tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-220889252024-03-12T19:20:22.657-05:00Brian Hinshaw -- Townblog<i>Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.</i>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.comBlogger444125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-10081733444275463582018-04-27T12:03:00.001-05:002018-04-27T12:19:58.235-05:00They've Shown This on Both Screens<h2>
Recent Sequels</h2>
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The Negotiator II</h3>
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Patton Oswalt takes a dramatic turn as a stunted academic trying to make sense of Taco Bell’s menu discourse. What separates a Gordito from a Chalupa, and which should one prefer for one’s lunch? Other customers seem to know what they’re doing, and order with confidence. Aren’t these all tacos, in the end? Why is the Taco Bell line the longest in the student union’s food court? Action reaches a crescendo when Oswalt meekly approaches the counter and asks for “just a taco.” And just when you think his order is complete, the twist ending: Baja or Bell Grande? <o:p></o:p></div>
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No Country for Old Men Too</h3>
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John Goodman plays the father of “tween” twin boys who have been squabbling over the family’s video game console. Goodman attempts vainly to set up parental controls on the machine, necessitating the creation of accounts, passwords, credit card numbers, system crashes, and a riotous foot chase through wet suburban streets. “I just copied the activation code from the other screen, so how can this <expletive> thing tell me its not found?” Goodman yells, in dialog one presumes came straight from Coach McCarthy’s book.<a href="applewebdata://37AF9AE4-1D23-49D3-A000-9C08FE5BDD63#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a> Javier Bardem returns as the Playstation 4.<o:p></o:p></expletive></div>
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Momento 2: Remember Momento?</h3>
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Veteran character actor Stephen Root takes a starring role as a middle-aged man who pays obsessive attention to trivia while tuned out to the world around him. We get a sense of the larger world through NPR newscasts playing in the background, while Root retreats further and further into flights of fantasy and escapism. In one harrowing scene, Root, surrounded by polyhedral dice and role-playing game character sheets, repeatedly asks his put-upon wife (Emma Stone) if she knows where the graph paper might be. “That’s the third time you’ve asked me that!” Stone sobs. “It’s like you don’t even listen to me!” Donald Trump is the president and everything is awful.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A Few More Good Men</h3>
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The feds are closing in on Ned Beatty in this courtroom drama. Beatty portrays a devoted father of two who’s been caught secretly stealing his children’s Barnes & Noble gift cards to use them himself. Under interrogation, he breaks down and admits the whole scam, yelling, “Who cares? It’s not like THEY read. I’m the one reading!!!!” Meanwhile, Beatty has to shell out for all the micro-transactions the kids are buying for the bleep-bloop games on their g*damn cell phones, but somehow it’s still Beatty who’s the fricking bad guy here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Children of Children of Men</h3>
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Jonah Hill plays an expert in Marvel Comics continuity who has survived an unnamed plague that took the life of anyone who could make, build, or repair anything. When society collapses and things fall apart, Hill can only throw those things out, or move to a new home. Sure, all the comic books are free now, but the WiFi is out and, shit, was that the furnace? Hill tries to start a fire with nothing but logs and a Bic lighter. Such an indoor kid. Julianne Moore co-stars as a pack of feral coyotes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="applewebdata://37AF9AE4-1D23-49D3-A000-9C08FE5BDD63#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a>A previous version incorrectly indicated that the author of the source material was Cormac McCarthy. This article has been corrected to indicate its author is in fact Mike McCarthy, head coach of the Green Bay Packers football concern.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-25701026633580966832016-09-12T16:38:00.002-05:002016-09-12T16:40:17.387-05:00I Pulled Into Nazareth<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Take a load off, Fanny.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">March 10th, 2016: my doctor called the very afternoon of my check-up to tell me my cholesterol levels were very high, higher than the last time I was in. He asked what I wanted to do about that. "Diet and exercise, I guess?" Was there a history of heart attack in the family? "No." So you want to…? "Change how I'm eating, get active. I don't want to take a pill. Pills have side effects." And we check in another six months, the doctor told me, making no attempt to mask his doubt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So skip ahead to now. I have lost 76 pounds as of this writing<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gqhwAnEoDhQ/V5p3_5VYRmI/AAAAAAAAB_c/p9pmBYfZPBEMBumOtQSwi6sAgao-yIoUACLcB/s1600/fruit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="152" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gqhwAnEoDhQ/V5p3_5VYRmI/AAAAAAAAB_c/p9pmBYfZPBEMBumOtQSwi6sAgao-yIoUACLcB/s200/fruit.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brian's lunch — photograph by T. Douche</td></tr>
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, for an average of about 2.5 pounds a week. A lot of this was an initial drop, and some say men lose weight more quickly/easily/temporarily than women, but it has also taken dedication and willpower and concerted change. Though maybe less of that stuff than you'd think, and more the regulation of good choices in order to avoid bad choices, and over time the replacement of poor habits with better ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is not the first time I've worked at losing weight, though I think this is the longest I've sustained the effort. It's also been a lot easier this time around.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Because a few people have asked what I'm doing, I thought this might be a good place for confession and proselytization. What follows are some basic tenets I applied from the outset and some rules I established for myself early on. (And as you'll see, I trust journalists more than nutritional scientists, but I suppose I'm genealogically so disposed. Unlike quacks, journalists are fact-checked.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Tenets</span></h3>
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<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If I was going to lose weight, it had to be permanent this time. Losing weight makes regaining weight easier, and in fact leads often to gaining even more weight than you originally had to lose. So I needed to think of this effort as a <b>permanent change in lifestyle.</b></span>
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<ol><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to the
</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/why-you-cant-lose-weight-on-a-diet.html?_r=0" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">dismal</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html" target="_blank">science</a> of weight loss, only 1% of dieters achieve permanent weight loss, and 41% of dieters gain back more than they lost. This suggests vigilance and permanence, and a willingness to do what 99% of dieters can't do. (Sciences suggests that your body reacts to a change in calorie intake as if its starvation, dropping your metabolic rate and increasing chemicals related to hunger. Fat cells don't fall off with the pounds — they just empty out, waiting to be refilled.)</span></span></ol>
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<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>I would not go to the gym.</b> Maybe this seems in opposition to the prior tenet, but my experience is that you can start going to the gym at any time, and you can stop going to the gym at any time. If this was going to be a permanent change, I also had to admit to myself that there is that within me which is indolent, shiftless, and lazy. I can find ways to justify not going to the gym today — too busy, too tired, will go tomorrow — and that can lead into justifying other bad choices</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">.</span></span><ol><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And as a corollary to the note on Tenet 1 above, it seems to me from what little we understand about what once-fat bodies do, elevating the amount of physical activity that my body does only to stop that activity was a bad idea. Again, the idea would be to make permanent and sustainable changes to how I lived. Crushing reps at the gym was not a realistic expectation I could have of myself. (The above is not to say that I don't aim to be more active than before, but I have always been the indoors type. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-r2BARj6Oo" target="_blank">The Lemonheads</a>: "I can't go away with you on a rock-climbing weekend / What if something's on TV and it's never shown again?") I would increase activity, walk when I can, but most of the change in my daily caloric totals would need to come from what I was eating.</span></ol>
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<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There were going to be things I would need to give up for good, and there were going to be things I knew I could not live without, and so I was going to need to<b> change my relationship with food</b>. The first narrative thought I can recall after speaking with my doctor and pledging to better health was, "Can I go the rest of my life without french fries?" And I decided that I could. I could not go the rest of my life without ice cream, though, and it was unlikely that I could avoid pizza forever. So I would need strategies for those thing</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">s</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">.</span></span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Logically slim</td></tr>
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<ol><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In fancier words: I had cause to develop a higher-order volition. A first order volition might be a desire to eat the whole pint of Ben and Jerry's Coconut for Caramel Core ice cream<sup><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=22088925#fn1" id="ref1">*</a></sup>. A second order volition would be to want to eat that pint, but also a want to NOT eat it. Free will (at least according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Frankfurt" target="_blank">Harry Frankfurt</a>) is the exertion of self-control. Each moment is a choice, no matter whose birthday it is and how good the cake may be. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia" target="_blank">The cake is a lie.</a> Cheat days = <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting">hyperbolic discounting</a>. I would change my life (and waistline) through logic. (I mean, have you ever seen a fat Vulcan?)</span></ol>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Rules:</span></h3>
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<li><b style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif;">Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.</b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Michael Pollan's <i><span style="color: #990000;">In Defense of Food </span></i>lays this out as a cardinal rule, along with warnings about "nutritionism." Pollen suggests you resist the idea that the healthfulness of food can be isolated into a particular nutrient ("fiber" or "Omega 3 fatty acids" or "essential vitamins") and instituted into processed food that could be somehow good for you. Communities all over the world sustained themselves on vastly different diets — the Mediterranean folks ate one way, Eskimos another — and that the only unhealthful diet is the Western one (the Standard American Diet, or SAD): processed food, high sugars, and government nutrition pyramids. According to Pollan, if it grows from a seed and people eat it, it's probably good for you. If it's a thing that ate stuff that grew from seeds and people also eat THAT thing, it's also good for you (and also probably an animal, in which case see others of Pollan's books.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>If you can eat it quickly, it's probably not a good choice.</b> <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bkb2I1YvEsA/V5pd2I30SKI/AAAAAAAAB-g/HxkcvzNFJfc9TA5H_gvji7iVL4taG89rgCLcB/s1600/kessler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bkb2I1YvEsA/V5pd2I30SKI/AAAAAAAAB-g/HxkcvzNFJfc9TA5H_gvji7iVL4taG89rgCLcB/s200/kessler.jpg" width="130" /></a>David A. Kessler explains in his book <i><span style="color: #990000;">The End of Overeating</span></i> that most processed foods are chemically designed to be appealing to us through salt, sugar, fat, but that most have also been designed to eat very quickly so that you consume more than you might intend. Kessler points out that even things like a chain-restaurant chicken dish probably uses engineered, processed and reconstituted chicken, free of anything like bones or connective tissue — all in order to reduce the work necessary to eat it, and to increase its potential for pleasure. In a sense, processed food has been partially pre-digested — that Snickers bar has been designed to get its caramel/chocolate/nougat/peanuts into your gullet without sticking to your teeth all while being marketed as if it were energizing trail mix. Pizza is gooey/salty/melty and really easy to pick up right out of the box and shove into your face hole. From Kessler, I take it that if you're not making it yourself, it's pretty much coming from Pre-Chewed Charlie's.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Plan meals, shop accordingly.</b> If you know what you're going to have for dinner, and if you know you're going to cook it yourself, it becomes a lot harder to go off track or to make bad/lazy decisions. I've been cooking dinner 5-6 nights out of 7 for the last 6 months, and I've only few occasions to think of other things I might rather be eating. You eliminate the option of takeout or frozen pizzas or whatever else, because you need to make the thing you said you were going to make.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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And if it's a good really plan, you need to make the thing because part of the thing you need for tomorrow's meal, so staying on track today helps you stay on track tomorrow. My wife found a subscription plan that's worked really well for us — <a href="http://thefresh20.com/">thefresh20.com</a> — that gives you a weekly shopping list of 20 items and 5 dinner recipes that use (and re-use) those items. Use of things like flour and sugar and dairy are kept to a minimum, and there are entirely gluten-free or paleo options available. Even better, ingredients cooked or prepped for one-meal are used in meals later in the week, so skipping a night of cooking means you're handicapping yourself for later meals in the week. (See again the notion of hyperbolic discounting!)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Track what you eat.</b> Like the previous 3 rules, this is a mindfulness trick. Logging what you're eat (or even better, what you're going to eat) means you're paying attention to what and how much you're eating, which makes it more likely that you stick to serving sizes, healthier decisions, and your other rules. I use a free IOS app-slash-website called <a href="https://www.loseit.com/" target="_blank">Lose It!</a>. (Truth be told, I've skipped tracking for the last few months once I felt I had good habits in place, though its probably not entirely coincidental that my rate of loss has slowed since I got out of a tracking routine.)