which is also my intention. My economics teacher has never said anything so complimentary about my writing. But he told our class that good writing can be the difference between getting published in a good journal and an okay journal. And this is a guy who runs the regressions and lets his coauthors do the writing. Lars Lefgren. He seems to be not a bad writer himself though. Really sharp guy. He graduated magna cum laude.

I like words. Do I like numbers too? Yeah. I mean sometimes I get nervous around them but I think it's just the kind of nervous you get around a girl you're trying to impress even though you know she's way out of your league. That might be the relationship I have with math. That could explain my math anxiety. I have striven to overcome it because I want to be someone who takes the opportunity to learn new things and because they are tools I want to have to help solve the problems that interest me. And at times I have despaired of ever being able to obtain a single iota of confidence or credibility in the quantitative world. But it just takes work, and when I do work at it, I can at the very least keep up. So far. And maybe just maybe my words are my ace in the hole, the key to her heart, my goofy smile that's just charming and distinct enough to make Girl take notice even though there's no reason in the world she should, and something lovely and unexpected and lasting comes out of it. I'm still talking about my relationship with Math.

I'm thrilled

2011-02-17T17:36:00.003-07:00

with my life. Wholly and absolutely charmed. HA!

Truncheons.

2011-01-29T18:14:00.002-07:00

The last thing I want to do is trivialize what’s going on in Egypt right now. I’ve been glued to my computer screen reading about it even though I’ve never been to Egypt and I realize I’m a big dork.

But what I’m saying is that the police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and TRUNCHEONS-- what a terrific and appropriate word. What word could possibly sum up the detached, heavy cruelty of this thing with no positive connotations like “truncheon”? I mean the way it evokes a crunch, you know, like of breaking ribs, but with the euphemistically meaningless suffix “-eon”, which has the sinister effect of making the word rhyme with something as amiable and boring as a luncheon. Man, what a good word. Truncheon.

I cleaned my room.

2010-11-27T20:52:00.002-07:00

I cleaned my room and it felt great. In fact I want to record the fact that I am writing this sitting at my desk. That hasn’t happened since I moved into this house. This is momentous. I have a cup of Swiss Miss on the desk next to me and also a pen holder that is actually a drill bit holder I got at D.I. My life is great.

When you clean up you find old stuff. Like your parents’ copy of The Power and the Glory and about a dozen other books you pilfered eight years ago (including Kafka’s The Trial-- that stuff is nutty). And old notebooks. Last time I went through this exercise, months ago, I found a spiral-bound steno notebook from high school I used to draw in, but it still had some empty pages so I started using them for To Do lists and provisional plans and things. (Pretty much what I use paper for is To Do lists, and pretty much I write them during sacrament meeting.) Today I found it buried beneath a stack of papers again and it was all full except for one empty page. So I tore it out along with a couple other pages with things that were still relevant to me on them, and threw the notebook away. And I know I have a worrying tendency toward nostalgia; that’s why I consciously decided I didn’t need anything in there anymore so there was no reason to hold onto it.

Still, I couldn’t keep back the slightest twinge of sadness. This thing has my handwriting in it; it has pages full of things I was thinking about and planning and worried about forgetting, many of which I actually did, eventually. It is, in its way, a record: proof that I lived and thought during the time it represents. Sometimes it’s nice for me to have proof of that. And there’s something cool about having it in this very ad hoc form, apart from my transcripts and class notes and correspondence and (neglected) journal. Looking at these artifacts of former lives, riddled with angst and uncertainty, helps me to see progress in my self-- I’m normally pretty confident that I’m now slightly less angsty and uncertain. So it’s the tiniest bit hard to let go of that tangible reminder that I actually am moving forward. But I can’t keep everything. Moving forward entails cleaning up, organizing, and throwing away. I’m okay with that. And that in itself is progress, right?

422-4636.

2010-11-05T18:50:00.001-06:00

Last night I went to the cowboy poetry festival of Heber, Utah, and saw such luminaries as Sourdough Slim, Doris Daley, and the Sons of the San Joaquin. The BYU Philharmonic, including Annie, was there too. In jeans. We sat right next to Kory's wife. Her name is Carolyn. She's from Montana. She's cool.

The BYU Operators told me that a postman called them today to ask how to deliver a 2100-pound package to the Crabtree building. Also Fidel Castro's daughter called to tell BYU she'd be in the area in January and would like to speak at the university. So if that happens: you heard it here first.

My life is beautiful.

Nature.

2010-10-13T01:19:00.000-06:00

Yes, I know. I know! The world doesn’t need any more self-reflexive blog diatribes on the excesses of information and communication, and anyway, Nature would have a hard time finding a less-qualified spokesman than yours truly.

And I like the twitters and the tumblrs and the readers and the texts and autotunes and awards shows and earbuds and the myriad twinkling accoutrements of the post-whateverist land I live alongside and choose to inhabit and which my grandfather would grumble about. I like that stuff. And I’m not going to say It’s Dumb or It’s Fake because mostly it’s just People, and of course most of them are dumb and most of them are fake, but that’s nothing new, and dumb people have had radio shows and written pamphlets and carved hieroglyphs and talked, I’m pretty sure, since the world’s had them in it, and you just have to love them for it. We’re all pretty dumb to each other most of the time.

And I guess I’m just talking about wanting to remember how dumb we are, and proud and happy and insignificant and beautiful, by examining an anthill maybe, or walking at night, or smelling things. I can see why Grandpa grumbled. There’s a lot to miss. There’s a lot that’s pretty unambiguously real. And I’m not saying I want to throw my computer into the river. Or give up TV or hamburgers. I’m not trying to be pious. I guess I’m just thinking a little more about balance, and about appreciating what underwrites all this. Which ultimately is not even Nature. But I think Nature is a little step towards it. So's People.

Baby Quails.

2010-09-28T00:38:00.002-06:00

This is how I fall in love with Salt Lake City on a Saturday:

Drive through the Avenues to the home workshop of a violin-maker who specializes in bows. Learn about the minute differences between Siberian stallion and Argentine mare hair.

Eat meat pies, plum bars, and eclairs from Mrs. Backer’s Pastry Shop while strolling down S Temple to the Presbyterian church and the Cathedral.

Climb Ensign Peak. Look at the the whole tree-carpeted valley. Watch the airplanes take off and land. See the baby quails on the trail.

Check out the Capitol Hill Ward meetinghouse. It looks like a Disney castle.

Hang out on the ample, shady lawn of the Capitol in late afternoon.

Drive through the neighborhoods of narrow streets and steep hills and old houses, pretty as any in Boston or Seattle.

Drink a Cherry Crush.

Eat an absurdly tasty reuben at Ruth’s Diner in Emigration Canyon. 1960 Corvette in the parking lot.

Wake up; we're here.

2010-09-20T23:45:00.002-06:00

All it took was me getting up in the morning, going running, listening to Wilco, and seeing the moms bringing their kids to school to bring tears to my eyes. That was Friday. Today it was the driveway in a neighborhood south of Seven Peaks with handprints and names in the walkway and "Concrete is strong. Family is stronger." You'd think it was that time of the month, or something. I don't know. There's a lot of beauty around.

Isaiah 55:2. Wipe that smirk off your face.

2010-06-15T02:23:00.001-06:00

I've always been reluctant to get very much use out of this thing, the blog, because I'm afraid I'll just come out whiny. Advance apologies if my fears prove well-founded.

