Cocodrilo's Kinderplatz

Tottering Forward

2009-11-02T16:41:00.001-08:00

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, speechless 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 ( five steps = skewering Polonius), the ghost of the father is still breathing down his neck, asking when, when, when.

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 here.) 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 seconds. 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 one by his side and one pointed forward, as if he were leading a charge. I hope to have video evidence soon.

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?

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.

A Boy of Our Own

2009-08-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

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 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 link, 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 today.

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.

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.

The realization is healthy. It has normalized my relation with the city: we're friends again. And though I wish dearly 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.

One Year's Eve

2009-08-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

Call 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.

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, gog-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.

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?

Juggler

2009-08-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

Zoogle 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 pre-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.

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 Zoogle 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: Zoogle 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.

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 de Soleil in about 16 years time. The only question at this point is where I can find a few child-safe chainsaws....

Back in the Burgh

2009-08-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

I 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.

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.

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?)

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.

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?

Big Moon

2009-08-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

Big 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-naped sapsucker. Patience, I tell myself: is it not pleasure enough that he is reputed to exist?

Benzoogle is learning to scream, shattered crystal followed by high, hysterical glass giggles that tinkle lightly on the soul. Wily, wily and fast, that boy: get him naked and he'll wiggle-step right past you before you can say Sneako McFleako.

To bed, to bed: red-eye tomorrow.

Home Stretch

2009-07-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we were picking up pizza at the Janesville 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 freshbaked pecan sourdough shared on the deck amid the howls of 5-month Zella and the porcine grunts of 11-month Snockelpea, all sharpened and clarified by the clean grassy smell left by an afternoon thunderstorm.

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-yourselfers, and back-to-the-landers 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 equidistribution of Like and Dislike.

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.

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.

A precipitous move to Janesville? On the heels of a summer like this one, the idea does not seem so farfeteched. 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.

Five more days in the mountains. Then a few days on the coast and we're off, back to the Burgh, 'America's Most Livable City', as Dean Labriola 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 inequalities 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.

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 bosco oscuro, I find it useful to remember that if I can't solve my own problems, perhaps I can solve someone else's. And that to do that, it might be useful to take our new friends' ansatz 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?

The Sound of a Diaper Folding

2009-07-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

At 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2 am Monday morning

2009-07-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

A 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.

A few months ago Catalina read a book called Sleep Training: The No-Cry Sleep Solution, 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.

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.

Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.

Done

2009-07-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

1. 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.

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.

3. Found: one bug in modeling code. Seeking exterminator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

9. Rodents still duped by bird wire: cages on the raised beds continue sans chicken wire.

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.

To Do

2009-07-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

1. 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.)

2. Work on baking an authentic loaf of thick, crusty European Roggenbrot mit Sauerteig with which to dazzle and addict Klaus the Steiflippender Neighbor. Ulterior motive: loosen Klaus's Teuton tongue and start Z. on his third Muttersprache before he gets too old to hold it all in his head.

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.

4. Check in the morning to see if Zoogle still has blood seeping from his inner ear. If so, easy on tomorrow's variants of Cosme Cohete Hits Turbulence on Re-entry.

5. Do an internet search to see if Stan's $6000 vintage blood-tinged gaucho accordion with knife-scuffs might be had for somewhat less.

6. Water the flowers. Bury the tomatoes.

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 galvanized steel hinges and a sheet and a half of thick exterior plywood. Convert all this into a compost pile.

8. Wake up before Zoogle and get to work. Failing this, wake up after Zoogle and give thanks that you weren't on Redeye.

9. Add chicken wire to the rodent cages on the raised beds.

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.

Crank

2009-07-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

Benny 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 contemptuously 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 Tuvan warm up exercise, occasionally they snowball into spasms of white rage, eye popping, vein snapping contractions of anger whose raw emotional force lifts nape hairs throughout the room.

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 grumbelpocks Toews of a husband. But expectations 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 construction dust littering the dome floor gone to his brain? Sunburn? Dehydration? Brown house spiders....?

We tend to think that watching a child pass through developmental milestones is a moving and uplifting process. What I have come to realize that it can also be somewhat demoralizing. The Zoogle 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 wonderfulness 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.

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 temperament 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 guerrilla of an adult. Which he will be in about two years, at the rate he's going.

California

2009-06-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

I 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 of but in 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.

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.

These are the sunsets that I remember. I watched them for three years in Parkfield, with its vast silence and endless rolling hills, and then for four more in Atascadero, 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 Beem 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.

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-have's gnaw and pull at my consciousness. These are the agonies of Heimweh. 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 I that triggers our various worldly contortions 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.

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.

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.