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Drink water. </b> Humans aren't really all that great at reading signals in our bodies. Often, we feel hunger as a symptom of dehydration, so drinking more water will make eating less a bit easier. <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For me, this meant detoxing from diet soda. (There are <a href="http://time.com/3746047/diet-soda-weight-gain/">studies</a> that suggest that imitation sugars in diet sodas can make your body crave carbs, and others suggest that our bodies don't process imitation sugar any differently from actual sugar.) Prior to starting this effort, diet soda was a twice daily thing for me, and I quickly limited myself to no more than 12 ounces of it per day. Even that has fallen away — I drink hella sparkling water or tap water now, and haven't had anything artificially sweetened in months. (And learn to take coffee black, too.)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Raw fruits and vegetables only between breakfast and dinner. </b> Thaler and Sunstein's <i><span style="color: #990000;">Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness </span></i>introduced me to t<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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he notion of choice architecture — using behavioral economics to lead people into better choices. If I allowed myself only to eat whole fruits (or now and then, a salad) at lunch time, I wouldn't have to decide whether or not to eat healthily at the moment I was hungry. Our campus student union, which is the nearest place where I can find lunch, is relatively light (and samey) on its healthy options. As to prior habits: the bags of chips sold in the Union are chosen by its buyers to maximize their profits from student and staff wallets rather than to encourage good health — a nudge but in the wrong direction. Sure, one could read the bag and reason out that the serving size for Cheddar and Sour Cream Flavored Ruffles is 28 grams or 11 chips, with the bag containing four times its 160 calories, and one could respond with moderation and restraint. But most times, you (or leastways <i>I)</i> will eat until the bag is empty. So just don't buy the f*cking thing, and let the student union make a couple of bucks less each day than it might if it sold green apples and nectarines.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Avoid seconds</b>. Pollen's book points out that the so-called French Paradox — where the French eat rich foods and drink wine and still manage to look good in culottes — may be partly due to their cultural taboo on getting seconds. Probably, if you are serving yourself, you are instinctively/unconsciously putting on your plate the amount of food you need to satisfy you. (Not true, usually, in restaurants.) Going back to the buffet isn't necessary. If you give your body 10 minutes for your brain to assess what your body actually needs, you'll probably find you don't actually need any more than you've already eaten.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Follow serving sizes and exercise restraint.</b> As I mentioned above, there was no way I was going to live without ice cream, particularly when there are flavors of Ben and Jerry's out there to be tried and tested. I allowed myself ice cream once a week — on Sundays, for Walking Dead or Game of Thrones — but I stick to a half-cup serving, measured out to the gram. Once a week, if I feel like it, or not at all, if I don't. See the bit on second-order reasoning, above, and consider that losing one pound means taking in about 3,500 calories less than your body needs to maintain its current weight. Add a half-cup of ice cream to that, and you're now about 3,750 calories from losing that pound.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Remove yourself from temptations.</b> Family gatherings almost always seem to involve dessert — cake for a birthday, ice cream because ice cream. This is always a particularly hard time for me, as watching people really enjoy food (and talk about how much they're really enjoying the food) is kind of a drag when you know that if your enjoyment of that same food would come at a heavy cost (because you're in a bodily state where your metabolism is under-functioning and your hunger-sensing brain chemicals are over-functioning). One starts thinking of the injustice of it all, and feeling like cake is something one deserves, and maybe you even deserve it more than these people who are right now actively having their cake and also eating it, and so now you're annoyed and slighted and suddenly having the kind of relationship with food that you said you weren't going to have anymore, and… better to just go in the other room or take a walk or start doing the dishes if they'll let you.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Get a little obsessed (but keep it to yourself)</b>. A little obsession is good <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uPIo9kj2MfQ/V5p4hp1cH9I/AAAAAAAAB_g/DPNUAzc49N8iuAbiH9liR3vluKL5XXHbwCLcB/s1600/elephant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uPIo9kj2MfQ/V5p4hp1cH9I/AAAAAAAAB_g/DPNUAzc49N8iuAbiH9liR3vluKL5XXHbwCLcB/s200/elephant.jpg" width="128" /></a></div>
nourishment for the brain, I think. Getting a little obsessed with being healthier can't be too bad, as you read stuff and break habits and walk a little further and figure out to make kale into something palatable for humans. The danger is talking too much about it with people who you'll almost certainly bore — they aren't in the same place as you, since they don't need to make these changes or at least <i>aren't</i> making them. And talking about better health means you're going to end up talking about food which, as in the point above, isn't particularly helpful when you're trying not to think about food. It still frames the issue, as George Lakoff would tell you. So shut up about it. Or get a blog and write it down there, and then don't worry that there's now way anyone's going to read all this stuff. Because it's your issue, dummy.</span></li>
</ol>
</div>
<div>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Footnote</span></h3>
</div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QNMgpUybvxg/V5aAN6RG7rI/AAAAAAAAB9o/FZOJqF4pclsT6mLPBQQHPsWuJRMw-i2GwCLcB/s1600/cellphone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QNMgpUybvxg/V5aAN6RG7rI/AAAAAAAAB9o/FZOJqF4pclsT6mLPBQQHPsWuJRMw-i2GwCLcB/s320/cellphone.jpg" width="179" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><sup id="fn1">* I sent my wife a message saying that I was, immediately, making some changes to how I ate. Her initial response was a link to an article about new ice cream flavors and a link to where to buy them locally.</sup></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><sup><br /></sup></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><sup><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></span></sup></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><sup>
Since then, I can tell you that she's been incredibly supportive and involved, and has suggested some stuff that is adapted into the above. But its a good reminder that sometimes the train has to leave the station whether everyone's on it or not — some folks may jump on board down the tracks a ways, as K. did a couple weeks later.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=22088925#ref1" title="Jump back to text.">↩</a></sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-92116795130530443862016-07-26T10:59:00.000-05:002016-07-26T10:59:13.631-05:00Counting the Cars on the New Jersey TurnpikeMost nights, I read to my kids at bedtime. Because they are ten-year-old twins with separate and competing interests, I have to read them separate things — usually a sports book for Caleb and some sort of adventure book for Sam. We've read all the Harry Potters, George Vecsey's <b><i><span style="color: #990000;">Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game</span></i></b>, most of the Star Wars novelizations, <i>T<b><span style="color: #990000;">he Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron</span></b></i> by Howard Bryant, Colin Meloy's Wildwood series, and the very weird-but-cool <i><b><span style="color: #990000;">FreeDarko Presents the Undisputed Guide to Pro-Basketball History</span></b>.</i><br />
<br />
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8TFR5EF-iyk/V5d5x4s5SiI/AAAAAAAAB94/PDPE3aLXwhEpdK5n6u-a4hdrr1Hcbu-nACLcB/s1600/little-history-of-us.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8TFR5EF-iyk/V5d5x4s5SiI/AAAAAAAAB94/PDPE3aLXwhEpdK5n6u-a4hdrr1Hcbu-nACLcB/s320/little-history-of-us.jpg" width="209" /></a>Last year, I also folded in James West Davidson's <i><b><span style="color: #990000;">A Little History of the United States</span></b></i>, in part because the Jim Crow chapters of Bryant's stirring biography of Hank Aaron raised a lot of questions for the kids about issues of race in American history. It's a lovely book, with the kind of economy of language and story-telling that would allow someone to compress 500+ years of North American history into about 300 pages. It begins with the soaring birds seen by Columbus as he approached the continent in 1492 and ends with the dying birds seen by Rachel Carson in 1962, though the book reaches back further than Columbus and farther than Carson in between. It's even-handed, throughout, with particular attention to the twinned (and also separate and competing) American values of "freedom" and "equality"— as excellent an introductory history for kids as any I could imagine. It was a pleasure to read aloud — I felt, at times, like David McCullough narrating PBS' <i>American Experience</i>.<br />
<br />
We didn't get to Davidson every night, or even most nights, because we could only read it once the other two chapter books had seen fair representation AND if both kids were still awake. But when we at last came to the fortieth and final chapter last night, it was hard not to reflect on what was happening concurrently at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, on the divisiveness and hate-mongering at last week's Republican convention, and on the opposition to America's first African-American presidency. In a final look at lingering conflicts from our national history, Davidson writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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Puritans dreamed of a holy commonwealth where the saints
would rule and the strangers in their midst would learn righteousness. Jonathan Edwards saw the Great Awakening as
the first fruit of “those glorious times” predicted in scripture, when
divisions and conflicts would disappear.
These dreams of unity and harmony have propelled the peoples of America
for centuries.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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But the divisions didn’t disappear. Madison thought long and hard about that
problem as he worked on the Constitution.
A republic would always have divisions, he decided – factions, he called
them. And they arose not just because people came from different parts of the
world. The causes of faction were “sown
in the nature of man.” Humans make
mistakes in reasoning things out. Their
passions are easily aroused. They are
influenced by “self-love,” which blinds them to the viewpoints of others. More important, people naturally divide
because of their different circumstances in life. Most often, said Madison, divisions arise
because of “the various and unequal distribution of property.” . . . It was wishful
thinking to believe that humans would ever find a golden age so gentle, a
millennium so peaceful, or a commonwealth so holy that disagreements would
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No, if there was to be a “more perfect union” binding
together the people and provinces of the United States, it would have to come
from crafting a government that allowed factions to work out their different
interests – through debate, through a fair system of representation, through
compromise, through laws passed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--></blockquote>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
This is the kind of government I believe in — the kind that does what private citizens can't be trusted to do, because of our self-love and our factionalism, and the kind that engages in debate and compromise. The young woman I saw on cable news last night who displayed her Bernie Sanders tattoo and said she could vote for no one else is given over to self-love and factionalism, and I don't think you could find a better illustration of blinding "self-love" than the RNC's candidate, whose name is his brand and vice versa. Actual debate, meanwhile, doesn't really happen — the Republican-led senate has been avoiding it for years, and we're all well settled into our </div>
own closed-system modes of news delivery. I'm in the MSNBC faction, and the NPR/NYTimes faction. I'm sure I know at least a couple of people who are at least considering voting for Trump, but they aren't people with whom I ever talk politics. Or anything, much. I certainly know people who are considering voting for Green Party candidates (something I did myself in 2000) or perhaps not voting, because Hilary's centrist/hawkish/corporatist past isn't something they feel deserves compromise or concession.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WCkafg9uYSo/V5eHx9zRz5I/AAAAAAAAB-M/t4SbJmz0Ol88b0U6BwegDrj2JV3kAweLACLcB/s1600/IMG_0796.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WCkafg9uYSo/V5eHx9zRz5I/AAAAAAAAB-M/t4SbJmz0Ol88b0U6BwegDrj2JV3kAweLACLcB/s320/IMG_0796.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sam, Caleb, and a friend watch the July 3 fireworks at the lakefront.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I fervently hope that Secretary Clinton's campaign will reach out to Senator Sanders' faction through debate, representation, and compromise, and not only to make those voters feel they can come into the larger tent despite the seriousness of their tattoos and convictions.</div>
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dGRCXV3_vE8/V5eG7_ABpJI/AAAAAAAAB-I/dXSyVC1kYqQQAW6B5fhmcq1RUMisOqlMgCLcB/s1600/IMG_0803.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dGRCXV3_vE8/V5eG7_ABpJI/AAAAAAAAB-I/dXSyVC1kYqQQAW6B5fhmcq1RUMisOqlMgCLcB/s400/IMG_0803.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Beckum Little League All-Stars take the field following a summer storm</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-14858609074429812422015-09-23T11:37:00.002-05:002015-09-23T11:43:16.575-05:00The Tigers Have Spoken<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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As reported in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/books/ta-nehisi-coates-to-write-black-panther-comic-for-marvel.html">New York Times</a>, national corespondent for <i>The Atlantic</i> and National Book Award nominee Ta-Nehesi Coates is writing an upcoming 12-issue run of Marvel's <i>Black Panther</i>. We've given <i>Matrix </i>Jedi, Elvis Costello <a href="http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/e/elvis-costello-model.jpg">doppleganger</a>, and esteemed professor Dr. Cornel West, an outspoken critic of Coates, an opportunity to preview some of the early issues:</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1SL2OGTMrX0/VgLU7aMLWyI/AAAAAAAAB9U/ivDrFzSqIgQ/s1600/west.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1SL2OGTMrX0/VgLU7aMLWyI/AAAAAAAAB9U/ivDrFzSqIgQ/s200/west.jpg" width="165" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Brother Coates’ new issues of Black Panther are full of BAM
and POW, but they hardly measure up to James Baldwin’s historic run on the comic
back in the Mighty Marching Marvel Society days of the salubrious
seventies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baldwin’s excoriation of the
exploitive American eye towards brother T’Challa’s native Wakanda and the
imperialist strip mining of its vibranium resouces led to collective action,
and may even have inspired the organization that came to share the hero’s
name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coates’ Panther, meanwhile, makes no