I need to do this because I suffer from a rare disease that causes my sense of self to diminish to dangerous levels if I don't emit words. And since my journal got stolen last month and I haven't yet begun to replace it, this is where I do my exercises. I said I suffered from a rare disease-- I was joking, and I probably shouldn't be joking because there are probably people who really do have diseases like that. Furthermore, it's probably abundantly clear to everyone that this disease, if we're serious about calling it that, is actually not rare at all.

I was going to write a lot this summer. Instead so far I've just played rock and roll. Which has its own rewards. One of the main rewards is being in a band called Casanova Frankenstein.
Come see us play this Friday, 18 June, at 8:00 pm, at 184 E. 500 N. With my friends The Brocks.

casanovafrank.blogspot.com

I made it home safely.

2010-06-13T11:20:00.000-06:00

In case you are wondering what happened in the last few days of our trip, now that we've been back for a month, we just wrote about them.

sandblogeurope.blogspot.com

Ghost in the machine.

2010-05-27T09:58:00.000-06:00

I've heard the MSN "new message" sound come through my headphones seven times in the last ten minutes, and no one's chatting me.

Either me or the computer is insane.

Gone. Going.

2010-04-22T20:46:00.002-06:00

Until further notice, I'll be in Europe with Annie and Nate.

Come with us.

Glory.

2010-04-15T23:06:00.001-06:00

"Glory be to God for dappled things," wrote Hopkins. I love this phrase, this word. Glory is one of the most beautiful concepts and least understood ideas in English-- at least I don't understand it. But parable-like, it yields upon closer attention, revealing layer after layer of meaning to the dedicated searcher. On one level, "glory" seems to signify a particular flavor of brightness or shininess associated with divinity, as when the glory of the Lord abode on mount Sinai in Exodus or shone round about the shepherds in Luke. Isaiah prophesied, "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." Maybe it's that word "revealed," but I feel this must refer to more than mere physical light. Glory also seems to connote spiritual enlightenment: Jeremiah said, "let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord." In the New Testament especially, "seeing the glory of God" seems to accompany a greater understanding about God's nature. Jesus salved Martha's doubt by reminding her, "Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" The miracle that followed wasn't characterized by heavenly radiance, but by evidence of God's power and love. Jesus talked a lot about glory in his intercessory prayer:

And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.Jesus' use of the word "glory" here resists easy categorization--it's clearly not just "glow". Jesus had the same glory as the Father, and gave that same glory to the apostles in order that they might "be one." Jesus had previously told his apostles that he and his Father shared the same goals and values and attributes, and in that sense they were "one," while still occupying separate roles as distinct individuals. So as near as I can tell, God's glory is, in a sense, his essence. Jesus wanted his disciples to behold it--to perceive it, to incorporate it--just as God conferred it to his son, through love: for he loved Jesus before the foundation of the world, and what is God's essence if not love? It's what defines his fullest and truest and realest self; perhaps God is glorious because he knows that and lives it, purely and naturally. If so, glory is not a trait reserved exclusively for gods. The Proverbs teach that "The wise shall inherit glory" and that "the hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness," suggesting that glory comes with sincere experience, increasing as we come to know, and become, our best selves. Paul seemed to agree that mortality is a process of learning how to see more clearly and enact more fully our truest nature: "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." In other words, we as individuals are at our most glorious when we understand best who we are and who made us, following the example of him who most completely comprehends his own divine nature-- Chríst.

"What I do is me; for that I came." The scriptures are charged with the grandeur of God, his glory made manifest through his works. "The heavens declare the glory of God;" exulted the psalmist, "and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Hopkins too had a deep admiration for nature's involuntary, whole-souled, existential song of praise to its creator; his invented term "inscape" characterizes the individual identity which every member of creation enacts or "selves," expressing through action its essential being, and which ultimately constitutes the fingerprint of the divine. This looks to me like glory at its best. Each tiny detail of God's creation-- fresh firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings-- exhibits such loveliness in its being and elicits such joy in Hopkins (and me) as to defy interpretation as anything but a distilled, concentrated expression of God's love: dearest freshness, deep down things. "The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests: and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory," says the psalmist, clearly possessing a Hopkinsian appreciation for nature's beauty as the hallmark of divine design.

But God's glory is most fully displayed, for both Hopkins and scripture, in his crowning creation: nature's clearest-selvéd spark Man. In Isaiah the Lord said, "for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him." His deepest glory, it seems, is to see us deal out that being indoors each one dwells, acting in his eye according to our godly inscape, and recognizing those clear-selvéd sparks in us as divine. God told Moses, "This is my work and my glory-- to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." This is a remarkable thing, an incomprehensible thing; for if glory is inscape, then God's work and his self, his pure being, is to see us become like him. The absurdity of this proposal, the radicalness of this posited transformation, is so enormous as to leave me speechless, so I'll quote Hopkins:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and

this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond. What of that Jack, joke, poor potsherd? God's glory is to see us become immortal diamond, but we matchwood mortals can't always stand God's glory. Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation when the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. The Lord told him on another occasion, "no man can behold all my glory, and afterwards remain in the flesh on the earth." And in the days of early Mormonism, God told the saints "ye are not yet pure; ye can not yet bear my glory." Geologically, the wanwood leafmeal of decayed carbon matter only becomes immortal diamond through heat and pressure over thousands of years; the process of being made pure to bear God's glory can be in itself excruciating, at least for Hopkins (and me). His terrible sonnets evoke the fell world-sorrow of mortal man yearning toward an unreachable divine, made not less but rather more painful by the certainty of God's glory. "Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend," Hopkins cries, "how wouldst thou worst, I wonder, than thou dost, defeat, thwart me?"

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

with darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why?   "That my chaff might fly; my grain like, sheer and clear." Hopkins knows. And he knows God knows. The pain of separation serves to refine and mold us into our most completely inscaped selves. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment," wrote Paul, "worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." In another letter, Paul even suggested there is beauty and wisdom in suffering itself: "Wherefore I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory." And who understands this dark side of Glory better than Jesus himself? "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things," he asked his disciples, "and to enter into his glory?" It was that conversation that made their heart burn within them-- only after the preceding days had brought much gall and heartburn in the fell of dark, not day.

   "Glory be to God," Hopkins wrote, "for dappled things." There could be no things more dappled than us who he fathers-forth-- more swift and also slow; sweet and also sour; adazzle, and also painfully dim. And yet we are his glory, his being, his self-- because he loves us. And in a way perhaps only any parent can understand, somehow his glorious love is no less for our dimness, our darkness, our fellness, our blindness. He loves us-- for Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men's faces. But he also loves us even when we do not reck his rod. And when we breed not one work that wakes. And when selfyeast of spirit sours our dull dough. And when we wrestle with him, our God (my God!) for years. He loves our blear. He loves our smear. He loves our smudge. He loves our smell.
   Praise him.

Baby steps.

2010-04-01T17:16:00.000-06:00

After a year and a half of my patient tutelage, my phone has finally, suddenly learned how to spell 9428 as WHAT (not WGAT) and 9268 as WANT (not WBNT).

Miracles happen.

Up next: NEXT (not MEXT).

Vampire Weekend.

