tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85582214101000722762024-03-05T21:03:13.190-08:00Cocodrilo's KinderplatzDiary of a first year father.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.comBlogger92125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-39060898488162924292009-11-02T16:41:00.001-08:002009-11-03T17:59:01.516-08:00Tottering Forward<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzhK8uXxsA5cpuajTyaTGiMRwtojpKxC4AL6kFm92i9E_lQi8Ml1CSRl7R6llSwvQ8YbXyZB4MupBKKrzJ8hSafnKTaJfa5VPqClynwXPw5GhxlIX5mFFMdy9PZKlYV-vipjk3pnp44YFv/s1600-h/img_1883.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzhK8uXxsA5cpuajTyaTGiMRwtojpKxC4AL6kFm92i9E_lQi8Ml1CSRl7R6llSwvQ8YbXyZB4MupBKKrzJ8hSafnKTaJfa5VPqClynwXPw5GhxlIX5mFFMdy9PZKlYV-vipjk3pnp44YFv/s200/img_1883.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399671802742394658" border="0" /></a>Henry is Benjamin's best and oldest buddy. They share a nanny, trade binkies, swap bottles, and tag-team the cat. Tight Terror Partnership aside, however, it would be difficult to find two boys of more divergent character. Henry is a long haired, wildly careening storm of a boy who has been characterized by his parents as "a child of thoughtless and reckless action." He walked at 12 months, and has been falling on his face ever since. Benjamin, on the other hand, is a ruminator: a fat, speechle<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZp1glvySTx5Qx2KWSqFG6AUQ3fdUiM23oQgE-fxLw6ozKyUHVDQxbsOyKO-remP7rz2mPS_TZnvOrNPdBFBcl-ytqxa20y-Y0BApWNGA1pnmaLN54NoDfdwmjVTAzTGgxoeZhr3KnUdZ/s1600-h/img_1892.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZp1glvySTx5Qx2KWSqFG6AUQ3fdUiM23oQgE-fxLw6ozKyUHVDQxbsOyKO-remP7rz2mPS_TZnvOrNPdBFBcl-ytqxa20y-Y0BApWNGA1pnmaLN54NoDfdwmjVTAzTGgxoeZhr3KnUdZ/s200/img_1892.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399692197915838802" border="0" /></a>ss dwarf-Hamlet, parallized by girth and self-doubt. At 14 months, he is still firmly earthbound, and though he has shaken things up with the occasional plunge (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhRzsBK0sd4"> five steps</a> = skewering Polonius), the ghost of the father is still breathing down his neck, asking when, when, when.<br /><br />Not that said father is any particular hurry to have this guy up and running. He is quite fast enough on all fours, especially right after a bath, when, stark naked save for a hooded towel draped cape-like from his head, he streaks from the bedroom, cackling at his own boldness and jeering at his pursuers. (To see a slightly subdued version of this Caper of the Fantasmita Azul, click <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q91CmbfNpmI"> here</a>.) He has three major crawls, in fact: one is his Getaway crawl, a jaunty, hands-and-feet crawlwalk in which he can traverse a 20 foot room in about 5 sec<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhHOPxx_4bFFIqO-5Y7-pczvy4OhzC3-Qn8NvB3mozmty4umkFCl07BqGxjA9b0G2llrv3Dhyphenhyphen51fogjNTo8Vodz_O0TretwpOjBmPRZ0xOUc-XFOqUMiJs7OFO8fIDFvBNPndGuy4lFmE-/s1600-h/img_1886.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhHOPxx_4bFFIqO-5Y7-pczvy4OhzC3-Qn8NvB3mozmty4umkFCl07BqGxjA9b0G2llrv3Dhyphenhyphen51fogjNTo8Vodz_O0TretwpOjBmPRZ0xOUc-XFOqUMiJs7OFO8fIDFvBNPndGuy4lFmE-/s200/img_1886.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399693876543583458" border="0" /></a>onds. The second is his Latin crawl, a butt-swaggling, head-bobbing dance of a crawl that he slips into on sunny days and whenever he has no particular destination in mind. The third is his Ninja crawl, where he holds himself vertically, sitting on one leg tucked indian-style under his butt and extending the other like a crab-claw, pulling his body forward in discrete, focused bursts. For the Ninja crawl, he either holds his arms akimbo, which makes it look as if he were doing ballet, or he holds on<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1i9J4anKl-Z7_iEVENxnJlLJCU-r8IiEEYEkmJEXyRhQU76VUKLEr8DL6Xq4xHNgpFAxuSSD9mD7eN63hjZERHDHXQl7Kx0nn4v7IOXTIqJ4f3h1epxl2aiVtgFtiY1TdICg5iLvl0t7F/s1600-h/img_1890.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1i9J4anKl-Z7_iEVENxnJlLJCU-r8IiEEYEkmJEXyRhQU76VUKLEr8DL6Xq4xHNgpFAxuSSD9mD7eN63hjZERHDHXQl7Kx0nn4v7IOXTIqJ4f3h1epxl2aiVtgFtiY1TdICg5iLvl0t7F/s200/img_1890.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399694119867623026" border="0" /></a>e by his side and one pointed forward, as if he were leading a charge. I hope to have video evidence soon.<br /><br />For Halloween the boys dressed as the reverse of their natural temperaments: Wild Boy Henry was a cute yellow duck, sweet, tame, approachable, while Benjamin the Contemplator was a drunken sea captain, a Queeg in the throws of excess. Henry's parents had the good sense to go as themselves, while Benny's mom dressed as the sea and his dad as the Dali Lama. Is it any wonder the poor boy is doomed to a life of confused and timorous reflection?<br /><br />In any event, the boy is up and tottering forward, as is this blog. (I tried to kick the habit, but after two months on the wagon, I fell for the charm of a Developmental Milestone, and here I am again, downloaded and outsourced in the blogosphere.) Stay tuned for more videos.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-64799575723363313862009-08-31T20:55:00.000-07:002009-09-01T20:41:27.525-07:00A Boy of Our Own<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_eTOXTTZEgkayQ1w0hDNh_5EVet23eRS_Mjfl-aFDCbnso4kTKL00o-GnuRBSt974wCqzwYmfZY9cspzAwxOJjfMTUX9AfLcXaaMKe8Dwhom3cet0tQK936OMDGOs8Dt1s9Wt-j6SNPy9/s1600-h/image431.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_eTOXTTZEgkayQ1w0hDNh_5EVet23eRS_Mjfl-aFDCbnso4kTKL00o-GnuRBSt974wCqzwYmfZY9cspzAwxOJjfMTUX9AfLcXaaMKe8Dwhom3cet0tQK936OMDGOs8Dt1s9Wt-j6SNPy9/s200/image431.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376708115297982706" border="0" /></a>Zoogle's first birthday may have been a symbolic milestone, but it came and went with amazingly little fanfare. Catalina bought a metallic helium-filled balloon with "Happy Birthday!" stenciled in red letters on both sides, and Benjamin spent most of the day staring at the ceiling, pondering the perversities of a Law of Gravity that worked one way for unwanted peas and another way for shiny oblongs. Whenever the problem became too complicated, he would grab the balloon by its ribbon and attack it with his teeth. Later in the day there were a couple of gifts, packages left by Chinabuela during our <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBR7vwg76S0TPOsL-bfNk4zBf7KJHcyakYp_XmGDU_IGRS9WBVubkT2xLHG_ttQO_aDu73ICX8MKwpFDeXE1sjmZQOcv5J5GvH2SmGrYlLS1EOFt3A2XIJbSulUIj4ckljyRS3hMbLm6L/s1600-h/image439.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBR7vwg76S0TPOsL-bfNk4zBf7KJHcyakYp_XmGDU_IGRS9WBVubkT2xLHG_ttQO_aDu73ICX8MKwpFDeXE1sjmZQOcv5J5GvH2SmGrYlLS1EOFt3A2XIJbSulUIj4ckljyRS3hMbLm6L/s200/image439.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376700922739924290" border="0" /></a>rendezvous in the dome. Though I thought about occupying my red-eye shift by letting Zoogle tear into the pretty wrapping paper, it occurred to me that this was a ceremony my wife might not wish to miss, and that I should probably wait until evening. Alas: she apparently assumed me too much the Grinch to care, because by the time I got home from the office, the wrapping was in shreds and Zoogle had long since read, drooled on, bent, and forgotten its contents. (My wife did have the delicacy to capture this moment on film, however. Here is a<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t78FEuc382k"> link</a>, if you're interested.) In the evening we ate birthday pie, some low-sugar local organic peach concoction with an all butter crust, garnished with the green wax of the single candle that no amount of coaching could induce Zoogle to blow out. He went to bed late, and after a postprandial tea we followed suit, dropping like old fruit on spent soil.<br /><br />And thus the First Year came to a close. Discussing the mind-blowing fact that we'd been playing the Parent Game for a full twelve months, Catalina and I agreed that Time in the presence of a child is like space in the presence of worm-hole: strongly distorted, obliteratingly intense. Interestingly, neither of us can describe this "Zoogle Effect" with any accuracy: on the one hand, we feel that time essentially hasn't moved since the boy came off production, and the other that it flies along at breakneck speed. Perhaps our inability to describe the New Time has to do with the fact that it has bifurcated, and now there are two Times, one local, one global. Locally, i.e. on the level of the Everyday, Time is this wild, whooshing thing; I think of a drunken 19th century London cabbie careening along rough cobblestones on a dark night with a mad mare and willing wench, though doubtless other metaphors would work. Globally, however, it is completely static: on the level of personal memory, Time is a large stone in a windless dessert, immovable, unchanging, empty and fixed. I ask ourselves what I did this year, and though I massage my temples and pull at my graying hairs, racking my tired memory for a clue, I keep coming back to the single fact that we took care of Benjamin. There were a few trips to the park, and I do seem to recall a little travel here and there, but the fact of the Child is so vivid and pressing and inescapable that it obliterates almost everything else.<br /><br />The fact that Parenting looms so large in my memory doubtless has something to do with the sheer number of waking (and no so waking) hours it has occupied. Tom Beem was telling me about a book called "This Is Your Brain on Music", in which there was a theory that professionalism is really a function of 'hours logged', and that after 10,000 hours of doing anything, anyone with even a modicum of talent can rightly call themselves a professional. I find the theory suspicious, but I do feel that the obliterating intensity of the Child provides an interesting context in which to subject it to interpretation. Could it be that after so many long night of cooing, so many diapers changed, so many fingers wackled and lips puckered and faces pulled, that after all this my brain has actually custom molded itself to the task of child-rearing? That the mental resources siphoned into fatherhood uprooted vast dendrite fields and pruned my neural trees? The thought gives me the jeebies. Still, I know that Time is a powerful shaper, and it is an indisputable fact that a disproportionate percentage of my consciousness last year was devoted to thinking about my kid. Painful thought it be, perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that when I think about this year, all I see is the monochrome tundra of Baby.<br /><br />Of course even Baby admits outside influence, and we have tried to keep at least a tenuous hand on the arts. Last night, for example, Catalina and I saw a film. It was the first film we'd seen for almost a year, and as we snuggled beneath into the couch with our tea and our blankets, I was reminded of a similar night shortly after Benjamin was born, a time when we were so exhausted that to actually stay up and enjoy ourselves seemed an outrageous gesture of defiance. But though I was delighted to be visited by this nostalgic vision of the New Parent, I realized that there were critical details about that viewing that I couldn't reconstruct. Were we holding him? Was he sleeping? I remember Zoogle sitting in his papasan, facing away from the T.V., but I find it unfathomable that<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_thix2SAlS2K-HMqz7G1I2vfwwd-uFf0GRLlfSF7Ir7T0EaG9lJraLhQOaxdnlH8bzbx8ltyQpHWJ9DdgZL8puK6QHrfatRltb1XtJWiyeAbtH9Ih5fz1FEUqZpuu4VKVL1IGf9x8UP8b/s1600-h/img_0045.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_thix2SAlS2K-HMqz7G1I2vfwwd-uFf0GRLlfSF7Ir7T0EaG9lJraLhQOaxdnlH8bzbx8ltyQpHWJ9DdgZL8puK6QHrfatRltb1XtJWiyeAbtH9Ih5fz1FEUqZpuu4VKVL1IGf9x8UP8b/s200/img_0045.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376701860307250962" border="0" /></a> there was ever a time when this rambunctious and restless child could have slept so deeply that the noise from the television wouldn't have woken him.