critique of the Black president in power, or the rampant capitalist wage
inequity evident in the disparity between the tony Starks and the proletariat
Parkers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He hasn’t familiarized himself
with our hero brethren who have struggled alongside us: Black Goliath, Black
Lightning, Black Talon, Black Manta, Black Vulcan, black Power Man, and
(somehow) the Bronze Tiger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until he’s
studied these afro’d and afro-centric heroes of the four-color struggle, Coates
will remain a mere darling of Stan Lee-liberals and jackbooted Kirbyism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Also, as brother Jonathan Lethem proved with his 2007 attempted revival of Omega the Unknown, no one wants this shit. Finally, in what can be attributed only to Coates' youth and an unwillingness to examine our era's omnipresent neocon ogliarchy, brother Ta-Nehesi completely misunderstands the villain he employs against brother T'Challa. </span>As any scholar must recognize, Klaw lost his powers in a fight with
Carnage in Amazing Spider Man #676, but here he appears again as a bigoted
imperialist with a vibranium-powered sonic laser rather than as a being of pure
sound as he’s appeared since his fight in Dazzler #11.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Please send my no-prize to
the efficiency apartment I'm sharing with John Edwards in Topeka, KS.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-34692228270275651702015-05-05T16:59:00.001-05:002015-05-05T16:59:44.479-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>North American Anthology</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of<b> Pop Music Literature</b></span></div>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Four: <span style="color: #660000;"> "When They Ring Those Golden Bells," (Trad.)</span></b></span></span></h4>
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Oranges and lemons,<br />
Say the bells of St. Clements<br />
You owe me five farthings<br />
Say the bells of St. Martin's<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;">From a traditional English children's rhyme first printed in <i>Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book</i>, circa 1744. The tune of this rhyme is meant to be reminiscent of change ringing (which, per Wikipedia, is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns. That is, the sound of St. Clements' bells make the sound of the words "oranges and lemons."</span></blockquote>
Throw the vandals in court<br />
Say the bells of Newport<br />
All will be well if-if-if<br />
Cry the green bells of Cardiff<br />
Why so worried, sisters, why?<br />
Sang the silver bells of Wye<br />
And what will you give me?<br />
Say the sad bells of Rhymney<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;">Pete Seeger's folk song, "The Bells of Rhymney," utilized part of a 1938 poem by Welsh poet Idris Davies. That poem, "Gwalia Deserta," dealt with a Welsh coal mining disaster and a failed 1926 general strike. The poem moves the bells of London to South Wales.</span></blockquote>
You owe me a move<br />
Say the bells of St. Groove<br />
Come on and show me<br />
Say the bells of old Bowie<br />
When I am fitter<br />
Say the bells of Gary Glitter<br />
No one but you and I<br />
Say the bells of Prince Far-I<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;">The Clash's "Clash City Rockers" bases part of their song on these prior two, appointing the status of august old church bells to Birmingham's The Move and Australia's The Groove, as well as David Bowie, future pederast Gary Glitter, and the Jamaican deejay Prince-Far-I. (Tommy Thumb: You ain't happy less you got one.) Some say this song borrows a guitar riff from The Who's "I Can't Explain."</span></blockquote>
Cause it ain't the glory days<br />
With Bruce Springsteen<br />
I'm not a virgin so I know<br />
I'll make Madonna scream<br />
You hate Michael and Prince<br />
All the way, ever since<br />
If their beats were made of meat<br />
Then they would have to be mince<br />
Rock the bells<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;">Unless you were to find the 12" extended single version of this song, which emerged on Def Jam in 1985, you wouldn't actually hear any bells on LL Cool J's "Rock The Bells."</span></blockquote>
Ring them bells, ye heathen<br />
From the city that dreams<br />
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries<br />
Cross the valleys and streams<br />
For they're deep and they're wide<br />
And the world on its side<br />
And time is running backwards<br />
And so is the bride.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;">Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" appears on his 1989 record Oh Mercy, following his born again period. Dylan told the New Yorker in 1997: "<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 17px;">Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like 'Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain' or 'I Saw the Light</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 17px;">'—that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs."</span></span></blockquote>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-19956907327731493772015-05-01T13:08:00.000-05:002015-05-01T13:32:26.275-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>North American Anthology</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of<b> Pop Music Literature</b></span></div>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Three: </b><span style="color: #660000;"> </span><span style="color: #660000; font-weight: normal;">John Henry and John Hurt</span></span></span></h4>
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John Henry was a steel-drivin' man, swinging his nine-pound hammer to clear the C&O Railway's Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia. Henry drove steel drills into the rock-side, making the holes for the explosives that will later blast that rock away. In 1872, with work on the tunnel nearly completed, an agent for a steam drill company brought a drill to the tunnel for demonstration purposes. John Henry took a lot of pride in his work and didn't care to have that machine taking the work of men like him. A contest was set up between the steam drill and John Henry, a contest that lasted a day and a half. John Henry had outpaced that steam drill, but it cost him his life.<br />
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<i>Furry Lewis, "John Henry," recorded for Vocalion Records in Chicago, IL, 1927. </i></div>
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But also: John Henry was prisoner #497 at the Virginia penitentiary, on work-release for the C&O, working beside the steam drills on the Lewis Tunnel that was underway near Millboro, VA, in 1873. Henry swung his hammer so fast and powerful, the men of the line organized a race between the man and their best steam drill. When he died in 1873-- his hammer in his hands -- he was buried in the sand along the rail lines running behind the prison.<br />
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Or even still: John Henry was born a slave in 1850, to P.A.L Dabney of Georgia. Danny's son went on to be chief engineer for the C&W Railway, and John Henry went along as a freedman to work the Oak Mountain Tunnel near Leeds, AL, in 1887. There, he was challenged to see if he could beat that ol' steam drill, and by now you know the rest of it.<br />
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John Henry, one of these men or none of them, becomes a story passed through folk tales and songs, something born native to this country, invested with a full history of slavery and conscription and labor, American exceptionalism in overalls. A tale becomes a legend becomes a metaphor, eclipsing any attempt at biography. A man ain't nothin' but a man, poor boy.<br />
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John Smith Hurt was born on July 3, 1893, or he was born on March 8, 1892. He lived in rural Mississippi, where he taught himself to play guitar in a finger-picked style that syncopates like ragtime piano. He worked as a farmhand put played his old-time music for house parties and country dances. A fiddle playing friend won a contest to record for "race records" studio Okeh, and upon a recommendation, "Mississippi" John Hurt got an opportunity in 1928 to record his songs in Memphis and New York City. He recorded 12 songs across six 78 rpm records. They were a commercial failure -- the Great Depression soon led Okeh out of business and Hurt returned to his hometown to work as a sharecropper.<br />
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One of the songs Hurt recorded in 1928 was "Spike Driver Blues," which incorporates the legend of John Henry in both a real sense and as a kind of metaphor for what hard work's going to get you. A spike driver sets the spikes on both sides of a rail, cementing train tracks in place, something of a different job than Henry was previously said to have. "Spike Driver Blues" and its variant, "Take This Hammer," both branch out from the tale of John Henry to something more -- reflecting on what John Henry <i>means</i>, perhaps.<br />
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<i>Mississippi John Hurt, "Spike Driver Blues," Okeh Records, 1928.</i></div>
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In 1952, Moses Asch's Folkways records released <i>The Anthology of American Folk Music</i>, a collection of 1927-1932 recordings assembled by bohemian collector Harry Smith. Included on the three LPs in the box were two songs from John Hurt, "Frankie" (which we'll discuss another day) and "Spike Driver Blues." The Anthology birthed the great folk revival of 50's and 60's, influencing new folk artists like Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan.<br />
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A fan of the <i>Anthology</i>, Tom Byrd Hoskins, became determined to find out what had become of Mississippi John Hurt. After hearing a 1928 song of Hurt's ("Avalon Blues") that contains the lyric "Avalon, my home town / always on my mind," Hoskins scoured maps of Mississippi but could not find an Avalon there. There was an Avalon in Georgia, but no John Hurt there. Finally, an 1895 atlas showed a little hamlet of Avalon, later incorporated into Grenada, MS. A girlfriend volunteered a car, and in 1963 the two of them tracked him down Hurt, then 72 or 73. Hoskins and his associates gave Hurt a guitar, arranged a new home in Washington, D.C., and drew him out into the limelight of MacDougal and Bleeker Streets, the Newport Folk Festival, and television appearances on the <i>Tonight Show</i> and on Pete Seeger's 1965 PBS show <i>Rainbow Quest:</i><br />
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<i>"Spike Driver Blues," Mississippi John Hurt, Rainbow Quest (TV Show), 1965.</i></div>
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By 1966, John Hurt was wore out, tired of the bookings and attention, and wanted to go home. He snuck away from celebrity and, back in Avalon on November 2, 1966, he died with a hammer in his hands.<br />
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There is no beating the steam drill, is there? John Henry may have run the race against the machine, but it cost him his life. So: steam drill wins. On the other hand, John Henry still exists in the American folk realm, while steam drills have gone the way of dynamite, locomotives, and large public works programs. It is not uncomplicated: bringing a black man out of obscurity to perform for white bohemians and their obsession with authenticity and old, weird America. The hammer brings the railroad, the railroad takes the people through, tuned out to electric guitar.<br />
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Dave Van Ronk, author of <i>The Mayor of MacDougal Street </i>and the basis for the title character in the Coen Brother's <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i>, led me to Mississippi John Hurt through his version of "Spike Driver Blues" on a 1997 tribute album to Harry Smith's <i>Anthology.</i> Something about Van Ronk's Brooklyn-ish asthmatic/emphysemic wheeze makes the track stand out starkly, and in his version the lyric "This old hammer killed John Henry / But it won't kill me" sounds to my ear like: "This old hammer killed John Henry / Who killed me?" Van Ronk died in February 2002.<br />
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<i>"Spike Driver Blues," Dave Van Ronk, Down in Washington Square: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, 2013</i></div>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-8890959527800037742015-04-24T15:12:00.002-05:002015-04-24T15:28:28.485-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>North American Anthology</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of<b> Pop Music Literature</b></span></div>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Two: </b><span style="color: #660000;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000;">Bayard Godsave's "White Man in Hammersmith"</span></span></span></span></h4>
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Bayard Godsave's short novel*, "White Man in Hammersmith," which appears in <i>Torture Tree</i>, is dedicated in part "to Town." That's me.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #660000; font-size: x-small;">*I prefer the term "short novel" to "novella," because <i>novella</i> strikes the same reactive nerve in me as do most portmanteaus: <i>webisode</i>, <i>guesstimate</i>, and the now thankfully obsolete <i>cassingle</i>. These words create bullshit specificity -- do we really need a word to indicate a thing and its form all in one go? Even short novel seems unnecessary and arbitrary: is <i>Of Mice and Men</i> called a short novel? Or <i>Bright Lights, Big City</i>? Anyway: I will refer to Godsave's "W.M. in H." as a <i>story</i> from here on.</span></blockquote>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NMM_VvVEIm8/VTkVHR98o2I/AAAAAAAAB8Q/yJwDpl__4go/s1600/10348541_10102079476424638_8911946170694323951_n-194x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NMM_VvVEIm8/VTkVHR98o2I/AAAAAAAAB8Q/yJwDpl__4go/s1600/10348541_10102079476424638_8911946170694323951_n-194x300.jpg" height="200" width="129" /></a>It is a great story full of great writing, and I'm proud to be identified as its ideal audience (if that's what a dedication is meant to do...?). The story is narrated by a expat American running a small recording studio in Trinidad, and his ancillary connection to an attempted coup there by radical muslims in 1996.<br />
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The title comes from The Clash's "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais," which the band released as a single in June 1978. It also appears on the US version of their eponymous 1977 debut album, which wasn't released in the States until 1979. "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais" is the best Clash song, a song that well illustrates their mesh of politics and punk, a song that cements them as The Only Band That Matters. I presume Bayard dedicated "W.M. in H." to me because he know how much I love "(W.M.) in H. P.," and how much I revere the song's co-author, Joe Strummer. However, there are aspects to both the song and its namesake story that touch on issues of (White Man) privilege and cultural appropriation that also -- perhaps not as consciously -- might play into the dedication and the thematic unity between the song, the story, and its dedicatee (i.e., yrs trly.)<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oWAMin8BnCs/VTqXCO2VZHI/AAAAAAAAB8k/PbR6wzIEbVE/s1600/hammersmith-palais-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oWAMin8BnCs/VTqXCO2VZHI/AAAAAAAAB8k/PbR6wzIEbVE/s1600/hammersmith-palais-02.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a>The song "(W.M.) in H.P." is about a white Londoner (Strummer, himself the son of a British foreign service diplomat) who attends a a reggae concert at the Palais, hoping to absorb some of the danger and rebellion of Jamaican music but ultimately let down by the show's shallow glitz and showmanship: .<i>..but it was Four Tops all night / with encores from stage right</i>. The singer then turns that thought onto the shallowness of the by-then-fully-mature London punk scene -- <i>they're all too busy fighting / for a good place under the lighting</i> -- when they should be using punk's energy for forward political movement: <i>the new groups are not concerned / with what there is to be learned / They've got Burton suits, you think its funny / turning rebellion into money</i>. By song's end, the singer himself gives up and gives in: <i>I'm the all-night drug-prowling wolf / who looks so sick in the sun / I'm the white man in the Palais / To go looking for fun</i>. It's sort of Thomas Frank's <i><span style="color: #660000;">Commodify Your Dissent</span></i> in a four-minute pop song.<br />
