(Just What the World Needs) Another Blog...

And for My 70th Birthday. . .

2011-10-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

When he turned 50, one of my oldest friends--we were roommates freshman year in college--jumped out of an airplane. For my 60th--I can't say I planned it, but it's as good a reason as any for doing it--I biked the C&O Canal towpath, nearly 185 miles from Cumberland, Md., to Washington, D.C.*

Writing this a few days afterwards, I feel better than I'd imagined I would when I was planning the trip this summer. I'd gotten a great new bike last year, a Cannondale Quick CX Ultra, but back problems and bronchitis kept me from doing much riding that summer. And though I went into the winter with the best intentions, once it got cold the bike stayed in my office. In April, when I finally got back on it, I went two-and-a-half miles before I had to turn back, completely winded.

Once I'd talked my friend Bob into doing the C&O Canal with me, I started to train. Early in the summer, I rode 35 miles one morning, the longest I'd ever gone. A few weeks later, I developed knee problems, which meant cutting back how much I rode. But at least the two orthopedists I consulted didn't tell me to give up riding completely.

I wasn't entirely convinced I'd be able to finish the trip, but my wife drove Bob and me to Cumberland on a recent Thursday morning anyway. After a few unseen delays--the purchase of a commemorative jersey at a bike shop; adjustment of the new grips on Bob's bike--we waved goodbye and took off. We rode about 45 miles to Little Orleans that first day and another 45 to Williamsport the second. From there, it was about 40 miles to Harpers Ferry.

The end of that third day was the worst of the trip. Not because I was tired or my legs hurt or I was thinking about the 60 miles we had to ride the next day. I was, they did, and I was. But what was truly awful was that the only way to get across the Potomac River to the hot shower and soft bed I so desperately craved was to climb a narrow set of twisting stairs with my fully loaded bike.

But I made it up the stairs (and back down again the next morning) and Bob and I made it to Washington. I feel pretty proud of myself for doing something I never thought I'd be able to. That is, until I think about the avid cyclist the innkeeper at Little Orleans told us about. He rode from Washington to Cumberland and back to Little Orleans--about 225 miles--all in one day.

It's something to aspire to.

*Now, the full disclosure implied by the asterisk above. I didn't really ride the entire 184.5 miles of the C&O Canal towpath from Cumberland to Washington. About a half-mile from the end, I got a flat near 31st Street in Georgetown. Since my wife was only 10 minutes away, I decided not to be a purist. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway: A few tenths of a mile ahead, the towpath was blocked by a chain-link fence.

Family History

2011-09-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Since I finished my novel more than a year ago, I've been working on a family history/memoir. (I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a memoir/family history.) For most of the time, I've been transcribing family letters. Members of my family have lived in the same house since 1929, and as people came and went over the years, they left behind things they probably intended to come back for but never did.

It's meant for a full attic.

In August, I went down to the South Carolina town one set of grandparents came from. I'd always intended to finish the research before I begin to write--making notes along the way, of course, so that I wouldn't forget important ideas. When I came back from the South, though, I was so excited by what I'd found in libraries and archives I decided I had to write while it still burned in me.

As part of my research, I've been reading a book called "History of the American Negro and his Institutions, South Carolina Edition." A kind of "Who's Who," it was published in 1919 by a man named Arthur Bunyan Caldwell. I don't know much about the history of the book, but Caldwell published seven volumes covering five Southern states and the District of Columbia. (One state may have taken up two volumes.) Each book includes profiles of about 300 prominent black men. There are a few women--four in the South Carolina volume.

With something like 5,000 family letters to transcribe, it's not as if I don't have enough to do. But I decided to go through Caldwell's South Carolina book a few days ago, making a count of the people profiled, their occupations and whether they'd been born before the end of the Civil War.

Interestingly, only about 75 were born before the end of the Civil War. Most of those, of course, were born in slavery, though a few had been free. Most of the men were preachers, the majority Baptists, followed by African Methodist Episcopalians. But there were doctors, lawyers, dentists, school teachers, college professors and college presidents. There were businessmen, farmers, leaders of fraternal organizations, undertakers, and insurance salesmen. One woman was a doctor, another a nurse.

A year or so ago, when I told a friend (she's white) about a relative who'd been a lawyer and college professor and administrator in the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she asked, "Was his wife white?" I laughed and said, "Of course not." Still, though I'm heir to that history, I never imagined then the variety I'd find in Caldwell's book.

Of course, the men and women he profiled weren't typical of black South Carolinians in 1919. They'd worked hard, seized opportunities, been lucky. In the process of getting college educations, going to medical school, and buying land, they endured privations and humiliations most of us can't imagine. When Caldwell allows them to speak, they are too often accommodationist in the Booker T. Washington vein. They had to be, of course.

Nonetheless, their example and their achievements speak powerfully across the years. Sarah Palin? Rick Perry? Michelle Bachmann? John Boehner? We've survived worse; we'll survive them too.

Coffee Shop Encounter

2011-09-18T06:44:00.000-07:00

When I walked into my local Starbucks the other day, I nodded at a black man sitting at a table by the window. After a moment, he nodded back. There was something, well, off, in his acknowledgment, so I looked at him and the man he was sitting with more closely. They were, I realized, Somali or Ethiopian. I felt a little chagrined.

No wonder he'd looked at me strangely: It was a black thing, and he hadn't understood.

I don't know where this custom of African-Americans acknowledging each other in public--even when they don't know one another--came from. As a boy growing up in a Washington, D.C., where men still wore hats and women still sometimes wore gloves when they went out, I thought it was simple good manners. Those same manners, and a sense of racial self-worth, also meant black men and women who'd known each other for years would address one another as "Mr." and "Mrs.," granting one another courtesy titles whites did not.

And perhaps it was just Southern good manners, as most blacks who live in the North came from the South. But I think that obligation of recognition (which, sad to say, doesn't seem to exist anymore) was also part of what James Weldon Johnson called "the freemasonry of the race." It's similar, I think, to the way Jews of a certain era called each other landsman. Or the phenomenon of two Americans--of any race--encountering one another overseas. Just hearing American English when you've been struggling with French evokes a sense of kinship. At least when it doesn't send you running the other way.

Of course, the man in the Starbucks knew nothing of that. And as I said, I felt chagrined, though not as embarrassed as the time, coming out of the movie "Kung Fu Panda 2" (I've got a 10-year-old; what else can I say?), I asked an Asian woman what the Chinese characters that had appeared in one scene meant.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm Korean. I don't speak Chinese."

Well, I'm Back. . ..

2011-09-18T06:29:00.001-07:00

I was a little surprised when, a few weeks ago, I saw I'd not posted here since April. I don't really know why. It wasn't a conscious decision. Part of it was that I was having some trouble with carpal tunnel syndrome. After a while, I invested in speech recognition software. It's cumbersome and inefficient, but I hope the keystrokes I save will eventually help my wrists heal.

But the other reason I stopped blogging was that I felt as if I'd run out of things to say. There are only five or six subjects I care enough to write about and being, like Winnie-the-Pooh a bear of very little brain, I felt as if I'd said everything I have to say.

What I've realized, though, is that I've been writing for such a long time it's hard to give it up. I may repeat myself, but I think I'll keep writing anyway.

Will Republicans Finally Come to Their Senses?

2011-04-28T04:47:00.001-07:00

I felt a little sick yesterday reading about President Obama's decision to release his birth certificate. Strange as it may seem, the move Obama was compelled to make reminded me of the Leonard Rhinelander v. Alice Rhinelander trial. Born Alice Jones, Alice Rhinelander was a woman of mixed race, a laundress and nursemaid who married Leonard Rhinelander, a New Yorker whose occupation Wikipedia quaintly lists as "socialite." Leonard's father was a real estate magnate worth millions.

Shortly after Alice and Leonard married in 1924, newspaper stories began to appear claiming he'd married a black woman.

Apparently under pressure from his parents, Leonard soon left Alice and sought to end the marriage, claiming she'd deceived him about her race. The all-white, all-male jury couldn't decide just what she was simply by looking at her in the courtroom. To help them, Alice was obliged to disrobe (albeit in the judge's chambers) so that the jurors could inspect her.

Of course, the president hasn't been subjected quite the same kind of abasement since the 2008 campaign. Still, the harassment was grounded in America's continuing obsession with race, and a desire by conservatives to humiliate Obama. For members of the lunatic fringe right wing, it was never about the birth certificate. The real goal of these despicable people was delegitimizing the Obama presidency.

As the New York Times notes today, "[T]he birther question . . . was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race. . . . It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious 'other' would have been conducted against a white president."

But here's what's truly mindboggling: Even though the president's released his birth certificate, the crazies on the right aren't going way. Some people--among them the irrepressible Donald Trump--are calling for an investigation into its authenticity.

A recent poll found that 45 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born outside the United States. Which leads me to wonder whether nearly half of Republicans are crazy or just plain stupid. Or whether there's something about being a Republican that makes people delusional once they join the party.

And, as if I needed more proof that there's something fundamentally unAmerican about contemporary conservativism, this afternoon some Republicans pronounced the whole thing Obama's fault because he hadn't released his birth certificate earlier.

My country, my country.

'Nuff Said

2010-09-20T16:56:00.001-07:00

The Knight Life
by Keith Knight

The Washing Machine

2010-09-20T09:22:00.001-07:00

In late July, 13 months after the expiration of the warranty--and a month after the American Express extended warranty had expired--our Kenmore washer quit working. The error code on the LCD display translated as a water inlet problem, but nothing the manual suggested worked.

The repairman who came (in early August) diagnosed a broken pressure switch. With parts and labor, we were out nearly $300. Three cycles later, the machine stopped working again.

The same technician came Aug. 12. This time, he said two circuit boards were bad. He didn't have them, so he'd have to order them. With labor, we'd be out nearly $800.

Added to what we'd already spent on the first repair, the cost was starting to approach what we'd paid for the machine. And when you pay that much for a washer, you expect it to last a long, long time. Here's what happened after my wife wrote the president and CEO of Sears:

Sept. 10 -- Call from Sears Executive Offices. Woman offers to issue retroactive one-year extended warranty. She makes a Sept. 13 service appointment; assures us she'll call after repairman's visit.

Sept. 13 -- Repairman does not have parts required, knows nothing about extended warranty. Call woman from Executive Offices. No answer, leave voice mail. Call several times over next several days. No response.

Sept. 15 -- Call Executive Offices emergency response number. Woman who answers promises to e-mail original woman who called; promises response within 24 hours.

Sept. 16 -- Call Sears Home Services. Warranty is on file! Make appointment for Sept. 28.

Sept. 17 -- Call Sears Home Services: Will repairman have parts? Request parts be ordered.

Sept. 20 -- Call Sears Home Services. Have parts been ordered? Service order has note about parts. Will they guarantee repairman will have parts when he comes? Transferred to different department. Learn technician must order parts. Explain I have parts numbers. Ask what point to tech coming out again just to order parts? Put on hold. Woman comes back, says she's found a way to order the parts. Tearfully express my thanks.

Sept. 23 -- Parts arrive. One good thing about this--practicing my Spanish at laundromat.

Sept. 28 -- Repairman scheduled to come between noon and 4 p.m. Call Sears at 3:30 p.m. Advised repairman running late. Repairman calls at 4:16, advises he will call when on his way. Wife calls Sears at 7:30 p.m. Advised that repairman tried to call but received no answer. Check voice mail; no message.

Sept. 30 -- Still waiting to hear from Sears Executive Offices. Repairman arrives; replaces parts. Two hours after repairman leaves, attempt to run clean cycle as per his instructions. Washer reports F27 error code. Call Sears Home Services, advised repairman can come Friday or Monday. Call Executive Offices, leave message I'm renting pickup truck, loading washer, and leaving outside front door of Sears store in mall.

After this, I stopped taking detailed notes, but the woman from the Sears Executive Office who'd first called finally called back. At first, she said she'd replace the machine, then after she checked, she found out Sears' policy was to try one more time to repair it.