<br /><br />And suddenly the sheer magnitude of the experience I have forgotten comes crashing in on me. In a flash I remembered that initial two or three months when we would bring him tucked in a ring-sling to the cafŽ, and we would order our coffee with cool urban Žlan and sit down and get to work. Work? With Benjamin? These days the idea is so foreign as to be laughable. I don't remember how he used to look or how he used to sleep or when he used to smile or what noises he used to make. And I realize that at some point there was a definitive transition, a point when he moved from Baby to Boy, and I'm stunned that I never noticed it, that I never fixed in my mind that critical tipping point when our child made the irreversible passage from some ridiculous Carry-On to this willful and wonderful Person that we have on our hands <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoncFwhad4imFj7gB4e1t9gWc1mAyXZPb8tDt4zVppqs-K3bdNAh67SMUaDlXQXnbNENiE_-WAkr4tt4nKDgaPIv8sc85iZR5wFqKw22VlFA_gbOUIlODr94Shoxq2-8-30aXFoxBKu58K/s1600-h/image246.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoncFwhad4imFj7gB4e1t9gWc1mAyXZPb8tDt4zVppqs-K3bdNAh67SMUaDlXQXnbNENiE_-WAkr4tt4nKDgaPIv8sc85iZR5wFqKw22VlFA_gbOUIlODr94Shoxq2-8-30aXFoxBKu58K/s200/image246.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376703875916056178" border="0" /></a>today.<br /><br />Children are reputed to have a focusing effect: once you've got a child, it's impossible not to start thinking in terms of the rest of your life. Predictably, Benjamin has had this effect on us. I've just finished reading a book entitled "A Place of My Own", a thoughtful meditation on architecture, space, America, fashion, and society by the same guy who told us about Maize Walking in the "Omnivores Dilemma." Michael Pollan wrote the book when he was expecting his first child, and though it chronicles his attempts to design and build a "writing house" in response to the shifting winds of his professional calling, there is a strong sense that this foray into nestcraft is motivated as much to have something to show his son as to have space in which to work.<br /><br />Both themes, new fatherhood and drifting interests, are dear to me, and already I've got the bug, already I want to be off building something, laying foundations and raising roofs. In some ways a lot of the negative energy surrounding my relation with Pittsburgh last year had more to do with this constructivist impulse than the city itself: now that I've returned after a long, clarifying hiatus in the mountains, I see that the real problem with this city is merely that it's not a place I wish to build in, and that at this particular juncture in my life, building (au sense plus grand du terme) is exactly what I want to be doing.<br /><br />The realization is healthy. It has normalized my relation with the city: we're friends again. And though I wish dearl<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMfws3F5MSPXYKpOEbQ3xlZO6gzQyRiXqlKiQCw_D6fFQNtwE2-iJZjmF3e7H8lblhTTj564PtzNKIMADNsh2yOa5QW3aQ0fHFWmdm1tBbNKCTauSqHZ5mvffQc2Jf_3r-A5pcqo24N9B6/s1600-h/img_1296.jpg"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; display: block; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMfws3F5MSPXYKpOEbQ3xlZO6gzQyRiXqlKiQCw_D6fFQNtwE2-iJZjmF3e7H8lblhTTj564PtzNKIMADNsh2yOa5QW3aQ0fHFWmdm1tBbNKCTauSqHZ5mvffQc2Jf_3r-A5pcqo24N9B6/s200/img_1296.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376708811156785266" border="0" /></a>y that I had some better sense of the future, of either what I wanted to be doing or where I wanted to be doing it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the continuing tug of this new, rambunctious lifeform that seems to have found its way into our household is going to act as a clarifying agent. To be unmoored in the world when time drifts at the slow pace of the Self is one thing, quite another is to be unmoored when time is a raging bundle of curiosity careening at breakneck speed around the corners of the Collective. For better or for worse, Benjamin is now our Secret Sharer, an embedded perceptive intelligence who someday will produce questions that require brave and unapologetic responses. It is my fervent hope that under his tutelage, we will learn to live in such a way that we'll have those answers when we need them.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-8131585830243430872009-08-27T21:09:00.000-07:002009-08-27T21:46:09.575-07:00One Year's EveCall it the cold front passing through, but I have this weird feeling in my bones that tomorrow everything changes. Perhaps I'm wrong, of course. Perhaps only I will change. But this is only logically distinct, not empirically. And either way I'm nervous.<br /><br />Of course I can't know until tomorrow. But my intuition tells me that there is a basic difference between the father of a newborn and the father of a one-year old, a difference that begins on the level of the wardrobe and extends to the level of ontology. The man in the thick of his child's first year is the canonical New-Parent, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">gog</span>-eyed, frazzled, sheet-rumpled, while the man with a one-year-old is merely the Parent, rheumy, droopy, groomed. I feel that to cross the threshold of a child's first year within the confines of a stable domestic arrangement is akin to a solemn forswearing of poetic improvidence, that after one year the Simple Idiocies (running off to the French foreign legion, developing an opium habit, turning to cards) lose their appeal and slip out of reach. There remains only the Slog, the long, dippy road to college funds and pension plans.<br /><br />Make no mistake. The Slog has its charms. But isn't it odd that I find myself downplaying my son's birthday even more than I downplay my own?Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-85569155613959841202009-08-19T20:51:00.000-07:002009-08-23T20:54:17.192-07:00Juggler<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Zoogle</span> is learning to juggle. Several months ago I noticed that whenever I'd grab a couple of balls and start weaving a pattern in the air, he would look on attentively, often breaking into smiles or clapping his hands in the uniquely spasmodic way of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">pre</span>-toddler. This response was gratifying to me as a father (what luck that one of my obscure talents was actually useful) and totally charming, but otherwise struck me as a perfectly generic expression of enthusiasm, one employed with equal ardor for such varied phenomena as dead leaves, sleeping cats, fruit flies and sofa lint. At no time did these signs give me the sense that the boy was about to embark on a career as an etymologist, say, or as a char-boy.<br /><br />But by gum he has decided to become a juggler. The other day I decided to interrupt my circus show with a little interactive game of I'll-Give-You-The-Ball-If-You-Give-It-Right-Back, a game <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Zoogle</span> naturally mistook for You-Pass-the-Ball-and-I'll-Eat-It. Just as I was about to intercept what I thought was a direct pass to the mouth, however, I realized my mistake: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Zoogle</span> was merely waving it up and down, hefting it, so to speak, getting a sense for its weight and texture. He did this a couple of times, and on the third or forth heft, he let fly, a beautiful upward arc that landed on the ball of his left foot and rolled to a standstill by my knee. I then gave him two balls, and he did exactly the same, hefting first one, then the other, then throwing them both in quick succession. Plop plop. The balls lay where they had fallen, and after a second or two of close scrutiny, as if to ask himself "did I really do what I think I just did?", he looked up and blossomed into a smile.<br /><br />So we have another juggler in the family. He can't walk yet, and shows no symptoms of knowing anything about language, and is generally behind in every developmental category except for weight, but I have every reason to believe that I'll be getting ring-side seats to Cirque <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">de</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Soleil</span> in about 16 years time. The only question at this point is where I can find a few child-safe chainsaws....Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-72936256210187520932009-08-15T21:00:00.000-07:002009-08-15T22:08:02.875-07:00Back in the BurghI find it unfathomable that we are actually back in the Burgh. Yes, of course, I bought return tickets several months ago, and yes, of course, I told my chair to expect me. But there was a time there in mid-July, when we were in full Dome stride, scraggly and dirty and juggling 52 visitors and work and child care and an aggressive schedule of local exploration, there for one brief instant all thoughts of the Burgh had vanished, and life was exceptionally good. Pittsburgh had begun to seem like a formal backstory, a sinister hintergrund that existed only to explain the glorious vordergrund that was Life in the Mountains. We accepted it as we once accepted that Nostromo had dabbled in the African diamond trade, and that Marlowe had had dealings with the natives: a sketchy narrative hook, quickly skimmed and dimly remembered in the eager pursuit of the Next Thing.<br /><br />But for better or for worse, the hintergrund has become the vordergrund, and we are back in the land of smokestacks. Which is actually damn beautiful this time of year, with an almost jungle-like lushness in the local parks and all manner of flowers bursting from the rather too-cultivated window boxes of the local kleinburgers. In our two-month absence a 10 foot tree seems to have sprung up in the driveway, and tomato plants have sprawled so aggressively that we can't find the basement stairs. The oaks are festooned with songbirds, and the white hum of crickets lasts long into the night.<br /><br />So, barring the flight back, things are off to a good start. (The flight back could not have been worse: whether it was because or in spite of our disconsolate child and 100 pounds of hand luggage, we got stuck in Chicago and didn't pull in until 5 in the morning. Zoogle, needless to say, was delighted, principally because the delay provided an excellent excuse to wreck his already shattered sleep schedule. Last night he ran laps from 11 to 4, and he's wasted no time in breaking out into a full body flaming red stress rash. When do these creatures acquire normally responsive bodies?)<br /><br />Aside from extinguishing Zoogle-flames, we're settling into what we hope will be a steady and productive routine. Miles to go in the next four months: Catalina needs to finish a chapter and half of her thesis and apply for jobs, while I need to finish at least one paper, apply for a grant, apply for jobs, and teach two or three courses (for which I have made not the slightest preparation.) Add to this the usual ratty social calendar, a teeming self-improvement agenda (yoga, bird-watching, reading: it's all there), and a growing need for downtime, and you have what is clearly an impossible set of ambitions. Our real ambition is to fail gracefully.<br /><br />It has occurred to me that Zoogles' first birthday is less than two weeks away. The thought impresses itself for two reasons: one, that this means we engendered this creature almost a full two years ago, which is odd, since I have no memory of time moving since then, and two, that this blog, which has been a lovely but time-limited discipline, will need to wind to a close. Which is unfortunate, for where else will I vent my urban spleen?Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-26113040607995761252009-08-05T00:54:00.000-07:002009-08-05T01:12:02.037-07:00Big MoonBig belly moon tonight, waddling through the night like a washed up tenor. And there are bear tracks on the driveway, rustling in the bushes: still, no signs of the red-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">naped</span> sapsucker. Patience, I tell myself: is it not pleasure enough that he is reputed to exist?