Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago

Thomas the Tank Engine, rolling out of Union, IL.


The family, all aboard.


It was Olin's birthday, which meant he could pop into any picture he liked.


Caleb watches Illinois pass him by.


Sam, Kirsten, Caleb, Aaron, and Olin watch Thomas depart.


Watching the train roll out again...


Caleb inspects Sam's Thomas tattoo, as provided by Olin.


A first attempt at Mini-Golf.

At the Rain Forest Cafe in Chicago.


While the chocolate milk hit the spot, Caleb found the place far too noisy.


He never drinks a second cup at home...


Sam sits atop the giant suitcase at the foot of the "American Gothic" statue on Michigan Ave.


Uncle Tim, Sam, Aunt Kathleen, and Caleb in Millennium Park.


The spitting Crown Fountain in Millennium Park.


Sam gets daring.


Caleb at the Crown Fountain.


Getting low.

I Never Go Back To The Old House Anymore

A blast from the past...

Triangle Man Hates Particle Man

As I've said before, I'm a Unitarian, and from that we can expect that I don't know much about philosophy, theology, or ancient history. In an attempt to rectify that, and as challenged by a bearded Michigander, I'm undertaking Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, a 916 page small-print volume from 1945. My copy comes from the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I found it wedged under a water cooler (or "bubbler") on the basement level to prevent water from leaking out onto the indoor/outdoor carpeting and thereby creating both a mildewy smell and squishy footfalls 'round the old foosball table.

Here's what I've learned from the first 50 pages:

"Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe" (11). Almost all of what Russell says about the dangers of -- or I suppose I should say "excesses of" -- theology bring the presidency of G.W.B. directly to mind.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it" (11). This is essentially what Camus and other more optimistic (relatively speaking) existentialists were saying about a decade later. Those Frenchies stole from us!

Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers; ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible" (20). So all these jackasses that are yelling at congressmen because health care for poor people will somehow make them less free are totally leading us to dissolution or subjection to foreign conquest. I say we ossificate the bastards.

Book One, Part One, Chapter One ("The Rise of Greek Civilization") makes it clear that the early Greeks essentially stole their culture from Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Cretans.

I'm interested by Russell's use of the works of Homer to explicate the Greek pantheon of gods. The Iliad and the Odyssey (which date from 560 to 527 BC) "represent the point of view of a civilized aristocracy, which ignores as plebeian various superstitions that are still rampant among the populace" (28). And then: "It must be admitted that religion, in Homer, is not very religious. The gods are completely human, differing from men only in being immortal and possessed of superhuman powers. Morally, there is nothing to be said for them, and it is difficult to see how they can have inspired much awe." (29) Russell quotes from Gilbert Murray's Five Stages of Greek Religion: "The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The most they ever did was to conquer it... Why should they do honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers" (30). So, again, Dick Cheney = Hephaestus.

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter... Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasureable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse" (33).

Russell makes the case for the influence of the worshippers of Dionysus and Orpheus on modern thought: "Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion" (34).

"We know more or less what an educated Greek learnt from his father, but we know very little of what, in his earliest years, he learnt from his mother, who was, to a great extent, shut out from the civilization in which the men took delight" (40). Someone is probably already on this, but I think it would be interesting to read a History of Household Knowlege, a book that would chart the more domestic aspects of the development of mankind. How did the Greeks approach child-rearing? How did germ theory affect household chores? When was the couch invented?

Aniximander -- "the second philosopher of the Milesian school," mid-500's BC -- argued that "there was an eternal motion" between the elements of fire, earth, and water, "in the course of which was brought about the origin of the worlds. The worlds were not created ... but evolved. There was evolution also in the animal kingdom. Living creatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man, like every other animal, was descended from fishes. He must be derived from animals ... because, owing to his long infancy, he could not have survived, originally, as he is now" (45). Then, 2300 years later, Mr. Charles Darwin.

Aniximander is supposedly our first map-maker, and he held that earth is shaped like a cylinder. You have to love these early arguements about the shape of the earth. "No, sir, it is like unto a coffee table." "Certainly not. Our world has the form of an inverted sandal."

On Pythagoras, ca. 532 BC: "Some say he was the son of a substantial citizen named Mnesarchos, others that he was the son of the god Apollo; I leave the reader take his choice between these alternatives" (48). And, later: "He may be described, briefly, as a combination of Einstein and [Mary Baker] Eddy. He founded a religion, of which the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans" (50). The religion, for a time, "acquired control of the Senate and established a rule of the saints. But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled." Turns out that Bertie Russell's a funny, funny man. And kinda looks like Sid Caesar, doesn't he?