The service tech came on or about Oct. 1, and replaced the water pump. It worked for several cycles and quit again. Alas, however, we were not to get our new washer because the very first service call back in August didn't count on Sears' three-strikes policy.

The same tech came out Tuesday and made an emergency order for three new parts and a service appointment for Oct. 28. The parts came Friday and I called Sears Executive Offices and got the appointment date changed to Saturday.

I'm waiting for him as I write this. This time, they promise, we get a new machine if the repairs don't work.

Norman Rockwell's America

2010-09-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

Over at his blog, Little by Little(hales), my long-time friend Bret Littlehales recently posted a paean to painter Norman Rockwell. Bret and I have known each other since high school and, in that time, he's compiled an enviable list of accomplishments. He's a formidable photographer and an accomplished blues harp player. (You can read about his recently released CD here.)

Bret's not too shabby a writer, either. I'd been to see the Rockwell exhibit at the Museum of American Art at about the same time he did, but reading his comments on Rockwell's technique, I realized how much I'd missed. Of course, I was with my 9-year-old, and before we went to see Rockwell's paintings he'd had to endure the exhibit of photographs by Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art.

I suppose I don't really have to tell you which exhibit my son liked best.

I agree with Bret that Rockwell's technique was extraordinary. Rockwell seems always to have done work for hire, however, and I've always wondered what he might have done had he invested that technique in some pure product of his heart. Interestingly, the work in the exhibit comes from the collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two Hollywood craftsmen as concerned--as was Rockwell--with creating striking images as with keeping people coming back for more.

But that doesn't explain my growing sense of unease as I walked from painting to painting. I was halfway through the exhibit before I asked myself, "But where are the black people?" As it happened, I was in front of a magazine illustration from the '20s or '30s featuring two boys, one of them black. It was, I think, the only depiction of African-Americans in the show.

Of course, Rockwell began his career in 1913 (he was just 19!), a time when black Americans rarely appeared in popular art as anything other than caricatures. And it's true that he did include images of black men and women in his later work. One of his most famous, and most moving, paintings is of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges on her way to integrating a New Orleans elementary school. It's about as far from the coon stereotype hanging in the Museum of American Art as you can get.

Maybe it's just my growing sense of paranoia--justifable, I submit, given the latest assault by Newt Gingrich on President Obama or given nutcases like the one my friend Eileen Pollack interviewed for a piece about the militia movement. An IT professional, he's presumably smart enough to know better, yet he believes "President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number"--but I found it significant that the Rockwell exhibit was packed and that virtually all of the visitors were white.

I suspect many found Rockwell's paintings comforting. And how could they not, in the confusing, polyglot nation that is America in 2010? In contrast, Rockwell showed us an America as American as, well, apple pie. In his country of barefoot boys and pig-tailed girls, honest, thick-fingered workingmen don't fear speaking their minds at town meetings, and tough, road-weary truckers are decent enough to be moved by a grandmother and her grandson saying grace in a diner.

It's hard not to be moved, too. And, in the end, if it's true Norman Rockwell didn't really show us as we truly are, it's also true that he showed us as we, deep inside our secret hearts, want to be--a nation of values, a people of possibilities. A few good movies from the 1930s and '40s do something similar: The Best Years of Our Lives, say, and, less successfully, Since you Went Away. We could do worse than to remember and celebrate that, amidst the idiocy and the name-calling of this fractured, fractious political season.

Newspaper Stories

2010-08-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to start work at a newspaper when messages were sent via a system of pneumatic tubes, there were still Linotype machines, and smoking was allowed. No one chewed tobacco--it wasn't that long ago!--so there no spittoons, but a few smokers eschewed the ashtrays to ground out butts on the floor.

When I told that to someone once, he said, "Now that's a real newsroom!"

I began as a copy-boy (actually, we were called copy-aides because so many were female, and all of us were over 18), working from 7 p.m. to 3 in the morning. Late at night, after the dayside editors and reporters had gone, and the composing room was sending plates for the final edition to the presses, some of the men who'd worked at the paper for years would tell stories.

The head nightside copy-aide, a man nicknamed Noodle (for reasons I never learned), had lots of stories. One of the best one was about a summer intern who couldn't seem to do anything right. After reading his copy one afternoon, his editor stalked over and threw the pages on his typewriter.

"I don't know why they even bothered to hire you," the editor bellowed. "You'll never make a good reporter. You can't write. You can't spell. Look at this story. It's got holes big enough to drive a truck through. You don't know the first goddamn thing about going out and getting a story."

The editor stalked off, and the intern turned quaking to the old reporter whose desk sat beside his.

"Did you hear?," he stammered. "Did you hear what he said to me?"

And, the old reporter said, "You? I thought he was talking to me."

I've forgotten the name of the old reporter, but perhaps it was the same one who, sick of driving to College Park to cover Maryland football, decided to go to the bar across the street and watch the game on television. He might have gotten away with it too, except for not being able to go to the locker room to get quotes from the coach and players.

And perhaps he was the same sports reporter who took his editor's hat, stuffed it into a plastic capsule, and sent it to the composing room in the pneumatic tube system with a note reading (in its entirety) "HTK," newspaperese for head[line] to come.

I must have heard dozens of those stories over the 15 or so years I worked at the paper as copy boy, editor, and writer. Like baseball, journalism is full of characters, or used to be before editors and writers had to worry about seven-figure mortgages in Cleveland Park or Chevy Chase and private school tuition. And, while a newsroom on deadline is filled with furious concentration, after the paper's been put to bed, newsmen (women too) relaxed by telling stories as they had a few at the bar downstairs.

At least, they used to.

Sadly, Noodle died of cancer a few years ago and, at the memorial for him at the paper, I learned that while he was full of good stories, he was also the subject of a few.

The funniest didn't take place at the paper, though. It happened when two guys with guns walked into the house he shared near Du Pont Circle, years before the area's gentrification.

They made everybody sit in the living room while they gathered wallets and valuables. Noodle, being Noodle, was unable to resist making wisecracks. Finally, one of the gunmen said, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to shoot your friend."

To which Noodle, even then a budding editor, replied, "What makes you think he's my friend?"

And The Rain Came Down

2010-08-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

About 3 a.m. on what would have been our third day camping on Assateague Island, I woke up to the sound of frozen peas hitting the tent's rain fly. Seconds later, thunder and a flash of lightning told me the twenty-somethings in the campsite next door weren't pelting us with vegetables because I'd gone over to ask them to be quiet so my son and I could sleep.

After 10 minutes or so, it quit raining, and I went out to find the friend I'd gone with taking his daughter to the bathroom. There was another scary flash of lightning before they came back, so I went to their tent, woke up his son, and told him we were going to the car.

The five of us woke up three or four hours later to gray skies, soaked clothing, and a drenched campsite. I hadn't known it was going to rain, so I hadn't even thought about putting away the stove or covering the food and supplies with a tarp.

Since the forecast called for a 100 percent chance of rain, it seemed like a good idea to forget about that last night of camping

Still, it was great till the rains came. The children had fun playing on the beach. We all went canoeing. And, as you can see from the picture, once again Assateague proved to be the only place where I can get a kite into the air.

If we go again next year, I'm bringing a tarp to cover everything that doesn't go in the tent.

Heard on the Street. . .

2010-07-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

My wife took the car to go to a picnic at a co-worker's house this morning, so my son and I caught the bus to the mall. He needed to buy a birthday present at the Lego store, and I thought I'd treat him to lunch and a movie.

Getting the bus turned out to be less hassle than I'd expected. WMATA, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, has GPS-equipped buses, so we were able to log on, find the time the bus was expected at our stop, then leave the house a few minutes before that.

The driver was a man in his 30s with near waist-length dreadlocks. Most of the people said hello to him when they got on, and thanks when they got off. The mall was at the end of the line, and when we got off, I overheard him tell a woman her hair looked nice. She told him thank you.

Seems like you must know most of these folks, I said to him.

See 'em every Saturday, the driver replied. These are my people.

Later, waiting to get popcorn at the movies, I heard an older woman ask a younger woman (her daughter?) if she was planning to go out tonight and what time she'd be back.

I don't know if I wanna go out with him tonight, she replied. Not if we're just gonna break up. I'd feel too sad.

So why not just spend the night with him at his place, the older woman said, and then break up in the morning?

So Many [Fill in the Blank]; So Little Time

2010-07-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

Even if I only owned 600 CDs, 300 LPs, 100 DVDs and VHS tapes, and 100 cassette tapes), I suspect I'd still feel overwhelmed by my entertainment options.

But I've also got months of MP3 files on my computers for my five (working) MP3 players, Slacker and Pandora accounts, and several hours of movies purchased from iTunes, mostly to entertain my 9-year-old on long car trips.

Then there's Netflix.

For a while, the offer--watch as many movies as you want for $17 a month--seemed too good to be true, but I gave up my Blockbuster card once I did the math. I was getting about eight movies a month, which cost about the same as a Netflix subscription. And I didn't have to worry about surly clerks and driving to the store.

Things got even better when Netflix began to offer movies on demand. It took some experimenting, but after a while I was able to do it with an old laptop hooked up to the TV via the VHS player and a cobbled-together array of cables.

It was just enough of a hassle--dragging out the laptop, finding the cables, connecting them in the right order, waiting for the computer to boot, realizing it wasn't configured for dual displays, rebooting again--so that we mostly did it only when I'd forgotten to queue up a kid-friendly picture for Family Movie Night.

I suppose we could have just gotten a new DVD player or some other device that connected to the Internet, but we were too cheap. And then Netflix announced that it was offering streaming video on the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, watching movies on-line became a lot easier.

So, here I am now with nearly 150 movies in my regular Netflix queue, about 82 in the Watch Instantly queue, and 23 (release date unknown) in the Saved queue.

I don't know how those numbers compare to other Netflix customers. I do know that, sometimes, contemplating my queue, I start to feel a little guilty. I really should organize it, deleting the movies I'll never watch (even though I know they'd be good for me), and arranging what's left so all the musicals, film noir, and Hollywood blockbusters aren't clumped together.

I might, one day, just like I might actually sit through Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of a Qwest commercial from the days when the company's catchphrase was "ride the light." In it, a man checking into a seedy motel asks if there's any entertainment. The clerk tells him they've got "every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night."

I couldn't find the time now to watch just the ones in English, but maybe in 20 or 30 years, when I'm old. . . If I can still lift a remote.

New Wheels (Part Two)

2010-07-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

I didn't know it then, but while I was signing the credit card slip for my new Cannondale bike, I was coming down with bronchitis. And then, a few weeks later, when I was finally feeling better, I had minor surgery on my ankle. The result was that the new bike sat in the basement for about six weeks before the orthopedist gave me the okay to ride it.

The temperature's been in the 90s, but after it had cooled down Thursday evening, I went out with a friend. We rode to Reston and back on the W&OD Trail, about 13 miles. And yes, the bike was as comfortable and as much fun to ride as it was the first time I got on it.

Smart People (Part Two)

2010-07-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

So, after I wrote about how more and more it's begun to seem to me that Americans mistrust intelligence, Judith Warner writes about the same thing here in the New York Times Magazine.

She begins by observing that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was probably downplaying her intelligence during her recent confirmation hearings because "[a]ny hint of an I’m-better-than-you sentiment, especially if that sense of superiority is based on intellect or fancy speech or having attended an Ivy League school, can go over very badly in America today, where 'elite' has gone from being a word of admiration to one of insult."

Given how prevalent this anti-intellectual bias seems, I'd been thinking that it wasn't a new phenomenon. I'm probably right. Warner goes on to quote from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. (It won the Pulitzer in 1964.) This one sentence sent me to Amazon.com in search of the book: "[Intellect] is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism."

Warner also quotes Susan Jacoby, whose The Age of Unreason contains frightening examples of what Americans don't know.

According to a survey Jacoby cites, American 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in math literacy when compared to students in 28 other countries. Two thirds of us don't know the three branches that make up our government and an equal number can't name one Supreme Court Justice.

