It's Margaritas When The Egg Nog's Gone

Best Christmas Ever.  My thanks for the chicks and ducks from Heifer International, the waving Mao watches that don't tell time, the Obama candy bar and giant "Yes We Did!" print, all the books and sweaters and cocktails and good food and schnecken.

Sam and cousin Aidan on Christmas Eve in Granny & Poppa's Cottage on the 26th Floor.  Sam has finger puppets, and Aidan a shirt from NASA, both shipped in by their great aunt and uncle in Maryland.

Settling down in the hallway to listen for the prancing of tiny reindeer on the roof.  (Or failing that, the footfalls of the senior senator from Wisconsin, who lives just above.  Said Clement Moore: "I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself; a wink of his eye and a twist of his head soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.")

The train set what Santa brought.  (Some assembly required.  Helpful tools:  one alan wrench, two Philips head screwdrivers, four fingers Makers Mark.)

A side view of the "Caleb" and "Sam" lines.

Christmas morning, busy at play.

Uncle Tim helps Sam, Caleb, and cousin Alex assemble a different train at Grandma and Grampa Lathrop's.  Your correspondent provided the cowboy hat.

Grampa helps Sam show off his bear mitts, which he's had on practically ever since.  "I'm a bear," says Sam, "ROAR!"

Caleb visits with Grandma Greenhoe and Maggie, who is ailing (though not enough to prevent her taking a good swipe at Caleb not long after this picture was taken.)

Eating cake at Grandma and Grandpa Greenhoe's, Christmas night.  Nice mug, Sam.

Playing with Asia at Mary and Jerry's, where the boys lived for a time before they came home to us.

Sam and cousin Andrew at dinner.  I like the grainy, Norman Rockwell hue to this picture.  I also liked the bourbon old fashioned in the foreground.

They're cousins -- identical cousins.  Andrew Shen (drums), Alex Shen (lead guitar), Caleb Hinshaw (rhythm guitar, vocals), Sam Hinshaw (bass).  Pictured here backstage at the Sullivan show, just before their first American television appearance in December, 1963.

---*---

The Townblog family and staff are off to spend the New Year holiday in the Kalahari Resort in the unlikely Wisconsin Dells.  Whatever you may feel about 2008, you'll have to admit it ended well, and 2009 looks to be an amazing and dynamic year.  I can't wait to see you in it.

Let's Call Her Halcyon And Hope That She Holds

I have just finished reading 1,085 pages of Thomas Pynchon, and if Malcolm Gladwell's premise in Outliers is correct, I only need to read 8,015 more pages to become good at it.

Against the Day spans the time frame between the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the close of the first World War. It involves boy scientists, densely described Steampunk airships, anarchism, Colorado mining, the era of "The Great Game," mole men, time travel, the Tunguska Event, union busting, private detectives, and warring Balkan states.

This being a Pynchon book, it also contains invented song lyrics, strange sexual practices, passages of unattributed and/or untranslated dialogue, the occasional absence of needed context, and very complex mathematical problems. In places, the novel is as compelling and readable as any potboiler, and in other places it is as abstruse and impenetrable as French critical theory. ("The less you understand, the better you listen," said Lacan.)

With hundreds of characters and locations both real and not real, I won't even try to recount anything like a plot, despite the fact that things happen and certain interests are carried forward in the manner that fiction typically required. A Belgian mayonaise factory blows up. A stock boy who may later become Groucho Marx appears for a page or two. Russian balloonists drop heavy cubes in quadratic formation, just as in Tetris. Ships sail on the sea of sand beneath the Central Asian deserts. There is romance and revenge and dynamite and coffee.

Did I enjoy the book? Long parts of it, yes.

Was it funny? It was amusing. I laughed out loud once while reading it, during a scene in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand plays the dozens in an African-American proto-juke joint in 1893 Chicago. (In fairness, I don't often laugh out loud while reading; most books, including ones mean to be humorous, really just result in knowing smiles. Also in fairness, I laughed out loud three times while reading the first chapter of Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.)

I do remain somewhat unsatisfied by the reading experience, particularly since I invested a lot of precious time into the project. I feel like there was a lot I didn't fully understand, a lot of nuance missed, a lot of metatextual jokes I didn't catch, and I'm sort of left wondering if that book wasn't f*cking with me. The question is put best by the British: "Are you taking the piss?"