Who Loves The Sun

Caleb has been told repeatedly not to do this.

Matthew, Sam, Caitlin, Caleb, and Summer at Kirsten's Surprise Birthday Do-Over Picnic Contingency Party. Matthew and Caitlin came all the way from Wellville, NY.

Sam is fond of Stanley Kubrick films and Steven King adaptations, although that still doesn't justify ripping the window screen like that.

Caleb and Caitlin, on their first date. Kissin' cousins, and a long distance romance.

Matthew watches the thunderstorm over Lake Huron in Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin.

Sam roosts in the Reiman Aquarium at Discovery World.

Cousins Caitlin, Sam, and Matthew in the galley of the Challenge.

Cousins in the car. Matthew was concerned about whether we had poison snakes, poison oak, or poison ivy in Milwaukee. "What about poison sunblock?" he asked. "I think you mean poison sumac," I said, "and, no, we don't have much of that either."

Caleb and Sam raiding the lost ark.

Teddy entertains the boys and Aidan. Minutes earlier, Teddy named the boys' stuffed tiger "Billy Blake," and went on to recite "The Tiger" in its entirety.

Getting the absolute most out of a rain puddle.

Sam at the State Fair.

Caleb at the State Fair.

Romeo And Juliet Are Together in Eternity

I was looking to read more of Jim Crace, because I'd very much liked The Devil's Larder, a book of 64 short stories concerning food (including a haunting one about masturbation and scrambled eggs). Also, Bayard had met him during a recent U.S. book tour, and made him out to be an amiable and adventuresome sort. So I picked up Being Dead second-hand from Boswells, and later discovered that it had been inscribed:

For Kathy
with my warmest regards (to a New Atheist)
Jim Crace
I'll admit that I don't totally get the book signing thing, nor autographs. It seems like you're sort of asking for a receipt that you've met someone famous, or at least someone involved in the production of a commodity. I guess it's similar to the reasons why people seem eager to be on television, or even to stand outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza at 7am to watch television being made. You can point to a thing, and say "I was there when that was made and therefore I must exist as well." Or maybe there's more to it and I'm just not seeing it.

At any rate, here's evidence that Kathy-with-a-K attended a reading by Jim Crace, had some sort of conversation with the writer about a recent areligious conversion, and then asked him to sign this book which she had either already read or planned to read. Presumably, she spelled out her name so that he could more acurately take it down. Then, at some point between the original publication date for the hardcover in April, 2000, and the point when I bought the book in July 2008, Kathy took this book which had been personalized for her specifically and sold it to a second-hand book shop, and it then made its way onto the shelves at Boswell's.

Doesn't seem right. It seems to me that if someone writes in your book, you are honor-bound to hang on to that book for the rest of your life. So either Kathy-with-a-K is a cold and heartless athiestic book spurner, or she has gone to dirt and her copy of Being Dead sold off by the estate manager hired by her greiving Unitarian children.

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Which brings me to the book itself, which concerns -- it may be obvious to say so -- the condition of being dead. Somewhat like a fictional treatment of Mary Roach's Stiff, a book my wife loaned to me after our first date*, Being Dead follows the story of the bodies of two zoologists from the time of their brutal murder on the dunes of Baritone Bay to their ultimate discovery and removal by the police and the coroner. It's sort of an anti-mystery, in that the murder is sort of besides-the-point, unsolveable and unsolved -- death, in this book, is a matter not of spirituality or deductive procedure but of zoology. Sentimentality is abolutely avoided, and oddly this gives the book it's freshness and spark.

Entwined in the description of the bodies and what happens to them (or, really, given the agentless-ness of nature, what occurs to them) over a period of six days are chapters that cover their earlier lives and chapters that work backwards in time on the day of the couples murder. None of this is driven very much by suspense or the urge to see what happens (which we already know, anyway). Instead, the driver here is Crace's skill with the language; he's able to describe the rupture of human flesh by violence in a way that is both beautiful and repulsive. He has a particular capacity for writing about nature -- the work of beetles and gulls, wind and waves. The book's setting -- Baritone Bay -- could exist on the coast of California or Massachusetts, in the south of England or western Australia, and yet it's desciption is precise and specific. One's never quite sure whether the insects and vegetation he describes actually exist, but his authority is such that we are able to see them anyway.

Ultimately, we're left with a sense of the beach as a landscape built and dependent upon death -- discarded shells, bones of fish pushed out of the sea, bits of oysters dropped by a gull, etc. -- so that this place we view as serene and peaceful is also the locale of a primal and vicious nature. (As you may know from a previous post, I had to take a break from this relatiely short -- 196 pages -- book in order to take in something lightweight and funny.)