Now, just one more set of numbers, these from a column by the Times' David Brooks: "In their book, The Narcissism Epidemic, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. . . . In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an 'important person.' Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes."

But the View was Great!

2010-07-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on the hike (three miles? Five?) to Jump Rock, at Goshen Scout Reservation last month. I'd had minor ankle surgery a few weeks before, so I was surprised to be able to make it up and back. The view from Viewing Rock (about two-thirds of the way up) really was great, though.

Smart People

2010-07-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

It took moving to Virginia three years ago for me start to think Americans aren't comfortable with intelligence. All the dads I met talked about their son's athletic gifts; none about how well they did in school. After a few weeks, I told my wife I thought most of them would rather have their sons grow up to be Alex Rodriguez than Bill Gates.

When I put this theory to one woman at an elementary school science competition recently, she thought for a moment before saying, "I guess there's nothing wrong with being smart. As long as you don't hold it over other people."

I suspect this discomfort with intelligence is the reason behind the criticism President Obama gets from columnists and commentators who deride him for his "arrogance" about being "the smartest guy in the room."

Of course, it comes from people who should know better. Like scholar Charles Murray, who famously said during the campaign that "the last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government."

The thing is, Alex Rodriguez's skills--like all athletic skills--were most useful eons ago. It used to be that the survival of the tribe depended on hunters with strong arms (good for throwing stones to bring down game) and strong legs (good for chasing food). Rodriguez may be a joy to watch on the baseball field, but it's Bill Gates's insight, business savvy, and intelligence that count in our world.

On some level, I think most of us understand this. All the same, I'm not waiting for The Washington Post to announce that some kid with a 4.0 GPA and 1600 on the SATs has agreed to go to MIT, in the same way that the paper breathlessly covered the Wizards selecting John Wall in the recent NBA draft.

On E.B White

2010-05-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

I've had a copy of Essays of E.B. White on my shelf for years, product of a foray into some secondhand bookstore or a gift (the price tag was clipped) from someone I don't remember. The other night, a week into a cold that turned into bronchitis and four days spent mostly in bed, I took it down.

Of course, I'd read Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little to my son. The Elements of Style, which White revised and edited from a book self-published by one of his college English teachers, has bee on my writing desk for years. Yet, though I'd known White wrote for the New Yorker for some 60 years and was aware of his reputation as an essayist, somehow I'd managed never to read any of them.

It's enough to say that over the last few says I've been making up for lost time. The picture of White on the dustjacket shows a man with thinning white hair and a sparse mustache. Though he stands outside in the snow, he wears only a tweed jacket. He looks straight at the camera, honest, inquisitive, straightforward.

Which sums up his essays. They're leisurely paced without being boring, erudite, witty, and charming, entertaining without being frivolous. One of the strengths of his prose is its authority, something too many of today's writers confuse with snarkiness. White is never that, though from time to time, he allows himself a sentence like, "And if the surf hath lost its savor, wherewith shall we be surfeited?," on why he quit going to a certain Florida beach after the sand dunes were leveled.

I know nothing about how White actually wrote, whether he used pen, pencil, or typewriter. Something about the prose makes me think he used a typewriter, an old portable manual typewriter of the kind foreign correspondents used to carry in the movies. The prose has the thought-out rhythms of the pre-computer age, each word burnished and its place in the sentence ruminated upon before the fingers touched the keys to deliver the finality of black ink on white paper.

It's always dangerous to speculate about what writers were like, but White seems a decent man in his picture, an impression sustained by "Bedfellows," the essay I finished before bed last night. In it, White remembers Fred, a long-gone dachshund, and muses on two articles and a book by three Democratic politicians. "I take Democrats to bed with me for lack of a dachshund," he explains, "although as a matter of fact on occasions like this I am almost certain to be visited by the ghost of Fred, my dash-hound everlasting, dead these many years."

"Bedfellows" was written in 1956, but it could have been written yesterday. White skeptically reports Truman's complaints that the "Republican-controlled press" was hostile to his 1948 candidacy, lied about the facts, and refused to report on his campaign. He muses about Cold War "loyalty-security procedures," and he balefully contemplates a statement by then-president Eisenhower (there's also a Republican in the bed) that "most Americans are motivated . . . by religious faith" because of the implication that "religious faith is a condition . . . of the democratic life."

"This," White concludes, "is just wrong," continuing, "I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior."

Like George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," this is one of those essays I'd like to send to certain persons in authority.

So Many Books. . .

2010-05-26T05:22:00.000-07:00

For years I worked as an editor for the book section of a newspaper. . . back in the good old days when newspapers had book sections. There were many things to like about the job--the chance to meet and talk to famous writers; the camaraderie of spending the day with other people who thought books were important--but perhaps the best perk was getting to take home as many books as I wanted.

It was also the worst thing about working for the section. Years since committing my last crime against literature (i.e., writing my last book review), I find myself with hundreds--perhaps even thousands--of books I've never read. I'll probably never read most of them: So many books, so little time, as we used to say, contemplating the tens of thousands that arrived each year from publishers.

To make matters worse, I used to go to at least two or three used book sales a year, in addition to regularly frequenting any number of secondhand book stores. I don't go to many book sales anymore, finding it too disheartening to contemplate the volume of product by purveyors of assembly-line fiction--"writers" like Stephen King, David Baldacci, and James North Patterson.

There's something depressing about the stacks of BSOs (book-shaped objects), which everyone couldn't wait to get a few months before and then discovered there was no point keeping. There ought to be a law requiring a deposit when you buy BSOs; that way, there'd be incentive to return them to the store after you'd done using them.

Nowadays, I go to a book sale every other year. Last year, I tried the one run by the McLean chapter of the American Association of University Women. It was good enough to make me consider returning to my old habits, only this year with a shopping cart if I buy as many books and records as I did last year.

I'd also like a barcode reader, like the one I've seen people with at other sales. That way I could avoid getting copies of books I already have. For years, I could never remember whether I owned The Journals of Andre Gide, so whenever I ran across a set at a sale, I'd buy them. By the time I realized I was never going to read them, I owned three or four sets.

New Wheels

2010-05-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

So, after we got back from a five-day bicycle trip in Arizona, I promised myself I'd get a new bike to replace or supplement the bottom-of-the-line Trek 820 mountain bike I've been riding since last spring.

The Trek was supposed to be my wife's, one of the premiums she could choose from as a reward for working 10 years for the same company. But, she's already got two bikes--a really nice Jamis road bike she rides 20 or so miles to work, and a folding model she won in a contest--so she let me have the Trek.

I rode it almost every Sunday last summer with my son when we went out on an unpaved trail a few miles from our house. I even put a rack on it and used it to run errands to the grocery store and to get to and from the Metro.

The first quarter-mile or so on the street or paved trail was always torture. The Trek has a steel frame and fat mountain bike tires and it must weigh at least 35 pounds. Until I get going, I feel every pound!

Over the past two weeks, I visited six bike stores and rode different bikes made by Trek, Marin, Jamis, and Cannondale. I liked a Cannondale, though it was the wrong size. The Jamis was the right size, but didn't feel quite right. And while the Trek and Marin were adequate, each was missing something I couldn't quite articulate, though I could feel its absence.

I'd all but decided to go with the Jamis when I found a store that had a Cannondale Quick CX Ultra in the right size.

It was love at first ride.

The folks at the bike shop didn't have one they could sell me off the floor, but they're having one shipped from their other store, and installing a new handlebar stem, new grips, and a trip computer.

I'll take the subway to the bike shop when it's ready on Tuesday, then ride it home through Arlington and on the Custis and W&OD trails.

I can't wait.

Spring's Good News

2010-04-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, the agent who'd been reading the revised version of my novel called. She'd read an earlier version of "The House of Eli" last year, made some suggestions, and over the succeeding months, I'd incorporated many of those suggestions--and some new ideas of my own.

We talked for about an hour before the conversation lagged. Holding my breath, I waited for her to say, "I think you've done an incredible job revising the book. Unfortunately, the market for fiction's terrible these days, and as much as I like your novel, I don't think I can sell it."

Instead, she said, "So, do you think you're finished?"

I told her yes. And then she said she'd like to represent me.

I was floating for days afterwards.

Denzel Washington and the Last Taboo

2010-02-01T13:51:00.001-08:00

If ever there were a black actor who could be said to have crossed over to appeal to all audiences, it would be Denzel Washington.

According to the Internet Movie Database, he's made more than 50 pictures, with half-dozen or so in development. He's one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. His co-stars have included such luminaries as Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman, Tom Hanks, and Julia Roberts.

In all his movies, though, I don't think I've ever seen one where Denzel Washington kissed a white woman.

In several pictures--Deja Vu, Out of Time, Training Day, Devil in a Blue Dress--Washington's had love interests, but they've always been women of ambiguous racial appearance, women like Paula Patton, Jennifer Beales, and Eva Mendes.

Worse, in the kinds of pictures (The Pelican Brief) where a white character would at some pivotal point bed his white female co-star, Washington's character just grins likeably and moves on.

It's enough to make you think of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Shirley Temple, the archetypes of the selfless, sexless black man and his white, female sidekick.

". . . there are at least three themes that are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned," Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, among them "a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren..."

Nabokov was talking about books, but he could as well have meant the movies.

Another Draft Finished. . .

2010-02-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

I knew it'd been a while since I'd written here, but I didn't know it was this long. . .

It wasn't an oversight, however: It was deliberate. In September, I decided that, apart from letters, I wasn't going to write anything else while I worked on the revision of my novel. I finished last week, and took the manuscript to the post office this morning.

Last year ended with some good news. On Dec. 29, my story, "A Few Good Men," which first appeared in Stress City: A Big Book of Fiction by 51 DC Guys, was published in Best African American Fiction 2010, from One World/Ballantine.

I haven't seen many reviews, but there was this mention in Library Journal. Here's hoping it's a harbinger of good things to come in 2010!

Assembly-Line Fiction

2009-09-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

The news that Dan Brown's latest book-shaped object (BSO) sold more than a million copies its first day in the stores made me want to write about what I've come to think of as assembly-line fiction.

And then, at the barbershop this morning, I came across this by Benjamin Alsup in the June 11 issue of Esquire. It says it far better than I could.

Here's how Alsup begins: "I've never read a novel by Nicholas Sparks for the same reason I've never seen a movie starring Ashton Kutcher: because I'm stupid, yeah, but I'm not that stupid."

Alsup didn't read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, but he did read three BSOs--excuse me, books--by Dean Koontz, Harlan Coben, and David Baldacci. His devastating conclusion:

"It seems it's widely considered bad form to call stupid things stupid. But that's mostly what these books are. They'll cost you $25 a pop, waste a half day of your life, and leave you neither smarter nor happier, just kind of bored and a little depressed. That's no way to spend a summer. Screw these books. Take a walk."

Or read a real book.

This Writing Life

2009-09-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

A while back, I wrote about waiting for agents to tell me whether they were interested in The House of Eli, my novel about black men, fatherhood, and violence. (That's the shorthand description I came up for author bios.)

The agent who's had the book since March has been impossible to reach. But the second agent called recently to say she liked the book, wanted to work with me to get it published, and thought it would have a better chance if I made some revisions.

We spent nearly an hour on the telephone.

Of course, no writer likes to hear his book's too long, but she made some great suggestions. And I knew she understood what I was trying to do when she started to give an example of a scene that could be cut and I finished the sentence for her and she said, "Yes, that one. It's great, well-written, and everything. But does it really belong in this book?"

So that was about two weeks ago, and after a cold that had me off my feet for several days (when you have an 8-year-old, you catch everything that's going around the classroom), I'm back at work.

With any luck, I'll have the book done by . . .

No, no predictions. like auto and home repair, writing always takes longer than you think.

Black, White, Other. . .