Vacation

2009-06-25T07:38:00.001-07:00

In the dream vision we are writing furiously in our nook amid the pines while child-starved family members eagerly Zoogle-sit for hours at a time. The vision also includes incense bearing trees, demon-lovers, Abyssinian maids, and all kinds of hanky panky on the banks of the river Alph, of course: a richly textured opium dream as beautiful as it is doomed.

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 Schliessenmaul, hand over the zumopfergehoerendeerbse and be done with it. At 9 we would hand off the Zoogle, 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 bungalow, the matronenhefte Gerte with a beaming Zoogle in her arms, a wriggling, happy child glowing in the dual delights of reunion with mama and liberation from Biederfrau.

But we are academics, not bankers. The defining characteristic of our job is its lack of leisure time. Academia (at least pre-degree or pre-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 Gesammelte Werke. 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.

In effect, then, vacation is just a code word for 'doing everything you usually do, with the added challenge of more social expectations.' Zoogle still gets up at 6 every morning. Redeye 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.

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 lovesongs 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 eyebags when we return to the grind in August.

Microsaurus

2009-06-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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?

A Chicken in Every Pot

2009-06-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Either a campaign photo to accompany Z's future bid for fraternity president, or blackmail material when I run for national office.

Geometry

2009-06-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

If René Descartes had stopped after his cogito, 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 la chair and l'homme?

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, stiff, 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.

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 find 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.

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.

Zoogle Finds His Stride

2009-06-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

Catalina 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.

"Apart from having memorized the Zauberflote, anything new?" she asks.

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.

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 crawler.

"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.

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.

New Developments

2009-05-31T19:39:00.001-07:00

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 eyebags, slurred speech, and tsi-tsi fever not withstanding, they looked great, shining with the natural radiance of new life and fresh beginnings. Details of the journey can be found here.

The hitching won't take place right away, of course: we intend to give Zoogle 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 injera against twenty cases of Camelscud honeywine, with the caveat that all four guardians split the loot even-steven, 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.

Meanwhile, Benjamin's growth continues apace. Those six, hopeless hours in the car on the way back from Blacksburg 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 thrown a third tooth, crawled four steps, fed himself with a spoon, learned how to wave, and mastered the double perididdle. All in the space of about three days.

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 inscrutable feature of the World-in-Flux, a world essentially beyond his ken and experience, but with his newfound 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 belligerent. 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, embarrassed pools visible long after the tide has changed.

Matters of Method

2009-05-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

Seeing 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps to be continued some day.

Nuptials

2009-05-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

At breakfast the day after the ceremony, cousin Erica promised a fivespot 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 Toews-clan neurosis, it's any one's guess. If you want in, shoot me a name and a Lincoln.

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 snippety life summaries that are the staple of large and infrequent family gatherings. Anna and Bill pulled off their 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 know anyone on Bill's side, though Catalina apparently recognized one of his friends as an old crony from the La Sociedad Latina at UVA. We waxed formally nostalgic about by-gone times and moved on with some relief.

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 having a baby has a catalyzing effect on one's role within the Tribe: from Autochtonous 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 about Wherefores and Whencetos and other basic matters of Life and Self and Meaning about which the wild and willful Toews clan doubtless has wise and relevant things to say, that those questions would need to wait. Which is probably just as well: knowing that Broodstock trumps Philospher-king in tribal poker doesn't change the game, just the strategy.

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.

Second Hand

2009-05-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Apple

2009-05-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

New York, 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. At first blush the Cafe Fabiane 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-savagers, 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 Fabiane looks like an oasis of Sittingroom in a Standingroom city. I take a seat by the window, my lips on a mug and my eyes on the street.

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 sartorial 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, tattooed forearms, fishnets, heals, hats, scruff. The flotsam of the flow towards identity.

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.

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.

But here, in this café, in the heart of this bougie, 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 wallstreet, 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 seducible. They are Pynchon’s Crew, Sick and colorful and sad and endlessly entertaining.

Summer

2009-05-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Spring term has officially gasped its last. High time, too: it had been languishing in the IC 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 ghostcampus.

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 experiential 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 Orestian flight and not worry, at least for a moment, about the furies of the Everyday.

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 booky 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.

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.

Babble

2009-05-07T19:45:00.000-07:00

For 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 here for a sample. Click here for a sample with a slightly higher signal to anger ratio. 50 ducats to the first Champollion to crack the code.

Pink Flamingos

2009-04-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

The old lady next door lives alone and has few visitors. She is gray and plump and strong as a Chinese mastiff, with a rounded back and a beautiful open face whose skin bears the stamp of six children and a half century of steelbelt air. Though nimble for her age, her walk evokes images of a pachyderm on stilts, each step a jerky plunge, the integrity of the limbs a miracle. Evenings she can be seen plop-plopping to the garage, which she enters with a button and exits in a four door cream colored sedan which roars off into the rain on errands unknown. She is always smiling, scurrying past.