2010-03-28T01:15:00.001-06:00

I went to see Vampire Weekend, and loved it. The guys didn't act pretentious. They didn't seem to want to rub anything in our faces. They talked about the beautiful architecture in Salt Lake City as they introduced their song about architecture (Mansard Roof), and they mentioned two of the universities close by, BYU and Utah, as they dedicated the next song (Campus) to all the students in the audience. You know, reaching out to the locals, knowing something about us. And if the lead singer strapped on a Rickenbacker guitar just to play it for about 8 bars on my least favorite of their songs (Giving up the Gun), well, can you blame him? Rickenbackers are gorgeous.

I went to see Vampire Weekend with the guy who introduced me to Vampire Weekend, my cousin's husband Robbie, and two of his brothers. The highlight of the show came when he was telling us he went on a walk with his oldest daughter. When he asked her if she wanted him to carry her, she said, "No, I'm strong. I'm fast. I'm big. I'm everything you are, except you're a dad, and I'm a child. Did you know child comes from children? When there's more than one you say children but when there's only one you child. Or their name. My name is Lydia." And Robbie said, "You are the coolest three-year-old in the world."

The easy part.

2010-03-24T22:24:00.003-06:00

The rampant obstructionism of the Palestine/Israel peace process by extremists on both sides is cynical, xenophobic, and morally reprehensible.

But moral outrage is the wrong focus for the debate. So are partisan politics and religious conviction. The best chance Americans have to help bring peace to the region is to address the Middle East conflict as a fundamental matter of our national security.

The fight over the Holy Land, understandably, evokes deep-seated emotions. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been charged with war crimes, and both sides have argued convincingly that the other poses an existential threat to their nationhood. Supporters of both sides in America tend to invoke provocative imagery, from apartheid to the Bible, to evangelize their position. The danger of such hysterical argumentation is that it draws attention away from the most immediate effect of the conflict on the average American: people hate Americans because of it. The lack of resolution over a prospective Palestinian state is a cankerous source of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. That makes it a potent recruiting tool for those working in the violence industry to lure unemployed young men with no avenues for political expression into the business of killing Americans.

This perspective is finally starting to gain some cultural momentum, thanks in part to General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, who testified before Congress on March 16th:

"The [Israeli/Palestininan] conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [Mideast] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas."

In other words, the first front in the war on terror is the diplomatic one between Israel and Palestine. Over the course of the last decade, American forces have gotten wiser about the way they prosecute the war on terror, and while there's certainly a long way to go, it's encouraging to see phrases like "shock and awe" give way to "hearts and minds." Everyone seems to agree by now that military force will have no lasting effect against terrorism until the source of anti-American grievances that cause it are removed.

Of course there is more to mere pragmatism in the resolution of the Middle East conflict. Justice, morality, and history all play their part. But the same people who make impassioned, idealistic pleas built on these emotional appeals are often the people who have the most to gain by prolonging the conflict. The moderate majority of both Israelis and Palestinians want nothing more than peace. And as General Petraeus put it, it's in the interests of Americans to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Barack Obama seems to understand this better than any American president in recent history. But even as he rightly condemned Israel's recent announcement of more Jewish settlements to be built in Palestinian East Jersusalem, Congress welcomed Prime Minister Netanyahu with both arms on his recent trip to the United States. Ultimately, for American diplomatic pressure to have any teeth, it must carry the weight of not only the president, but of Congress-- and of the American people who elect Congress. Obama performed a Herculean task in bringing health care reform back from the dead, largely through a combination of selling it directly to the electorate and negotiating with Congress. With that monkey now off his back, he can devote more political capital to the establishment of a Palestinian state, another of his foremost stated goals. But it will require convincing Americans that Palestine is important enough to write their Congressmen about, much like he did with the health care reform bill. And that will require showing Americans that peace in Palestine is a matter of American national security.

It must be recognized that the creation of a Palestinian state is not the ultimate solution to terrorism, either. In the end, terrorism will only be contained (if never fully eradicated) when Muslim countries, and indeed all poor countries, become transparent, open societies where people have prospects for education, employment, and free expression. Seen in this context, peace between Israel and Palestine looks like the easy part.

It must be beautiful.

2010-02-22T00:55:00.000-07:00

It must be beautiful to be a commentator for the Winter Olympics, because you can say whatever you want, and no one knows enough to tell whether or not you're totally making it all up.

Jones.

2010-01-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

Every night, as I drive home on dark and empty roads listening to the BBC on the radio, I crave a McDonald's spicy chicken sandwhich. Every night.

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar. Please, raise your hand.

2010-01-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

I just realized I forgot to cancel my free trial of Amazon Prime before a month was up, costing me seventy-nine big ones.

Consolation:

- I now can get free 2-day shipping on all my Amazon purchases for a year.

- The amount I saved by buying books online rather than the bookstore is still more than $79.

- $79, if you think about it, is really a pretty small price to pay to learn my lesson: cancel free trials in a timely manner. I'm positive I won't have to relearn that lesson ever again. Right?

- The pioneers had to pay annual fees of up to three or four times what we do nowadays for their Amazon Prime memberships.

- I beat "Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time" with my friends at the Nickelcade. We blew up the Technodrome.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

2009-12-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

"3. Another great trick I learned was to take a dry orange peel and make sure you powder it very fine. Then mix it very well with about a half cup of regular milk. Place this mixture onto your face making sure your whole beard is covered. Then leave it on for about forty minutes or so. This has a amazing effect how soft your beard gets. Then place a cold compress afterwords. I have done this plenty of times to my brother in law, hubby etc."

What you can do with a degree in economics.

2009-12-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

Be an economics Professor at Columbia University

or the President of the US Soccer Federation

or both, like Sunil Gulati.

"My Life" Flashed b4 my eyes!!!

2009-11-19T09:46:00.006-07:00

Sorry I haven't blogged in awhile! I know all of you readers out there around the world have all just been on pins and needles waiting for my next post!! :)

WEll here it is b/c OMG I was awoken from my blogging slumber and shocked into ACTION! last night because !!! news flash !!!

a.
meteor.
hit.
the.
frickin.
earth.

And it was like it lighted up the whole sky, seriously, as bright as DAY, and then it all went dark again. Like a fireball, but then it disappeared. So anyways they were talking about it on tv and some scientist guy was like, Oh, it broke into a jillion pieces. I was all, like, Where did they all fall??? 'cuz that could give you some serious brain damage, LOL. But I guess all the pieces just disappeared. And on tv they were all talking about how they though it was the end of the world, and there life flashed before theyr'e eyes and all that, and I'm like, OMG!! 'cuz we were totally just talking about metafores in my english class and this is TOTALLY a metafore about........

(can you guess it??)

Life!!!!

I know, deep, huh??? But, think about it, it totally IS!!! B/c you're born, like, a baby, like, nobody sees you right? Well I mean they see you but, you know, you're little. A little light!!! Then you grow up in a flash of glorius light (yay COLLEGE!!! woot woot) and then you get old and broken down and then you die. OH!!! And you even get BURRIED IN THE EARTH!!! And a meteor gets burried in the earth to!

So, anyways, thats my deep thoughts for the day LOL! Just thought you would all like to hear about my genious metafore. Thanks prof. Johnson!!!

Solidarity.

2009-11-18T00:52:00.010-07:00

This is what a feminist looks like.

Viva WRI.

Food, Inc.

2009-11-17T17:08:00.005-07:00

Chickens now produce more meat in less time (why is this bad?).

Multinational corporations are just trying to make profits (why is this surprising?).