<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Benzoogle</span> is learning to scream, shattered crystal followed by high, hysterical glass giggles that tinkle lightly on the soul. Wily, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">wily</span> and fast, that boy: get him naked and he'll wiggle-step right past you before you can say <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Sneako</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">McFleako</span>.<br /><br />To bed, to bed: red-eye tomorrow.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-68057605022494972702009-07-31T23:30:00.000-07:002009-08-03T22:41:23.691-07:00Home StretchA few weeks ago we were picking up pizza at the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Janesville</span> Pizza Factory when a young couple with a baby approached us and said, in effect, "hello, you are a young couple with a baby, let's have dinner together." And so, after some delay to allow the family waters to rise and recede, we did: a mellow meal of split-pea barley soup, tofu-balls and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">freshbaked</span> pecan sourdough shared on the deck amid the howls of 5-month <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Zella</span> and the porcine grunts of 11-month <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Snockelpea</span>, all sharpened and clarified by the clean grassy smell left by an afternoon thunderstorm.<br /><br />Kindred souls are rare and wonderful things. Strangely, kindred souls in remote locations seem to be no rarer that their counterparts in the heavily populated regions (though they are just as wonderful.) Whether this phenomenon is a reflection on us or on humanity is a question I'm probably not qualified to answer: true, I tend to like the sorts of loners, individualists, do-it-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">yourselfers</span>, and back-to-the-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">landers</span> that you find in the dark heart of rural America, but I would hardly say that my friend-circle is limited to this class of people (consider my wife....) Perhaps then there really is some Law of Thermodynamics that governs the distribution of kindred tastes, an aggregate statistics dictating the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">equidistribution</span> of Like and Dislike. <br /><br />Whatever it is, these people rocked: they were the kind of people we'd like to be if we had more time to work at it.<br /><br />It is unfortunate, of course, that we met them the week before we were to leave. Not just because it would have been great to spend more time with them, but also because they could have given us a better sense of what it might be like to try to build a life in these parts. This is a relevant issue, especially now, in the last few days of our sojourn, as we find ourselves spending a little more time each night on the back deck watching the sun go down, trying to soak a little more of the spirit of this place into our bones, our senses, so that when we return to the Burgh, it will still burn within us, and we can think clearly about the Next Step.<br /><br />A precipitous move to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Janesville</span>? On the heels of a summer like this one, the idea does not seem so <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">farfeteched</span>. Still, something holds us back, something that is not about careers or money or networks, but some basic question about how to invest a life, how and when to tie yourself to a chunk of land and a group of people, how to throw down roots and build up homes and etch out identities. None of these questions have easy answers, but seeing other people, about our age and in about our circumstances, seeing them in action struggling to find these these things out: this is a rich and rare discovery, and one I would very much like to have pushed further.<br /><br />Five more days in the mountains. Then a few days on the coast and we're off, back to the Burgh, 'America's Most <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Livable</span> City', as Dean <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Labriola</span> liked to cackle on about before keeling over of that spring-term pneumonia that found such fertile ground on the soot-sodden lungs of a Pittsburgh Lifer. Not a bad place in its way, especially as viewed from far away: it is the city in which Benjamin was conceived, and born, and will turn one in less than a month. It is the city in which, for the first time in my life, I've Professed. It is also the city in which I've discovered my mixed appetite for teaching, and in which my heart hardened to the ugly truths of formal academic productions, and, further afield, in which I finally understood who loses, and how, when the planet gets ripped apart for material and industrial ends, and how economic <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">inequalities</span> degrade a place, and segregation gets so entrenched there's no way to root it out, even when its underlying causes are long dead and the new regime is the sort of mild academic liberalism which one expects to be the total opposite of such a state.<br /><br />It is important to remember that the world has problems, and those problems need solutions. A part of life is taking care of yourself: thinking about your food sources, your kid's college fund, your retirement. But in the midst of the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">bosco</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">oscuro</span></span>, I find it useful to remember that if I can't solve my own problems, perhaps I can solve someone <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">else's</span>. And that to do that, it might be useful to take our new friends' <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">ansatz</span> as paradigm, something along the lines of "hello, you are a humanoid, I am a humanoid, let's have dinner." After all, in less than a month we'll be the prime custodial units of a one year old: if now isn't the time to start thinking about what kind of home, what kind of world we want for that boy, when is?Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-70982978350948075652009-07-26T22:34:00.000-07:002009-07-27T00:07:11.635-07:00The Sound of a Diaper FoldingAt the height of the madness there was a regulation size city bus ripping limbs left and right as it blundered toward the hook-up, two freewheeling French girls with flip-flops and several bottles of burgundy, a vatic 14 year old nose-locked to his blackberry and subject to spontaneous chicken-jigs, a silver-bearded Jonah, a hands-laying healer woman, a towering robo-hulk with a good eye for long shots, a storyteller-gunman type, replete with a grey moustache, large regular teeth and narrow eyes, a Chinese tea pusher, a Turkish epicurean, a Colombian poet, a purveyor of fine theorems, and one wild whale of a one-year-old with a penchant for pigscreams. Inexplicably, nothing broke, no one got hurt, and the Gathering ended as inconspicuously as it had begun: a little dust on the chairs, the distant hum of the highway. <br /><br />Family is a wonderful thing. Among its other virtues, it provides a window into a cross section of humanity that otherwise gets winnowed out by our social and professional biases. When was the last time I talked world history with a jittery teenager? Or discussed domestic policy with a retired LAPD officer? There are perspectives and rhythms that I had totally forgotten about, having fallen into the usual trap of assuming that the bulk of the world was like the one in which I spend my days. Newsflash: it is not. <br /><br />Of course the average mathematician doesn't have to travel very far from his office to realize that mismatched socks and uncombed hair are far from the usual fare. But whenever I revisit my family, I am amazed at just how narrow my circle really is. If the world were nothing more than the gross aggregate of the life I live every day, the people that form my family would be totally uninventable, so far from the mean as to imply some structured skewing of the data: a character fraud, as it were, carried out by some wily painter of people-scapes and set just so to substantiate my pet theory of Natural Diversity. As it is, it can be a challenge to appreciate that these characters were formed in the same slow crucible of experience as I, and that what look like the wild, improbable touches of a journeyman artist are in fact the natural consequences of experiences totally beyond my ken.<br /><br />We had a great time. We sang, we danced, we drank, we croqueted one another to the rotten log halfway down the mountain in ever widening circles of sporting malice. Wings were flapped, feather preened, crests shaken and bills stretched. It was the Great Family Roost, 2009, and every zany pin-feathered cockastruz who came got exactly what he was looking for: a scent of the flock, a sense of the family pattern. And then, without warning, it was over. Perhaps the Great Cockastruz flapped his wing, or shook his tail. Whatever it was, they all got the signal, and one by one they packed up and pulled out, leaving nothing behind except a few tracks, a couple of white smudges: the usual aftermarks of zootomical scrutiny. <br /><br />Today, for the first time in two weeks, we are home alone. As the din ebbs and the dust settles, nature slowly pushes in to fill the spaces: the wind is back to its old tricks of making noise in the pines, I see, and that obnoxious Stellar's Jay has decided to come back and pick away at the herbs again. Zoogle and I saw a 10 point buck down the hill this afternoon, and later we spied a spotted fawn asleep on the sand at the side of the road. As we ate dinner in silence on the back porch tonight, we noted that the sun had remembered its old trick of arranging the day's left over color in bright, clean swathes across the twilight sky. And a gray fox came trotting across the lawn just as the first stars came out, a swiftly moving shadow whose passage mopped up what remained of the malice.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-11304234088270804412009-07-20T01:48:00.000-07:002009-07-20T02:49:38.154-07:002 am Monday morningA lot of people ask if Benjamin sleeps through the night. I never know what to say. Yes, he is capable of sleeping through the night: he has done it more than one occasion, and both his parents have risen like sunflowers the morning after, beaming and radiant as they sing the glories of the Regular Boy. And then there are nights like tonight, where it's 2 am and Zoogle has been thrashing around like a downer cow for three hours. Does Z. sleep through the night? Perhaps we can say: yes, as long as the night is deemed to have started at the hour of his choosing. And as long as sleep crawling, fitful dreams, random cries, and the occasional foot to the thorax are included within the general category of somnolent behavior.<br /><br />A few months ago Catalina read a book called <span style="font-style: italic;">Sleep Training: <span style="font-style: italic;">The No-Cry Sleep Solution, </span></span>thinking to nip this little Turandottino in the bud. "All right, what's the skinny?" I ask her, thinking to save myself the trouble of reading yet another two hundred page technical text based on an idea so flimsy that all of its essential features would fit on a stickynote. But it turned out that the wily autheress had been cheap even by the standards of advice-books: the ruling idea was so slender it slipped through the cracks entirely, and my professional reader of a wife, this trained parser of texts, was wholly incapable of giving me anything more than the roughest of vague ideas. "You need to be prepared to suffer for ten days", she managed to report. "Ten days, and then you're in the clear: consider it an investment." But the rational for the suffering, and its details, and the way all this pain was supposed to transform our child into a rat-tailed liron: all these things were forgotten, or never absorbed, or so obscured by the Attachment Parenting mumbo jumbo that they never crystalized into hard, concrete plans of action. Anyway, the punchline is that we never took the plunge, and thus continue with the nuits blanches long after most babies are sleeping like turtle doves.