I've probably gone on enough about death, and will now have to post up a weeks' worht of pictures of my beautiful and hilarious children to make up for it. Goodnight, Kathy-with-a-K, wherever you are.

Imaginary Trouble

I've read more books, and will now post some thoughts about them as an academic exercise in deluding myself that I am still somehow thoughtful.

I had not intended to read James Wood's How Fiction Works, since I knew from some of his literary criticism in the New Yorker that our tastes in fiction do not much overlap. But there I was, standing before the cash register at Boswells, about to buy the book further down this page and looking at their table of impulse-y, mostly joke-y sorts of books. There, amid books of funny lists or zombified parodies, was a slight little thing whose title font recalled the early 60's Glass family books of J.D. Salinger. So, judging a book by its cover -- and with my wife and children waiting in the mini-van outside -- I bought the book.

Wood's taste in fiction strikes me as rather stuffy and conservative -- his examples of good writing (or good fiction or good metaphors or good characterization) tend to the likes of Flaubert and Austen and George Eliot and the 19th century Russians. He's directly -- perhaps solely -- concerned with "realistic" genre-less literary fiction, a form which, Wood says, "schools its own truants" of "magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers." I suppose that, in literature as in high school, I hang with the truants. (It is a fair point, even so. As Newton showed, it is to action that we equally or oppositionally react.)

Wood explicates and examines "free indirect discourse," a third person narrational style that I first learned from John Gardner's Art of Fiction, and is able to demonstrate how this technique -- thought to be relatively modern -- creeps up in even the omnisciently-narrated 19th century novels he clearly reveres. Wood's book certainly crackles along and he effectively demonstrates what remains vital in the "classics," and I will say without qualification that I enjoyed his perspective.

Wood is clearly pre-Freudian in his tastes, and rightly mistrusts any characterization that is too psychologically apt. "Many of the most absorbing accounts of motive," he writes, "are studies in mystery." He draws upon Stephen Greenblatt's Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare to demonstrate specifically removed explanation, cause, and rationale from his tragedies expressly to highlight their mystery. Despite clear answers in the source texts Shakespeare utilized in writing his plays, we never learn why Iago hates Othello, or what's really bugging Hamlet, or why Lear shuns his favorite daughter. The audience is left to guess and speculate, and this very lack of clear answers is what draws us to back to these works.

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Speaking of Shakespeare, here's Fool, a retelling of King Lear by the American comic author Christopher Moore. I had been reading about grisly murders in 2666, and then took up Jim Crace's Being Dead only to find that it, too, involved long and lovely descriptions of the scene of a brutal and random murder. I found myself hungry for something light, funny, and relatively corpse-less, and decided upon this book. (Yes, most of the cast is murdered, but not with the kind of Woodsian realism of Bolano and Crace.)

I'd liked Moore's Lamb, a comedy that accounts for what John Prine has termed "Jesus: The Missing Years" but which also serves to spotlight the elements of eastern religions within the teachings of Christ, an approach that a pragmatic Unitarian like myself can truly dig. Fool doesn't carry the same kind of intellectual heft, but it's quite a lot of fun -- full of sex and deceipt, sly references to the works and words of Shakespeare, clever insults, and Python-like verbal mania.

There's only one page -- late in the novel -- that gets Tom Stoppardly post-modern, a nice sort of wink to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, without making too much of things. The language of the book nicely combines the elaborateness of Elizabethan stagecraft with modern American and British slang. It also lends King Lear a happy ending, in the manner of a Shakespearian comedy, rather than the usual bloodbath. (OK, so there's a bloodbath, too.)

I Got My Head Shaved

New Camera! (Please send money.)

Caleb (port) and Sam (starboard) on The Summit.

Aubrey and Maturin sail in search of Napoleon's fleet.

Caleb points out the Milorganite plant. "Put a little of yourself in your lawn," he says.

Caleb, Aidan, and Sam on the docks.

Outside the Jelly Belly warehouse in Pleasant Prairie. The two were apprehended at the state border and the car was returned without damage.

"I got my head shaved / by a jumbo jet

It wasn't easy / but nothing is."

Whoo-hoo.

Future Deadheads Sam and Olin do their freedom dance at Chill on the Hill.

Sam with Kyle at Mary and Jerry's house, their former foster placement.

Sam and Caleb attempt to conscript Ashley onto the swim team, at Mary and Jerry's.

Aidan outfits Sam in his Batman glider wings.

Sam, with his tiny apple, and the great Teddy Powers.

Caleb does his best Cosby imitation for Uncle Teddy. "Because the people -- you see -- have the brain damage and the children and the choc-o-lot pudding pops," says Caleb.