Bright Copper Kettles and Warm Woolen Mittens

A few of our favorite things, this Yule:

Snow Days.

Playing with Friends.

Enjoying the decorations -- and candy canes! -- at M & I bank.

Establishing détente with Santa Claus.  (Peace talks continue, but with continued fruitful negotiations, we believe we may see an end to the Cold War with the North Pole within the next couple of days.)

Visiting the Mitchell Park Domes with Papa and Granny.

"Decorating" Christmas cookies at Granny and Papa's cottage on the 26th floor.

Sam's output was less than prodigious.

Coloring at Grandma and Grandpa Greenhoe's house in Jackson, WI.

And, finally, modeling ladies' footwear.

Merry Christmas to All

from Brian, Kirsten, Caleb and Sam

Authority Always Wins

Perhaps it's the Midwest in me, or maybe it's my astounding talent for humility, but most of my demands are made in the whimperative. In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker illustrates the convergence of the imperative and the whimpy with the sample sentence, "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome." It would be too bold, too daring to say "Give me the guacamole," so we couch it in the throw pillows of politeness. But a large part of us wants to just grab the stuff and have our Tex-Mex way with it.

It seems to me that what we culturally call "literature" is often that sort of writing that asks, please, if isn't any bother, would you consider sending the guacamole this way? Most fiction seems to seek to present what we know, as written by people who are writing what they know, for an audience that knows what it wants. It's interesting and remarkable, then, when a book or an author steps out boldly into the territory of assertion -- or, as we called it in the MFA program I attended, "authority."

Here's a passage from Jose Saramago's The Stone Raft, a novel in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks away from Europe and drifts out to sea:

The starlings kept on screeching and began to stir uneasily, some had awakened as the men spoke, others, perhaps, were dreaming aloud, that terrible nightmare of the species, in which they feel themselves to be flying alone, disoriented and separated from the flock, moving through an atmosphere that resists and hinders the flapping of their wings as if it were made of water...

This is bold. Saramago suggests -- no, by God, he asserts -- that birds dream, and dream in this particular way and, as we should infer from the familiarity in the words "that terrible nightmare of the species," the dreams of birds have been well-charted and quantified. This is an author who steps beyond writing a novel into the realm of universe-creation. Saramago as narrator becomes the voice of God, the world-shaper of genre fantasy and sci fi, the 19th Century George Elliot style omniscient narrator. This style of story-telling is rare in mainstream literature, probably since about the onset of relativity theory.

Machine, a novel by Peter Adolphsen that comes highly recommended from Jordan at The Inside Flap, is full of the same sort of authority as in Saramago. In following the creation of a drop of oil from its prehistoric creation to an ultimate end, Machine is as daring throughout as the passage from The Stone Raft above. In 85 pages, Machine delves into the thoughts of an Eocene-era horse, the nature of power, a comprehensive list of ethnic groups of the mid-20th-century Soviet Union, and the engineering flaws of the Ford Pinto, in addition to mounds of geologic and biologic data that explain the creation and dispensation of oil. One presumes, for most of its pages, that it's narrator is as all-knowing as Saramago's or Elliot's. The book, as fiction, seems to brim with fact.

But authority of the sort that fuels Adolphsen's machine is, as in Saramago, playful. One character, seeking out poetry similar to Emily Dickenson's, discovers in his local library the double-haiku's of Poems, the sole book from Seymour Glass. And here's the bold part, the part that approaches the dreams of starlings: Seymour is not fact. Seymour Glass is a central figure in every J.D. Salinger book except the one for which he is most famous, despite the character's suicide in his first appearance in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," from 1948. (A side note on Seymour: I haven't read "Bananafish" in a very long time, but it always struck me as kind of twee, and it's culmination in suicide a juvenile last grasp at getting some drama into the story. The rest of the Glass family novels and stories strike me as Salinger's attempt to make up for, excuse, or, you know, whimperate that first gloss.)

But, just as I love the terrible nightmares of starlings, I love that this book, so full of lore, sneaks in this bit that can refer only to a fictional world, the drop of magic that calls reality into question, that suggests a realm beyond the known.

Christmas Books 2008

Jacob Marley and Me
John Grogan

A heartwarming book in which a wealthy but spiritually bankrupt author is visited by the spectre of the author's loyal but disobedient Labrador retriever, presaging Christmas night visits from The Ghost Dog of Important Life Lessons Past, The Ghost Dog of Important Life Lessons Present, and The Ghost of Important Life Lessons Future. At the emotional but uplifting conclusion, the author realizes that lightweight memoirs about one's dogs are are just the sort of thing America no longer needs.