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The narrator in Godsave's novel is essentially taking on the same mission as Strummer in the song: he uses his white American privilege to make a personal paradise of Trinidad in the '90s, appropriating what he prefers from the culture (music, weed, an atmosphere of danger and dissent) without really understanding what he's doing. (Cf. Strummer on the recording of <i>Sandinista!</i>, the Clash's Jamaican dub and US hip-hop influenced album named after socialist Nicaraguan rebels: "I smoked so much pot, I'm surprised I haven't turned into a bush.") At the same time, the Trinidadian mystic/musician Master Z, with whom our narrator is obsessed and embroiled, is appropriating western/America hip hop in it's 90's/Pantherish guise of radical militarism, just as Strummer reports finding Leroy Smart and Delroy Wilson taking on aspects of the stalwart oldies-circuit Four Tops.<br />
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"W.M. in H"'s narrator's white/rich/expat privilege is most evident in that the novel places him always in contexts of recall and reaction: his privilege prevents him from doing anything but react. Most of his interactions with Master Z happen through media -- observing his radicalism through a control room's window, watching the coup on television. Our narrator can only consume culture, he can't really engage with it. He's the audience to history, like Strummer at the Palais or standing by as Caribbean youth challenged UK bobbies at the Notting Hill riots in 1976 (cf. The Clash, "White Riot.") This is part of what privilege does -- puts you behind the window, puts you in front of the screen, makes you audience or consumer rather than actor or maker. It makes you a book's dedicatee, perhaps, but not its author.<br />
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Neither "W.M. in H"'s narrator, nor "(W.M.) in H.P"'s narrator, nor I (fan of both) can be free of allegations of privilege and cultural appropriation. The life I live, the music I prefer, are things given to me, handed down or handed over. Even my kids are mine through a kind of cultural appropriation, though its not pleasant to dwell on that thought. One doesn't like to think of oneself as more Four Tops than drug-prowling wolf, even here in my lower-middle forties.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GCb3s8Nicvw/VTqXDvcDtPI/AAAAAAAAB8s/CC2EL4h_ku4/s1600/hammersmith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GCb3s8Nicvw/VTqXDvcDtPI/AAAAAAAAB8s/CC2EL4h_ku4/s1600/hammersmith.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a>Junior Murvin said: <i>All the peacemakers turn war officers.</i><br />
Eddy Grant said: <i>Well, I'm running -- police on my back.</i><br />
Willie Williams said:<i> A lotta people won't get no justice tonight, so a lotta people going to have to stand up and fight.</i><br />
Lloyd Price said:<i> Stagger Lee threw seven, Billy swore that he threw eight.</i><br />
James Wayne said: <i>Down the road, came Junco Partner -- he was loaded as can be.</i><br />
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Joe Strummer, who also said these things, died in December 2002. The Hammersmith Palais closed down in 2007 and was demolished in June 2012.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #660000;">p.s.</span></b> Order Bayard Godsave's <i>Torture Tree</i> <a href="http://www.queensferrypress.com/books/torturetree.html">here</a> or ask for it at your local bookseller's. Both of the short novels within are tremendously good and well worth your time, attention, and dirty ill-gotten lucre.</div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-57686614011697817792015-04-21T17:55:00.001-05:002015-04-21T18:03:24.828-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>North American Anthology</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">of<b> Pop Music Literature</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>
One: </b><span style="color: #660000;"> </span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000;">Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" #12 & 35</span></span></span></span></h4>
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Jack Dove dj'd under a name that would later embarrass him, having chosen a tag that was cutting edge at its invention but dulled and gummy by the middle of the next year. He might have done better by "dj jack dove," in e.e. cummings uncaps, which through its obviousness and utility would have stayed sharper in the knifeblock than the name he'd stretched for. It was under this name, the one he'd wince to hear when he'd run into patrons of the dance club in later years -- always at the grocery store or the mall, wherever the lights were too bright, and always when his kids were misbehaving, the auld acquaintance being the absolute worst kind -- under this name he'd posted to the internet a mash-up of Bob Dylan's thing about "everybody must get stoned" and Sly Stone's thing about "I-high love everyday people."</div>
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It had come to him in his sleep, or from the verge of wakefulness anyway -- connecting those two songs, and he'd worked on a title before he'd manipulated the music into any form of actuality. Downloading, cutting up, recalling a short story from his high school literature textbook, all of it coming together without really thinking about it, almost in the way he read those stories in high schools, watching the words without recognizing that he wasn't actually reading, seeing without comprehending, turning back to see where he'd stopped paying attention. What is there to know about zen that one cannot better intuit about zen? </div>
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Dylan's song is, on the level most often appreciated, about getting high. It's also about a certain kind of inevitability, of outside forces working upon the individual: they will stone you when you are walking home, but you needn't feel so all alone -- they do this shit to <i>e'erbody</i>. Stone's song, meanwhile, is about acceptance and diversity, different strokes that move the world, but it's also kind of a resignation to our separateness, to man's inability to figure out what bag you're in. It's also about getting high. Only in that every Sly Stone song is about getting high.</div>
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None of these levels factored into Jack Dove's work with the two songs in ProTools -- to the extent that he sought meaning at all, he meant only to recreate the idea that had come to him in sleep, the creation of a sound he'd heard in a dream, a sound that did not exist and wasn't even a sound. But its interesting to consider that Jack Dove took two songs that are celebratory on their topmost layer ("What do call what's <i>above</i> the subtext?") then merged them into something about the inevitability of division, persecution, and violence. The addition of the Shirley Jackson story, in the form of the composition's title and that doubled meaning of "to stone," underscores all of this in a way that, again, the mash-up artist -- the author, or collagist -- was entirely unaware but for which he must still be held responsible.</div>
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The song he'd created -- or merged, or stole: these are someone else's argument to make with you -- this song made from other songs about stoning and people and everybody, this song has long since disappeared from digital space, from peer-to-peer file sharing sites, or wherever such things once had their loci. The source file must have lived on some long-wiped hard drive, the weblink broken and 404'ing to nowhere and nothing. Before winking out, and according to server analytics themselves now overwritten with now-now-now, the file was downloaded two hundred and thirty seven times. Its possible, one supposes, that copies may still exist, floating out on the ethers and iClouds, ready for recharge on a Gen2 mp3 player in the lowermost desk drawer in an ex-girlfriend's guest room, just as it is possible that it is gone entirely. Like the sound of an airplane too far away to see, its jet trail only ones and zeroes.</div>
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Stranger still: when Jack Dove merged the Stone horns of Cynthia and Jerry with the Dylan horns of Doc Butler and Charlie McCoy, he also merged -- in ways too elaborate to detail -- distant branches of his family tree, as one of the horn players of the Family Stone was a shirt-tail relation of his maternal uncle and one of Dylan's players had once been married to a second cousin-once-removed, but mapping this out is oblique and hard to follow. And, frankly, as Jack Dove was no more aware of this than any other layer of meaning beneath what can be felt in one's funk and heard through one's earbuds, to make anything more of this particular coincidence would be to strain credulity.</div>
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Some time later, Jack Dove was recognized by his long-lapsed dj tag in a southside Super Target by a man only slightly younger than he, but a younger man all the same, one who'd so far resisted any urge to change his clothes or hairstyle or metaphysics from how'd they'd been situated way back in his dancehall days. "Yo: dope, that was dope," this younger man said, in relation to the digital construction or the dj or that period in which they once shared common space. Then a handshake too intricate to recall and a question: "You holding?" Jack Dove looked to his small children in the cart as if he were afraid they might be hip to the lingo, as if they'd knew the soundtrack, as if they too might be hiding pebbles in their balled-up fists.</div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-41653586402496113192014-05-24T13:07:00.000-05:002014-05-24T13:07:00.606-05:00Second Hand News (Part Three)<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>And now the thrilling conclusion to...</i><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Wade's Husk</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I</span>n the comfort of the living room, the telethon went coasting into its final hour. The host, clearly crushed by the low totals on the tally board, loosened his necktie and lowered himself onto the studio's platform steps. "These kids," he said, leaning his head onto his microphone hand, "who will help them, if not you? And when, if not now?" And then more video clips of the children, many of them as old as me, striving to play, to laugh and smile and plead with dewy eyes. Did they have any idea how lucky they were, those kids, for their care and attention, for their stirring afflictions? At the end, with music swelling and toll-free numbers scrolling, one little boy who seemed half made of metal was caught giggling at the spoonful of applesauce held out for him by a red-sweatshirted volunteer. She pressed her finger to his nose like a button. What could be more lovely?<br />
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When it was at last all over, my brother's rumpled castoff husk reflected in the darkened TV screen.<br />
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I got the shirt off first, unbuttoning the cuffs and jerking the cotton from the arms when it snagged on a crack or a cuticle. Little bits of him flaked off like dust, scratching the tenderness out of my own hands. Next went the shoes and the socks, the pants and finally the underwear: every part of him yellow and gruesome, coiled like rotted rope. I bunched his clothes and carried them to the laundry chute, leaving his shoes neatly aligned by his bedroom door as if it were St. Nicholas' Day.<br />
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Maneuvering the husk into one of the foggy biomed bags the city provides for Tuesday pickups, I noticed the Sail Club bracelet still wound around his stiff wrist. I yanked fiercely -- tried my best to twist his rigored fingers -- but in the end it took the garden shears from the garage. Stabbing through the thin underside of the wrist with the wide lower jaw of the shears and working ruggedly through the his arm, ripping the skin rather than cleaving it.<br />
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Detached, Wade's arm was lighter than I'd expected, and despite the toughness of the outer layer, the inside was still damp and not as obscenely jaundiced. I ran a finger down the glossy inner arm, collecting some moisture off the insides like the dew that develops on refrigerated cling wrap. The hollow inside smelled a good deal like my gym locker, like a camp mattress. Holding his skin to the light showed the sinewy indentations of veins and muscles. I'd never before noticed the cross-hatched and wavy texture of all skin -- his and mine both. I'd though fingerprints were limited to the fingers. But no: we are everywhere covered by swirls and roadmap routes and ravines. There is no silk to skin at all.<br />
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I found I could fit my hand into his, and I wore his skin as a glove while I sealed the body bag and ran the vacuum, which rattled over his spot on the rug as if it were sucking up tacks. His fingers seemed to tingle over mine, they seemed both fragile and mean, fingers that must have scuttled quickly through snow, wanting to both retreat to a mitten and yet go on packing a better snowball. This was, wasn't it, his winter skin?<br />
<br />
Lugging the bag downstairs and outside, I let his head waffle and thump against each step but the last. I waited there at the curb for the moment my father's wagon would turn up the drive, waited in the stamping cold and its slight scent of spring. Wade, I imagined, would be sitting up front in the passenger seat, and I would meet him with a wave as he sought out the bundled refuse of his former self.<br />
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the end<br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">last of three parts</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></i></div>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-3192136527974788832014-05-23T16:44:00.000-05:002014-05-23T16:44:00.327-05:00Second Hand News (Part Two)<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>We now return you to...</i><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Wade's Husk</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I</span>t had happened for the first time on my ninth birthday, in front of all my friends from the third grade. That was back when there weren't that many people shedding, when they didn't know if it could be catching. People thought it was a thing caught by touch, like leopardsy or cooties.<br />
<br />
So there was Jon and Chad Schmidt and Chad Schmidt's brother all gathered around the dining room table, candles barely in my cake and not even lit, and Wade starts shaking and picking at himself, all the mothers gasping and pushing their kids to the front door. Chad Schmidt's brother had to be pulled by his collar. My parents -- no one knew anything then -- sped him off to the hospital and I was left alone, nine years old, with my yellow cake and wrapped presents. Wade had never been satisfied with just his own birthday, he always wanted mine as well; ever since, his wasted husks have haunted me at nighttimes, ruining perfectly good dreams with their bitter laughs and soggy motion.<br />
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His shell was still lying tangled on the floor of the den the next morning when I checked in on the telethon -- the hosts were sleepy and slow to respond to a chirping girl in metal crutches. My parents were in the kitchen, racing the paper and sipping coffee. "Wade shed," I told them. "And then just left himself right there on the floor."<br />