Reading is fundamental.

I'd Still Own The Film Rights And Be Working on The Sequel

Here's a long post about some elements of the culture I encountered this weekend while my kids were either sleeping or napping (which, I know, amount to the same thing, but if you have young kids you'll understand the distinction):

Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution is a surprisingly suspenseful and fun examination of the five Best Picture nominees from the 1968 Academy Awards: Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I only recall seeing one of these -- The Graduate -- although the others have since been added to my Netflix queue (excepting the Rex Harrison version of Dolittle, which Harris' book makes out to be a total disaster.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is to imagine the alternate universe in which different choices were made for particular film roles (Jane Fonda as Bonnie, for example, or Ronald Reagan and Doris Day as the Robinsons, or Robert Redford as Benjamin). These movies, as treated by Harris, also come to embody aspects of the changing American culture in the late '60s, with the old Hollywood (evidenced in the studio system that put forward Dolittle, or Hepburn and Tracy in Coming to Dinner) brushing up against new Hollywood (the Nouveau Vague-influenced Bonnie and Clyde, the disaffected youth in The Graduate).

The most interesting, and surprising element, of the book for me was its focus on Sidney Poitier, who starred in both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Coming into 1967, Poitier was the Oscar-winning sole representative of African-American maleness, someone who in movie after movie portrayed the sort of polite and well-spoken Negro who could rise above racial prejudice by the sheer force of his manners and diction. Essentially, Hollywood movies demonstrated that racism would be overcome by the willingness of black males to behave in the way that privileged whites imagined themselves behaving -- stoic, persistent, upstanding, and ultimately asexual. By the end of 1968, even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the culture had changed -- Poitier's characters were insufficiently angry, and his career waned (at least partially by his own intention) throughout the 70's and he's rarely appeared in front of a camera since the 1980's.

Pictures at a Revolution would be an excellent companion piece to Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year That Rocked The World. Both books demonstrate what promise existed for real cultural change in 1968, a promise almost entirely ignored by tuned-out hippies and self-centered baby boomers in the -- let me check my watch -- four decades since. The idea that change can erupt from the actions and ideals of young people is one that is now used only for the marketing of sneakers and soda pop.

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I read David Shields' autobiographical novels Dead Languages and A Handbook for Drowning while still an undergraduate, and both were hugely influential for me as novels that represent a struggle to come of age despite (or even because of) relative affluence and liberal, attentive parents. Along with the works of Salinger and Fitzgerald and Camus, these two contemporary novels helped explain why I felt angst and despair when (in the grand view) I had little to angst or despair about.

Since those novels -- which appeared respectively in 1989 and 1992 -- Shields has turned entirely to non-fiction, crafting a form that weaves between the culturally-focused essay and the memoir. It's a form that can have interesting results -- an essay on Bill Murray that appears in Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (from 2002) is chiefly concerned with what we (including Shields) respond to so positively in Murray, why he seems so watchable and funny, and does this largely by Shields investigating his own response to Murray. There's huge potential in Shields style to reveal the way we think, and the way a specific life (Shields') reflects the larger culture. It seems tricky to do without falling into a solipsistic morass of egotism, but -- for the most part -- Shield avoids those potholes through yet more examination of his own doubts and faults and losses.

Enough About You comes in well under 200 pages, and I read it in an afternoon, and sometimes I come to mistrust books that I can read so quickly. Too often, Shields uses a kind of collage technique -- short vignettes that have some thematic connection -- in place of developing ideas and drawing those points towards the connections were left to imagine. And yet, Shields' ability to illustrate his own life and connect it -- even through ellipses -- to ours is
strangely fun and alluring.

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Pan's Labyrinth. Great movie. So great, I watched the director's commentary, too, which made me like the movie even more. When I first got a DVD player, I re-watched a whole lot of movies with the director's commentary track, but ultimately found that few are worth the time investment. Between those that are too technically-focused and those that seem to constitute listening to the movie's creators watching the movie, there were only a very few that seemed interesting to a casual fan. Guillermo del Toro, however, really illuminates his movie, which intersects between a story of a fascist captain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War with a dark fairy tale. Del Toro reveals, for example, the similarity between the tree featured on the movie poster at left, and the shape of fallopian tubes. He also draws a connection between the movie's stories and his reaction to the rise of the age of the War on Terror in an incredibly interesting way.

It's good fun just to listen to Del Toro talk. He's got that Spanish way of turning "t"s into "d"s, and he refers to a group of horses he's employed in the movie as "psycopathic homicidal motherf*ckers."

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All this, and I got to leave my orthopedic boot behind. I'm limping along in two shoes!