Cold, Fat, and Jolly: Why We Need a Toy Revolution—And How It Can Renew Christmas
Thomas Friedman

The New York Times columnist who didn't win the Pulitzer Prize for Economics argues that, due to climate conditions and a lack of supply chain innovation, the elf-led toy creation in Santa's Workshop is headed towards global irrelevance. Friedman finds private shipping ventures to be faster and more reliable than reindeer, who are often unable to get toys to children until last minute Christmas morning. And while elves historically made high-quality wooden toys, their unfamiliarity with plastics and electronics suggest an emerging obsolescence, unlike the cheaper, faster, and highly educated labor available in places like Bangalore, India.

Twilight Before Christmas
Stephanie Meyer

A young adult novel in which abstinent and therefore moody teenage vampires refuse to have either sexual or vampiric relations with petulant yet beautiful teenage girls who totally want to do it with them.

Silver Bells!
Malcolm Gladwell

The author conveys some hastily drawn anecdotes, building an argument by example that seems to suggest an approach to life that will make one both rich and happy, except then it doesn't. In this case, Gladwell argues that the best Christmas presents are ones that come from the heart. Just as Outliers contains a stunningly fact-free reduction of The Beatles into four kids who tried really hard, this book posits that Jesus was just all right.

It Won't Be Long 'Til I'll Be Tying On My Flying Shoes

As good as it might have felt at the time, and as much as Helen Thomas may have wished she'd thought of it first, I am going to have to come out in opposition to the act of throwing one's shoes at the President. He may well deserve it, and it does call to mind one of the funnier stand-up routines by Eddie Murphy, but I can't help but think it will take our country in the wrong direction, particularly in regard to civil liberties.

If the reaction to the shoe-throwing is anything like the reaction to other acts ranging in severity from civil disobedience to outright terrorism, the response will be a reduction in the number of places where I can peaceably wear footwear.

Places Where One Is Expected To Remove One's Shoes (or Soon Will Be):

1. The airport.
2. The homes of certain Japanese people.
3. The homes of people with new carpeting (or, more likely, a weird fascination with peoples' feet)
4. The pre-toddler room at day care.
5. Presidential press conferences.

Here's the thing: I hate taking my shoes off. I like to wear lace-up shoes, and if you're going to have your laces good and tight, you can't just slip shoes on and off, which means you've got to spend some time untying both shoes, loosing the laces, getting the feet out, etc. This involves either kneeling, usually in a doorway or in a line leading to a metal detector, or bracing yourself against someone's shoulder like a sweaty Bruce Springsteen loping around the neck of Clarence Clemmons on the record sleeve of Born To Run or trying to keep balance, stork-like, on one foot. Being a bigger guy, it is not always an easy thing to get my feet to where my hands can get at them. So I feel like it's an awful lot of work to take off my shoes for some small and insignificant reason like, say, flying to California or asking a question of the President.

Also, feet are kind of nasty. They're pale and callused and yellow in parts, and they smell and collect sock lint and, thousands of years ago, they were hands. Gross.

(By the way, several of today's news reports have revealed that throwing your shoe at a person is considered an insult in Muslim cultures. Thanks for that, press corps. If this is the sort of work you've been doing instead of throwing your shoes at the president, you might have found other things to do with your time.)

Just as people largely stopped using commercial airplanes once they had to take off their shoes to do so, now people are going to stop asking news-type questions of their president. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that the threat of having their patriotism challenged prevented the press from asking hard questions about the run-up to Iraq, and now -- or at least for the next 35 days -- they'll be too busy getting their shoes on and off to notice the last-minute fire sale on democracy.

(Post title by Townes VanZandt, my near namesake.)

Please Have Snow and Mistletoe

In any roll of photos, you're going to find at least one Sam Hamwich.

Sleigh Ride.

One year later. They're just not that into you, Claus.  Maybe you'd better come through with that train set.

At UWM's Multicultural Holiday Fair, the boys are serenaded by a Christmas gnome.  Personally, I'm siding with Olin (at right).

These are our favorite ornaments, made by their daycare in their first ear infection-filled winter.  They look so sick and miserable in these photos, but so adorable at the same time.  The red noses and the puffy, pleading eyes.  How could we have let them leave the house that day?