<br /><br />And so it is that at 2 on the night before the day on which my wonderful wife freely volunteered for an extra Redeye shift to give me a little more time to work on my paper, I am up writing in my blog instead of nourishing my soon-to-be-taxed brain with a full night's sleep. Meanwhile, four guests snooze like trolls in trailers ten yards away, and two more, in the upstair's bed, have the presence of mind to mumble something about a cursed blighter as they smile drowsily and burrow deeper beneath the sheets.<br /><br />Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-13274122318103152202009-07-14T22:52:00.000-07:002009-07-15T00:04:48.653-07:00Done1. Picked up a kilo and a half of unpasteurized goat blow from my dealer on Hick's Road. Assurances were given that this is truly the good shit. Doubts niggle.<br /><br />2. Baked two whole-wheat sourdough almond loaves as part of Operación Conquistaklaus. One was snatched from the cooling rack by a low flying Steller's Jay, the other picked to the bones by the Dome's long-whiskered resident rodent. Operación postponed.<br /><br />3. Found: one bug in modeling code. Seeking exterminator.<br /><br />4. Managed to slash a trench in Zoogle's leg with a piece of plywood spinning free in a power drill. The wound blends with his eczema, sunburn, diaper rash, carpetsores, and babypox, luckily.<br /><br />5. Have played Stan's guitars. One is a certifiable piece of shit, the other a sort of blackmarket dung. No word on the accordian.<br /><br />6. Have performed final rites for the tomatoes, one of the peppers, all the garlic, and a number of flowers. Have tentatively subcontracted keeners for the onions and the broccoli.<br /><br />7. The idea of a triple bin composter received a very lukewarm response from the mother-in-law. Possible explanations: one, she knows that they don't work, two, she doubts our ability to generate that much compost, three, she doesn't want to have to look at the thing, four, she thinks they generate bad karma, five, she doubts my ability to make one, six, had a bad experience with triple-bin composters in the past and doesn't want to dredge up memories. All cards very close to the vest, as usual. Work proceeds without drive, wily-nily and at a sluggish pace.<br /><br />8. Zoogle is back to his old tricks of running laps between the hours of 2 and 4 in the morning. It is not a matter of waking before or after he does: it is a matter of finding some five minute slice of time in the day when Dad-blear clears and I can remember whom to curse.<br /><br />9. Rodents still duped by bird wire: cages on the raised beds continue sans chicken wire.<br /><br />10. I am stiff as a German lip, bloated with pie crust, drowning in Walden, invisible to my wife, and a teething ring to my boy. No complaints.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-66355946169363087562009-07-10T21:39:00.000-07:002009-07-11T16:50:59.054-07:00To Do1. Read up on how goat's milk affects babies before accepting the 2 gallons/day that Eric's neighbors currently use to water the shrubs. (Note to self: find out if all goats are such boom-or-bust creations before buying one for your wife.)<br /><br />2. Work on baking an authentic loaf of thick, crusty European <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Roggenbrot</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">mit</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Sauerteig</span> with which to dazzle and addict Klaus the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Steiflippender</span> Neighbor. Ulterior motive: loosen Klaus's Teuton tongue and start Z. on his third <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Muttersprache</span> before he gets too old to hold it all in his head.<br /><br />3. Finish at least one academic paper before I leave the mountains, that I might start on an essay when I reach the coast, that I might apply for grants and jobs when I reach the Burgh, that I might leave the rain-addled East forever for the glories of this open West.<br /><br />4. Check in the morning to see if <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Zoogle</span> still has blood seeping from his inner ear. If so, easy on tomorrow's variants of Cosme <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Cohete</span> Hits Turbulence on Re-entry.<br /><br />5. Do an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">internet</span> search to see if Stan's $6000 vintage blood-tinged gaucho <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">accordion</span> with knife-scuffs might be had for somewhat less.<br /><br />6. Water the flowers. Bury the tomatoes.<br /><br />7. Buy two 10 foot pine two by fours, one 12 foot two by six, as many as six 8 foot one by sixes, though fewer if I can find suitable portions of one inch plywood lying around the house, six <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">galvanized</span> steel hinges and a sheet and a half of thick exterior plywood. Convert all this into a compost pile.<br /><br />8. Wake up before <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Zoogle</span> and get to work. Failing this, wake up after <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Zoogle</span> and give thanks that you weren't on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Redeye</span>.<br /><br />9. Add chicken wire to the rodent cages on the raised beds.<br /><br />10. Do yoga, bake a pie, go to the lake, read Walden, love my wife, dandle my boy. Contemplate why I never get anything done during my summer vacation.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-29417716030640318912009-07-08T22:13:00.000-07:002009-07-10T11:35:05.962-07:00CrankBenny seems to be developing a troubled side. Setting him on his back for a diaper change is like setting him in boiling oil: the horrified shrieks and violent thrashing last for hours. When you offer him food in which he has no interest, he will hurl it <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">contemptuously</span> to the ground with one backhand sweep and stare with bored, irritated intensity at a spot on the far wall. He has also started to produce low, throaty growls, often for no reason. Though for the most part these growls are subdued affairs, somewhat unnerving but easy to write off as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Tuvan</span> warm up exercise, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">occasionally</span> they snowball into spasms of white rage, eye popping, vein snapping <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">contractions</span> of anger whose raw emotional force lifts nape hairs throughout the room.<br /><br />The fact that our child is developing a temper is perhaps not totally unexpected: he is, after all, the ill-begotten offspring of a fiery Latina and her <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">grumbelpocks</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Toews</span> of a husband. But <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">expectations</span> aside, he has been such a sweet child thus far that this shift to the cranky makes me wonder if something is happening to the boy. Could those three new teeth be torturing his gums? Has licking all the lead-infused <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">construction</span> dust littering the dome floor gone to his brain? Sunburn? Dehydration? Brown house spiders....?<br /><br />We tend to think that watching a child pass through <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">developmental</span> milestones is a moving and uplifting process. What I have come to realize that it can also be somewhat <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">demoralizing</span>. The <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Zoogle</span> that came out of the box was a wonderful creature, healthy, happy, perfect. At the One Month mark, the object of parenting seemed to consist of nothing more than holding steady at the helm: acting in such a way that this natural <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">wonderfulness</span> would just continue, in degree if not in form. What this naive vision overlooks, however, is that sweetness is no more intrinsic to our animal nature than frightful rage and violent displays of temper. Sweetness may be useful for convincing your mother not to throw you out with the compost, but rage is good back-up system, a terrifying efficient way of ensuring that she doesn't take you for granted and continues to feed you on schedule.<br /><br />Benjamin is still a sweet child. His smile illuminates the room, and when he laughs that high, ridiculous giggle, there is not a heart in the world that can resist him. But slowly, a more complex creature is oozing into being. He is 'own little man', as my uncle recently said, willful, independent, conscious of what he likes and doesn't like and ruthless in letting you know it. And while this particular Crank may be short lived (he won't be in diapers forever), I strongly suspect that what we are seeing reflects some permanent stamp of character, a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">temperament</span> that is at once fiery and stubborn and will last long into his adult life. Which is a sobering thought: if nape hair rises at the antics of a 25 pound cherub gone berserk, imagine the effect when he's a hairy chested six foot six 250 pound raging <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">guerrilla</span> of an adult. Which he will be in about two years, at the rate he's going.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-58190549472892620142009-06-29T08:49:00.000-07:002009-07-01T13:51:07.925-07:00CaliforniaI am sitting on the back porch of the dome, feet on the table, beer in the hand, watching with a sort of Buddhist vacuity as the sky changes from navy to baby blue above a band of smoldering orange at the far end of the valley. There is something singular about these colors: they seem to exist only in California in the summer between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. Seeing them on this peaceful, windless evening, I am struck with a strong sense of my youth, a time perhaps too much given to the long and mindless contemplation of those elusive solar halos arching along suspected horizons. This is not memory, it is something more intense: sitting here tonight with sun going down at my feet, I think not <span style="font-style: italic;">of</span> but <span style="font-style: italic;">in</span> old patterns, am brought back to a mode of perception that I had long lost track of: a quiet, non-invasive way of seeing the world that is spiritual, imaginative, and dangerously undisciplined.<br /><br />It is difficult to explain to someone who has not wasted years of their life watching California sunsets what is so spectacular about this light. The sun creeps not just behind the flora, but beneath it, inside of it, so that the sweep of the wild barley, the elegant sparsity of the native oak, the serrated contours of the pine, all these things begin to burn with a slow, glowing fire that connects, for one luminous, precarious moment, the earth, the sky, man, God, the individual and the collective, and there for a brief moment it holds, a pulsing, living symbol of relentless and inescapable unity, before the peak fades and the light ebbs and that strong, amber glow of connection slowly cedes to a lingering sadness, a darkening awareness of doomed dreams and impossible beauty.<br /><br />These are the sunsets that I remember. I watched them for three years in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Parkfield</span></span>, with its vast silence and endless rolling hills, and then for four more in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Atascadero</span></span>, where the valley lay like a fiefdom below the brow of the Old Man's pleasure palace. Perhaps so much light-gorging went to my brain. Many of my present memories of place are associated with certain qualities of light, so that now, when I think about that day at the beach with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Beem</span></span> and the Crew, or that time we shot skeet with Uncle Bob, or holding hands with Tiffany by the lake, or the final set of tennis in our match for the league, what I remember are less the activities themselves but rather the shape of the light, its eddies and its pockets. My memories are Transcendent-pink, Lugubrious-amber: always wordless, always aching, dying and turning black.