2009-09-11T04:36:00.000-07:00

Last year, a few weeks before the election, I was complaining to a friend about the way various Republican hit-men (and -women) were attempting to tar then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"I know," he said. "It's not even like they're calling him black or African-American. They're calling him"--he paused, trying to find the right word--"Negro."

I've thought about that conversation for a while (I told you this blog doesn't run on Internet time), and I've decided he was wrong, even when he explained he'd meant it was impossible right-wing Republicans could think of Obama "in even as remotely a civilized term as 'Black,' let alone in a racially neutral way."

The right wasn't attempting to define Obama as African-American, black, Negro, colored, or even nigger because all--even (especially?) nigger--have been peculiarly American archetypes throughout our history. To have so defined Obama as any would have been to admit Obama was an American.

Instead, they called him a terrorist, accused him of palling around with terrorists, stressed his middle name (Hussein) in an attempt to define him as Other. They're still trying to. What else is the so-called birther movement, which seeks to prove Obama was born in Kenya?

My friend's mistake, I think, was to think of the word Negro as inherently derogatory. It isn't necessarily, instead referring to black men and women of a certain era and a certain class and to an inherently and inalienably American culture. Because he's white, he shied away from using the word nigger. I was grateful. Like colored or Negro, it's a useful word, but one I'm uncomfortable hearing from whites, even as part of a discussion of Huckleberry Finn.

I'm borrowing here, of course, from Ralph Ellison, who in turn borrowed from Constance Rourke, whose American Humor: A Study of the National Character, posits several American comic archetypes, including the Yankee peddler, the frontiersman, and the minstrel singer.

Thus for Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin to have called Obama a Negro (or even a nigger) would have been to admit familarity and even kinship. Think about The Jazz Singer, where the son of a Jewish immigrant becomes American by rejecting his father's wish that he become a cantor and then, in an archetypal immigrant rite of passage, anointing himself with blackface. Think of the way white Southerners used to call their white caretakers Mammy (mother), or the way they called black women Aunt and black men Uncle.

All connote familial relationships the right wanted nothing to do with.

We've had many chances throughout our history to solve the conundrum of race. Obama's election was our latest. We're blessed, as the friend who sparked these thoughts observed in an e-mail discussion a few weeks ago, to have him as president. In many ways, his election has brought us together. But it's also overturned the rocks and shown us some of the vile things dwell outide the light.

When We Were All Americans

2009-09-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

We were talking about politics and the environment via e-mail recently when a friend's use of the phrase "anti-Americanism" brought me up short. Short of applying it to the 9/11 terrorists, I'm not sure what the words mean. All one has to do look at today's partisan bickering--viz the hysteria about President Obama's address to schoolchildren--to understand one man's anti-Americanism is another man's patriotism.

The other day, checking my e-mail and surfing the Internet while my wife and son were away touring the Gettysburg battlefield, I turned on the television and found a 1942 movie, Seven Miles from Alcatraz, on Turner Classic Movies. The picture's about two convicts who escape to a lighthouse where a Nazi sympathizer plans to take several German spies to a submarine waiting off-shore.

At one point early in the picture, one of the cons declares himself a man without a country with no stake in the war, making his point so emphatically I knew--though I wasn't able to watch the whole thing--he'd have changed his mind by the time the movie was over.

Of course, the movie represents a different, more innocent era. When one one of the cons leers at Anne, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper, observing that five years is a long time to be without a woman, we know it's just talk.

I'm not the only one who's been thinking about World War II and what it is to be an American.

In a recent Sightings column, Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal concludes that "the success of [Quenten Tarantino's movie] 'Inglourious Basterds' suggests that most Americans, no matter how they feel about waterboarding, gay marriage or health-care reform, pine in their secret hearts for a lost world in which everyone can agree on at least one thing: Nazis are no damn good."

I think Teachout's right, in the sense that World War II was the last time the vast majority of Americans agreed about the nation's mission. Still, I prefer homefront pictures like The Best Years of Our Lives and Since You Went Away, believing that they more accurately depict that lost world and the awareness that the fact we were all in it together made it necessary to transcend our differences to ensure our survival.

Fall, Again

2009-09-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

Mornings have been distinctly fall-like when I go out to walk the dog, even though the odds are mid-day will bring such oppressive heat and humidity it's possible to believe summer might never end.

I feel as if I ought to be returning to school, thoughts of fresh starts and new beginnings, like a sheet of blank paper or a pencil sharpened for the first time, called by the passing of the seasons

But I haven't been a schoolboy for a while, and, in fact, 60's in the rear-view mirror and gaining, no matter how hard I jam the accelerator. More and more, even if I stay up past midnight, I find myself awake before dawn, brooding about things done and undone, roads taken and roads abandoned.

At six in the morning, having slept through my dark night of the soul, the dreams it inspired forgotten, I lie wondering if there really are no second acts--or even second chances--in American lives.

More About the Movies

2009-08-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

So, last week I took my 8-year-old to see Shorts, the new movie by Robert Rodriguez. (He also directed Spy Kids, and its two sequels, which we watched on three consecutive Family Movie nights. Ah, the sacrifices we make for our children!)

Half-way through the picture, it struck me as it often does when I take my boy to the movies, and I asked myself, "Where are the black people?" Oh, late in the picture there were a few in a crowd scene, but they didn't have speaking parts and were gone as quickly as they'd come.

This paucity of speaking roles for black actors reminded me of Stormy Weather, James Gavins' flawed new biography of the great Lena Horne. Roles for black actors were limited when Horne became the first black to sign a long-term movie contract in the 1940s. At best, they were allowed to play maids and Pullman porters. At worst they were the kinds of clowns and buffoons typified by Stepin Fetchit or Mantan Moreland.

Understand that I'm not calling for a return to those not-so-good old days, but as bad as those stereotypes were, at least there were black characters in the movies. Now, alas, blacks seem to have virtually disappeared from pictures. And when they do appear (as in Shorts), they've been silenced, which I suppose could be considered an improvement over that time when black actors were forced to speak dialect that bore no relation to reality because it was how white screen writers thought black people should speak.

So, coming home from Shorts, I talked to my boy about some of my concerns, and together we came up with the Black Star Movie Rating System. Here it is:

Zero Stars: No black characters in the picture. None. Nada. Zilch.

One-Half Star: Black characters in the background, but no speaking roles.

One Star: Black characters with minor speaking roles.

Two Stars: Black characters in supporting roles such as sidekick.

Three Stars: Black characters in major roles playing a pivotal part in the action of the picture.

Four Stars: Several major black characters, with one or more playing a pviotal part in the action.

One More Thing I Hate About the Suburbs. . .

2009-08-16T15:15:00.001-07:00

5. Play Dates

When I was a kid, you walked out of your house after school if you didn't feel like watching television or reading, and you played with whoever was outside. If no one was--but there usually was--you might walk up a friend's front steps, knock on the door, and ask if he could come out.

Now, living in the suburbs, I have to call or e-mail the parents of my son's friends to set up times when they can get together. I understand why it's that way--kids make friends in school, and their friends don't always live nearby.

Whenever I go to pick up the telephone, though, I start to feel the butterflies I did, oh so many years ago when I was single and calling to ask someone out on a date. I'm doing it for someone else now, but it still doesn't make it any easier.

Which makes me glad my kid's learning how to use the phone.

Waiting is the Hardest Part

2009-08-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

After finishing my novel, I sent out query letters to agents a few weeks ago and got back lots of "Thanks, but no thanks letters," including--the unkindest cut!--one photocopied slip on pink paper.

But two agents were interested in the book (it's called The House of Eli, and it's about black men, fatherhood, and violence). So now I'm waiting and, in some ways, it's just as hard as writing the book was.

Meanwhile, I've had some good news. My story, "A Few Good Men," published last year in this anthology, has been selected to appear in an antholology of best fiction from black writers. It's supposed to come out next spring.

I'd feel better though, if I weren't having a recurrence of the hand and wrist trouble that's plagued me off and on for the last few years. Especially since I had to give up blogging--well, typing, really--a few weeks ago after slashing open my palm trying to replace the handle on a ceramic compost container.

A Few Things I Hate About the Suburbs

2009-08-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

We moved to the suburbs nearly two years ago because we wanted a better school for our 8-year-old. We found what we wanted, but I also found things to regret about leaving the city. Here, in no particular order, are some things I've come to hate about the suburbs:

1. SUVs

Seems like every time I get stuck in traffic, it's behind someone driving the kinds of vehicle you need a step-ladder to climb into. With four rows of seats, these gas-guzzling Gargantuas and Sasquatches are what you'd expect to see that reality-TV family with eight kids driving. Most of the time, though, the ones I pass are carrying no one but Mom.

Who are these people and why do they think they need such large vehicles?

I confess to a certain schadenfreude and smug superiority last year when gas prices edged up to $4 a gallon.

2. The fetishization of the American flag

Many of the SUVs and cars I see are bedecked with American flag stickers. Lots of folks in our neighborhood fly the flag year 'round, day or night, rain or shine.

We fly ours, too, but only on national holidays, and we bring it in when it starts to rain and at night, because it's not illuminated by a light. (I'm a Cub Scout den leader, and the boys had to pass a requirement on how to treat the flag.)

About 40 years ago, when my old college roommate was going to drive across the country--something of a rite of passage in those days when we all read On the Road--his father gave him a flag decal to put on his Nash Rambler. Sometimes I wonder if we're not returning to those Vietnam-era divisions so that, once again, it's become necessary to display the flag to prove you love your country

3. The idea that military service is the only way to honor America

The other thing I see on people's cars--I spend a lot of time ferrying my child between various summer camps and after-school activities--are stickers proclaiming allegiance to the Army, the Marines, or some other branch of the service or one of the service academies.

I'm still waiting to see a sticker for the Peace Corps or Teach for America, either of which is at least as honorable a way to serve the country.

4. Too much emphasis on sports

I thought, briefly, about signing our kid up for baseball when we moved, but my wife said it was too late, and she was probably right. He was 7 then, and most kids had been playing some kind of organized ball for a couple of years.

Most afternoons after school (and on the weekends) the fields in our little town are filled with kids playing sports. I suppose it's a good thing and, as one father told me, "It keeps them out of trouble." And if I had a child who was athletically gifted, perhaps I'd feel differently, but I've got a boy who'd just as soon read a book as kick a ball.

Sometimes, when we're out, and moms or dads see him reading, they'll come up and say, "Oh, that's great! I wish I could get my son to read." And I think--but never say--"Well, maybe he would, if you'd just take that ball out of his hand and give him a book!"

Maybe I Should Get a Tattoo, Too

2009-07-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

I wish I'd seen Times Square before they cleaned it up, but when I went to New York in my misspent youth, I always went to Harlem or the Village. Now--except for the theaters on the side streets--Times Square's become a generic tourist attraction, with Toys R Us, a Hershey store, Hard Rock Cafe, etc., etc., etc.

I'm not so much nostalgic for the X-rated sleaze that used to infest the area as confessing a certain sadness when any distinctive place becomes just like everywhere else. Pretty soon, all of America will look the same, and you'll have to ask the locals to know where you are.

One measure of how little I get out these days is how surprised I was at the number of people I saw with tattoos. I don't just mean boys and girls with nose or eybrow rings and magenta hair, or the bouncer-like types guarding the Hard Rock Cafe. I saw more than a few women with tattoos pushing baby carriages, including one with what looked like green vines running up her left arm, under her sleeve, over her chest, and up her neck.

The last time we went to New York, I agonized over whether to wear a suit to the theater. I knew better this time, but I was still surprised to see an older man wearing a polo shirt, bright red shorts, and running shoes without socks take a seat a few rows in front of us.

At least he wasn't passing a bucket of fried chicken to his seatmates.

It made me nostalgic for a time I know only through movies and stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a time when men and women dressed up to go to the theater. Why, back then men even wore suits to baseball games!

Nowadays, of course, it's gotten harder and harder to tell who the grownups are, because most of us who aren't anymore still want to pretend we're young.