And all food is corn. Why? Because the US government's subsidies to corn farmers cause them to produce way more corn than people demand, making it so cheap that food companies include it in their products to take the place of actual food, which is more expensive. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Maltodextrin. Di-glycerides. I don't even know what these are, but apparently they all come from corn. And they make junk food cheaper relative to more nutritional food, creating a system of incentives that perpetuates diabetes and obesity, especially among the poor. But that still doesn't exhaust the massive surplus of corn produced by American farmers. So we send it to Africa, where it's so cheap that people eat it rather than buy food from African farmers, who subsequently go out of business, leaving the country dependent on US "aid."

Answer: kill subsidies.

Fate Smiles.

2009-10-18T01:42:00.002-06:00

All these gorgeous things happened to me in the space of about a week.

Munchies was my favorite Chinesey restaurant, and it was gone, but now it's back (incarnated as Cooking Taste Right) and their tapioca drinks are as good as ever. And the Taiwanese lady who runs the place remembered me from before.

We were walking down the street and a middle aged couple said to us, Did you see the space shuttle??? So we looked where her finger was pointing in the night sky and the moving dot of light we saw was definitely, unquestionably, the space shuttle.

A Hot Pocket was just hanging, like a very loose tooth, from its perch in the vending machine. As I was contemplating whether or not to start pounding on the glass, my wondering eyes beheld it, of its own accord, fall right down to the bottom. So I bought a dreamsicle and ate them both.

At the Festival Latinoamericano downtown, I stopped at one of the booths set up for a dentist's office (maybe a Spanish-speaking dentist? I don't know why they were there) and tried to toss the ball into one of the holes on the wooden cutout of a mouth. I got it in the hole marked "toothpaste." And they gave me some free Crest Pro-Health Night Mint toothpaste. I didn't even know Night Mint was a thing. But I like it.

Juan Martin del Potro won the US Open. He is from Argentina.

Killer week.
But this week was probably even better.

Grendel's Mother and Garcia Marquez:

2009-10-02T14:31:00.005-06:00

Magic Realism in Medieval England

It is a widely-held belief that magic realism began when the writers of the Latin American Boom started weaving in supernatural occurrences among the stark details of mundane settings. Although its precise characteristics are often negotiable, one broadly accepted definition of magic realism is "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something 'too strange to believe'." (1) As more of it has been produced over the last half-century, scholars have started identifying unifying threads within the body of writings that people call magic realism. The Emory Center for Postcolonial Studies identifies the following four common characteristics of Magic Realism.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Salman Rushdie are all well known practitioners of magic realism. But none of them was the first to write it. In fact, England was a hotbed of magic realism over a thousand years ago.

Beowulf, one of the best examples we have of medieval English fiction, was composed somewhere between 700 and 1000, a time during which invasions and migrations were constantly altering the demographic and political landscape of England. The epic combines quotidian and mythical elements in a way that bears the undeniable imprint of magic realism. It matter-of-factly includes trolls, elves, living dead, giants (ll. 111-114), dragons, and the Grendel among the villains against which its human protagonists fight. And while those protagonists may be human they exhibit moments of superhuman strength: "It was the space of a day/ before [Beowulf] could reach the bottom [of the ocean]," (ll. 1495-6) and "It was not granted to him/ that iron-edged weapons might ever/ help him in battle; his hand was too strong,/ he who, I am told, overtaxed every blade/ with his mighty blows (ll. 2682-6).” And what about that editorial “I am told”? In the absence of any statements by the author—or even any idea of who the author is—this may be as close as we can get to an “irony regarding the author’s perspective.” One of the most recognizable features of Anglo-Saxon literature is Wyrd, the supernatural force that governs mortal happenings and is almost personified: “Wyrd often spares/ an undoomed man, when his courage endures!" (ll. 572-3)” The very ambiguity about how animate wyrd is adds to its mystery and hence to its magic. But perhaps the story’s most magic realist element is Grendel’s mother (ll. 1258-9). Through her, the narrative recognizes that not even foul monsters exist independently of anything else—they too have someone who brought them up, who cares for them, who mourns them. We’re forced to recognize familiar elements even in the horrifying Grendel.

But there are other details that separate Beowulf from fairytale. The Broadview Anthology’s introduction states that the story is set in a historically accurate Scandinavian geography, and that “a number of the poem's characters . . . are mentioned in other sources as if they were figures of history rather than fable.” Moreover, the poem’s themes are far from purely fantastical. Broadview goes on to state that Beowulf is an “intensely political poem,” and that

Kingdoms and successions, alliances and truces, loyalties and the tragically transient stability of heroic society are the poem's somber subtext, a theme traced less in the clashes of the battlefield than in the patterns of marriage and kin, in stories remembered and retold, in allusion and digression and pointed foreshadowing.
In other words, the presence of the supernatural in Beowulf is not gratuitous, nor is it the primary focus of the author. The poem incorporates these devices in its examination of matters of daily concern to the people it portrays. “Beowulf is neither myth nor folktale,” asserts Broadview. It can only be magic realism.

But the supernatural in the middle ages was not confined to fiction. Bede is considered the father of English History. His most well-known work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is shot through with magic realist traits. Bede lived in Northumbria, a land bordering the territories of the wild, primal, and mystical Picts (now Scotland). It seems he considered the Picts and the other Celtic tribes of the British Isles a natural source of mystery. He mentions that "it is said that the Pictish race [is] from Scythia”, which the footnote clarifies could mean Thrace or the "farthest northern regions of the world, Ultima Thule.” His description of Ireland is paradisiacal:

No reptiles are found there, and no snake can live there; for, though snakes are often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die. On the contrary, almost all things in the island are efficacious against poison . . . the island abounds in milk and honey.
Bede balances mysticism and historicism by emphasizing the supernatural in the geographic realms just beyond the familiar and the known.

The most overtly magical moments in Bede’s history are the visions. While they are to be expected in hagiographies like the Abbess of Whitby’s story, Bede also includes visionary elements in his secular history. The account of Edwin’s ascent to power revolves around his conversion, brought about by the occasion when “suddenly in the dead of night he saw a man approach him whose face and dress were equally strange” who told him, “I know who you are, and why you grieve, and the evils which you fear will fall upon you." Bede writes, “it is said that he immediately disappeared, so that the king might realize that it was not a man but a spirit that had appeared to him." By making this detail so central in this otherwise earthbound account of political and military machinations, Bede shows that the supernatural inhabited not just the lives of the saints but the lives of the secular. Also, his practice of prefacing supernatural occurrences with “it is said” may be his way of maintaining authorial reticence, a coy acknowledgment of the potential unbelievability of that doesn’t commit itself to strict approval or denial. According to him, the first commanders of the Angles “are said to have been” descended from Woden.

Caedmon’s story provides particularly realistic detail. Before he was visited in his sleep and commanded to “sing about the beginning of created things,” he was just a regular bloke with no particular musical talent. Bede makes a point of clarifying that “sometimes at feasts, when it was agreed for the sake of entertainment that all present should take a turn singing, when he saw the harp coming towards him, he would rise up from the table in the middle of the feast, go out and return home.” Describing Cademon this way makes his character delightfully believable, and thereby places his supernatural experience squarely within the context of the ordinary.