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"Aww," my mother said, setting her mug on the breakfast nook bench, "my poor poor baby." But I am the younger, I am the baby, and I very nearly said so, but all I had by then was the back of her bathrobe. My father meanwhile looked up from the Arts & Leisure section to consider me over the top of his glasses. "A family," he said, his attention back on the paper, "shares responsibilities. It'd be nice if you pitched in once in a while."<br />
<br />
But no way was I going to have anything to do with that thing. It was his skin, after all: what could belong to him more? So I retreated to my room, between the bed and the wall, looking over some <i>Incredible Hulks</i> and listening to the voices in Wade's room as they cracked right through the plaster. My mother promised him anything he wanted from the grocery store in that sweet sort of tone I only hear after the school's Spring concert and the winter one. "Are you comfortable?" she asked, and "Not even Alpha-Bits? Not even Marathons?" And then my father too: "Nothing at all, champ?"<br />
<br />
Before long, Father was at my door, more familiar in his way. "Come out of there," he told me, "and let's get this den cleaned up." Wade stood directly behind him, pink as Valentine candy, a vicious grin cutting across his tight new skin.<br />
<br />
They took him to the mall, my parents, for new soccer cleats and probably ice cream, leaving me to dispose of his remains. I warmed some water in the Radarange and stirred in a packet of cocca and crispy marshmallows. I had a Diet Slice and some cheese crackers. I put the telethon on the kitchen's black-and-white, and I tried to imagine a house not so haunted.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
---to be concluded---<br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">second of three parts</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></i></div>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-3165326067283878842014-05-22T20:00:00.003-05:002014-05-22T20:04:56.751-05:00Second Hand News (Part One)<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Wade's Husk</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>first appeared in Potomac Review</i></div>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>Vol 7, No 1, Winter 1999-2000</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">M</span>y Brother Wade got the TV remote out of my hands with a great final tug and then he was down on the brown shag carpeting, wiggling out of his skin; he is in that 12 percent. I should have seen it coming -- the way his hand had clamped waxy and cold around mine, the way he slurred through his loosening lips and stamped heavily around the ottoman like a mummy in snow boots -- and had I known, <i>had I but thought!</i> as my father says, I would have been in a better position to keep the remote. Instead it was now going spend the rest of the evening in my brother's old hollow hand, the fingers stiffening over the buttons, stuck on some horrid sports channel.<br />
<br />
In summers, he can get it off in one piece, Wade can, if he unbuttons his shirt, tears open his cheek from the temples to just past the shoulders and then backs out of the whole deal as if it were a tight pair of jeans. In winter, though, it's harder for him: he grunts and whines, he flips himself around on the floor trying to get at those parts of him that haven't slackened yet. Watching him, you think of fish struggling upstream, or the groggy bears that in storybooks shuffle stretching from their caves to scratch their hackles against pine bark. You think of Discovery Network rattlesnakes.<br />
<br />
It was over soon enough, and my brother stood naked and sunburn pink in the middle of the room, catching his breath. I waved him out of the way of the television and, once he'd gone into the upstairs bathroom to cover his tender new layer in Noxema, I switched over to the cerebral palsy telethon just now hitting its stride on Channel 18. I'd had to actually get up off the recliner and press the little black buttons on the set itself, stepping clear of Wade's skin, the remote trapped somewhere beneath the chest cavity, his stupid face beaming up in dumb eyeless surprise.<br />
<br />
"Aren't you at least going to clean it up?" I shouted towards the stairs. It was already drying out and stiffening up, turning in spots that sick shade of yellow. I sat on the lip of the chair and poked at it with the tip of one Ked, having to my memory never been alone with one of his husks before. His chest dented in over the tip of my shoe, then slowly reclaimed its shape once I'd sat back. On television, the actor that plays Fonzie held a microphone to a little boy who's mouth could barely work around his words.<br />
<br />
Wade returned in his soccer shorts, the smell of cold cream stinging my eyes. He draped bath towels over the couch, wound the remote from the clutches of his former self, and eased down onto the cushions. "Fffff," he goes, blowing air through his teeth at like the slightest twitch. He clicked the sports back on.<br />
<br />
I told him again he'd better clean himself up. After a while, I couldn't stand looking at them anymore -- not the old Wade laid out and not the knee-socked athletes bounding across the tube -- and went into my room. We could be just months from a cure, they'd said on the telethon, about those other kids.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
---to be continued---<br />
<i><span style="color: #990000;">first of three parts</span></i></div>
<br />Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-35473963353937958892014-04-03T10:30:00.000-05:002014-04-03T11:09:40.963-05:00Auld Acquaintance (Part Four)Boston, Mass. 1996.<br />
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The oranges never came. I got a check for $100. Bob Edwards didn't call. Harper's never approached me. I called Florida State's Writing Program and asked about the oranges. They said they worked with a particular grove and if I never received the oranges, I should take it up with them. I called the grove on three separate occasions, an answering machine each time. My Homicide phone did not ring.</div>
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<i>(Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to.)</i></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q_FZ3h_9iWU/UzhyyiMfatI/AAAAAAAAB6Q/VcbIE3mmnhU/s1600/mlB_ZLgVN3ma7fNw0WOSCiw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q_FZ3h_9iWU/UzhyyiMfatI/AAAAAAAAB6Q/VcbIE3mmnhU/s1600/mlB_ZLgVN3ma7fNw0WOSCiw.jpg" height="127" width="200" /></a>"The Custodian" appeared in Sundog, and has been reprinted in a couple anthologies and a textbook, and it showed up as the topic of an <a href="http://english.wisc.edu/wallace/?page_id=63">article</a> by Ron Wallace in <i><a href="https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media">AWP Chronicle</a></i>. It lives on in the Web in <a href="http://leemartinauthor.com/blog/2012/08/taking-care-at-the-end-the-art-of-misdirection/">interesting</a> <a href="http://www.smokelong.com/interview/pamelapainter26.asp">and</a> <a href="http://rochellehurt.com/2012/06/20/worlds-best-short-short-story-contest/">complimentary</a> ways, and family, co-workers, and friends across the country have reported coming across it in writing classes, teacher trainings, and Google searches. My wife read the story online before our first date, doing her due diligence to dig up any digital dirt.</div>
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In some ways, that story's out there having the career I always wanted for myself. On the cusp of its eighteenth birthday, that story is not so much a child of mine as a doppelgänger, a shade using my name and making something of itself while I stay home and do the washing up.</div>
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Anyone who says they have no regrets is either lying through their unreflective teeth or living such a charmed life as to be contemptible beyond all measure of reason. Even Sinatra reported having "a few" regrets, and who lived a more privileged existence than Frank <i>effing</i> Sinatra?</div>
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I regret that I didn't push harder for the deluxe treatment -- pushing back on Florida State for NPR connections, for a little box in the Readings sections in the front of Harpers. I know other writers who've sparked their careers by nudging editors. Just wasn't me, still isn't.</div>
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<i>(Coyness is nice, and coyness can stop you from saying all the things in life you'd like to.)</i></div>
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For lack of a crate of oranges, I went to one of the futon stores that serve all the underfunded students of metro Boston, and bought a table that fairly looked to be made from old fruit crates. I stenciled the thing with red spray paint and made myself a crate where none had appeared.</div>
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I stayed in Boston until August of 2002, then brought that coffee table back to Milwaukee with me. I published a few more stories in disparate places and I worked on a novel for a while, but sputtered at it and back-burnered it, and worked more and got married and had two kids through adoption and a book appeared in my local bookstore that traded on exactly the same high concept character idea I'd been working on in my book except written by someone else, which crushed me, and though work I invested myself into issues of student retention and success and always sort of thought the whole time that I'd get back to writing fiction, and then one day you realize you've entirely run out of excuses. "Read less, write more," a friend wrote to me at the end of last week. "Seriously."<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
------</div>
<br />
In Pam Painter's Short Short class, everybody had their particular trick when it came to in-class recitals. I recall Ted Adams rubbing hell out of his eye socket while trying to bring back the opening paragraphs of <i>A Hundred Years of Solitude</i>. And I remember the otherwise unflappable Jessica Purdy in full voice-quake, maybe reciting the tip-of-the-tongue-to-the-top-of-the-teeth bit from <i>Lolita</i>. I squinted, head down, trying to imagine the page I'd studied, saying...<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">it was
between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again,</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">hearing the
watch.</span> It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I
give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire<span style="text-decoration: none;">; it's rather
excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all
human experience</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">which can fit
your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's.</span>
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it
now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. <span style="text-decoration: none;">The field
only reveals to man his own folly and despair,</span> and victory is an
illusion of philosophers and fools.</span> </blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Previously: <span style="color: #990000;">Parts <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/03/auld-acquaintance-part-one.html">One</a>, <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-two.html">Two</a>, and <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-three.html">Three</a>.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;">–§–</span></div>
</div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-28900014355256984732014-04-02T10:30:00.000-05:002014-04-03T11:13:04.215-05:00Auld Acquaintance (Part Three)<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Brian Hinshaw</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>The 1996 World's Best Short Short Story</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Sundog: The Southeast Review</i>, Vol. 16, No. 2</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #990000; font-size: large;">The Custodian</span></div>
<br />
The job would get boring if you didn't mix it up a little. Like this woman in 14-A, the nurses called her the mockingbird, start any song and this old lady would sing it through. Couldn't speak, couldn't eat a lick of solid food, but she sang like a house on fire. So for a kick, I would go in there with my mop and such, prop the door open with a bucket, and set her going. She was best at the songs you'd sing with a group -- "Oh, Susanna," campfire stuff. Any kind of Christmas song worked good too, and it always cracked the nurses if I could get her into "Let It Snow" during a heat spell. We'd try to make her take up a song from the radio or some of the old songs with cursing in them, but she would never go for those. Although once I had her do "How Dry I Am" while Nurse Winchell fussed with the catheter.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, her daughter or maybe granddaughter comes in while 14-A and I were partway into "Auld Lang Syne" and the daughter says "oh oh oh" like she had interrupted scintillating conversation and then she takes a long look at 14-A lying there in the gurney with her eyes shut and her curled-up hands, taking a cup of kindness yet. And the daughter looks at me, the way a girl does at the end of an old move and she says "my god," says, "you're an angel," and now I can't do it anymore, can hardly step into her room.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Previously: <span style="color: #990000;"> Parts <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/03/auld-acquaintance-part-one.html">One</a> and <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-two.html">Two</a></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Next: <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-four.html">Aftermath</a></span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-7237009210356633862014-04-01T10:04:00.000-05:002014-04-03T11:12:50.471-05:00Auld Acquaintance (Part Two)<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Previously: </i><i style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/03/auld-acquaintance-part-one.html">Part One</a> </i></div>
Charlestown, Mass. Early Summer, 1996.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'd bought the phone at Office Max, likely the cheapest model on offer. It was only fate or kismet that it had the exact ring as the office phones featured on NBC's <i>Homicide</i>, a show that made it okay to spend Friday nights alone. A show that kept me at my cathode-tube iMac until 10 Eastern, writing away, because what else could I do with the time? If hunger is the best gravy, loneliness is the best punch-clock. <a href="http://www.ninomiya.org/otherstuff/phone.wav">This</a> is how my phone rang. Mine and Detectives Pembleton, Munch, and Lewis.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-79TooV0x0ac/UzhhDC2GUOI/AAAAAAAAB50/lAwgQXqZOqs/s1600/SOFA+FRONT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-79TooV0x0ac/UzhhDC2GUOI/AAAAAAAAB50/lAwgQXqZOqs/s1600/SOFA+FRONT.jpg" height="138" width="200" /></a>So one Saturday morning that summer following Pam Painter's Short Short course, my phone burbled. It was Janet Burroway, a name that was familiar but one I couldn't place. (Had my back not been turned to my bookcase, where Burroway's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Fiction-Guide-Narrative-Edition/dp/0321277368/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1396203008&sr=8-5&keywords=janet+burroway+imaginative+writing"><i>Writing Fiction</i></a> was the bulk of my personal Self-Help, Advice, and How-To section, I might have gotten it.) I hazily realized she was calling to tell me that my story had won Florida State's Short Short contest for that year. She told me how much she liked the story, explicating the part that calls back "Auld Lang Syne" in the mother's cupped hands, told me last year's winner had not only won the promised $100 and a crate of oranges but also had this story reprinted in Harper's Magazine and read aloud on Morning Edition. She told me I sounded young -- I wasn't even aware I'd spoken -- and asked what I did.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I told her I was a grad student in Emerson's writing program and working in Human Resources for a mutual funds company. She said she was thrilled that a young person had won, that others had spent years trying to win their contest. (To someone with my esteem issues, this meant she was already regretting the decision.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