Walking towards the train at Union Station in Washington, I saw two women who appeared to be in their seventies, both dressed in the kind of multi-colored bell-bottomed clothes some hippie chick might have worn to the Fillmore 40 years ago.

It reminded me of the couple with gray-streaked ponytails, sandals, blue jeans, and tie-dyed t-shirts that I saw in the supermarket years ago. They were in the vitamin aisle, and the man had a bottle close to his nose, wire-rimmed glasses on his forehead, so he could read the fine print.

Later, out in the parking lot, I watched them get into a PT Cruiser with hot-rod flames on the sides. It had handicapped plates.

On Broadway

2009-07-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I just got back from New York, where we stayed in a nice little hotel--the Mela--and saw two plays, the revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, starring Rupert Everett and Angela Lansbury, and God of Carnage, which won Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actress (Marcia Gay Harden.)

I'm not going to write reviews here (I did too much of that working for The Washington Post's Book World). But it's enough to say I liked both enormously.

I'd wanted to see them because of their casts--Lansbury, of course, but also Harden, Jeff Daniels, James Gandolfini, and Hope Davis in God Of Carnage. I wasn't disappointed. The acting in each play is excellent and I felt the way I imagine my son does when I read one of his favorite stories, enchanted and enthralled, willingly suspending my disbelief.

Both plays are laugh-out-loud comedies, though you laugh for different reasons at each one.

In Blithe Spirit, a seance goes haywire, and successful novelist Charles (Everett) finds himself haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole). As good as Everett, Ebersole, and Jayne Atkinson are (Atkinson plays Charles' second, put-upon wife, Ruth), it's Lansbury as the wacky, bicycle-riding medium, Madam Arcati, who steals the show.

Lansbury's 83, but she cavorts around the stage with the energy and enthusiasm of a far younger woman.

A far darker comedy, God of Carnage tells of a couple Alan and Annette (Daniels and Davis) whose son has assaulted the son of Michael and Veronica (Gandolfini and Harden) on the playground, knocking out two of his teeth. What starts as an amicable meeting to discuss the incident quickly turns ugly as the couples trade insults, drink more than they should, and tear the masks off each other and themselves.

It was all great fun. New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley put it best: "Never underestimate the pleasure of watching really good actors behaving badly."

We Wear the Mask

2009-06-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

The death of Michael Jackson gives me occasion to remember Stanley Crouch's essay "Man in the Mirror," which appeared in the collection Notes of a Hanging Judge.

Responding to those who (simplistically) thought Jackson's plastic surgery a sign of his self-hatred and the singer's desire "to eradicate his Negroid features," Crouch launched a long riff on masks and how we Americans improvise our identities; on practices of ritual mutilation and scarification in Africa; and on minstrel shows and gender bending.

It was Crouch's conclusion that got me, though, when I reviewed the book when it came out in 1997.

"When a man's power is found in an adolescent form, time impinges upon his vitality," he wrote. "If sufficiently spooked, he might be moved to invent a world for himself in which all evidence that he was ever born a particular person at a particular time is removed. That removal might itself become the strongest comment upon the inevitable gloom that comes not of having been given too much too soon but of having been convinced that one is important only so long as he or she is not too old."

The Coming Apocalypse

2009-06-26T03:23:00.000-07:00

Two of the scariest books I've ever read are Colman McCarthy's The Road and Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

The Road, which has been made into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen and forthcoming in October, is the story of a man and his son wandering in post-apocalyptic America.

Just what's happened--nuclear war? environmental disaster?--isn't clear. But all of society's institutions have collapsed and the unnamed protagonist and his son roam through a bleak, unforgiving landscape where nothing grows and people eat other people to survive.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded shows us how this terrible future could come to pass.

It's a big book--438 pages--and Friedman would have been better served by an editor who made him cut 100 pages or so. Midway through, there's a a long, italicized section about how technology could help us use less energy without significantly altering the way we live that seemed more authorial self-indulgent than absolutely necessary to me.

But, quibbles aside, this is an important--and very scary--book that lays out in exhaustive detail how we got to the point where global warming threatens all life on Earth and what we can do about it.

Yes, Friedman says, there is a solution. The problem is, we needed to have started yesterday.

Celebrating Loving Day

2009-06-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Today, June 12, is Loving Day, a time to remember Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple--he was white; she was of mixed black, white, and Indian ancestry--whose suit resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court overturning laws against interracial marriage in at least 16 states.

You can read more about the Lovings at the link above or at lovingday.org.

For two years, my wife and I hosted Loving Day celebrations at our home in Washington, D.C. (One appears in the picture above.)

We're unable to host a celebration this year, which is unfortunate, because Loving Day has particular meaning for us now that we live in Virginia. Forty-two years ago we, too, could have been arrested for violating state law.

But even though we can't host a celebration, we'll still take a moment to remember the Lovings and honor their courage and their desire to live in full possession of all their rights.

At the Movies. . .

2009-05-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago, I started a magazine called Black Film Review because the movies I was seeing--and I went to the pictures a lot back then--either had no black characters or else featured thinly disguised stereotypes of the kind present in American culture since the beginning.

When I go to the movies these days, mostly I go with my 8-year-old son. Confounded by how little has changed, I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be time to resurrect BFR.

Take the new Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

The first in the series, Night at the Museum, featured the great Bill Cobbs in a fairly large supporting role, but--unless I'm forgetting someone--no black characters among the historical figures who magically come alive once the museum closes.

The sequel remedies that, featuring a group of Tuskeegee Airmen in two or three scenes, though none of them is really important to the picture.

Is the paucity of black figures in the two movies the result of the filmmakers' ignorance? Or are the pictures a fantasy that blacks weren't really part of American history?

I'd be a lot more depressed about this if I hadn't seen the new Star Trek, which features lots of steamy looks between Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and more than a few steamy kisses between Uhura and Spock (Zachary Quinto). Of course, as real fans know, in 1968 Nichelle Nichols' Uhura and William Shatner's Kirk shared what might have been the first televised interracial kiss.

Sadly, in 2009 "post-racial" America, there's less of those kinds of interracial relationships in the movies than there are in real life.

Last week, the New York Times ran a story about Phylicia Rashad's role at the mother in August: Osage County. It's an inspired piece of what's sometimes called "non-traditional casting," as Rashad's family in the play--husband, daughter, sister, and others--are all white.

Too bad Hollywood can't be as colorblind.

It Made it Hard to Type. . .

2009-05-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, I was trying to force a metal handle onto a ceramic container we keep (actually, make that kept) in the kitchen to collect foood waste for composting.

The container shattered, leaving a cut on my left palm that required a trip to an urgent care center and four stitches,

The downside to all this was not being able to use the computer. The upside was discovering it was possible to live without e-mail.

The stitches came out earlier this week. We now have a metal container on the kitchen counter.

Music Mashups

2009-05-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

This is one of the coolest videos I've seen on-line, which actually isn't saying much because I don't spent much time watching TV on the Internet.

Anyway, as The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan explains, a musician who goes by the name Kutiman created an album of songs--and here's the really neat part--made up from fragments of clips posted on YouTube.

You can watch the rest of the songs here.

Tell Me This Isn't True. . .

2009-04-07T15:43:00.000-07:00

In a front-page story from this morning's Washington Post, Frito-Lay flack Aurora Gonzalez has this to say about why the company's revamped its packaging so that the Lays bags, for example, shows a heap of potatoes:

"It's anecdotal, but we've had people tell us that they didn't know there were potatoes in potato chips," Gonzalez said.

Must be the same people who voted for Sarah Palin.

What I've Been Reading. . .

2009-03-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Inside Drood, the mammoth new, 784-page novel by Dan Simmons, is a skinny book trying to get out.

Reading it, I felt the way I used to feel, years ago, when I still read books by Stephen King: I knew I was going to hate myself in the morning, but I kept reading anyway. Afterwards, I was tempted to send the author a bill for all the time I was never going to get back.

It's impossible to adequately summarize a book of that length in the space I'm going to give myself here, but the conceit of the book--narrated by the Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins--is that Charles Dickens may be in thrall to a mysterious half-Egyptian named Drood, who's leading Dickens to perform all manner of hellacious acts, including murder.

I read, and liked, Simmons' The Terror, the story of an English expedition lost in the Arctic that also uses historical figures and is based on real events.

Drood, however, seems contrived, and the best I can say for it is that Simmons paints a nuanced, complex portrait of Victorian London, a city of gentlemen in fine clothes, women forced by hunger to prostitute themselves, and heaps of horse manure by the Thames. Obviously, he's done his research.

Which might explain why the book is so long--after researching so much, he hated leaving anything out. Drood did send me, briefly, back to the Dickens biographies I own, and to the library for a biography of Collins, where I found that, instead of inventing, Simmons has simply repeated what others found about both men's lives.

Much shorter, and of more consequence, is In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan's follow-up to The Omnivore's Dilemma. The argument here is what Pollan calls the American Paradox: "The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become."

Instead of worrying so much about what we eat, Pollan calls for us to go back to the eating habits of our grandparents and great-grandparents and to eat less meat, more fruits and vegetables, and to get our food from the perimeter of the supermarket, instead of the aisles, which feature processed, laboratory-created food.

One of the most telling anecdotes in the book has to do with the soup experiment. Seems people in other countries rely on how full they feel to know when to stop eating, whereas Americans rely on external cues, like whether the plate or the bag's empty.

One academic--a professor of marketing and nutritional science--did an experiment where he set up bowls of soup to fill from the bottom as people ate.

"Those given the bottomless bowl," Pollan reports, "ate 73 percent more soup than the subjects eating from an ordinary bowl; several ate as much as a quart. When one of these hearty eaters was asked his opinion of the soup, he said, 'It's pretty good, and it's pretty filling.' "

Dan Simmon's Drood is the literary equivalent of that bottomless bowl.

Jimi Hendrix on TV, 1965

2009-03-15T17:23:00.001-07:00

A friend sent me the link to this YouTube video, which purports to show Jimi Hendrix's first filmed appearance, from a 1965 TV show.

"Astral Weeks" P.S.

2009-03-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't changed my mind about "Astral Weeks Live" after listening to it again. But I was struck by how some of the music is more rooted in the blues than in the studio album.

Many of the lyrics--for all the Celtic mysticism qualities--were AAB blues, like this verse from "Slim Slow Slider":

Saw you early this morning, with your brand new boy and your Cadillac,
Saw you early this morning, with your brand new boy and your Cadillac,
You're gone for something and I know you won't be back.

"Astral Weeks" Redux

2009-03-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

For years, Van Morrison was one of the few recording artists whose new album I'd buy without hearing it first. After a while, though, disappointed too many times, I stopped because I'd listen to his new albums once or twice and then never again.

But when I heard a few months ago that he was going to do Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl, I was intrigued. It's a classic Morrison album--perhaps the classic album--one that defines his career.

For that reason, I wish I could write that this new live version is better than--or at least as good as--the original.

It's not.

I've only listened to it once, so it's just possible it may grow on me, but my initial impression was that it wasn't especially well-recorded, with too many of the instruments almost buried in the mix. Worse, Morrison's singing really came alive until "Sweet Thing," the third track on the album.

Even then, I felt he was holding back, and I found myself wondering if it was his legendary shyness or whether, like Bob Dylan, there's a part of him that just doesn't care what the audience thinks.

Another problem, are the absences of Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay (who died in 1994) and Richard Davis, the bassist who's played with everyone from Eric Dolphy to Janis Ian. Their replacements try, but Bobby Ruggiero plods where Kay danced, and while David Hayes does a fair job of channeling Davis, he lacks Davis's gravitas and authority.

Is the reason I don't like Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl more because I'm comparing it to the original instead of judging it on its own merits?

Perhaps.

But I like both versions of Love's Forever Changes, the original that came out in 1967 and the 2003 live version with a band that was actually Baby Lemonade. I've listened to the live and studio albums one after the other, enjoying how guitarists Rusty Squeezebox and Mike Randle embellish original guitarist Johnny Echols' parts, and marvelling at how Arthur Lee compensates for not being able to hit the notes he could have nailed 35 years before.