<br /><br />I was shooting the shit with The Old One the other day, trying to explain why the last several months had been so difficult. At some point in the conversation the word 'regret' surfaced, and though his council was to avoid that road at all costs, these sunsets remind me that even if he's right, it would be useful to find a way to express the ways in which these could-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">have's</span></span> gnaw and pull at my consciousness. These are the agonies of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Heimweh</span></span>. And though I realize if they remain unchecked they devour the Self, it is also true that their existence reflects some key truth about our character, our assumptions, our basic constitution. The <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> that triggers our various worldly <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">contortions</span> may not snap into clear relief simply by understanding how this light, this place, these trees and this ocean and these magnificent mountains that roll on far farther than the native habit of one man's natural imagination, how these things integrate to a sense of Home, but it will almost certainly remain obscure if we don't.<br /><br />Of course there is more than self-knowledge at stake: there is also the Future. And what has slowly become clear to me is that a man with no sense of native place is weak and vulnerable, incapable of either living or dying with grace. What has become clear to me, now that I have spent two aimless seasons among the Cloud-people and fathered a son and worried escape on no savings and no plans and no relevance and no reasons, what has become clear to me is that Home is for the lucky and the skilled, that it is a whirling club Fate throws us as we cross the narrow gap between Going and Coming, and that if we flub our footing or look down at the wrong moment, it falls and disappears forever.<br /><br />Francisco says that if you've been happy in some place, you should never go back. I consider Francisco a wise man, but I wonder if the reasons for his dictum were rooted in memory or in light. It makes all the difference: I don't think much about having been happy in California, but tonight, sitting alone on the back porch as the sun set set over the valley, tonight in this simmering light I am joyful as I haven't been in years.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-19009506251841989412009-06-25T07:38:00.001-07:002009-06-27T15:58:36.595-07:00VacationIn the dream vision we are writing furiously in our nook amid the pines while child-starved family members eagerly <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Zoogle</span>-sit for hours at a time. The vision also includes incense bearing trees, demon-lovers, Abyssinian maids, and all kinds of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">hanky</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">panky</span> on the banks of the river <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Alph</span>, of course: a richly textured opium dream as beautiful as it is doomed.<br /><br />I do not believe (more exactly: I chose not to believe) that summer vacation with a toddler is an intrinsically fantastical concept. Were I a banker and my wife a socialite, with the joint objective of catching up on light reading in the spas of Baden Baden, I believe that relaxation, at least to some degree, would be within our reach: we would simply hire a nanny named Gerta <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Schliessenmaul</span>, hand over the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">zumopfergehoerendeerbse</span> and be done with it. At 9 we would hand off the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Zoogle</span>, at 10 my wife would take the Mud Treatment, I would smoke my pipe all day, and early every evening there would be a knock at our <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">bungalow</span>, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">matronenhefte</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Gerte</span> with a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">beaming</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Zoogle</span> in her arms, a wriggling, happy child glowing in the dual delights of reunion with mama and liberation from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Biederfrau</span>.<br /><br />But we are academics, not bankers. The defining characteristic of our job is its lack of leisure time. Academia (at least <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">pre</span>-degree or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">pre</span>-tenure academia) represents a kind of indentured contract with Posterity, wherein any time not spent teaching or sleeping or eating Chinese takeout is time that really ought to be spent developing one's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Gesammelte</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Werke</span>. The academic is always looking over his shoulder, always wondering who will be asking about his latest Productions, always anxious about his grant applications, always cultivating his great, writhing hoard of good ideas. <br /><br />In effect, then, vacation is just a code word for 'doing everything you usually do, with the added challenge of more social expectations.' <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Zoogle</span> still gets up at 6 every morning. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Redeye</span> shift, anyone? Nary a taker, and no wonder: just about every evening is filled with low-key, desultory conversation that drags late into the night, the sort of loose, fragmentary talk that gets mixed with drinks and mild boasting and family stories, slowly building the slender structure we call Clan. And Clan can be a beautiful thing, but it pays no heed to child bio-rhythms, and doesn't recognize the relentless metronome of the Tower, and runs rough-shod over anything shy of a Deed.<br /><br />Being on vacation at the Dome is a wonderful thing. The air is clear and calm, and in the late afternoon native birds loose their long, lazy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">lovesongs</span> in the wood below the lawn. The clean, forgiving scent of pine acts as an absolution from the soot and exhaust of the Big City, seems to purge my body of Pittsburgh's diesel fumes and restore the animal edge to my bludgeoned senses. From the back deck, one can watch the sun set over the valley, the smouldering orange glow of the desert a mortar of light holding the living green of the pines into a firm but fading natural mosaic. This area is a place of spectacular natural beauty, and not a day passes in which I don't consider myself exceptionally lucky to be here. But it one thing to be lucky, quite another to be rested: I anticipate heavy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">eyebags</span> when we return to the grind in August.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-63213316237548073032009-06-16T12:39:00.000-07:002009-06-22T20:46:33.449-07:00Microsaurus<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGNrsqmvHHgIPTtPshB2uTit_f6VVaWzKqqhgzZp_rdfFgks8wHNKuSMl4nqo-sokE78OWTcd5JHIYVnAQCbh9sBzOrCPVIYlJ9Hn1u8EHRS_fd52oOKU90WWhVPSkxZ0VYqAnRMo6daY/s1600-h/microsaur.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 133px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGNrsqmvHHgIPTtPshB2uTit_f6VVaWzKqqhgzZp_rdfFgks8wHNKuSMl4nqo-sokE78OWTcd5JHIYVnAQCbh9sBzOrCPVIYlJ9Hn1u8EHRS_fd52oOKU90WWhVPSkxZ0VYqAnRMo6daY/s200/microsaur.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350364337838397314" border="0" /></a>Zoogle has become a Microsaur. In baby-geologic terms, what this means is that he has evolved from Palaeozaic-ridiculous (think charcol and paper sketches of gimpy, improbable life forms) into Mesozaic-monstrous (think raging flesh-rending terror.) More concretely: from haphazard fusion of parts whose functional design brings into serious question the wisdom of evolutionary advance, he has evolved into the sort of hellraising, hair lifting, spine tingling life form whose shear ferocity suggests that it could, maybe, conceivably, in just the right circumstances and in just the right microclimate, find some competitive niche in the biological world.<br /><br />None of which is to say that he is any less goofy now than he was nine months ago, of course. If anything, he is goofier: his primary interests are still ceiling fans and airline stewardesses, and he derives unreasonable pleasure in giving long winded lectures on the nature and taste of floor particles, flapping his wings for emphasis as he drones on in Babylonian duo-tones. But these and a few other evolutionary picadillos aside, he possesses some formidable talents. He can scamper on all fours at about the same rate as a startled mountain tortoise, for example. His fingers clench and tear like osprey talons. And he roars and thrashes like an Amazonian manatee, his three fell teeth flashing and snapping as he spasms along in mad and forgetful pursuit of The Shiny Thing.<br /><br />Scientists agree that the Microsaur is probably the dominant life form in the Modern American Household. Though it appears weak and clutzy, in reality it is a prince of domestic destruction whose sharp-eyed, quick-scrambling, high-energy wail of pending chaos sends chills through his slow moving parents. Some speculate that the key to understanding the microsaur's success lies in the critical balance between brain mass and body strength: while the Tyranosaurus Rex set the standard with its walnut sized cerebellum and cargo ship sized body, subsequent life forms have had to carve out their niches at different points along the brain-body spectrum. Zoogle's is a luminous mind in a jewel box, and as such he keeps the house in shambles.<br /><br />Who knows how long the Microsaur will reign supreme. We've been scanning the developmental sky for signs of comets, but thus far have seen nothing that looks like it has cataclysmic potential. Perhaps that is not so horrible, however, at least on the level of historio-biological narrative: after all, how many kids would go to the natural history museum if old T.R. hadn't had a good long run of things?Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-88532125381423286392009-06-16T12:05:00.000-07:002009-06-16T12:38:42.054-07:00A Chicken in Every Pot<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqHWBi_uS3MQnLHldmZAD6xRRV5h2JqYO7ybf-EykfRDFiqv2dxs2A47R5fF-xntGoLrODaxdNi0-5J6ls72wu9LqPya857ZP9hw1Uv8_aDNZTa-PvJyZnxpBQm_awsIRB-8hOLO_HRBX/s1600-h/IMG_1369.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqHWBi_uS3MQnLHldmZAD6xRRV5h2JqYO7ybf-EykfRDFiqv2dxs2A47R5fF-xntGoLrODaxdNi0-5J6ls72wu9LqPya857ZP9hw1Uv8_aDNZTa-PvJyZnxpBQm_awsIRB-8hOLO_HRBX/s200/IMG_1369.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348004213758624578" border="0" /></a>Either a campaign photo to accompany Z's future bid for fraternity president, or blackmail material when I run for national office.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-66488842817605602402009-06-13T09:16:00.000-07:002009-06-13T12:33:56.084-07:00Geometry<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1tRgIe6c4kIdI_J1oEIITGFt7tnJ3T1NXcpgHNM9vXkJ6-u7_Y06Q23oplortjYfzzKOCfp0HbL7K6g18T1xEocesawRJr2bs14NXtNfzye89Vexu6UNPMA52bVNZdhC-C2V5fOUYcgTk/s1600-h/descartes.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 164px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1tRgIe6c4kIdI_J1oEIITGFt7tnJ3T1NXcpgHNM9vXkJ6-u7_Y06Q23oplortjYfzzKOCfp0HbL7K6g18T1xEocesawRJr2bs14NXtNfzye89Vexu6UNPMA52bVNZdhC-C2V5fOUYcgTk/s200/descartes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5346864873782511970" border="0" /></a><br />If René Descartes had stopped after his <span style="font-style: italic;">cogito, </span>posterity would have had the benefit of his genius without the burden of his prolixity. As it happened, he kept on, and a consequence Western civilization inherited not just ontological security, but a lot of footnotes and a Mind-Body dualism which continues to rankle as the fundamental division of modern man. Not that I blame the box-faced Mr. D: with a mug like that, who wouldn't try to set a little distance between <span style="font-style: italic;">la chair </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">l'homme</span>?