She asked if I knew of Jerome Stern. Again, familiar but not clicking (and again, Stern's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Shapely-Fiction-Jerome-Stern-ebook/dp/B004V3QUKQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396203054&sr=8-1&keywords=Making+Shapely+Fiction"><i>Making Shapely Fiction</i></a> was right there in the room with me.) "He was," said Burroway, "but there you've already heard me say 'was.'" The Florida State contest had been Stern's labor of love, and he had just that Spring died of cancer. "So I can't promise you that this year will be like last year, in terms of the exposure," Burroway said. "We're all fumbling in the dark here, after such a loss."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The call came to end, and I hung up, and holy shit, I think I was just talking with Janet Burroway. And I won, and I'm going to be in print and I'm going to eat oranges and be in Harpers and Bob Edwards is going to interview me on the radio.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I called my parents. "Oh," they said, "that's great." My effusing embarrassed them. I felt like I was telling them I'd discovered all the eldritch secrets of the Kingdom of Atlantis. "Mmm-hmm," they said, "how wonderful. One hundred dollars, you say?" I'd borrowed $40,000 from the federal government to go to art school and write stories, and here I'd just made enough off of professional writing to pay for about two weeks' worth of interest on that loan. They didn't see the victory.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
So I called Pam, who was genuine and thrilled. She asked if I'd called my parents. I told her I had, but that I felt like they didn't totally get it. Pam said we'd need to get the class back together when the oranges arrived. "We'll inject them with vodka and have a party!" she said.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I was over the moon. Could not sit still. Everything was about to change.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And then, for an awfully long time, nothing happened.</div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i><br /></i>
<i>Next: <span style="color: #990000;"> <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-three.html">The Story in Question</a></span></i></div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-41665497525384128012014-03-31T09:02:00.000-05:002014-04-03T11:18:18.427-05:00Auld Acquaintance (Part One)Emerson College. Boston, Mass. Spring of 1996.<br />
<br />
I wrote a 250-word, two paragraph story on assignment for <a href="http://www.emerson.edu/academics/departments/writing-literature-publishing/faculty?faculty_id=439&filter=F">Pamela Painter</a>'s short short class. This story concerned a woman who visits her mother, dying of Alzheimer's in a nursing home. Together, they sing Christmas carols, though the dying mother has otherwise lost all powers of language and recognition. This story was pulled directly from my own mother's experience with my grandmother, who'd passed away a few years before after a long slow decline.<br />
<br />
I read the story aloud in class. "That's sweet," Pam said after I'd finished. "Now make it cruel."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fUAS8e383FM/UzhYINP4rPI/AAAAAAAAB5k/wg01XViJqMU/s1600/dollhouse+sofa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fUAS8e383FM/UzhYINP4rPI/AAAAAAAAB5k/wg01XViJqMU/s1600/dollhouse+sofa.jpg" height="133" width="200" /></a><i>Make it cruel. </i> This is the genius sting of Pam Painter's teaching in three little words. (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Fiction-Guide-Narrative-Edition/dp/0205750346">Janet Burroway</a> has similar advice: "Only trouble is interesting.") Pam was the best writing teacher I've had, and I've had more than a few. Pam killed your darlings. She had no patience for those who didn't do the work, or who didn't invest their all into their writing. She required her students to memorize and recite good writing, however we might define it, so that we'd learn to attend and respect the language. (I memorized the last paragraphs of John Cheever's "Farewell, My Brother" and the opening of Quentin's section of <i>The Sound and The Fury.)</i> Once, Pam made a student delete a Word document from his laptop computer so the he'd have to rewrite -- not just revise -- the short work of half-assedness he'd just shared with the class.<br />
<br />
Fellow grad students at Emerson feared Pam Painter, and with good reason. If you took Pam's class, you had to have the confidence enough to know you could do the work, and lots of it. Years later, I was invited into Pam's writing group. Another member mentioned having spent the previous day meditating in praise of Pam's great mentorship. "Well," Pam said, "you should have been writing."<br />
<br />
So...I rewrote the story, changing the point of view character and clicking into "Auld Lang Syne" as lodestone for memory, cutting away explanation for inference, hanging everything on this notion of cruelty. Probably I'd been listening to a lot of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0l3QWUXVho">Nick Lowe</a>.<br />
<br />
We were asked to bring stamped envelopes to class along with our final drafts, all of us sending off our manuscripts to Florida State University's <a href="http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazines/southeast_review.htm">Sundog: The Southeast Review</a>. I'd sent out stories before, and I'd slowly been wall-papering my Charlestown apartment's bathroom with rejection slips: The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Kenyon, Agni, Antioch, Cream City. So far, I'd been published only in Drake University's student literary magazine (1989) and in a short-lived Marxist newspaper in Chicago (1991). An unpublished runner-up in Milwaukee's Shepherd Express 1992 short story contest.<br />
<br />
You learned to accept rejection, and you came to relish those notices that came on full-sized paper or with a human touch -- a signature, a few words of encouragement. "This came close!" someone had written (by hand! blue ink!) on a form that came back to me from Story Magazine.<br />
<br />
You've heard writers compare their works with children -- you raise them from nothing into near-adulthood, send them out in the work and hope they do well, etc. Not in my experience. For me, submitted stories were like the mash notes I passed to crushes from the 7th grade through way too late into high school: awkward and needly, both full of and unsure of themselves, bombastic but fragile. <i> Do you like me? If so, check here. </i>So much pressure on 22¢ postage.<br />
<br />
So off went the latest and last version of the story, its title changed from "Adeste Fideles" to "The Custodian," motoring to Florida under the protection of a security envelope and an Elvis stamp.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>Next: <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2014/04/auld-acquaintance-part-two.html">A few phone calls</a></span></i></div>
Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-81527709674582893812014-03-29T15:19:00.000-05:002014-03-29T19:03:34.202-05:00Put Up a Parking LotBoston, Mass. Spring of 1995.<br />
<br />
One of the other grad students was hosting a party out in Braintree. I don't remember anything about the actual party beyond a general sense of red: a walk from the Red Line T, a new construction condo of faux red brick, red Solo cups for your bottle beer. (No one did kegs in grad school, as the transportation issue got in the way: no one had a trunk. Better to ask that all comers BYOB, carry in twelve's from the package store on the corner.) I feel like <a href="http://www.chriselliott.org/">Chris</a> was at that party, and also <a href="http://christopherbundy.net/">Chris</a>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oEH371y8g5A/UzYcMgJmXMI/AAAAAAAAB5E/J74OZ91HrQE/s1600/usa-olympics-slideshow-red-solo-cup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oEH371y8g5A/UzYcMgJmXMI/AAAAAAAAB5E/J74OZ91HrQE/s1600/usa-olympics-slideshow-red-solo-cup.jpg" height="133" width="200" /></a>What I do remember well is leaving. A group of us called a cab, either in an effort to catch the last northbound train or because we'd missed it entire. We filled the cab, one of us shotgun and the rest crammed in along the backseat. I ended up in the middle, on the hump, pressed forward a bit to allow others to have girls on their laps. (Yes, they were women -- aspiring poets and memoirists, women who'd go on to high profile jobs at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brace, but because they were on boys' laps, they were girls too. Alluring, intimidating, unknowable girls.) I did not make friends easily that Spring, if indeed I ever have.<br />
<br />
The cab held a thick tong of incense, masking something earthier and less legal. The driver was thick and coal-black, a ringer for the actor Yaphet Kotto -- Lt. Al Giardello on NBC's <i>Homicide</i>, Fridays at 10 Eastern, a panacea for smart young men with inactive social schedules.<br />
<br />
The cabbie wore a dyed orange dashiki and a little pillbox hat to match. He was chanting along with some lush rhythms coming through the radio.<br />
<br />
I could not talk comfortably with girls, less so women or children. I inverted in the company of strangers or teachers or authorities of any stripe. Small talk was a foreign language. My tools were nervous laughter, self-consciousness, and lame attempts to look engaged without engaging with anyone. I inspected bookshelves or stayed close to the booze. Cf. Jona Lewie, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62eTq8ErUOQ&feature=kp">You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties</a>," Stiff Records, 1980.<br />
<br />
Who could I talk to? Without any crippling self-awareness whatsoever? Cab drivers.<br />
<br />
I met the driver's bloodshot eyes in the rearview, his skin so dark that the whites of his eyes looked jaundice yellow. Lined with weariness or herb, maybe both. "What are you listening to?" I asked. There was other conversation in the car, but it didn't involve me.<br />
<br />
His answer in a kind of Carribean patois: "West African chant, man." He issued some groove, spreading his hands wide and shimmying in his seat: picture Little Richard just about to hit the keys.<br />
<br />
"Right on," I said, then ducked down to watch Boston at night out the side windows. I felt him flicking his eyes towards me in the rearview: to the road and to me, the road and to me.<br />
<br />
"Ay man, ay," he said after a while.<br />
<br />
I gave him my attention, some negotiating going on with the couples to my right and left.<br />
<br />
"Ay man," he said. "You got beeg head, man. You know you got<br />
beeg head, man?"<br />
<br />
I needed clarification on the direction of the conversation. "You're asking," I said, "if I know that I have a big head?"<br />
<br />
"Yeah, man. You know? Beeg head fill up whole window." He gestured as to indicate all of the moon and stars. He had the attention of us all, by now.<br />
<br />
"I--," I said. "Yes, I'm aware that I have, I guess, a large head." (It's true. What can you do with a head this big? Hats don't work -- they only serve to make the head look even larger, the hat by comparison a tiny monkey fez. I can barely comb my hair.)<br />
<br />
The cabbie met my eyes and nodded, proud of me. "Beeg head," he said to himself. "Ay, Beeghead Man: what you do with beeg head, man?"<br />
<br />
Again, needed clarification. "What do I do with my big head?"<br />
<br />
"Yeah, man: whachu <u>do</u>?" The others in the cab useless now, not daring to laugh for fear they'd miss something.<br />
<br />
"Right now," I told the cabbie. "I'm in graduate school..." I wasn't sure how far out he wanted me to report.<br />
<br />
"GOOD," said the cabbie. "You fill beeg head up with <u>BOOK</u>."<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">–§–</span></div>
<br />Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-43550064096688314072014-03-28T19:08:00.001-05:002014-03-28T19:11:51.961-05:00Don't Stand So, Don't Stand SoA friend of mine coordinates English Composition courses for a college in a Midwestern state not far from here. Every now and then, I get a copy of a student message worth consideration, much as we used to bark about students when we were both teachers here in Milwaukee.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">Got this from female students this week:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"><i>Mr. [redacted], I was wondering who I should talk to regarding my current professor, [also redacted]. I am not satisfied with his teaching at all, he shows no respect for the students. If anyone walks in late he rolls his eyes at them every time. I got marked off on a rough draft because I didn’t have any resources, but no where in the requirements did it say that I needed any outside sources. I talked to him after a class and asked him and he then just told me that I need one. I was trying to understand and it felt like he was just shooing me away. I haven’t learned anything in his class because he uses examples from the 1990’s and doesn’t explain things very well, getting off topic in class sometimes. Then in a class period a couple weeks ago he was showing us a pepsi commercial from when he was a kid and when the clip was done on YouTube it showed suggestions for other related searches. There was a video of commercials that have been banned from TV and it was a girl eating a hot dog seductively making it look like something sexual. He then points it out to the class and laughs. I was disturbed at this, he then clicks on [another ad] because he was curious, the video then was a bunch of women eating different foods very seductively. It was very unprofessional and it should get brought to someones attention. Just wondering what I should do or who I should talk to?</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">I also have had meetings with other female students re: his showing of videos. One said "I felt that his desires [for the women in the ads] were on display for the whole class to see."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">ME: "You mean that he was, um, 'interested' in the images?"</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">HER: "Oh, yeah. he was totally creeping out on them."</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">I have two more meetings scheduled </span><span class="Object" id="OBJ_PREFIX_DWT76_com_zimbra_date" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: monospace;">today</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">and</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"> </span><span class="Object" id="OBJ_PREFIX_DWT77_com_zimbra_date" style="cursor: pointer; font-family: monospace;">tomorrow</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;">with yet other female students about, I am guessing, his porning out in class.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is followed by the firm but forgiving message he'd sent to the teacher in question. But the "examples from the 1990's" stuck with me. I felt the need to write a response in the character of the writing instructor in question, creating him out of the student's message and also getting in an old shot at the curse of the 3-Paragraph Theme, because there are some things of which I can never let go.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Britney,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">Your three paragraph theme regarding how much Rebecca Solnit hates the gym has led me to respond at length in writing of my own, not least because without proper context you might later off yourself like that one guest who was bullied so horribly on the Jenny Jones talk show. Remember Jenny Jones? She looked a little like Debra Norville, but was far sexier, particularly if you’ve seen her as I have, on internet video, taking down a footlong meatball sub.