For a long time I've wanted to engage this woman in a conversation. Perhaps it is her smile, perhaps the fact that I find her presence improbable, a woman in the twilight of her life alone in rented quarters in one of America's grayest cities. Whatever the reason, our interaction seemed fated to exist within the small, dry world of formal hellos and distant waves. But yesterday the good lord sent a sign that it was time to talk: as I was heading out to the garage to get my bike, what should mine wondering eyes behold but a flaming pink flamingo, perched with acrylic calm under the flowering dogwood and gazing with dull nobility over a demi-ring of obeisant petunias. At the heel of the bird squatted the neighbor, grinning like a jackal and packing dirt with her bare hands.

"That should hold 'em" she wheezes as she flails into a standing position, wiping her hands on her trousers. She is smiling, as usual, and there is something girlish in her manner, giddy and nervous, as if she wants to make a good impression (or avoid a bad one.) Following my glance in the direction of the pink monstrosity, she giggles "oh, I just couldn't resist," and goes on to explain that she'd really like a little fountain, too, to make the presence of the bird seem more natural, but that the sort of fountain she has in mind, rock, with a little trickle, would be both very expensive and prohibitively heavy. And the flowers? Ah, yes, well, those are technically unrelated to the bird theme, they just look pretty. They are plunked down without skill in small holes dug directly into the lawn.

And so we talk, about gardening, about birds, about living in Pittsburgh and raising families and traveling to distant, sunny countries. She, it turns out, is the widow of a Pittsburgh Petroleum and Glass man, a naval engineer turned corporate flunky who ended up in Pittsburgh because 'that's where the job was.' They came in 1957, and though the husband apparently had ambitions to transition into international banking (she mentioned the dream of an apartment in Buenos Aires) that era was coming to end, while Petroleum and Glass was the Great New Hope. And though the prospect of hacking away in a corporate cubicle in the slushbelt quickly lost its luster, the husband had the good sense to transfer to the international division, where he was promptly shipped out to Cuba. They were living in Havana on New Year's Day, 1959. She talks about sneaking out to watch the parades, witnessing the buses full of young men converging on the plaza, the long lines of singing barbudos queued for their pistolas and their cuchillos: the arming of the People's Army. She talks about six months of splendid sunshine, rum, poker, hired help, corporate privilege, before the fusilamientos began, and the mood changed, and Fidel smirked as the Americans slunk away. She talks about the death of the unsustainable, the return of the inevitable: sure jobs in ugly places, swelling bellies and growing roots.

The rest, then, was the Burgh, black and smelly in those early days, slowly evolving into something different. She recalls black air days in which she would keep her children inside the house. Curtains were taken down weekly and scrubbed white. When some visiting Uncle made mention of the foulness of the air, their response was yes, well, that's how things are around here. As if it were a fact of nature. As if the conditions in which one lived were imposed by a higher power, and one had no choice but to accept them. And anyway, wait and see: Pittsburgh's day is coming. The fact that Pittsburgh was 20 years behind Boston was, for the husband, a selling point, for it meant space, freedom, room to grow: they could support a big Victorian house adjacent to the park, countless children, a colony of tabby cats. "And we sent our kids to the Catholic school over there by Saint Bede's" she tells me, adding, almost as an afterthought, "at least before the finances went belly up," suggesting a whole layer of suffering I don't have the courage or the tact to investigate. Her youngest boy, apparently, didn't make it out before the drying of the wells. He was taken from his Catholic school and sent to the big public school in Wilkinsburg, the predominantly black neighborhood three blocks down the road. "He had a hard time," she says with the resigned neutrality of someone determined to give setbacks no more than a bit part in the narrative of their life. The boy works for the government now and has "a very stable job," which I surmise is a hallmark of success. I ask about the periodic smell of sulphur that wafts across our neighborhood some mornings in the summers. She nods. "I can't smell it, but Nichole says she can, and we think it must come from the Thomas Edgarton Steelworks down in Braddock." She looks a little sad. "It's unfortunate that it smells bad, but you know, I think it's good that that plant is still going. After all, so many have closed. And it's part of the history of this town...."

The conversation goes on for an hour. Eventually, I wriggle off, making my excuses about being late for work and promising that we should get together soon for a picnic and more stories. On the way to work, I let her stories swish around in my brain, excerpting small segments, blowing them up and letting their narrative implications swell and shrink as they may. I think about how, in the absence of great will, chance defines the main contours of a life. How the difference between conditions imposed by man and by God blur in the daily struggle for sustenance. I think about how one in four people in Braddock have asthma, how nostalgia clouds common sense, and how identity and allegiance coalesce around prominent accidentals.