The same's true of Smile, Brian Wilson's 2004 release of what's been called "the Great Lost Beach Boy's Album." Van Dyke Parks's new arrangements tie together threads that were left loose earlier, different, but not better or worse, than the earlier album. And, while Wilson's voice is far more ravaged than Lee's, you understand listening to him that (like Lee) he's lived what he once only wrote about.

He Worked For the Post Office Too

2009-03-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Just finished Victoria Glendinning's Anthony Trollope and now trying to decide whether I'm up to the six volumes of his Palliser novels. I finished the first some years ago, but chickened out at the prospect of reading five more.

As a writer who agonizes over every word, I'm in awe of the amount Trollope produced--scores of novels, stories, essays, travel books. He set himself a goal of so many hundred words a day, rising early to write before going to work as an administrator at the British Post Office.

(Some people credit him with inventing the letter box, but Glendinning says he only supported the real inventor in getting it adopted by the PO and placed on city streets.)

One of the small pleasures of Glendinning's biography are the books she quotes from, books with titles like "Reminiscences of a Literary Life," "Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known," "Collections and Recollections by One Who Has Kept a Diary" and, my favorite, "Memoirs of an American Prima Donna."

Is This Goodbye, Gus?

2009-02-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

This just in: The Minnesota Vikings have waived quarterback Gus Frerotte.

I'm waiting with bated breath to see if another team picks him up so I can find out where I'm going to transfer my allegiance next season.

Why Black History Month?

2009-02-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

If I were the Benevolent Dictator, black history--like women's history or the history of the Irish in America--would simply be taught as part of American History, and we wouldn't have Black History Month.

A friend I told this to disagreed. "You love your wife 365 days of the year," he said via e-mail. "But you still celebrate Valentine's Day."

Well, maybe, but having a separate month almost seems to say black history is separate from American history. The truth, however, is that it's almost impossible to imagine America without black people.

The thing is, there weren't any Americans--except Native Americans--when the first Africans and Europeans encountered each other here. The moment that encounter began, however, Africans and Europeans began to make each other into Americans.

That idea seems pretty simple--and pretty obvious--to me, but you'd be surprised at the people who have trouble with it.

Some of them, white and liberal mostly, want to get history books to call slaves "enslaved persons" instead of slaves.

I understand why, but the root of the word slave is Slav, because at one time in history, Slavs were other people's property. The word enslaved removes us one step from the realization.

Then, too, there's this: White people told my ancestors they were slaves. Now, centuries later, other whites are telling me my ancestors were enslaved persons.

I don't see the difference. Either way, it's white people telling me what my ancestors should be called.

Wish I'd Written This. . .

2009-02-25T06:07:00.000-08:00

Stephen L. Carter has a good piece in this morning's New York Times about how subtlety gets lost in the media--mainstream and otherwise.

His starting point is the recent speech by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a speech most remembered--because it was the one thing reported--for Holder calling us "a nation of cowards" because of our reluctance to talk about race in America.

Now, here's the thing: I was a journalist for nearly 20 years, and one of the things I loved about the profession was the chance it gave me to do things I was (sometimes) afraid to; go places I might not have; and talk to people I'd never, ever have met otherwise.

More and more, though, I've come to see journalism as the equivalent of the high school kid who goes around telling people the bad things someone else has said because he wants to play "let's you and him fight." And it's gotten worse with the coarsening effect of the Internet and the escalating influence of people like Matt Drudge.

In his piece today, Carter makes the point that we don't just talk about race "in simplistic categories." It's anything important: "Whether we argue over war or the economy, marriage or religion, abortion or guns, we reduce our ideas to just the right size for the adolescent tantrum of the bumper sticker."

And he quotes from Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451"--the title comes from the temperature at which paper burns--where the fire chief in charge of burning books explains why:

"Books, says the fire chief, make ideas too difficult. The reader winds up lost, he says, 'in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.' " And so people demanded they be burned because the ideas they contained were too complicated.

What Offense?

2009-02-22T16:43:00.000-08:00

This cartoon, accompanying Gene Weingarten's "Beyond the Beltway" column in today's Washington Post magazine, prompted a pre-emptive apology from The Post.

The paper wants to be sensitive about last week's incident in which a chimpanzee attacked and severely injured a woman in Connecticut. And, of course, there's the mini-controversy over a recent New York Post cartoon showing two cops standing over a dead chimpanzee.

"They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one cop says to the other.

The Rev. Al Sharpton saw that as an attack on President Barack Obama, given the fact that the stimulus bill was Obama's first legislative accomplishment and--as Sharpton put it--"the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."

(Actually, I think he means "attacks on", and someone should have told him the word "being" was superfluous.)

Grammar aside, if you try hard enough, I suppose you might see the point the Rev. Al's trying to make. Still, couldn't it be the cartoonist just thought the stimulus bill so bad it could have been written by a monkey? And maybe it's just that I'm a former book reviewer, with a tendency to over-think symbol and metaphor, but I wonder whether he had in mind that old adage about a million monkeys on a million typewriters coming up with Hamlet, given enough time.

But I just don't get the fuss about the cartoon accompanying Weingarten's column. In fact, I'd skimmed it Sunday morning and decided not to read more because it featured his "friend Gina Barreca, the feminist scholar." I don't find her particularly funny.

Before concluding that "[w]e regret the lapse," The Post's Editor's Note says "[i]n addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that [the paper] does not countenance."

What racial stereotypes? I see a monkey--excuse me, an ape--carrying away a woman who appears to be blissfully happy. Perhaps the editors should have been more concerned about the position of the (wilting?) flowers in Weingarten's hand.

What I've Been Reading. . .

2009-02-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

Finished Lee's Virginia Woolf. Years ago, when I was single and childless, I would have spread out the reading as I turned to The Waves, To the Lighthouse, and other novels and essays as Lee discussed them. (It was how, years ago, I read a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and why I own a copy of The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

I may, or may not explore Woolf's body of work--so many books; so little time!--but I'd heartily recommend her A Writer's Diary. Cobbled together by her husband after her death (Victoria Glendinning has an interesting discussion of the process in her Leonard Woolf), it's like Maxwell Perkins' Editor to Author--essential reading for anyone writing fiction.

I don't mean either will tell you how to write a novel or short story. What you can learn, though, is that next to talent sheer perseverance is what it's really all about for any writer.

I'm getting over a cold (when you have an 8-year-old, sooner or later you get everything that blows through his classroom), so I've been reading more than usual. Finished Scott Smith's The Ruins--which, come to think of it--may have been what made me sick. (Stephen King is a great guy, but I should know by now not to read anything he recommends.) Still, it won't prevent me from looking for Smith's A Simple Plan, when I go to the library today.

Also read Updike's The Widows of Eastwick, though I never read its predecessor. I should probably look for it, but I'm not sure I liked The Widows... enough. Updike, of course, died last month and, while I hadn't read much by him till I picked up The Widows..., from time to time I'd ask myself why.

Scott Timberg says it better than I could in this piece from the LA Times.

Before The Widows..., the last Updike I'd read was the collection of essays and reviews, Hugging the Shore. Before that, I'd ventured into the omnibus edition of the Rabbit novels that's been on my shelves for years. I never got further then the first few pages, mostly because I found myself focusing on how they were written instead of what was written.

Then too, I was writing--as I usually am--and Updike's style was powerful, if not entirely to my taste, and the last thing I wanted to do was re-read my work a few weeks later and realize I was going to have to throw out pages of a not-very-good imitation of Updike.

Also read The Magnificent Ambersons, which is probably most remembered now not as the novel by Booth Tarkington, but as a failed Orson Welles film. I'm disappointed to find the movie not available on DVD from Netflix.

I mostly remember Tarkington as author of a series of novels about a boy named Penrod, who was a kind of American William. Penrod, though, had a black friend named Sam, and I cringe to think how Sam was depicted. The blacks in Ambersons, all peripheral figures, are similarly referred to as darkies, speak in dialect, and in one instance, go around singing about women and gin.

Ambersons was published in 1918, so it's a reflection of its time in other ways too. Tarkington piles description on description, and his characters go on and on and on, long after you've gotten the point. In that sense, it's of that time before radio, movies, and television when reading was far more central to our culture.

'Nuff Said (3)

2009-02-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

"Go down to Nether Wallop to lecture to the Air Force about the German character. I do not feel that the young men really like it. They are all fascists at heart and rather like the Germans."

Harold Nicolson
Diary
Dec. 20, 1940

Great Sports Story!

2009-02-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

Seems there was this kid who tried out for Chantilly, Va., High School basketball team four years running, but was cut each time. But he's been team manager the past two years, and dedicated enough to help with off-season workouts.

A while back, the coach put it to the team: Given senior Rafik Shoorbajee's commitment, what if Shoorbajee were allowed to suit up and play as first man off the bench Senior Night?

The team said yes, and senior Shoorbajee played in his first--and last--high school game a week ago.

If I read The Post's account correctly, he had four points and one rebound.

And a great story to tell his kids and grandkids.

This is what sports should be, and all too often isn't. The stories are different, but it reminded me of the one about the girls softball team whose members chose to help an opponent around the bases when she injured herself after hitting a home run--even though they knew it meant they'd lose the game.

Matters of Usage

2009-02-14T15:01:00.000-08:00

I can't stand people who spell definitely "definately" or write it's (it is) when they mean its (the possessive). The first is just carelessness--or the inability to use a spell-checker. The second happens because some people think the possessive is always formed by adding apostrophe s.

What's irking me now is having the receptionist at the doctor's office ask, "Do you have your driver's license and health insurance card?"

I'm always tempted to respond, "Yes" without reaching for my wallet, and waiting to see how long it takes her to ask again. For a while, I actually did respond, "I drove here--I'd better have my license."

What they really mean, of course, is "May I see your driver's license and insurance card?"

So why don't they just say that?

I guess there's a manual, or a course, called Office Manners for the Medical Profession that advises that the roundabout locution is more polite, because I've heard it three or four times in the last couple of weeks.

Letters of Intent

2009-02-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

Skimming stories about top D.C.-area high school athletes and the colleges they've chosen, I looked in vain for their grade-point averages and SAT scores. I suppose they must all have made Cs and scored 1010 on the SATs (or had B+ averages and 400 SAT scores) according to the NCAA's sliding scale.

I confess to being something of a sports fan. For two or three seasons, my wife and I shared season tickets to the Washington Nationals with a group of her co-workers and friends. I watch boxing. And channel surfing the other night, when I stopped at "Inside the NFL's" coverage of the Super Bowl and then, later, watched most of NFL Network's replay it wasn't because I hoped the Cardinals might win this time.

More and more though, I find myself thinking about the people in the uniforms when I watch sports.

It's easier not to with football players--the helmets make them somehow less human, until a particularly vicious hit reveals just how fragile they really are. But every time I watch basketball, I wonder if the players (NBA, college, high school; it doesn't matter) can read or write or if they've been passed along from grade to grade because of their skills on the court.

And I can't help thinking about how young black kids grow up thinking basketball or football is all that's open to them because reading or studying is "acting white."

A kid I knew, about to graduate from high school, once told me that if he really, really wanted to, he could play in the NBA. This though he'd gone to a small school with about 40 students in his senior class, and played only when the team was so far ahead (or so far behind) it didn't matter.

But it's not just the kids. The coach of one of the Washington area's high school basketball powerhouses once told how he'd called a student's mom to tell her he was cutting her son from the JV squad. "Fine," she said, "but tell me: What does this do to his chances of playing professionally?"

Back in 2002, when Redskins Hall-of-Fame cornerback Darrell Green announced his retirement, some sportswriter asked if he wished he could play just one more season. Green said no. He'd had a great career, done everything he wanted. And then Green turned the tables and asked the reporter, "I mean, hey, wouldn't you want to be me?"