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">In any case, I suppose I can’t fault the structure of your essay, in which you charge Solnit with first hating technology, then cars with a bit more specificity, and ultimately the modern practice of driving one’s car to a health club in order to walk on a treadmill. Do they still call them Nordic Tracks, or perhaps Tracs, as we did in the 1990’s? (By the way, is it just me or does that decade seem like only a few years back, rather than 20 years ago now?) While your essay’s content may be questionable, your efforts to first introduce your topics, then enumerate them in order and in distinct paragraphs all to their own, and then succinctly summarize all you have to say in a one-sentence bang-and-done final sentence is, as we once said, pretty rad.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br />Structure-wise, you’ve constructed a taught triple-decker BLT sandwich whose content looks larger and more glistening in your hands than it might otherwise. If we can remember the movie titled “Almost Heroes,” which nominally starred the late Chris Farley and the pre-post-Friends Matthew Perry, we might remember that something that seems like it might be good on paper will actually come out sort of bloated and half-dead. While your paper goes only onto the top of a second page, I still had to take several breaks to watch an image gif of Ginger Spice licking a lollipop just to invigorate me to press on. I mean, your second paragraph was shorter than Urkel! Some ideas need time and length — say, that of Arsenio Hall’s fingers — to develop. (Maybe it’s the word “develop” that reminds me, but do you know if any footage exists of Anna Nicole Smith visiting a Hardee’s?)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br />If I were to rate your paper between 1 and 10, with 1 being Janet Reno chewing a Chicket and 10 being Heather Lockyear sucking a bratwurst out of a bun, I’d put your essay at about a 4. In other words, Courtney Love and rope licorice.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br />Please see me for conferences in the darkened basement hallway of the engineering building. Also, I just want all the student’s to know that I’ll be providing Nathan’s Hot Dogs as a free snack to whomever’s interested. (Have you seen the SBTB episode where Screech joins a competitive eating contest? That was a good one, right?)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br />Your Mack Daddy Composition Instructor,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Brian Hindshank</span></span>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-57750501780135227302014-03-28T16:24:00.001-05:002014-03-28T16:27:46.270-05:00She's My Soft-Touch Typewriter<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3pI_rZhtZs/UzXkwmXwyTI/AAAAAAAAB4w/4iFMsrzi5Dc/s1600/armdfrcs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3pI_rZhtZs/UzXkwmXwyTI/AAAAAAAAB4w/4iFMsrzi5Dc/s1600/armdfrcs.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">Franklin Bruno's book for </span><a href="http://333sound.com/" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">33 1/3</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"> has struck a really interesting way to write about music. It's an abecedary of </span><i style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">Armed Forces</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">' song titles, motifs, themes, important figures in 20th century fascism, etc., with only passing regard to Elvis Costello's private life (beyond those things that illuminate or problematize items listed above). By organizing the book alphabetically by key terms, Bruno can deal with the album's themes of militarism and imperialism in both the political and personal arenas in a way that connects by inference and foregrounding and callback. The album itself isn't Costello's best, and may not even make it into my All Time Favorite Desert Island Costello list, but it's probably the most worth examination and consideration in exactly the way Bruno goes about it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">Really the only aspect of Costello's personal life that plays a part in this book has to do with an ugly </span></span><a href="http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20073464,00.html" style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">argument </a><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">with Bonnie Bramlett and the Stephen Stills Band in a hotel bar in Columbus, OH, in 1979. Costello says things in this altercation that, whatever the motivation (i.e., trying to irritate Bonnie Bramlett) and how great the intoxication, are pretty unforgivable. (Although apparently his targets, James Brown and Ray Charles, did, or sort of did, forgive him.) Bruno's concern is only how that complicates, underscores, and cross-cuts Costello's aim on this album to twin interpersonal behavior with imperial and impersonal state actions, particular in regard to Costello's own connection to black American beat music.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">I've not read much of the 33 1/3 books but this was far different from the "fan's notes" I was expecting -- it's hard (and probably beside the point) to even detect whether Bruno even cares for Costello's record all that much, except as a kind of text to be read against its author's concerns. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">If more of these 33 1/3 books approach their subjects in this sort of lit-crit way, rather than in a "How They Made It" or "What the Lyrics Mean" fashion, count me in. I'm looking towards Lethem's book on <i>Fear of Music,</i> or maybe the one covering <i>Paul's Boutique.</i></span>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-33497725003660703562013-09-12T10:07:00.001-05:002013-09-12T10:08:14.346-05:00A Jumped-Up Pantry Boy Who Never Knew His Place<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If an auto-biography involves a tale that is at least partially based on the writer's own life, I'm going to coin auto-bibliography as a tale that informs the reader about his or her own experiences. Maybe often we say we "identify" with a character, but I think that's usually kind of froth of empathy and character motivation that parses to readers as sensible and real. But these are books that I identified with in a more personal way -- I saw myself in them. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I mean -- if I can paraphrase Morrissey -- they something to me about my life.</span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u>2. Five Auto-Bibliographical Novels</u></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u><br /></u></span></b>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GWFoMbpYLDQ/Ui9ORnCEXcI/AAAAAAAAB10/wHpdsmdBrR4/s1600/Mullhouse.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GWFoMbpYLDQ/Ui9ORnCEXcI/AAAAAAAAB10/wHpdsmdBrR4/s200/Mullhouse.png" width="128" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Steven Millhauser, <i><span style="color: #660000;">Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffery Cartwright</span></i>. A close read of the title gives it away, but this is a faux-biography of a ten-year-old novelist by his eleven-year-old best friend and biographer. The appeal is an incredibly detailed chronicle of childhood imagination, in such a way that vividly captures the spirit of play. For me, at the time I read it, it led to treasure trove of recovered memories -- the non-traumatic sort. (The conceit, spoiler alert, is that the genius artiste Edwin is really no different than any other particular boy who fascinates over comics and spaceships and toys.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jonathan Lethem, <i><span style="color: #660000;">The Fortress of Solitude</span></i>. Again, here is the exactness of the tween/teen years that resonates, in a novel that uses superhero powers as a metaphor in all kinds of cross-wired ways. I explained some of what I love about this book <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-know-im-unloveable-you-dont-have-to.html">here</a> (in a post whose title also quotes Morrissey -- I may be more of a Smiths fan than I thought I was). While I was reading this book, I wanted only to be reading this book. Not because it's particularly suspenseful or compelling in its plot, but because I really felt at home in reading it. I did not grow up in Brooklyn, my father was neither a painter nor a soul singer, and these characters would have been a few years older than me, and yet I more closely identified with this book than any other I've ever read. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Colson Whithead's <i><span style="color: #660000;">Sag Harbor</span></i> is The Fortress of Solitude on summer vacation. In a way that Lethem captures late 70's/early 80's teenagerdom, Whithead does the same for mid- to late-80's summer vacation on Long Island. He <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2009/05/by-that-soft-and-shining-sea.html">covers</a> the rise of the waffle cone, the summer of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, when everyone said "dag." There's also, here, a whiff of the teenaged fear/suspicion of dads -- one's one, others -- that resonated for me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">David Shields, <i><span style="color: #660000;">Dead Languages</span></i>. Another novel about a teenaged middle-class boy, this one with a stuttering problem and journalist parents. It's been a long time since I'd read this, but feeling pangs of identification with it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sam Lipsyte</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="color: #660000;">The Ask</span></i>. At the start of this book, its point-of-view character has a bureaucratic job with a third-tier university. It's a very funny book, particularly the daycare-in-a-minivan bit involving <i>The Passion of the Christ</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Extra non-novel bonus: Sam Lipsyte, "The Dungeon Master," <i><span style="color: #660000;">The Fun Parts</span></i>. A short story that recalls for me the Weir's Downer Avenue basement, playing D&D -- a game designed for 5-7 role players -- with one other person, with the game being far more about story-telling and problem-solving than dice roles and dwarf vs. beholder melee.</span>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-47803394602696388992013-09-10T09:58:00.000-05:002013-09-10T12:29:02.372-05:00There's Money In New Wave<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A friend -- my oldest friend, in fact -- asked me via text message to send him a list of the 50 books that have most influenced me. I like a good challenge, and I'm game to talk about good books, so I'm going to make use of this space to do it. In chunks, thematically linked, over the next ten posts -- and with the caveat that influences wax and wane (as do obsessions, phases of the moon, and/or friendships) so this may be biased towards the now. (Raymond Carver, for example, was a huge influence on how I wrote stories in pre- and early graduate school, but he doesn't hold much sway on me any longer. I guess we'll see if he makes the fifty.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>So: </b>this is for Rob Weir. Feel free to eavesdrop.</span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u>1. Five Books that Merge the Fiction and History</u></span></b><br />
<b><u><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></u></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
All five of these books sprawl without necessarily being long-- multiple characters and points of view, "plots" (such as there are any) covering long periods, connections drawn or suggested between disparate situations. None of these books would rightly be called "historical fiction," but yet they all are tethered in certain ways to events and people we'd recognize as having actually existed. These books appeal not because there are "real historical figures" in them, but because the merging of what we think of as "real" with fiction infuses mystery into what we think we know. Each of these books suggest some kind of invisible layer of meaning, some unknown connective thread, between what is real and what isn't, between what we know and who we are. Maybe when faced with the unknown or the insensible, we create meaning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hF-QEoa5Stk/UdRaJqon57I/AAAAAAAAB0w/X7Yga8Q3CVI/s510/74998403.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hF-QEoa5Stk/UdRaJqon57I/AAAAAAAAB0w/X7Yga8Q3CVI/s200/74998403.jpg" width="133" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jake Arnott's <i><span style="color: #660000;">The House of Rumour</span></i> is a fantastic novel, and it's a crying shame you haven't heard about it. It shares the literary DNA of David Mitchell's <i>Cloud Atlas</i> and Jennifer Egan's<i> A Visit from the Goon Squad</i>. In 22 chapters mapped on to the arcana of the tarot deck, Arnott links together a secret history of the 20th century. Actual historical figures interact with fictional characters, and different literary styles infect particular chapters. Ian Fleming appears as a point-of-view character, as does a character that could be a stand-in for George Michael (the pop star, not the founder of <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-official-fakeblock-app/id660387504">FakeBlock</a>). As in <i>Infinite Jest</i>, the plot -- such as there is one -- concerns a mysterious and important document related to Rudolph Hess' strange 1941 peace mission to Scotland.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">E. L. Doctorow, <i><span style="color: #660000;">Ragtime</span></i>. Race relations in the early 20th century, written with a cool kind of distance. Houdini, Freud, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Stanford White. Doctorow said, <span style="background-color: white;">"I'd never read that J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford met. But for me their meeting was unavoidable ... So have they met? They have now." </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Don DeLillo, <i><span style="color: #660000;">Underworld</span></i>. The long prologue first appeared a novella in a 1992 issue of Harper's Magazine as "Pafko at the Wall." At that time, Harper's Magazine used a different paper stock -- less shiny, thicker -- for the long-read folios in their magazine, paper that was gravid to the touch. I may have read this in the Cafe Demi. In it, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and NYC restauranteur Toots Shor watch the Giants play the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in 1951. The baseball from that game ("Giants Win the Pennant! Giants Win the Pennant!") carries through the rest of the book -- a talisman like the Hess documents in <i>House of Rumor</i>, the videotape in <i>Infinite Jest</i>, or...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">...the desiccated penis removed from Napoleon's corpse in John Vernon's <i><span style="color: #660000;">Peter Doyle</span></i>, a book which is sadly out of print. I wrote about <i>Peter Doyle</i> <a href="http://townblogb.blogspot.com/2008/12/poor-napoleon.html">here</a> a few years back. (I'd also put Peter Doyle on a list of books that seemed to promise a sequel that is yet to arrive, along with Peter Carey's <i>The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith</i> and Susanna Clarke's <i>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</i>.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Brooks Hansen, <i><span style="color: #660000;">The Chess Garden</span></i>. This novel involves letters sent home to Dayton, Ohio, by an elderly doctor assisting in a refugee camp in South Africa during the Boer War. The letters themselves become a kind of fable, though the "real" world the novel sets up includes a young Paul Lawrence Dunbar. There's a bit with a horse stuck in an attic during the Dayton flood. The horse is named Cow. It's fun and sad and weird in the right sort of balance.</span>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-33614011747437496962013-06-14T23:24:00.001-05:002013-06-14T23:27:50.904-05:00Short People Got No Reason<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7Fs_hI8yIvA/UbvscBwzK6I/AAAAAAAAB0M/QXgEIjvhjyE/s640/blogger-image--1176510020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7Fs_hI8yIvA/UbvscBwzK6I/AAAAAAAAB0M/QXgEIjvhjyE/s320/blogger-image--1176510020.jpg" width="199" /></a><span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Andrew Solomon's <i>Far From The Tree</i> is a project. It is work. It's a hefty book in hardcover, and it demands and deserves acuity from its readers. Mostly, that work feels rewarding, but it also feels like work. Many episodes with that book ended with clapping its cover down, sighing like a hard day had ended, swearing at its relentless punches at one's facility for empathy.</span></div>