According to the Broadview Anthology, "our study of the past says as much about us as it does about the past we try to study (p. 2)”, and a magic realist reading of our culture’s old writing sheds more light on our literary present than we might expect. Medieval English literature clearly meets the qualifications for magic realism. But contemporary literary criticism insists that magic realism is something that comes from the third world in the twentieth century. Indeed, if we consider Bede to have written magic realism, he is probably the only Anglo-Saxon male ever to do so. Today magic realism is written in Latin America, in the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent. It is written in the developed world by women and minorities. In other words, “magic realism” has come to mean “not Anglo realism,” with the distance between consisting of geography, race, or time. By applying the label “magical” to those elements of other cultures which used to be present in our own, we are imposing an implicit sequential hierarchy—realism dominates mysticism, the rational supplants the irrational. This belies an enormous cultural hubris. The main difference between magic realism and realism is that the latter comes from a modern Anglo-Saxon culture that has rejected the influence of the supernatural and the mystical. However, as other traditions have found their literary voice (and as we’ve examined older Anglo-Saxon culture), it’s become clear that rejection of the unobservable is the anomaly, not the other way around. Luis Leal said, "Without thinking of the concept of magical realism, each writer gives expression to a reality he observes in the people.” The term “magic realism” implies that magic is not included in what’s real. But in the culture of medieval England as well as in many cultures today, the opposite is true: no depiction of life is complete without acknowledging the unexplainable. The contemporary American poet Rita Dove put it this way: “To me, just looking at anything closely is pretty magical. I've had people point out passages they think of as having elements of magical realism, and all I can think is: isn't reality magic?” (2) Bede thought so.

It's the Economy, Stupid:

2009-09-30T18:20:00.006-06:00

Why Modern English is Not Better than Old English

Sometimes Old English gets characterized as evolutionarily inferior to Modern English—the communicative Neanderthal to today’s Homo Linguisticus. And in a way it’s understandable: the language certainly had a smaller vocabulary before the introduction of Norman French, and it barely resembles today's English on the surface. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature states that

“Old English poetic language is not necessarily congenial to the demands of precise reasoning; sentence boundaries and relationships between clauses are often uncertain. And yet despite these interpretative problems, the Exeter Book ‘elegies’ are among the most moving and powerful poems in Old English.”

Moving and powerful they certainly are. But what Broadview misses is that they have such force because of, not in spite of, these interpretative problems—or at least the linguistic differences in which they have their roots. If English’s evolution made it broader, it also made it shallower. The gain in quantity of verbiage available was accompanied by a loss of significance: when you have more words to choose from, each word must necessarily embrace less meaning. This dearth is evident in modern attempts to translate the Anglo-Saxon classic The Seafarer, one instance in which Modern English shows itself to be far less expressive than its “less evolved” antecessor. Because it lacks the necessary density of meaning and economy of language, Modern English grunts and snorts through The Seafarer where Old English sings.

Translation dilutes The Seafarer‘s content by shearing off the multiple associations Old English attaches to each word. The language is more condensed than we can adequately express with Modern English. In their translation, Igor Fux and Matthias Kasimir try to limit the effects of this problem using parentheses and slashes to indicate ambiguous or multi-layered meaning in the original. It opens “May I by myself sing (work) a true song” (Fux and Kasismir, l. 1). This significant double-meaning in the word “wrecan” (l. 1) is lost in other modern translations, which each choose some variant of one meaning or the other. As such, modern readers miss out on this imagery that blurs the line between tangible and metaphysical creation, a connotation that would have been clear in the ears of Anglo-Saxon listeners more accustomed to working with their hands than we are today. Fux and Kasimir seem similarly ambivalent about “narrow/ frightening” (l. 7), “weep/ wail” (l. 10), and “lowered/ cut” (l. 12). These are not different voicings of a similar concept, but radically divergent readings of each word in question. Shifting them into our more narrowly defined language requires excluding some of the meanings present in the original Old English words, and the poem loses thickness as a result.

Modern English also fails to invoke the significance of The Seafarer’s original spare form. Jonathan Glenn’s translation showcases how Modern English relies on too many words to truly capture the stoic melancholy of the Anglo-Saxons. The poem is an elegy, dealing heavily with loss, hardship, and solitude. Because its tone is so subdued, it needs to be pithy: what it says is enhanced by how few words it says it in. After all, these are warrior-folk living a lean existence. They place no premium on filigree; every word counts. Even the best modern approximations are too verbose. For example, “abode and still do bitter breast-care” (Glenn l. 4) cannot hope to be as concise as “bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe” (l. 4). Even though the number of syllables is the same, the increased number of accents and stresses in the modern line gives it more insecurity, more desperation to make its point known. And “the mind of the sea-weary one” (Glenn l. 12) can only stammer in blustered awe at the serene majesty of “merewerges mod” (l. 12). Modern translations may be considered to be less disjointed, more flowing and lyrical. But even this detracts from the original work’s significance, since elegies are meant to evoke abandonment and disconnection. Modern English loses the minor tonality expressed in that heavily rhythmic stress pattern, a pattern like oars rowing steadily away from home.

Languages suit themselves to the needs of the societies that employ them. In an orally literate culture like the Anglo-Saxons’, people can only understand words as fast as they can be spoken. So it makes sense, especially in poetry, that storytellers should layer each word with multiple meanings to provide maximum expression. Furthermore, in an environment of verbal economy, it is absolutely necessary to rely on form as much as content to communicate tone, style, setting, and even theme. Modern English is good at expressing a lot of things, but Anglo-Saxon elegies are not among them, perhaps because we don’t use English to pass down stories by oral tradition anymore. So the word “modern” does not at all confer superiority—it merely indicates what era the language is best at describing. Modern English does pretty well with stock markets and shopping malls and identity theft. But there’s nothing like Old English for talking about earfoðhwile.

A Modest Proposal

2009-09-24T23:47:00.002-06:00

Remember when you were in high school and your parents wanted you home by a certain hour from a party and they told you, "Just let me be the bad guy. You don't have to say you want to leave, just say, My parents will kill me if I'm not home by 12."

Maybe your parents were geopolitical geniuses, because that's exactly what Barack Obama has to do with little kid Israel right now. Despite demands from the Palestinians, the Arab League, the United States, and the left in his own country, Bibi Netanyahu complains that he can't muster the political gumption to freeze settlement building-- the right would freak out. I can understand that; he did, after all, get elected on a conservative platform. But look: right now America's president has made a conspicuous effort to reach out to the Muslim world and risked his own popularity at home by putting unprecedented pressure on Israel's leaders. Meanwhile Fatah has just had its first party-wide conference in 2 decades. If Israel keeps building settlements in the West Bank, it may well sabotage the best shot at a peace deal that has appeared since the Oslo accords.

Enter Dad Obama. And by "enter" I mean "invade." That's right. America invades (liberates?) the Israeli-occupied West Bank, doesn't kill anyone, gently but firmly escorts the building crews away from the settlements they're working on, and vaporizes every trace of settlement construction.

Before you hyperventilate, think about it. Israel's settlements in the West Bank are in defiance of UN resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention. The existence of the settlements--inasmuch as they represent a deliberate obstacle to Palestinian statehood and therefore a grievance of young, unemployed, potential Muslim extremists all over the world--constitute a far more serious and deep-rooted threat to American security than did the situations in either Afghanistan or Iraq before the invasions.