I suspect most sportswriters would. Me, I'd like to have asked Green (B.S. General Studies, St. Paul's College, 1998) to list the last 10 books he'd read before I made up my mind.

'Nuff Said (2)

2009-02-11T17:05:00.000-08:00

"The Greek idea that an educated and cultured life is a good thing in itself because it implies some degree of active desire to discover the truth, to appreciate and to achieve beauty, as well as to attain to morally worth conduct in human relations, did not appeal to many of the down-to-earth Romans."
Everyday Life in Ancient Rome.
F.R. Cowell

What I've Been Reading. . .

2009-02-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

Nation, by Terry Pratchett, Victoria Glendinning's Leonard Woolf, Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill, Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee.

I came to Leonard Woolf via Alison Light's Virginia Woolf and Her Servants, which is just what the title says--a look at the women (and men) who cooked and cleaned for Woolf and her family, emptied their chamberpots, mopped their floors, and cultivated their gardens.

Athill's book is sad but moving. Nearly 92, she's writes about what it looks like knowing you're close to the end of your life. I'm looking forward to reading her "Stet," a memoir of her life in publishing. (She was V.S. Naipaul's editor in Britain.)

Nation is billed as one of Terry Pratchett's young adult novels, but I'd recommend it to anyone. If you haven't checked out his Discworld series, get thee to a library or bookstore. There are 36 in the library, with a 37th due in October. I can hardly wait.

Wasilla, Your Village Idiot's Missing

2009-02-09T17:04:00.000-08:00

Driving round my Northern Virginia neighborhood the past few days, I've seen a few bumperstickers reading "Sarah Yes!"

Given the women behind the wheel--middle-aged, suburban--I've got to assume the Sarah they're so enthusiastic about isn't Sarah Silverman. I haven't managed to get close enough to confirm it--my eyes, alas, aren't what they used to be--but I suspect they mean Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and quondam vice-presidential candidate.

But here's what I don't understand: What's so attractive about an unintelligent bigot? And why would anyone want to see one leading our country?

Oh, well, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, "Nobody ever failed to win election underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

In Defense of Poetry

2009-02-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Here's my idea of gun control: No one should be allowed to own a firearm if they're younger than I am and scored lower on the SAT. This would go for cops as well as criminals.

A little while ago, I saw four or five young khaki-clad sheriff's deputies waiting for a train in a Metro station downtown, each holding his hands on his thick leather belt in a way that called attention to his pistol. They were clean-cut, with close-cropped hair, their faces as untainted by wisdom as a cabbage.

They reminded me a lot of the police recruits I spent a few months following through their academy classes, years ago when I was a police reporter in Dayton, Ohio. The first few times I asked why they wanted to be cops, they said what they'd probably been told to: They wanted to help people. They wanted to protect the weak. They wanted to arrest bad guys.

After a while, once they'd gotten used to my being there, most admitted they thought it would be a kick to carry a gun and drive really fast without getting a ticket.

So, watching the deputies in the Metro station, I was tempted to go up and ask what books they'd read lately.

I chickened out.

Instead, walking away with my son in tow, I thought, "You know, I'd trust you guys with the power to deprive people of their liberty--and sometimes their lives--if I knew that just once you'd struggled for an hour or two with a couple of really difficult poems, say something by Pound or Eliot or Melvin Tolson."

Robert Frost must have felt the same way (though probably about all of us, not just cops). A while later, I came across this quote from his "Education by Poetry" in the New York Times: "Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world."

My Son, the Reader

2009-01-30T18:57:00.000-08:00

At 6, my son had already read the first two Harry Potter books. He wanted to start on the third but we thought it was too scary.

After we moved to Northern Virginia, he found a friend at his new school who'd read the third and fourth books in the series and he convinced us he could try them without having nightmares. So now he's finished all the books and re-read each (and/or listened to the audiobook) more times than I can count.

I grew up in Jamaica at a time when there were one or two radio stations, but no television stations to discourage reading. I've tried to interest my son in the books I loved then. He dipped into the William books by RIchmal Crompton, but balked at E. Nesbit and Edward Eager because, I suppose, they just weren't exciting enough.

So the other day, when we went to the library (we go at least once a week), I got him books by Neil Gaiman and Daniel Pinkwater. He devoured both immediately. And this morning, when I told him there was more by Daniel Pinkwater--a lot more!--his eyes widened and he grinned with the anticipation of spending more time with that master storyteller.

He's a little too young, but in a few years I'm going to have to introduce him to Howard Waldrop. My boy loves Greek mythology. I think he's going to like Waldrop's "A Dozen Tough Jobs."

An Era Ends

2009-01-29T05:49:00.000-08:00

This morning's Washington Post brings news of the end of Book World as a stand-alone section. Book reviews and news about books will continue in the Style and Outlook sections.

The section never really paid for itself--I know because I was a writer and editor there for about a dozen years--often running no advertising at all beyond the classifieds in the back. But for years, even though Book World lost money, the people who ran The Post supported it, believing one of the marks of a great newspaper was a stand-alone book section.

Times change. Now the failing health of the industry means newspapers can't afford grand gestures that cost money. It's too bad, and one more sign of the decline of the importance of reading in our culture.

Working at Book World was--for a while at least--a dream job. I got paid to read books and to write about them. All the same, for all that I enjoyed it, I'm not sure that in the end it was nearly as satisfying as writing fiction. (Which isn't as satisfying as writing it and seeing it published.)

When I dropped out of college in the late Sixties to go work in a record store near Washington's Dupont Circle, the manager was fond of asking how it felt to be in show business.

Sometimes, working at The Post, I used to think being an editor in Book World was like playing piano in a brothel. We made a lot of noise, but the real action was going on upstairs.

What Was he Thinking??

2009-01-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

I didn't catch it (though I read the transcript), but a couple of nights ago on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show, Juan Williams said Michelle Obama had "this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going," and claimed "her instinct is to start with this 'blame America,' you know, 'I’m the victim.' ”

All this, Williams said, could pose problems for the president because "people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross."

Now, I've known Juan for more than 30 years. We were students at Haverford College (he was several years behind me) and colleagues at The Washington Post. When Juan started as an intern at the paper in the mid-'70s (I was a copy-boy on the Metro Desk), he stayed at my apartment while he looked for a place to live. Over the years, we've wound up in the same neighborhoods--first Washington's Bloomingdale-Le Droit Park and then Takoma, D.C, where we'd see each other walking our dogs or hanging out with our kids.

So I've known Juan for a while. But apart from the need to be provocative so he can continue as Fox News' HNIC (Google the term if you've never heard it), what the hell was he thinking?

Over the years, too, I've had occasion to defend Juan to some (of our mutual) black friends. He's an intelligent man and an indefatigable reporter, though perhaps not an especially elegant writer. Like Shelby Steele (or Stanley Crouch) he's an iconoclast whose ideas go against the grain but are often worth listening to.

But for reasons I can't quite understand, Barack Obama seems to have stuck in his craw. During the primary and the election, he couldn't let go of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, even when most of the media moved on. And when, with a few exceptions, most folks were praising Obama's speech on race, Williams was dismissive, calling it ordinary and saying it didn't go far enough.

I'm not trying to say that either of the Obamas should be above criticism. "Dreams From My Father" was a little too PC for me, and I wound up selling my first edition on eBay days after Barack Obama's breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. (I made a ton of money, but I wound up giving it to the campaign last year.) And Michelle, well, there've been times listening on television where I've been thankful I never had to work for her.

But "Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress"? Or blaming America and casting herself as a victim?

It's been years since I talked to him, so I'm not the one. But somebody needs to sit down and talk to Juan to try to get him to quit putting his foot in his mouth.

The Value of Service

2009-01-28T17:17:00.000-08:00

For a while now, I've been wondering if the all-volunteer military is a good thing. I turned 18 during the Vietnam War, but my draft number was 303 and, because the lottery didn't go that high, I didn't have to decide choose between serving, applying to be a conscientious objector, or going to Canada.

At the time, I thought the draft unfair. Forty years later, I'm not so sure.

There's value in service, which is why when Barack Obama finishes dealing with the economic mess, I hope he follows through on his campaign promise to push for a bill requiring some form of national service for everybody.

Everyone ought to perform some kind of service to the country, working in a hospital or teaching in an inner-city or rural school, particularly now when we face so many problems. But I've come to think it especially important we share the burden of defending America. When I read an editorial or op-ed in The Wall Street Journal supporting the war in Afghanistan or Iran, I always wonder how many people on the editorial board have a child in the military, or even know someone who does.

(I think the same thing when I read The New York Times or The Washington Post.)

There's this too: I wonder what it means long-term for our military--and our country--when so many recruits fail to meet basic educational standards. Time magazine has a story about how only 71 percent of recruits had high school diplomas in 2007, as compared with more than 85 percent just two years before.

Worse, it seems to me, is that the percentage of so-called high-quality recruits--those with a high school diploma and scoring in the 50th percentile of the Armed Forces Qualification Test--dropped from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

The Department of Defense wants 90 percent of its recruits to have a high school diploma or better. Those who do are more likely to finish their first term of enlistment. About half of those who don't drop out before finishing their first enlistment.

Some numbers I came across from The National Priorities Project supported something I've suspected for a long time. Most recruits come from families with incomes of $30,000-54,999. Few come from families with incomes of more than $60,000 a year.

No one in the Department of Defense would put it like this, but don't all these numbers seem to say we're getting a dumber, poorer service?

New York, New York

2009-01-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

Just back from four days in New York, where my wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary

We stayed in a small boutique hotel called The Library Hotel, where each floor--and each room--is dedicated to a particular category of book using the Dewey Decimal System.

We were on the fourth floor (400 is Languages in the DDS), in a room with translations from Greek and Roman and books about Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Saturday night, we went to see David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow." I'd wanted to see it when Jeremy Piven played the lead, but he'd been replaced by William H. Macy. The play was three acts with no intermission. I could have taken another half-hour of Mamet's trade-mark dialog.

Sunday, we saw Will Ferrell's one-man show, "You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush."It struck me as a "Saturday Night Live" skit on steroids and, while I'm no admirer of George Bush, I felt a little uncomfortable at Ferrell's portrayal, being old fashioned enough to think we should respect the office, if not the man. I laughed, but a little while later at dinner, I couldn't quite remember why.

But I was so taken with this line from Mamet's play--"It's just words, unless they're true"--I wrote it down as we were leaving the theater.

A President For a Mulatto Nation

2009-01-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

We decided weeks ago we weren't going to the inaugural. Of course, we'd like to have been there for the historic moment, but getting there and the crowds would have been too much for our 8-year-old, so we wound up watching the swearing-in ceremony on television.

Of course, I was moved, but watching Barack Obama take the oath of office seemed almost anti-climactic compared with the drama of the primary. The suspense was unbearable. I checked the polls on-line several times a day, went again and again to the news sites I'd bookmarked, stayed up late watching Keith Olberman and, yes, sometimes Fox News.

Then, too, I'd canvassed for Obama--not much, but I did--and had a couple of telling moments. At one house, I told an elderly Pakistani couple they should consider voting early to avoid long lines. "Oh no," the woman replied. "We just got our citizenship. This is our first election, and we want to do it in person."

A week or so later, another man (also Pakistani, I think) refused to tell me who he'd vote for till he saw my Obama button. Then his face lit up and he said he'd be voting for "the right person." Something about the way he said it made me think he'd come from a place where it could be dangerous to say you'd vote for the wrong person.

Both were moments where I understood how precious it is to be an American.

I had some of the same feelings watching the "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial the day before the inauguration. We are a deeply flawed nation with--as the filmmaker Charles Burnett once put it to me--"a difficult history."

And yet, as the then-pending inauguration reminded me, there are times when we get it right. Many of the Founding Fathers were guilty of the grievous sin of slavery, but they also created the institutions that would, in the end, admit black Americans to full participation in the American Experiment.