<br /><br />Even without going to the extreme lengths of becoming a polymath of surpassing genius, however, it's not hard to see why sequestering the Self from the accidents of organic form makes a certain sense: the human body is weird. We look at our toes, st<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcUlr4rflFL347S17nzXvfkBEVvu4vJMYUURvUVgJZUuLNOuufAPfovDRcw7Qj0BZCTTtB05w5CK8Zaw9RFhWDLtnGjWrSyqCWtl5XChMu0hzJV_rvYlG66zgu0X-wCQR_4XXqsx6xm7GC/s1600-h/IMG_1363.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcUlr4rflFL347S17nzXvfkBEVvu4vJMYUURvUVgJZUuLNOuufAPfovDRcw7Qj0BZCTTtB05w5CK8Zaw9RFhWDLtnGjWrSyqCWtl5XChMu0hzJV_rvYlG66zgu0X-wCQR_4XXqsx6xm7GC/s200/IMG_1363.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5346847120961124866" border="0" /></a>iff, stumpy, helpless as newborn mice, or the elephant skin on the back of our elbows, or the tufts of hair sprouting like tundra grass from our ears (perhaps I should speak for myself) and we wonder how it can possibly be that the entity perceived by passersby has any relation to these accidents of carbon based biological bonding. Mind-body duality emerges as a natural response to the basic absurdity of biological expression.<br /><br />Of course, there is absurd and there is absurd. Absurd as I find my own body (I find it hard not to compare it find all sorts of marmasets and cockatooes and three-toed sloths crawling around below the surface), I must confess that I fi<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXq3y2BHlJXA5RIYKit-v1yKRoz7DInNSLFfplNZYUq3nBE6Sr5Tm0qS3v-pIUqUurJSbTHPOzW7f5CnGPOcbMVObSGieghORbdWEEglGr0VE1rDwcU35R51A1KMhHETYN5WGqx_EPgk0v/s1600-h/hair.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 128px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXq3y2BHlJXA5RIYKit-v1yKRoz7DInNSLFfplNZYUq3nBE6Sr5Tm0qS3v-pIUqUurJSbTHPOzW7f5CnGPOcbMVObSGieghORbdWEEglGr0VE1rDwcU35R51A1KMhHETYN5WGqx_EPgk0v/s200/hair.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5346848989078572450" border="0" /></a>nd Benjamin's packaging truly ridiculous. His foot is as thick as it is long, with soft, shiny skin, translucent nails, and a big toe that curls like a pig's tail. His hair is a field of barley after the harvest, sparse golden stalks protruding forlorn and alone. His cheeks are silicon implants, his fingers are small albino traffic cones, his brows furrow with the smooth, expressive fluidity of the managing director, and his legs are the drooping, cellulite-splotched appendages of an aging cheeseweib.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvLrRhyphenhyphenh8howxCtGz1kcwwaQeYjQGo3EE6CwqLHnS8bH_VfoAyrG1uP7dWYR9tqhzBaZJZmI7ZJOtJPFh5hY6LCr1U7CSfUgI2kpEdhvDdLMIkLazrqDqMmo7WRs0cpd01IIjGqJ_2LeH3/s1600-h/leg.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 172px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvLrRhyphenhyphenh8howxCtGz1kcwwaQeYjQGo3EE6CwqLHnS8bH_VfoAyrG1uP7dWYR9tqhzBaZJZmI7ZJOtJPFh5hY6LCr1U7CSfUgI2kpEdhvDdLMIkLazrqDqMmo7WRs0cpd01IIjGqJ_2LeH3/s200/leg.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5346895423511882754" border="0" /></a><br />Babies allow you to reconsider some long held prejudices about human texture and geometry. Perhaps because you spend a long time looking at them, you begin to observe the strangeness of their component parts, start to extend this strangeness to yourself. Round, smooth surfaces giving way to rough, bristled surfaces giving way to slack, wrinkled surfaces: the progression of organism, the evolution of human texture. I suppose no stage is intrinsically stranger than any other, but they all conjure up the basic dissonance of being a thinking creature in a physical body, beg questions about the relation between spirit and geometry, form and function. Perhaps it is not surprising that the man who embodies the Mind-Body split is also the originator of analytic geometry.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-84089754924038671152009-06-07T19:53:00.000-07:002009-06-08T12:17:19.118-07:00Zoogle Finds His StrideCatalina reports that at Zoogle's nine month pediatric appointment, Dr. Springer walked into the consulting room just as Z. was launching into one of his love songs. It was the Queen of the Night come to check on the sterneflammende Taminino, and as their eyes met and the song faded, Dr. S. stumbled, caught her breath, and burst into uncontrollable laughter.<br /><br />"Apart from having memorized the Zauberflote, anything new?" she asks.<br /><br />Little to report, of course. There was the usual, a touch of eczema, a chronic splotchiness on the ass, the eruption of a tooth and a propensity for horsey chuckles. Standard baby.<br /><br />But that was two days, several worlds ago. Today, today everything is different. Today Benjamin sprouted wings, grew fangs, erupted in curly black fur and began to howl at the full red moon rising above the tombstones. Jesus save us, we got ourselves a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5pIx3OxuMQ">crawler</a>.<br /><br />"Crawl" is actually a little strong. "Gimpy wiggle-hobble" is more like it, a Quasimodobaby with malice and angst swapped out for ineptitude and confusion. There is still a strong degree of randomness in his movements. He is a Brownian baby, each lunge a stochastic compass. But behind this flailing one discerns an intention, a definite preference for There to Here, There being where the parent is, the ball, the lead paint chip, the kitchen knife. And although linear trajectories seem plagues of the distant future, they rumble unmistakably on the horizon, dull and gray and vague and ominous, mushroom clouds in postwar America.<br /><br />Dr. S. concluded her consultation with the observation that Z. was a 'raging bull' of a boy, healthy as a Finnish farmer and a force to be reckoned with. Two days ago we took this as good news. Today, with 'raging bull' boy suddenly self-propelled and honing in on mass destruction, we are wondering exactly how much Dr. S. meant to say.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-73160803882080433842009-05-31T19:39:00.001-07:002009-05-31T21:32:56.501-07:00New Developments<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTgC7F_6tGcTvX3q1WhleGhkKypmoHm8_ZLrn-H2Ya8Aw4rjfWXKLIEHHaIaVg4tzrRaOjZj76-wcqtc_Lw23efo9TGzT3aRMkGKNkjxzE00yGqp8hfd6FoLxBCwsaN-U3vzaMEqXpH1_h/s1600-h/Zora+in+the+ducky.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 125px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTgC7F_6tGcTvX3q1WhleGhkKypmoHm8_ZLrn-H2Ya8Aw4rjfWXKLIEHHaIaVg4tzrRaOjZj76-wcqtc_Lw23efo9TGzT3aRMkGKNkjxzE00yGqp8hfd6FoLxBCwsaN-U3vzaMEqXpH1_h/s200/Zora+in+the+ducky.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5342188786945154754" border="0" /></a>Benjamin's bride-to-be arrived in Pittsburgh early last week, rosy and pink in her Ethiopian finery and surprisingly sweet, given the length of the journey (her duck, it should be admitted, was a little saggy, but that's a long swim by any measure.) The brunt of the trip seems to haven fallen on her escorts, April and John, but <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">eyebags</span></span>, slurred speech, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">tsi</span></span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">tsi</span></span> fever not withstanding, they looked great, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">shining</span> with the natural radiance of new life and fresh beginnings. Details of the journey can be found <a href="http://zoraborealis.blogspot.com/">here</a>.<br /><br />The hitching won't take place right away, of course: we intend to give <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Zoogle</span></span> and Zora a couple twenty years to get to know one another, to say nothing of putting the finishing touches on our dowry settlements. (Current offer: twenty bushels of fresh <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">injera</span></span> against twenty cases of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Camelscud</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">honeywine</span></span>, with the caveat that all four guardians split the loot even-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">steven</span></span>, slowly, over many rich years of regular reunions and good, celebratory cooking.) Consider yourself invited to the ceremony: 4 p.m., May 28, 2029, somewhere in the great Northwest.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Benjamin's growth continues apace. Those six, hopeless hours in the car on the way back from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Blacksburg</span></span> seem to have jolted the boy into radical advance: not only has he mastered the art of forward motion while holding himself in a standing position, but he has <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">thro</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzpEJnsl7Jt18rhr4X-Xq5phoBT_MxS30RQKQTSQZaarxje0kdI2ZUU5abexG373DOOkb1rF0xQG_pKsCA4eOVPPbRPgfZSoSWMqEymnsUo12PTscYG8pdsnskmlNEvuY9ecK_LqJnfp_z/s1600-h/IMG_1278.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzpEJnsl7Jt18rhr4X-Xq5phoBT_MxS30RQKQTSQZaarxje0kdI2ZUU5abexG373DOOkb1rF0xQG_pKsCA4eOVPPbRPgfZSoSWMqEymnsUo12PTscYG8pdsnskmlNEvuY9ecK_LqJnfp_z/s200/IMG_1278.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5342183798809730562" border="0" /></a><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">wn</span> a third tooth, crawled four steps, fed himself with a spoon, learned how to wave, and mastered the double <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">perididdle</span></span>. All in the space of about three days.<br /><br />I think he's a little stressed out by all this motion, actually: as a static, floor-bound blob, the coming and going of a parent was an <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">inscrutable</span> feature of the World-in-Flux, a world essentially beyond his ken and experience, but with his <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">newfound</span></span> mobility he understands that there is a relation between wanting to be someplace and actually being there, and all these movements assume new and sinister overtones. He is by turns clingy and explosively <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">belligerent</span>. He sobs at the temporary disappearance of a parent into the kitchen. He bellows at the sight of his Nubian bride. And he laughs, huge, convulsive belly laughs, laughs that build like waves on the open ocean, hang at his eyes and crash at his mouth, pure harmonics of the soul that swirl into soft, still, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">embarrassed</span> pools visible long after the tide has changed.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-41934340618445618202009-05-28T05:11:00.000-07:002009-05-28T06:17:24.094-07:00Matters of MethodSeeing the extended family always reminds me of Granny, the woman at the historical center of our common sense of clan. A while ago I sat down to write about this strong, spiritually emanative woman, and though I never finished the piece, two things occur to me: one, that I probably never will, and two, that this blog is as reasonable a forum as any other to give it air time. It is as fragmentary and inconclusive as any life, and should probably be read as something like an abortive statement of purpose for was ultimately to be a much larger project, namely a psychological and perhaps novelistic history of an odd and talented family. (Think Salinger's Glass family.) It was called Matters of Method, and goes like this:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Sunlight infuses this vision of my grandmother standing akimbo in the clearing. She wears light slacks and running shoes, supports a small dog chain in her right hand, and gazes at a clump of manzanita ten yards off, a thick, tangled briar that bristles and cracks as her two golden retrievers hone in on the target. Her long, brittle frame is erect, her head is slightly back, her eyes are narrow and she is smiling. It is a vision of beatification: my grandmother, Saint Jean of the Dog Trainers. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Jean was a Granny, not a Grandma. Grandma was the short frumpy one who gave away prayer cards and watched TV. But it was Granny who played gin rummy, wrote plays, boogied at the hoe down weekends with gramps and slipped her grandkids thin, decadent slices of homemade apple strudel late nights on the sly. It was Granny, with her laughter, her energy, her myriad interests, who stood at the epicenter of what I eventually understood as family. And it is in Granny’s life that I now comb for clues as, at the age of 37, newly gifted with a son and reconfiguring my own sense of family, I try to understand the grip and pull of wayward genes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I do not agree with Tolstoy that all unhappy families are unique, while all happy families resemble one another—bliss is misery’s double, and each anguish holds the seeds of a unique and elusive joy. But though every hue of unhappiness find a twin in the spectrum of bliss, the palate of misery is vivid and sharp. There is a reason that we read Inferno with pleasure and sputter mid-Purgatorio, and that Satan is the only character who lingers after a brush with Paradise. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">There is a dark thread that runs through my family. Our closets team with skeletons. This in itself does not interest me: dark threads are common as blue jeans, and skeletons dance daily on the airwaves. But I think it is a clue; I want to follow it from its murky socio-biological origins generations hence to its frayed end in the present, wound round the fingers that write these words. This is a sort of operation Ariadne, a guide-threading through the labyrinth of forgotten or excised fact. I am prepared to face my minotaurs. </span><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">She had a reputation as a woman who could coax magic from her dogs, and seemed to have settled comfortably into her status as someone with a touch, a nuance, a rare canine sensitivity. Years later fate dropped a mannerless pup on my own front step and Granny interceded by sending me a hardbound copy of the Koehler Method. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">William Koehler was a famous dog trainer. He had coached such Hollywood Wunderhunds as Lassie, Big Red, and the Shaggy Dog, and marketed a training system that “produces a dog capable of performing … Heel, Come, Sit, Down, Stand, and Stay, both on & off-leash in about 13 weeks.” Koehler was old school, a firm believer in ‘spare the rod, spoil the canine’. He worked in the fifties and sixties, and in my mind’s eye I have always associated him with the austere sensibilities of the westerns of the time, a large, leather-skinned man with a black moustache staring into the eyes of a terrier, saying in a low, gravelly voice “I’ll count three, I suggest you roll.” Memory is tricky, and mine is more devious than most, so I checked the web, just to make sure. There was Koehler, bald as an egg and looking more like Humpty Dumpty than a gunslinger. Zero for one. But koehlerrdogtraining.com did find the proviso “there are those who will find this method offensive...so be it; even Jesus Christ couldn’t please everybody. But there are many more who would bet the life of their dog on it’s result...a reliable off-lead dog.” Maybe I was on to something. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> I believe, broadly, in the law of cause and effect. I believe that if you spit in my eye, I will wash my glasses, and that if a pencil-necked stoolie in concrete boots is found bug eyed at the bottom of the Charles, then a man named Mugs sits sipping capuchino somewhere in the North End, his trousers dusted with limestone. It does not surprise me that my grandmother’s ‘secret’ lay hidden among strong arm techniques. Hell, she had been strong armed much of her life—why should she have thought other methods more effective? What interests me is not the fact that my grandmother used the Koehler method; what interests me is to what extent the Koehler method used her, used my father, used my family; to what extent the generational silence, the suicide, the long sequence of fractures and frayed ends struck, tamed, cowed and inspired this witting league into its present shape: a normal, American family. </span><br /><br />Perhaps to be continued some day.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-24403356931372195512009-05-27T06:34:00.000-07:002009-05-27T09:09:34.648-07:00Nuptials<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZFMCIN464p4EId-TGn79QkovQhap-4RfzUzP__qSljfIjwbcLKJIRZsiyWRiWgtp3zHFcAWxd4STaVQ3GMqDYU4WkuDqk4PIItLLnEkDYHfJq7O2IqdVMkKqrlk_NsVyUU0ZhOPUWkmC6/s1600-h/annaNpop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 138px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZFMCIN464p4EId-TGn79QkovQhap-4RfzUzP__qSljfIjwbcLKJIRZsiyWRiWgtp3zHFcAWxd4STaVQ3GMqDYU4WkuDqk4PIItLLnEkDYHfJq7O2IqdVMkKqrlk_NsVyUU0ZhOPUWkmC6/s200/annaNpop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340496627095362242" border="0" /></a> At breakfast the day after the ceremony, cousin Erica promised a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">fivespot</span> to anyone who could successfully predict the next cousin to get hitched. My money's on my dappled bay of a brother, of course, but by the time you factor in all the insidious twists of circumstance, will, ambition, and good old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Toews</span>-clan neurosis, it's <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">any one's</span> guess. If you want in, shoo<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZBANEFYUhm2ZJxi-EBQ3_xGpllMjWxikVfZTLCg2-pBAy0k2hJv_ZLtNblumNTW52Zf1xqO4uXsL77blLQLllHC6PhEtYoLXFQBn3abl1DUQ3DTVw7N971mC0mvAbtMpSKH-hg7kKxhB/s1600-h/paula.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 172px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZBANEFYUhm2ZJxi-EBQ3_xGpllMjWxikVfZTLCg2-pBAy0k2hJv_ZLtNblumNTW52Zf1xqO4uXsL77blLQLllHC6PhEtYoLXFQBn3abl1DUQ3DTVw7N971mC0mvAbtMpSKH-hg7kKxhB/s200/paula.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340531154469194930" border="0" /></a>t me a name and a Lincoln.<br /><br />The wedding was a Wedding, of the sort that everyone loves and no one can afford. The whole lumbering tribe appeared in full plumage, and amid the excitement of lavish dinners, open bars, a somber string trio, and a fleet of rambling groomsmen, we exchanged the sort of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">snippety</span> life summaries that are the staple of large and infrequent family gatherings. Anna and Bill pulled off t<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtIkRrFW7Iooyu_i3otKWRSpNPhncP9xCHlDsVdlhEMoA2CuyPyxB3Dx176Q9yhj06vJQT9wrOwaaCRR-4piXPSQ_zoGF71EsHr1ONy36ojPSU6bfznHdsM-AYh7De4ZvUWNIEYdhmlyYP/s1600-h/ericNzoogle.jpg"><img style="margin: 10px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 168px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtIkRrFW7Iooyu_i3otKWRSpNPhncP9xCHlDsVdlhEMoA2CuyPyxB3Dx176Q9yhj06vJQT9wrOwaaCRR-4piXPSQ_zoGF71EsHr1ONy36ojPSU6bfznHdsM-AYh7De4ZvUWNIEYdhmlyYP/s200/ericNzoogle.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340517882586244834" border="0" /></a>heir roles as Main Attractions with characteristic panache, doing all the flitting and buzzing the occasion demanded, spreading Natural Radiance in smooth, even layers, like fertilizer on a new lawn. Their parents were cool under fire, speaking dexterously, mingling with deft formality, charming and warm and welcoming and composed. I didn't kn<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVBAAf9Brd5ewKZh4XsyogjN0kuYSx06RNshMicr8vYjfCr6WavaWC2ftm8WEKwDX3d4-K4WChmEDLUx-sRCTyQUQ2FqpKdkI_4W0Lt55t8VWcyUJ1bPeOZfRTfR5NrVsd98yxAiEZ6jWW/s1600-h/dadNzoogle.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 190px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVBAAf9Brd5ewKZh4XsyogjN0kuYSx06RNshMicr8vYjfCr6WavaWC2ftm8WEKwDX3d4-K4WChmEDLUx-sRCTyQUQ2FqpKdkI_4W0Lt55t8VWcyUJ1bPeOZfRTfR5NrVsd98yxAiEZ6jWW/s200/dadNzoogle.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340497178139547794" border="0" /></a>ow anyone on Bill's side, though Catalina apparently recognized one of his friends as an old crony from the La <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Sociedad</span> Latina at <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">UVA</span>. We waxed formally nostalgic about by-gone times and moved on with some relief.<br /><br />Babies were apparently in season. Big ones, small ones, pretty ones, homely ones. I saw the cook eyeing Benjamin's physique with an appreciative eye, and decided to keep him away from the kitchen, lest he decide to put an apple in his mouth and baste him in butter sauce. So we strolled away, past flower pots and beer bottles to the tables where my seldom seen but endlessly fascinating extended family was swapping verbiage over gin and tonics. I made the interesting but obvious discovery that h<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0gn28Kpb02FQ9kFClBbXcjaQE5iILnrjqrklUL-LqoZlVCBYARpAzXNXi2NRIe-_Io9yMJ1a2MQZ3Ix6lp8tdt4tMgeCPL6CGdhZSsd69bNLiGdeXej0FWRcddH0QesfhYEFhVKydOG8G/s1600-h/erica.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 122px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0gn28Kpb02FQ9kFClBbXcjaQE5iILnrjqrklUL-LqoZlVCBYARpAzXNXi2NRIe-_Io9yMJ1a2MQZ3Ix6lp8tdt4tMgeCPL6CGdhZSsd69bNLiGdeXej0FWRcddH0QesfhYEFhVKydOG8G/s200/erica.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340532061516115474" border="0" /></a><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">aving</span> a baby has a catalyzing effect on one's role within the Tribe: from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Autochtonous</span> Agent with Interesting Agenda, one becomes The Accessory, the means to the next generation. Conversations with the baby in tow were, almost without exception, conversations about the Baby-In-Tow, and it became very clear to me that all those simmering preoccupations I carry around with me, those big, endless questions abou<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcM-Ljntw_Av7RSYCLV7VHDHV1hA_-CtOAWNAAM8TATrkvUeKbsBKdFJtzw0jPQovsxbk6PzZdo6gxboiExwT246p9WfAPiLBfpuKQeyc_qWRYlxbEJvCYpaHGWVCa-Ks3TO8urbpvu1O/s1600-h/barbara.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 192px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcM-Ljntw_Av7RSYCLV7VHDHV1hA_-CtOAWNAAM8TATrkvUeKbsBKdFJtzw0jPQovsxbk6PzZdo6gxboiExwT246p9WfAPiLBfpuKQeyc_qWRYlxbEJvCYpaHGWVCa-Ks3TO8urbpvu1O/s200/barbara.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340532478805895010" border="0" /></a>t Wherefores and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Whencetos</span> and other basic matters of Li<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">fe</span> and Self and Meaning about which the wild and willful <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Toews</span> clan doubtless has wise and relevant things to say, that those questions would need to wait. Which is probably just as well: knowing that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Broodstock</span> trumps <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Philospher</span>-king in tribal poker doesn't change the game, just the strategy.<br /><br />The drive home was long but uneventful. The last half hour was torture for Benjamin, who formally registered his indignation by taking his first guided steps forward the moment we set him on his feet in the kitchen.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-81324580278232085662009-05-22T22:10:00.000-07:002009-05-26T12:37:00.314-07:00Second Hand<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSTqZjC7J_xKUEjwPDRM25KcWwSgPFNeWNNE-5KTaqcHE_wuPbkJWw1U0T5zjZGN8AcCXiksTQnKfx_Svev5uTXjq4fi0XSWJnFYDbOhCmjXGz83dB7XgFQoA4_KYvuFxFWu1w_5pwfHt4/s1600-h/IMG_1225.