And here they are two years on, drinking their own bath water...

A Saturday morning in the snow...

Stockings, hung by the chimney with care.

When Sam and Caleb jingle bells, they jingle them all the way.  (And, yeah, those are antlers on their heads.  And, yeah, Sam's wearing his Batman pajama top, and yeah, he wore it from bed to daycare and back to bed, because that's how much we love Batman in the Hinshaw household.  Caleb sports the dinosaur.  Dinosaurs are cool, too, because there's a T. Rex in the Batcave.)

Poor Napoleon

Out of Print Book Review: Peter Doyle by John Vernon

On an as-yet uncomposed Nick Hornby-ish All-Time Top Five Favorite Desert Island Books list, I'd probably rank Peter Doyle at number one or number two. It pert' near blew my mind when I first read it in the early 1990's, around the same time that I read Doctorow's Ragtime and was otherwise reading as much William Faulkner as I could get my hands on. These books and authors were tied to an American past, connected to Huckleberry Finn and the Civil War and the particular American problem of promised but undelivered equality that underscores everything from the Declaration of Independence to the presidential election of 2008. Amist some undergraduate writing workshops and advice to "write what you know" in a time where short stories hewed to kitchen table domestic realism and Raymond Carver minimalism, these books held mysteries, loome large, and certainly seemed as "real" (or perhaps "realer") as any "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or "Cathedral."

Vernon's book opens at the autopsy of Napoleon on St. Helena, and the surruptitious removal of the Mighty Corsican's right thumb and penis. One of these, erm, units appears in the form of a totemic necklace that travels through the hands of Peter Doyle, a bus conductor and/or merchant marine who is believed by some to be the true love and muse of poet Walt Whitman. So Napoleon's penis transfers from Doyle to Whitman, from Whitman to Emily Dickinson, and ultimately follows Horace Greely out west, where it ends the novel with a plunge into the Colorado River. These characters strike you as accurate portrayals and, while a funny book, nothing is played for laughs.

After finishing the book, I was left with a lot of questions about what was real and what wasn't. I called the downtown library's Ready Reference, the precursor to the internet and the godmother of Wikipedia, to see if someone could tell me whether there was an actual, historical, real Peter Doyle. I wanted to ask about the dismemberment of the little Napoleon, too, but modesty held my tongue.

If there's a better novel out there about about a dessicated sexual organ of an imperial European and its effect on the lives of late 19th Century American poets, I'd sure like to know about it.

Vernon's book is currently out of print, but it may well be worth the hunt. I also enjoyed the same author's A Book of Reasons, a non-fiction account about cleaning out his reclusive late brother's house, with diversions into the history of tools and questions about how well we can know each other anyway. Lucky Billy is a new novel/history/ontological puzzle which seems to concern someone called "Billy the Kid," but not this Billy the Kid.

I Owe My Soul To Each Fork In The Road

Cupcakes from Whole Foods. Twenty minutes later I tried to make the boys take a nap. Like taming a tornado.

Sam at the Christmas parade, equally repulsed and fascinated.

Caleb and Kirsten at the parade. Caleb liked the marching bands. Kirsten, who hate parades and warm fruit, muddled through.

I mentioned this earlier.

The boys, unmoved by the Macy's parade on TV, decided to take all the Tupperware out of the kitchen cabinets. Oh, and the lighter fluid too.

A new found love of pumpkin bread.

Sam went crazy for the green beans at Thanksgiving at Aunt Mary's. He slotted them into his mouth one after another, like timber logs through a buzz saw. Uncle Tim is an enabler.

At the sand table at the Betty Brinn Children's Museum.

Sam felt that a puppet show about the three little pigs really needed to be sabotaged by a shark. "We're going to need a bigger boat," says the third little pig.

Emerging from a giant-sized model of the human heart, Sam nails the landing.

With their friend Olin at the Reiman Aquarium within Discovery World.

Caleb at a Lionel Train show in New Berlin. I tell you what, train geeks are some nice people.

Opening Grandma Glenda's birthday gift.

Sam's wearing Mr. Potato Head ears as earrings. The hipsters down the block at the Comet Cafe wish they could make their earlobes look this outsized. (Playskool probably doesn't want kids to do this, and this picture fairly screams "permanent and irreversible damage to the ear drum." In my defense, I was not in the room at the time.)