Who could then give Netanyahu any guff for halting settlement construction? To his conservative base, he could holler in shock and outrage, but he'd be totally powerless to do anything in the face of US Army-shaped "facts on the ground." And everyone would know it. We could even offer compensation to help displaced Israelis resettle in Israel proper. The Palestinians could remove the settlements from their list of objections and focus more energy on unifying themselves, improving security, and reducing corruption. The Europeans, long champions of Palestine, wouldn't even have to make any token noises about respecting sovereignty, since we wouldn't invade Israel at all, just the West Bank, and even then it would be Afghanistan-style: a friendly liberating force helping the locals against an oppressive tyrant. In fact, the American government is already helping to train Palestinian Authority security forces (with admirable results as internal security continues to improve in the West Bank). Of course the hardcore right-wing Zionists would hate us, but the increased goodwill from the Muslim world would be staggering. And isn't that what we've been trying to accomplish lately in those other Middle East lands we've invaded? Let's send our troops where they can really combat Arab Anti-Americanism. The only real front in the war on terror has always been Palestine.

Chaucer

2009-09-23T12:40:00.001-06:00

You know those people who get all excited about saying, "No one speaks well anymore! In fact the rabble would respond to this diatribe of mine by saying 'we speak good!' And that's disgusting! Ewww! Let's cut out the tongues of anyone who says the word 'like'!"

I can sympathize with those people, but man they sure make themselves easy to loathe.

I'm no linguist, but I feel like a lot of our colloquialisms have a longer and more distinguished history than we expect. I mean, look at Chaucer (the Knight's Tale, 192-3):

Hir yelow heer was broyded in a tresse
Bihynde hir bak, a yerde long, I gesse.

What a desperate cop-out for a rhyme, right? And yet it gives us a historical record of this crutch of a phrase that frankly I would have found hard to imagine outside of the twentieth century. I mean can you imagine Benjamin Franklin saying, "We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately, I guess"? Yeah, that's what I thought. And yet Chaucer used it . . pretty much the same way we use it today. I guess (har har) that Chaucer didn't shy away from using appropriate or relevant verbal conventions in his writing, as many writers and "You-know-what-I-mean" haters do. You know what I mean?

PS.
line 105.
Creon got served.

Man Proposes. God Disposes.

2009-09-19T01:27:00.004-06:00

We live in an age of wonder. This month, if all goes as planned, German cargo ships will be the first ones to make the trip from Asia to Europe through the Arctic waters north of Russia known as the Northeast Passage. This route cuts over 4000 miles off the trip ships currently have to take through the Suez Canal. “It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” said Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the Beluga Group shipping company, according to the New York Times. And that’s not global warming’s only breakthrough trade route. Some scientists now predict that navigation of the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic could also become commercially feasible within 20 or 30 years. The Northwest Passage has long been a dream for international traders, and the object of expeditions to prove its viability. In another age of wonder, the Victorian Era in England, one such attempt provided the basis for Sir Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes, part of the Royal Holloway Collection of Victorian paintings now on exhibit at BYU’s Museum of Art. The painting offers us an ambivalent view of social progress in Victorian England and invites to reexamine the advancements of our own era.

In 1845, England sent John Franklin to lead a crew whose aim was to map the Northwest Passage. The flowering of international commerce had already enriched Britain immensely, and the straits offered tantalizing financial gains to any country that could control them, if they proved navigable. Industrialization was also rapidly advancing the technology available for exploration. The expedition was outfitted with the newest inventions of maritime science, including steam engines from the London and Greenwich Railway and an iron rudder and propeller that could be retracted into iron wells to protect them from damage. The expedition set off . . . and was never seen again. Years later, searchers discovered that they had been trapped in the ice for years, gradually killed off by weather and disease and starvation. Marks on crew members’ bones indicated some had resorted to cannibalism. (1)

In Landseer’s deft hands, the scene becomes a perfect encapsulation of the Victorian era’s pathos. A forbidding but majestic icescape frames two polar bears ferociously tearing through the remains of the shipwreck, with a broken telescope lying discarded and useless in one corner and an exposed ribcage visible above the ice in the other. In many ways, Victorian England was a place of heady optimism, reflected in the rags-to-riches story of Thomas Holloway himself. But his collection of art, purchased a few years before his death, highlights the tensions associated with society’s progress. Many pieces are gritty scenes of the human suffering that accompanied urbanization: debtors’ prisons, rising crime, crowded homeless shelters. However, almost all the rest of the paintings exhibit a striking polarity: they are idealized scenes of rural bliss, natural beauty, and exotic locales. Escapism. The rich people who drove the demand for art—those who had benefited from the radical social and technological changes sweeping over England—wanted to forget about the price progress had exacted on their country.

Man Proposes, God Disposes is unique in the collection for synthesizing elements of these two groups of paintings. Nature’s awesome serenity serves as a backdrop to the woes humanity invented for itself: the obsessive, feverish worship of technology and commerce leads to calamity. That calamity was evident in the ills present in newly-industrialized Victorian England, and Landseer seems to say that such rapid and unconsidered change threatens to twist people’s very humanity from their grasp—can’t we see those ravenous polar bears as stand-ins for the crew members? And on some level, can’t a society be called cannibalistic that launches some to fabulous wealth at the expense of others who languish in poverty?

Landseer’s painting might be particularly relevant for us as a 21st-century audience. Our society exhibits many parallels to the Victorian Era: boundless opportunity, increasing reliance on technology, ubiquitous commerce. Bu with a daily backdrop of headlines populated with slums, hunger, and extremism, it seems unnecessary to ask what calamities could be riding the coattails of our progress. And the Victorians would probably be taken aback at the social cannibalism of Ponzi schemes and sub-prime mortgage loans. Landseer’s title is a warning; hubris has been the bane of mortals since Icarus. Our achievements must be tempered by an acknowledgment and minimization of their negative effects. So while the world produces and invents and communicates as never before, new passages are going to continue to open up to us. But every action has consequences. Or as the New York Times put it, global warming can help the Arctic open up for shipping, fishing, and oil exploration . . . but it “could be a particularly harsh jolt to polar bears.”

Fictionist.

2009-09-08T02:14:00.003-06:00

I know you are skeptical.
I was skeptical too.
Skeptical because anything that becomes a phenomenon around here usually drowns in its own popularity. Not only around here. I guess it stands to reason that when lots of people start telling you you're cool, you start to think you're cool.
Well, a lot of people around here have been telling Fictionist they're cool. But guys, guess what?

They kind of are.

Not that they know it. Well, they might know it a little. It might just be sloshing around their ankles a bit. But they probably deserve it. On Friday I went to a show of theirs at Velour and was fortunate enough to discover that this was the night they had chosen to unveil the songs that will appear on their next album in October.

Let me tell you why I was glad to hear that. First: I know that every band has those rabid fans who would probably scream in exultant and conspicuous recognition at the opening lick of every song, just so everyone in earshot knows This Is Their Favorite Song, and they will sing along with all the words. I wasn't ready for that. This was my first exposure to Fictionist (I saw them once as Good Morning Maxfield, but it was in the Wilk, which, come on, doesn't count), and everyone else's ignorance of the setlist made the playing field feel more level. I didn't have to fight my way into a social caste, I didn't have to prove anything-- it was about the music.

Second: the music is good. Fictionist is a band made up of musicians. You know, some bands are made out of people who devote themselves primarily to political opinions, or graphic design, or having the right friends, using the band as a billboard to paste their intentions on. Fictionist is a bunch of nerds. Frontman Stuart Maxfield used to be a fixture in the BYU Jazz combos, always with his mustard-yellow solid-body Telecaster rather than one of the big hollow boxes preferred by most jazz guitarists. Jacob Jones, the keyboardist, was another HFAC regular. I have seen him, with my own two eyes, playing Dixieland trombone in a straw hat. I don't say this disparagingly at all-- I'm saying the kids have credentials. And you can hear it. The chords are sometimes complex, but never for the sake of complexity. They are lush, or brooding, or nostalgic, or exuberant. And when the band falls seamlessly into a new time signature four bars before falling effortlessly back, they aren't shoving it in your face, they're just saying, Here, dance a little. The songs bypass gee-whiz unconventionality and deliver instead emotion that is familiar and universal, but sonically better articulated than we're used to.