It wasn't just the speeches recalling the words of Washington or Lincoln or the example of heroes of the Civil Rights Movement like Rosa Parks; it was also Garth Brooks doing the Isley Brothers' "Shout," Jon Bon Jovi channeling Sam Cooke in his duet with Betty Lavette on "A Change is Gonna Come," Shakira's gospel-tinged wails on Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground."

In the beginning, the only Americans were Native Americans, but once Africans and Europeans encountered each other here, each began the process of making the other American.

We are, as Ralph Ellison and others have observed, a mulatto nation. And now we have a president who truly embodies it.

How's That Again?

2009-01-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin, Alaska governor and (Yes, there is a God!) unsuccessful candidate for the vice-presidency, has a piece in today's Wall Street Journal, part of a "symposium" headlined "Hopes for the Obama Presidency." (Other contributors include the ever-dyspeptic Shelby Steele, Newt Gingrich, George McGovern, and Al Sharpton.)

I was all set to write a snarky post asking who'd written Palin's entry. After watching her on the campaign trail, I'd come to believe her constitutionally allergic to coherent sentences.

Then I read the piece again. Here's the first sentence: "Especially evident in these trying economic times is America's need for affordable, abundant and secure energy."

Yup. She wrote it.

Read the entire piece here (if you dare).

Let it Snow. . .

2009-01-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

In her Loving Family, Loving Language blog, Rachel writes about the cold and how "in Minnesota, life doesn't stop because it's cold." Rachel's blog

I spent six years in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa and though it's a pleasant 31.5 degrees in Northern Virginia this morning (there were snow flurries too), Rachel's post made me remember my first winter in Milwaukee.

I was a rookie staffer for the Associated Press and I'd just bought an old VW Beetle from Lizzie, my friend Roger's wife. (I'd known Roger in high school, but how we both wound up in Milwaukee's a story for another post.) After one lesson from Roger on how to work the clutch, I taught myself the rest on the way home.

Good thing I got it down before the first snowfall.

I grew up in Jamaica and in Washington, D.C., so I'd never seen as much snow as I did in Milwaukee. It snowed and it snowed and it snowed, and then it snowed some more. In the morning, you could see a small dark blue square--part of the roof of the Beetle. The rest was completely covered. All the same, when I finally dug it out, I found a ticket from Milwaukee's finest.

Over the course of that winter, I learned why people in Milwaukee have so much fun in summertime--they have to; they have so much stored up from winter. And I learned you can get used to almost anything. The morning the temperature finally rose above freezing--it had been 10 or 12 degrees for several weeks--I went outside in shirtsleeves because it felt so warm.

A few years later, living in Iowa City, I was prepared. But I do remember one day when the windchill factor made the temperature seem like -30 degrees.

My boss, a guy named named Pat Lackey (not the sportswriter) was on the telephone when I finally made it into the Office of University relations. We were the only two people in the office. It felt like somebody had forgotten to turn on the heat.

"How cold was it?" he was saying to someone on the telephone. "I'll tell you how cold it was. When I got to the office at 9 a.m., it was so cold I had to jump start my electric typewriter."

My Kindle for Kindling

2009-01-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

My worst news from the recently ended Christmas season?

According to a Dec. 23 report from the New York Times, sales of electronic books are up. Though less than 1 percent of all book sales, they increased three or four times in 2008 compared to 2007. Some observers think it won't be long before ebook sales are 10 percent of all book sales. NYT on ebooks

Call me old-fashioned. Call me a grouch. Call me a troglodyte. But I see this as one more sign of the coming apocalypse.

Would someone please explain to me the advantages of reading a book on a computer, laptop, cell-phone, PDA, or dedicated reader, apart from the number of books each of these devices can contain?

The book, as others have noted, is a just-about-perfect information storage and retrieval device. It's hand-operated, requires no external power, etc., etc. Properly put together, with suitable attention to paper, type, and binding, it can be a pleasing aesthetic object.

As much as I covet tech objects--I'd be ashamed to tell you how many MP3 players I own--I can't say the same of the Kindle, Sony's Reader, or any of the other ebook devices available or soon to come.

You wouldn't want to subject them to sand and salt water at the beach. You can't take them backpacking and tear out pages to light fires, at once lightening your load and recycling the paper. Once the batteries go dead, they're useless till you can find an AC outlet and, while I haven't tried one, I suspect the screens are too dim to be much use in bright sunlight.

Then, too, there's this: We're on the verge of becoming an aliterate society, which gives lip service to the value of reading while discouraging the kind of deep reading--and thinking--only possible with real books. On the other hand, ebook readers are perfect for the kind of plastic, written-to-order literature that dominates best-seller lists.

I suppose some people may develop lasting affection for their ebook readers, though I doubt most will. Technology works against it, encouraging us to buy new and improved models every year or so, and plastic just doesn't wear very well.

Of course, you have to take care of your books, too. I own first editions of Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring and Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion. Neither is in the kind of condition that would make it a keeper for a real collector. I treasure them anyway, wondering ever so often whether they might once have been read by some luminary of the Harlem Renaissance.

Then there are books that have certain associations, like my copy of Literature in New England, by Van Wyck Brooks. It belonged to my mother, a gift from Sterling Brown when she graduated from Howard University. I never met Brown, but I like seeing my mother's name with his on the flyleaf.

I could never feel that way about an ebook. Which means they'll take away my bound volumes when they pry them from my cold, dead hand.

'Nuff Said

2009-01-18T16:13:00.000-08:00

My 8-year-old son and I spent Saturday night on the battleship New Jersey in Camden with his Cub Scout troop.

On a tour of the ship, I saw this beside a drawing of the Grim Reaper on a wall of a gun turret:

"Those who oppose will meet me.

"Democracy at any cost."

Didn't the Athletes Do It. . .

2009-01-14T03:44:00.000-08:00

When "The Express"--a movie about Ernie Davis, the first black college football player to win the Heisman--came out last year, I started to wonder why so many movies about black athletes as agents of integration, and so few about the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. It was the third movie in three years to present the fight for equality as a struggle by black athletes to be accepted on the playing field.

It was as if Hollywood had taken literally legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant's response after a black player--the University of Southern California's Sam Cunningham--ran for 221 yards and scored three touchdowns to help defeat Alabama 42-21 in 1970.

"Cunningham," Bryant said, perhaps apocryphally, "did more for integration in Alabama in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years."

Bryant turned out to be right, at least in the movies.

Problem is there hasn't been the cinematic equivalent of Richard Attenborough's "Ghandi" about Martin Luther King--or full-length pictures about Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, Violet Liuzzo, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (if you don't know who these people were, go Google their names)

The thing is though Davis' is an inspiring story, the movie about him never strays from the conventions of the sports biopic. And, like "Remember the Titans," it's not really about the black character, who's pretty much the same throughout the movie. It's about the white character--the coach in "The Express"; an assistant coach in "Titans"--who moves from racism to acceptance.

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised the movies prefer to look at race through sports' rose-colored lens. We're a sports-obsessed nation. Dads want their sons to grow up to become Alex Rodriguez instead of Bill Gates and boxing, football, and baseball provide metaphors for everything from business to presidential debates.

Then, too, sports offers the kinds of clear-cut distinctions we seldom get in real life. Games are refereed by impartial observers. Everyone plays on the same field. The best team and the best players usually win.

Go check out the stories of some of the people I mention earlier. Many died so that others might be free, but while there is much that is affirming in their lives, any honest depiction of the racism and brutality they felt would leave audiences with nothing to feel good about.

Bear Bryant may have been right that sports did more to integrate America than Martin Luther King did. All the same, I can't help thinking of something a friend once told me about his father-in-law, something that shows the limits of believing what happens on the playing field will somehow change America at large.

The father-in-law, a white Southerner who so opposed his daughter marriage to a black man he's never seen his grandchildren, sat down one Saturday afternoon to watch his beloved University of North Carolina football team on television.

"Now we're gonna see," he said, "if our niggers can beat theirs."

Will You Please Be Quiet Please?

2009-01-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

The Victorians had what they call "muscular Christianity". For the last few years in America, we've had what I'm tempted to call stupid Christianity, which regards faith and the intellect as incompatible.

(But we also have stupid muscular Christianity, as this New York Times magazine profile of Seattle evangelist Mark Driscoll proves. Read it Here)

I've been thinking about this because Samuel Wurzelbacher (AKA Joe the Plumber, except he really wasn't) is off to Israel to report on that country's invasion of the Gaza for a right-wing religious web site.

In a saner, more civilized world, he'd be the punchline to a bad joke, as would his female counterpart, Sarah Palin, who's been complaining to a conservative filmmaker making an anti-Obama propaganda piece that Caroline Kennedy's been getting a free ride from the media while she was pilloried from pillar to post.

Of course, Palin's ignoring the fact that Kennedy can actually put together coherent sentences and has shown some intellectual gravitas by graduating from Harvard and Columbia University Law School and writing a book or two.

When I think of Sarah Palin (and Sam Wurzelbacher), I want to paraphrase something Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman: "Every word that comes out of their mouths is a lie, including and and the." Geoffrey Dunn on "Sarah Palin's Big Obama Lie."

In Praise of Gus Frerotte

2009-01-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

Call me a dreamer, but for a while there I was hoping Gus Frerotte might lead the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl.

I've been a fan of Frerotte's since he beat out Heath Shuler as the Washington Redskins' quarterback in 1995. Shuler was a first-round draft pick--number three overall. Frerotte was drafted in the seventh round, the 197th player picked.

I'm not going to pretend Frerotte is one of the greatest quarterbacks ever, though he's one of only two players drafted in the seventh round (in 1994) to play in the Pro Bowl. That was in 1996, and I don't think he's been back since. In 15 years in the league, he's played with seven teams.

He's got a 74.2 quarterback rating and, unfortunately, he's probably going to be best remembered for butting his head into a wall during a game against the New York Giants. He was feeling good because the Skins had scored. He sprained his neck.

But this season, in his second stint with the Minnesota Vikings, he took over for Tavaris Jackson--Minnesota's second-round pick. Frerotte went 8-3 and threw a 99-yard touchdown pass in November to tie the NFL record. The Vikings finished 10-6 to go to the playoffs. Jackson was 2-3. He took over when Frerotte broke two bones in his back, and the Vikings lost in the playoffs.

The thing is that while superstars like Tom Brady or Terrell Owens get all the attention, our own achievements are more akin to Frerotte's or those of Redskin James Thrash, an undrafted free agent who's been in the league since 1997. To my mind, what makes Frerotte (and Thrash) so special, is that they go out and do their jobs, without whining, without complaining like too many of the superstars

The Post's Mike Wise put it this way in a column about Daniel Eugene Ruettiger, the Rudy of the movie "Rudy": "[W]e get so consumed by the destination sometimes that we forget it's really about the journey--that it's not always where you end up in life; sometimes it's about the heart and courage you show in between."

Then there's this: A few years back, in his first stint with the Vikings, Frerotte had an incredible game with an unbelievable quarterback rating. Afterwards, in the locker room, he was asked what he could do next week to top it.

"Never play again?" he said.

Not on Internet Time

2009-01-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

I'm a long-time computer buff (we've got six at our house, equally divided between Macs and PCs, and at one time I'd put together all our PCs). But I've got a love-hate relationship with technology, something I'll probably rant about from time to time here.

I confess part of my opposition to the notion of Internet Time comes from having heard too many snotty editors half my age say, "Gee, this is really well written, but we're on Internet Time. Nobody cares any more."

And, of course, IT's the logical result of our American fascination with speed and efficiency. The problem, of course, is that it leaves no time for digestion or reflection.

A friend once told me she'd never imagined how hard she'd have to work to keep her blog known. I'm not willing to work that hard. So these postings will wind up as Leah Hager Cohen described hers on her blog: "[L]ittle paper boats [that} float off, beyond my control, perhaps to capsize or disintegrate."

Or the way it was when I dj'd on the AM carrier-current station in college. You could only hear it in the dorms and, since nearly everyone had a stereo, I never knew whether there was anyone listening or if I was just talking to myself.