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSTqZjC7J_xKUEjwPDRM25KcWwSgPFNeWNNE-5KTaqcHE_wuPbkJWw1U0T5zjZGN8AcCXiksTQnKfx_Svev5uTXjq4fi0XSWJnFYDbOhCmjXGz83dB7XgFQoA4_KYvuFxFWu1w_5pwfHt4/s200/IMG_1225.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5337770466869760898" border="0" /></a>For the last several months Benjamin has been able to support himself in a standing position with the aid of his hands, bouncing up and down on his mastodon legs while hanging for dear life from anything he can get his hands on (stacks of ceramic plates seem to be ideal.) Recently this behavior has evolved to include a one handed version of the stunt. Like a man on a bull, Zoogle fastens one hand to the wily and bucking beast that is the World and extends the other to the heavens, lets it ride high and loose, one finger extended and the thumb curled back under the palm, howling and puckering and heaving until the center gives way and he spirals nose first into the floor.<br /><br />There is a second variant to this behavior which is rapidly becoming the norm. In this newer version, the second hand no longer points heavenward, but flashes instinctively towards another object. If there is a block or a ball or a cat on the floor, Zoogle will squat and try to pick it up. Strangely, it is the collection of these other objects that now seems to be the real object of his standing: the second hand is usually busy exploring the world within seconds of achieving his feet, and he will strain to reach objects that he patently ignored while sitting or lying in their immediate vicinity.<br /><br />There is doubtless some deep insight into the workings of the human mind behind all this. Uncle Eric suggests that the behavior may reflect some basic acquisitiveness. I agree, though I suspect that there is more to the story than mere acretion. As a mathematician, and thus a man whose waking hours are devoted to ruminations on sets and functions, I'm inclined to view Zoogle's Second Hand phenomenon as a reflection of the way in which the brain understands objects as relations, rather than mere chunks of red, chewable plastic. It seems that for Zoogle, there are Objects, and there are Objects While Standing, and that the twain don't have a whole lot in common. Having worked through the one, he now needs to work through the other, scoopy cup by squeezy doll by long wooden spoon, until he understands exactly what it means to hold this particular thing in this particular moment. <br /><br />From a parental perspective, this is good news: it means all our toys will hold their interest value for twice as long. Still, there is something troubling about this behavior. One hopes he's worked it out by the time the scoopy cup gets replaced by the girl next door.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-16949693173214971922009-05-20T10:30:00.000-07:002009-05-25T08:16:08.022-07:00The AppleNew York, 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. At first blush the Cafe <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Fabiane</span> looks closed, but through the window I can make out what seems to be a long haired rat in a shopping bag looking snooty and bored while its owner explores the pastry display. Later Andrew will claim that only pig-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">savagers</span>, glue-sniffers, and tourists come here, given that the Verve is right across the street, but on this particular morning I am without the benefit of my brother's contempt, and the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Fabiane</span> looks like an oasis of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Sittingroom</span> in a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Standingroom</span> city. I take a seat by the window, my lips on a mug and my eyes on the street.<br /><br />In just about any other city in America, Wednesday morning foot traffic is pretty much limited to delivery men, grandmothers, and a few homeless guys. Maybe some scurrilous and dissolute college professors. But as I look around, I note that all I'm seeing are 20-30 somethings, a restless trickle of Young Hopefuls whose collective streaming etches small grooves in the face of the neighborhood. A river of distinct, luminous points, whose movement is the result of a physical law rather than will or need: the expected downward flow of an urban watershed. And as I sit and watch these young men and women shuffle by in ones and twos, each one so carefully crafted, each <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">sartorial</span> signifier so obviously considered, their faces begin to blend, and soon all I see is the macroscopic flux, the general move from Dream to Life, punctuated with a parade of rich particulars: leather satchels, dark jeans, small glasses, business-casual, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">tattooed</span> forearms, fishnets, heals, hats, scruff. The flotsam of the flow towards identity.<br /><br />I have only spent twelve hours in this city, eight of them sleeping, and already the spirit of the place has sunk its claws into me. On the way over, I got lost (of course) and ended up driving around docks and warehouses in Newark as night was falling and the wolves began to howl, but every guard, station attendant, businesswoman and beatnik from whom I sought directions responded with warmth, detail, and a smile. As if they were delighted for a chance to show off their city, proud of the fact that they had secured a bit-part in this ongoing production of urban identity; genuinely concerned for the Visiting classes. And the conceit (that New York is special, that it lies in the center, that its history and destiny subsume the individual) is strongly infectious: who can visit this city and not feel the pulse of something huge and central and great? The rough contractions of hope and abandon on a national and historic scale.<br /><br />Symbolism has a way of fading under the onslaught of Time Logged, of course. I dimly recall that when I moved to Pittsburgh, I did so in part because it too was a symbol, of working class America, of blue-collar struggle, of democratic advance. The power of that symbol lasted about a week. For the middle-aged woman in the toll booth who told me to take U-turn and get another ticket, the City-as-Symbol may take second place to City-as-Crushing-Economic-Reality. What does this place mean for that bearded bum in the gutter, or the trash-talking adolescents, or the Chinese delivery guy? For these, the city may be less the heart-and-soul of America than the everyday, crushing background reality from which it is the duty of every thinking, feeling soul to cut his bonds and find his distance.<br /><br />But here, in this <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">café</span>, in the heart of this <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">bougie</span>, expensive Brooklyn neighborhood whose streets are crawling with mopey young men in tight jeans and artfully uncombed hair, women with short skirts, bare shoulders, and leather writing pads, here New York is about proximity, not distance: it is about being in the epicenter. This is the young person’s New York, the New York to which every thirsty and questing soul must make ritual pilgrimage early in life. Some of these kids are making six figures on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">wallstreet</span>, others live hand to mouth, some furnish elegant single residence apartments with high end furniture while others pay what in any other city would be a fortune to occupy a small chink in a crawling rat’s nest. They walk the streets, they watch each other, they wonder who is who and where they’re going and who will succeed and who might be interesting or powerful or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">seducible</span>. They are Pynchon’s Crew, Sick and colorful and sad and endlessly entertaining.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-34972599602422342912009-05-15T12:00:00.000-07:002009-05-16T17:39:40.297-07:00SummerThe Spring term has officially gasped its last. High time, too: it had been languishing in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">IC</span> ward for over a month, but nobody, neither the students nor the professors nor the college president, had the discipline to pull the plug. Time, fortunately, keeps a clear head about these things: it announced the end with clipped indifference. As it switched on the summer sun, students and professors scattered like roaches, turning what had been a horrible tangle of legs and mandibles into a hermetic expanse of green lawns, shaded walkways, and distant mowers. A <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">ghostcampus</span>.<br /><br />Open summers are a gift. Waiting for them to arrive is a process that every kid in America recognizes as a test of patience, without quite knowing why, or by whom, the test is administered. And although the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">experiential</span> content of Summer changes as we get older, evolving from days at the lake with Granny, to drinking beer and getting laid, to frenetic attempts to produce new and viable research, the basic, psychological implication remains the same: summer is a temple of refuge, the one place we can arrest our <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Orestian</span> flight and not worry, at least for a moment, about the furies of the Everyday.<br /><br />Perhaps no one is as conscious of this sense of reprieve as university professors. After all, who else has such long-standing experience? As the student scurry off, to their backpacking tours, their internships, their jobs in the family bakery, the professors scurry too, each to his own <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">booky</span> burrow. The first week is spent taking stock, forming projects, gathering energy: recovering from the soul-searing work of sitting-in-judgment. Soon thoughts turn to the judgment that will be passed on their own work, both by posterity (the real judge) and the tenure committee (sham court). Even in this first flush of reprieve, the Professor is forced to remember that the three months of unstructured time ahead come with a ticking clock.<br /><br />I rail against this life, but I also love it. Its rhythms are semi-circadian, with cycles a touch too long and patterns a touch too irregular: it is an amplitude damping within a phase modulation, an oscillation that ebbs into some great flat continuum lying at the level of the Species. The annual summer twitters are an important (and lovely) part of the job, but they are shadowed by the multi-year chunks that always threaten Catastrophe (the Degree, the Position, the Product, the Promotion.) Like most professions, it can be both ennobling and eviscerating, luminous and petty. It taps wonderfully into cycles of seasonal growth, but hamstrings them with long term forecasts and the burden of an integrated life. Even now, at the beginning of what is shaping up to be a beautiful summer of family reunions in the mountains, countless research ambitions, wild schemes of going camping with Benjamin, and a raging social calendar at the dome, I am acutely conscious that those wonderful, boyish days spent pissing away time by the bucketful are a thing of the unrecoverable past.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8558221410100072276.post-74257763222335932752009-05-07T19:45:00.000-07:002009-05-07T20:20:04.742-07:00BabbleFor reasons ominous but unknown, over the last five days the Mothership has systematically reprogrammed the Babybot's firmware. As a consequence, the alien presence in our midst has transitioned from crude animal squeals into what Zoogelologists call Babble, a gurgling brook of sound that apparently carries meaning somewhere on planet Zog. Click <a href="http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~toews/materials/babbl2.mp3"> here </a> for a sample. Click <a href="http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~toews/materials/babble1.mp3"> here </a> for a sample with a slightly higher signal to anger ratio. 50 ducats to the first Champollion to crack the code.Cocodrilohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585298830429573161noreply@blogger.com1