Also-- and yes, this deserves its own paragraph-- they love the Beatles. One of the songs in Fictionist's set could have been the B-side George never wrote for While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and their encore tune was She's So Heavy. The last Provo band I enjoyed this much was Don Juan Triumphant, who I once saw play the second half of Abbey Road while waiting for someone to show up with an amp. It's not a coincidence.

Fictionist is real. No matter how many flannel shirts are in the audience, these guys just love to play. In fact, Stuart Maxfield looks a little uncomfortable in the jeans it seems his fans demand he wear. And that's a good sign.

Underground.

2009-08-31T01:37:00.003-06:00

If you haven't ever ordered an Animal Style burger at In-N-Out, I won't just assume you live at the bottom of the Marianas trench. You could also be Amish or Martian, or maybe you're a caterpillar so you don't eat meat. These are all valid excuses. Maybe you suffer from a life-threatening allergy to grilled onions. Who am I to judge?

My point is this: underground menus are often not quite as subterranean as they sound. You expect an underground menu, with such exciting and mouthwatering items as the Animal Style burger, from the kind of companies that keep up a folksy mom-and-pop image like In-N-Out. Especially when you start hearing about them on NPR. But you don't expect an underground menu at huge, boring, faceless national chains like Taco Bell.

I'm here to tell you that what you expect is, as usual, totally wrong.

Latitutde +40° 14' 55.55", Longitude -111° 38' 49.73": birthplace of arguably the best thing ever to be born in a Taco Bell, including Lindsay Lohan. Near the beginning of 2009, an employee at the Cougareat decided she wanted to improve on an existing underground menu item called the Man Burrito. She added a few touches of her own, suggested it to a few indecisive customers, and soon realized she had created an underground phenomenon. Without the help of national marketing campaigns (or any kind of marketing campaigns besides word-of-very-pleased-mouths), her creation began flying off the big industrial griddles at at rate of more than 15 per week.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the Super Man Burrito. You, reader, go over to BYU's Taco Bell and order one. All the employees know how to make it by now. The receipt will tell you that you have ordered a cheesy double beef burrito with guacamole, sour cream, red chip strips, and potatoes. But by the first bite you'll know that you got so much more. (Especially if you tell them to grill it. Don't forget.) By the last bite you'll FEEL that you got so much more. By dinner time you will still feel like you got so much more. And the best part? It's also on the receipt: three little numbers called $2.62.

This could replace the memory of talking to Javier the midget every day at lunch during high school as your favorite all-time Taco Bell memory. I know it has for me. But you don't have to take my word for it . . .

You never know.

2009-08-12T16:33:00.001-06:00

I came home one night and walked across my moonlit backyard to find a dead chicken with its feathers all over the lawn.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire -gmh.

2009-05-06T10:55:00.005-06:00

I went to the dentist-- have I told you this?-- for the first time in almost three years. They scraped on my teeth with these sharp metal things. I mean, yeah, I knew they were going to do that. But I'd forgotten how uncomfortable it is. Don't call me a crybaby-- I recognize it's no root canal-- I'm just saying there is something sinister about the cavalier way they drag those pointy things across the intimate parts of your teeth. The fingernails/chalkboard effect. In the middle of what seemed like an exceptionally thorough scraping I realized that almost every muscle in my body was tensed-- neck, shoulders, legs, toes. Because of one metal point on my teeth. I had to consciously will my fists unclenched.

Later I went to yoga. Yeah, you read that right. For the first time ever. On the wall outside the wood-floored, naturally lit, sanskrit-inscribed yoga studio-- yes, the wall next to the cash register-- there is a poster with little photos of a dude doing, I don't know if all, but a heck of a lot of the yoga poses. Let me just tell you there's one where he's upside down, completely vertical, balancing on his head. Crazy. In my class of course we're nowhere near that, it's definitely toward the beginner side of intermediate, and still, I'm sweating, my muscles are shaking, and I'm thinking, This is supposed to be relaxing? And yet by the time I got to the end, lying on my back, I was so calm I actually dozed off for a few seconds.

I was thinking about this while I was home, trying to balance the contentedness of rest and the restlessness of sloth. Hope and worry dominating each other alternatingly, like a rhythm, like a heartbeat. The ebb and flow of the tides at Point Lobos. Like my vacation was a study in tension and release.

Then on the day I got home I remembered, with a wallop, that's just what regular life is anyway. And it's all right. In fact it's beautiful.

Summer Reading.

2009-05-02T23:57:00.006-06:00

I recognize I haven't written here for a while-- but I've been busy doing more interesting things.

For example: reading children's literature. It's especially beautiful when you know people who write kids' books because sometimes they give you an advance copy and sometimes it totally melts you.

I heard this on Garrison Keillor.

2009-01-18T16:32:00.001-07:00

Listen. You will like it.

http://www.imeem.com/birchwood/music/0uMMWKSF/kristin_andreassen_crayola/

Strange and Beautiful.

2009-01-09T00:15:00.005-07:00

It's always kind of vivifying to start a new anything, and I'm starting a new semester, 2 new jobs, and a new apartment-- I've been feeling top-notch. But folks, here's the dark lining to my silver cloud: both my new jobs are at school, and my apartment is right across the street from school, which is all awfully convenient and all, and I'm not complaining, but: it means that more than ever The Campus Is My World. I tread the same paths again and again, in varying degrees of snow. I don't even feel like driving my 1984 two-wheel-drive Nissan pickup anywhere because no matter where I park it I get stuck in the ice and I have to ask someone for help. Not that I'm all averse to asking for help. People are always very willing. It's just . . . I'd prefer not to. I guess the Winter kind of forces us to confront our group-forming human instinct. Huh.

Anyway. A break in the monotony came a couple days ago. I had an evening class in a building I don't go in very often because it feels like a dungeon. When the class ended it was after dark, and as I walked out the doors it was snowing, everything was all obscured, and for a second, I didn't recognize where I was. I didn't look around carefully enough to orient myself, I just started walking and taking pleasure in this sense of being in a new and unfamiliar place. When you're in a different place, it feels good to have snow falling quietly. The snow serves to further surrealify things. Then I saw that crazy stained glass rocketship statue or whatever it is, realized I where I was, reoriented myself, and returned to my humdrum life. But it left me thinking how cool it might be to crash land in a new place where you don't know where anything is. Things just acquire a totally different feel when you recognize them. Know what I mean? It's not even the same town anymore.

If there's any place on campus that still holds for me a smidgeon of that undiscovered, virginal quality, it is (ironically?) Rape Hill. Those stands of trees, intersected only by meandering footpaths, strike me as the Provo equivalent to Hogwarts's Forbidden Forest. It's an oasis in the stark Purpose imposed by the rest of the campus's design. It maintains a certain enigma; it invites mystery and subterfuge. Let's go hide in the woods dressed like Mowgli for all of spring term. We shall feast every night on roast duck.

Math Brains.