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The introduction sets out a thesis on parents dealing with children they might not expect -- children with disabilities, gifts, mental illnesses. Solomon grants these children "horizontal identities," whereby they fit or identify more with others (even strangers) than the families, ancestry, social groups in which they have "vertical" identity. This carries into early chapters on the politics of deafness and dwarfism, areas that split over adherence to or an identity apart from the mainstream. Through surgery or DNA testing, modern medicine can "correct" or even (through eugenics) eliminate such populations, and Solomon argues with a great charity of humanity about why this is a dangerous and threatening idea.</div>
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Middle chapters break away somewhat to deal with families with greater issues, and the family stories in these chapters seem to get increasingly bleak to the point where one has to take regular breaks to hug one's own children, thankful that as tenuous or difficult as they can sometimes be, they are still a far lighter burden than some parents face. I found myself looking forward to the incongruous chapter on musical prodigies, figuring it would be a break from all the dire and the sad, but even there one finds tragic stories and broken lives.</div>
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It's also about that point in the book where attention turns from genetic conditions discovered at birth or early on to illnesses and behaviors that first manifest in later childhood or adolescence, which brings in a whole 'nother level of fraught anxieties.</div>
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What's important about <i>Far From The Tree</i>, despite or because of the work it demands, is how it reframes thinking about the types of children Solomon discusses and the need for parents, medical and mental health practitioners (and particularly ob/gyn and pediatric doctors), and all of the kinds of people who have operating hearts to deal more deeply with these children as persons, as beings with lives worth our time and our critical faculties and our work.</div>
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Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-69050747611031728132011-09-16T13:18:00.005-05:002011-09-17T10:15:04.578-05:00All Together Now: The Cousins Anthology<b>Episode One</b>: The Early Hard Day's Nights<br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><strong><span style="color:#3333ff;">The Cousins</span></strong> were an American rock band, active throughout the 2010s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Shorewood, WI, by 2011 the group consisted of Caleb (rhythm guitar, vocals), Andrew (bass guitar, vocals), Alex(lead guitar, vocals) and Sam(drums, vocals). Rooted in skiffle and 1950s rock and roll, the group later worked in many genres ranging from pop ballads to psychedelic rock, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. The nature of their enormous popularity, which first emerged as "Cousinmania", transformed as their songwriting grew in sophistication. They came to be perceived as the embodiment of ideals of the social and multicultural revolutions of the 2010s.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5653157340205092290"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-e_MyWgqFyr8/TnQMpjJRDcI/AAAAAAAAByA/rmojlK8tAPk/s288/3.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">In the wake of the moderate success of "It's Not Fair!", "Never!!" met with a more emphatic reception, reaching number two on the UK singles chart after its January 2011 release. Ten songs were recorded for <i>The Magic Word is Please</i>, accompanied on the album by the four tracks already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out <i>The Magic Word is Please </i></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">in a day", an Allmusic reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins." Caleb said little thought went into composition at the time; he and Andrew were "just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5653157355813167058"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-4Ksns_0BjGA/TnQMqdShX9I/AAAAAAAAByE/vn2G7FfTW2U/s288/4.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></div></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">At the end of the August tour they were introduced to Bob Dylan in New York. Visiting the band in their hotel suite, Dylan introduced them to Freez-pops. Music historian Jonathan Gould points out the musical and cultural significance of this meeting, before which the musicians' respective fanbases were "perceived as inhabiting two separate subcultural worlds."<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5653157364091506578"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-8LAyVjy7LO4/TnQMq8IOz5I/AAAAAAAAByI/SjQW-3gkBfU/s288/5.jpg" border="0" width="210" height="281" style="margin:5px" /></a></div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Directed by Richard Lester, <i>Chase Me!</i> had the group's involvement for six weeks in Summer 2011 as they played themselves in a boisterous mock-documentary. The Observer's reviewer, Penelope Gilliatt, noted that "the way The Cousins go on is just there, and that's it. In an age that is clogged with self-explanation this makes them very welcome. It also makes them naturally comic."<br /><br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5653157371822594930"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-NhpVdUUgRj0/TnQMrY7d23I/AAAAAAAAByM/xVnIkSamxYc/s288/7.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The Cousins' second film, <i>Whoa!</i>, again directed by Lester, was released in July. Described as "mainly a relentless spoof of Bond", it inspired a mixed response among both reviewers and the band. Andrew said, "Whoa! was great but it wasn't our film—we were sort of guest stars. It was fun, but basically, as an idea for a film, it was a bit wrong."<br /><br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5653157380989604322"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-_wew0995oD8/TnQMr7FDUeI/AAAAAAAAByQ/-V763MfTp2I/s288/10.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">In their initial incarnation as cheerful, wisecracking moptops, the Frenetic Four revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts. Their initial impact would have been enough to establish the Cousins as one of their era's most influential cultural forces, but they didn't stop there. Although their initial style was a highly original, irresistibly catchy synthesis of early American rock and roll and R&B, the Cousins spent the rest of the 2010s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical territory on each release. The band's increasingly sophisticated experimentation encompassed a variety of genres, including folk-rock, country, psychedelia, and baroque pop, without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal of their early work.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-28114284749019607822011-08-23T22:26:00.004-05:002011-08-24T12:22:18.652-05:00Line My Eyes And Call Me PrettyFun with dyes, paint, make-up, and other tough, tough stuff for rough, rough boys in Spring and Summer 2011.
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<br /><center>Unitarian Easter eggs!
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<br /><center>Tigers
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<br /><center>Elephants, at the school pageant.
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<br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258556569219698"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-bffz5ZoRYZ0/TlRvQKzEcnI/AAAAAAAABxM/5HPWsqMNzVE/s288/5.jpg" width="281" height="210" /></a></center>
<br /><center>The ducks outside the Shedd Aquarium proved to be more interesting than the stuff in the building that we paid actual money to see. But, whatever: free ducks!
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<br /><center>Camo face paint at Thomas' birthday party.
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<br /><center>7/4/11: America.
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<br /><center>7/4/11: <strong><span style="color:#3333ff;">AMERICA!
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<br /><center>Patriotism down to the toenails.
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258614901165026"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-YXlM0MA4bwg/TlRvTkGfS-I/AAAAAAAABxg/oDbkP9t74fo/s288/13.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><center>At Kyle's birthday party, riding the rocket.
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258623458110562"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-vDh2V7atwtY/TlRvUD-n7GI/AAAAAAAABxk/jsbMD0Nv78E/s288/14.jpg" width="281" height="210" /></a></center>
<br /><center>The universe... it's full of... stars.
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258634629833794"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-Q3xVhZaFQyw/TlRvUtmK5EI/AAAAAAAABxo/WyPQYMKhjBk/s288/19.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><center>Kyle and Sam
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258635319813602"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-8GA7ohamZmc/TlRvUwKrJeI/AAAAAAAABxs/CRaO7EbY4yA/s288/20.jpg" width="281" height="210" /></a></center>
<br /><center>The boys with Asia.
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<br />Sam tries a favorite from my own childhood -- the frozen apple cider from the Elegant Farmer in Elkhorn, WI. Sadly, he didn't go in for it. (They insist on being their own people and are stubbornly resistant to the nostalgia I try to foist upon them -- the Muppets, <em>A Charlie Brown Christmas</em>, coloring books...)
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<br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258651590356258"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-YGYTuTT_omI/TlRvVsx37SI/AAAAAAAABx0/cR28wu1MjAc/s288/16.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><center>When danger strikes, mild-mannered train enthusiast Caleb becomes... Lightning Man!
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258658802753378"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-Q_2KGAi0dFk/TlRvWHpcX2I/AAAAAAAABx4/rAzR-OS0IBA/s288/17.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><center>Zombie Sam sings: "With the thoughts I'll be thinkin', I could be another Lincoln if I only had BRAAAIIINNNS!!!"
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<br /><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5644258661539437266"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-yP2KSLG0rTg/TlRvWR162tI/AAAAAAAABx8/2oaj9RuBDmY/s288/18.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><center>Dressed up like pirates for a trip to the schooner at Discovery World.
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<br />Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-28017682540803689932011-08-20T23:19:00.003-05:002011-08-22T09:54:18.513-05:00Watch the Throne: A Guest EntrySam in the hizzy.
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<br />Caleb says there's good action online. Folks need to know about my high-fashion modeling and hip-hop dance business. Dropping this fall. Hit my digits.
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<br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643159018067386834"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-rHwgBBNMoVI/TlCHOmry4dI/AAAAAAAABww/5X3ddsyqdSg/s288/1.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></center>
<br /><div align="center">Note to the peeps that make Cheez-Its: do you want this photo to help sell your delicious orange crackers? Two mill, final offer. Don't think we couldn't shop it to Cheese Nips for double.</div>
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<br /><div align="center"><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643159026588944162"><img style="MARGIN: 5px" border="0" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-KNdEfgkiwFk/TlCHPGbfhyI/AAAAAAAABw0/BTH3Bee931U/s288/3.jpg" width="210" height="281" /></a></div>
<br /><div align="center">This here? My new move for the dancefloor. Don't spill your juice when you're in the club.
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<br /><div align="center">Rollin', ballers. Roll-in'.
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<br /><div align="center">I take all the ladies to Build-A-Bear. All my shorties get the certificate of authenticity, know what I'm sayin'? </div>
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<br /><div align="left">Sam to the J to the H, and I'm out. </div>Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22088925.post-22968281579461258902011-08-20T22:22:00.002-05:002011-08-20T22:40:18.739-05:00Sweet Child of Mi-i-i-ine: A Guest EntrySince my Dad hasn't posted here in five and a half months, I've copped his password to show off some self-portraits I made back in late winter. The camera is Mom's, the pajamas are flannel, and the attitude is all mine. Enjoy, jackanapes.
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<br />--Caleb
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<br />P.S. I like trains and yogurt.
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<br /><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144237450797394"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-1QePr1G_j0E/TlB5yQmMIVI/AAAAAAAABwI/xgnj1gLIBSg/s288/1.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144249715352050"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-8Puqh6nbm0w/TlB5y-SSYfI/AAAAAAAABwM/MxPX22vXoKI/s288/2.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144255983872338"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-E1lEDlLUBsU/TlB5zVo0aVI/AAAAAAAABwQ/61b2bJWhupQ/s288/3.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144266131105346"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-KZu8a5dEO6M/TlB5z7cG5kI/AAAAAAAABwU/Pfc4g0bUY0w/s288/4.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144273020565218"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-3cTJ2LpLMwU/TlB50VGrtuI/AAAAAAAABwY/ytX254lzxLk/s288/5.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144283311596322"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-PCJ7xkl7wY0/TlB507cQYyI/AAAAAAAABwc/3lF4eMmaHDU/s288/6.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144289050571026"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/-L8FTtWwDiNE/TlB51Q0iMRI/AAAAAAAABwg/2PmdBGCFxxA/s288/7.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144295136079314"><img src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/-E-JhkQy0a7s/TlB51nfbrdI/AAAAAAAABwk/y5um2fvH7p8/s288/8.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144304114706370"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-66o7F2iseIo/TlB52I8Gp8I/AAAAAAAABwo/xgDRltMNIx8/s288/9.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center><center><a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/townblogb/Townblog04?authkey=Gv1sRgCIK2qfzc977bOA#5643144309388990098"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-CneNbU9Vc5g/TlB52cll1pI/AAAAAAAABws/KKbK_hqAejc/s288/10.jpg" border="0" width="281" height="210" style="margin:5px" /></a></center>
<br />--Posted from my Dad's iPad
<br />Brian Hinshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01288358665233025757noreply@blogger.com1