2008-12-17T10:46:00.004-07:00

I just took my first final exam. I chose not to worry about any other ones until after this one was behind me, because it was the one I was most worried about: Economics. Sometimes people who know me ask me, puzzled, why I'm studying economics. Sometimes I ask myself that. Probably about every day. Especially on days like that day a few weeks ago when I got a 77% on my Econ midterm and a glistening 100% on my English midterm. Frustrating. But I just know that buried down beneath all the qualitative, relative, complex, inconclusive, human, intellectual flotsam strewn all over my mind, are my Math Brain Muscles, atrophied and anemic from so many years without seeing the sunlight. And I refuse to let them wither and die. Why? Because of the singular satisfaction, like that I had this morning, of figuring out how to solve problems and knowing you nailed The Right Answers.

Hold on, Math Brains -- I'm coming.

Reggie Love: Body Man.

2008-11-11T10:21:00.007-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/politics/27reggie.html

Want to know why this guy is the bizness? It's not because he walked onto the basketball team at Duke AND playing wide receiver on a football scholarship. It's not because he's part of a recently victorious, historic presidential campaign.
It's because his name is "Reggie Love."
And his title, is "Body Man."

Electionween.

2008-11-03T18:49:00.003-07:00

I've been reflecting a lot on how much I like having Halloween right in the middle of election season, as if by design, to cast an ironic light on all the posturing and costuming and cosmetics and, yeah, whoring. Both Halloween and elections seem to help people justify being a little or a lot whorier than social norms normally permit them to, whether morally or politically. Or, you know, both.

Vote yes on calm and reasoned debate.

2008-10-24T13:44:00.004-06:00

http://preservemarriage.ca/docs/france%20-%20summary.pdf

Don't Tread On Me.

2008-10-24T11:24:00.000-06:00

I was applying for a research grant. The grant is worth $1500, and it would fund a trip down to Argentina (nice research, huh), and to me personally it represented an opportunity to do things right for once. I wanted to work hard, put everything in order, do everything by the book, and win this grant, as if I could thereby prove to myself that I can be responsible. I'm always trying to prove that to myself. Ever since my 12th-grade English teacher Louise Durham called me a Play Station.
The bad news is that my desire to feel like I could be successful on "their" terms made me susceptible to that fearsome college campus epidemic, emasculating kowtowery. It may have been already in its early stages when I went to this proposal-writing workshop where people who give the impression of having authority on these matters give you hints at how to kiss butts more effectively. One of their useful suggestions was, "Memorize the phrase, 'I am uniquely qualified to complete this project because . . ." They made a big deal out of it, so naturally, when it came time to write up my proposal, I seasoned it liberally with uniquely qualified. When I showed my proposal draft to Jim Kearl, my faculty mentor, he scratched out the word "uniquely" every place it occurred. I gave a half-hearted yelp of protest: "But at the workshop they said . . !" Kearl replied, unflapped but not bitingly, "Nobody's uniquely qualified, that's stupid."
And of course he's right.
The Moral of the Story: Don't do things you know are stupid just to get stupid people to think you're smart.

Something Asian.

2008-10-22T09:10:00.000-06:00

http://web.mit.edu/zxq/www/mit/15575/

scroll down to the bottom and click on the flash animation. I like it soooo much!

It's Boot Season.

2008-10-21T15:18:00.001-06:00

It's Boot Season.

The girls are starting to complement their skirts with ever-thicker corduroy, or tweed, or wool buttoned coats and with staunch 'n' sturdy Eskimo footwear. Boots of every ilk-- furry, leather, moon. I love the functionality of it. Almost as if the drop in temperature jolts some primordial instinct in the girls to ditch their usual slenderfying but impractical heels or flip-flops or what-have-you, and bulk up, at least externally, putting on layers for the winter. Is it just my evolutionary instinct that finds that so attractive? Boots.

Fall has FALLEN, onto us, I guess. (PS: I fully recognize that fall is probably The Number One Most Juvenile and Cliche thing to write about. I know. Probably you all got your opinions about fall out years ago, when you were still in the womb. But guys, I'm a beginner, and you have to begin where the beginners begin.) You can't deny that fall casts a spell on you. If you try and deny that, you are just bitter, and you need to forgive whoever it is and move on. And it's urgent that you do it so you can enjoy this fall, because, it's a particularly delectable one. I just stepped outside to the sound of the American Flag not flapping but Snapping, RUMBLING, in the wind. That's how strong it was blowing. Meanwhile the sun shone, creating this gorgeous kaleidoscope effect as it glinted off the breezily liberated hair of all the girls walking across the quad.

In that air that seems to defy classification as anything besides "crisp," like the air of anticipation when you light a firecracker, you smell dances at the armory, and roast pumpkin seeds, and girls in boots, and the madhouse kitchen, and the first snow.

Pavlov's Dog.

2008-10-17T18:47:00.000-06:00

I can't help it: every time I hear that AIM "Someone just got online" squeaky door sound, my mind thinks THRILLER . . . and my body starts to dance.

Indomitable.

2008-10-06T18:12:00.000-06:00

Saturday Afternoon Session.

The choir was composed, boldly, of children. Dressed in their white shirts and pastel dresses. There's a part of the song that goes, "When dark clouds of trouble hang o'er us, and threaten our peace to destroy--" and the arrangement suggests doubt and sadness by turning momentarily to a minor key. But the kids defy it-- their invincibility is belied by their inexpertly-suppressed grins and fidgets. Their bodies revolt against the feeble attempts of words and notes to suggest mortality. And you can take refuge in their power.

Kids, man.

This is my heavy hand.

2008-10-03T11:49:00.000-06:00

I'm all about freedom of the press.
I encourage and applaud open and healthy debate.
But personal attacks just really stick in my craw.

love,
Wayne

So I'm in the library, and . . .

2008-09-30T21:15:00.000-06:00

. . . I just tooted.

Texting.

2008-09-27T20:20:00.003-06:00

I understand it has its uses. I realize that sometimes you are in class, or a concert, or a church, or the bathroom, or a myriad of other circumstances that assign spoken communication a spot somewhere on the scale between awkward and fatal.

But when there is an option, and there usually IS, why are we, fellow American youth, choosing to communicate in the less-efficient, less-clear alternative? Are we insecure about our ability to string together more than one subject and predicate at a time? Do we momentarily lack the emotional stamina for a talk on the phone? Have we become so isolated as a people that we actually prefer electrons on a screen to good old-fashioned sound waves from a speaker?

Here's my thesis: I think people feel wittier in text messages than in person. Texting is godsend for us products of the Seinfeld Era. Think about it: it's Clever Banter for Dummies. You receive a jab, and you get to sit and think and thumb while you formulate a parry and counterblow, without the pressure of responding in real time or the risk of sounding dumb. Well, let's just say less risk of sounding dumb. In a society that places such a high premium on wit, I guess it was inevitable that people migrated to a more distant and calculative way to interact.

But guys, I'm left with this intrigue: What are texting's rules of etiquette? Sometimes people send me texts, and it kind of gives me the impression they needed some iota of information from me that in their minds didn't warrant tolerating an entire conversation with me. It's not a particularly agreeable feeling; it kind of makes me want to call them back just to brass them off. Do you think they'll get annoyed if I reply with my voice? Or was that their plan all along, and I'm just playing into their hands (thumbs?)?

In sum: I would be real flattered to get a text message from you, yes you. But: if you text me, don't be surprised if you get a call back. Especially if I'm in the john.