This woman is an object lesson in adaptation, and I admire her. She has spent 50 years carving out a life in this rough and dirty adopted city. Her fortunes have risen and fallen, her children are long out of the nest, she can no longer smell sulphur in the air but she likes the fact that steel mills continue to churn out their foul product four miles down the river. She is vital and quick, she laughs and she smiles, and at the age of 70 she has finally indulged in the guilty pleasure of buying a pink plastic flamingo for her back lawn. Let us hear it for knowing when to let your hair down.

Co-op care

2009-04-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

When our theologian friends first mentioned the possibility of co-op childcare, I was jazzed: not only would it solve the 'don't quite trust the nanny' problem, but it would come at a price well suited to the academic budget (i.e. free.) The theologians illustrated the idea by describing two professorial couples who had decided that each of the four adults would have full childcare responsibilities one day a week, with the fifth day assigned by random draw. Unless you were really in the doghouse with Father Fate, most weeks you would be able to work 4 out of 5 days, a significant improvement over the 2.5 you could get by pooling resources with your spouse alone.

Of course, no one knows better than I that it is one thing for an idea to pencil mathematically, quite another to be worth a damn in real life. For one reason or another, co-op care has been slow to get off the ground. At first we wanted to see how the nanny care went, and felt that in the scientific spirit of 'one variable at a time', co-op care ought to wait until the nanny routine was well established. And of course 'well-established' is a slippery concept: since there was never a day when the nanny reported two perfectly behaved beaming children who had eaten like vikings, laughed like Friar Tuck, and slept like a couple of periwinkles, co-op care had to wait. Even when it became obvious that the kids had developed a certain robustness to the rigors of joint care, we continued to refer to co-op care as a distant possibility, a "yeah, we really ought to..." sort of endeavor that we would get to the same day we cleaned our sock drawer, sorted our files, and organized the garage.

Why such lethargy, when both the product and the price were so tantalizing? The embarrassing truth was that even though we blithely left our children in the hands of an unknown woman whose services we grudgingly valued at $12 an hour, the prospect of doing what she did scared the shit out of us. Two kids at once? You got to be out of your fucking mind.

Unfortunately, sanity is rapidly becoming a luxury we can't afford, as our bank accounts shrivel and our professional duties ooze like caustic mud into every crack and pore of our daily lives. All four of us are thrashing for survival, bugs in a garden fountain, lulled by the sheen of a shifting responsibility whose true treachery wasn't felt until way too late, when wings were already wet and bodies already heavy. Flight is a distant memory, a dim hope: everything hinges on time. And since we don't have the greenbacks to buy it, co-op care it is.

And yesterday, Oh Lucky Day, was my first turn.

Sweet Henry arrives looking like Babybot with a fuse job, his small saucer eyes a pale, vacant blue, his grin toothless and twisted, his long hair skewed left in some simulation of manic genius. He hits the floor at full crawl, attacking first the router, then the cat, then the glass vase, three forbidden objects in exactly as many minutes. He moves quickly, like a cockroach, only with a weird, high-stepping plop-plop motion, as if he were Private Baby First Class on parade, or some unholy Lipizzaner-turtle cross doing dressage. I watch him with dull disbelief. He manages to suck on the phone cable while shredding a book of Byronic poetry; he moves on to a massive gray hairball for dessert. Suddenly it occurs to me that we're all being duped, that no sweet little human baby could be an agent of such terror, and that therefore this writhing albino blob can only be an alien, sent from planet Zorg to systematically investigate the limits of my home network and my sanity. Just as I am about to warn the others, however, Zorgito abruptly abandons the cable, looks me in the eye, and erupts with a smile whose total length is at least double the size of his body. Relax, he seems to be saying, it's just you and me: how bad can it be?

But he's wrong of course: it's not just he and I, and it can be really bad. For there in the highchair is my own son, whom I have forgotten in the terror of the new arrival. Benjamin seems to have been taken over by aliens too. He is perched high in his leather-backed Director's Chair, grinning like Jack the Pumpkin Killer and waving a smoking plastic spoon. Blended peas can be seen on the floor, the stereo, the coffee pot, everywhere, in fact, but his mouth, which is wide open and broadcasting some static-studded message from the mother ship. They are everywhere. I turn to break the news to the Henry's mom, but already she's disappearing, all I catch is her left hand waving goodbye through the open door, ciao, see you in a few. Too late! To the left is Henry, to the right Zoogle, the one crouched and sprung, the other a sprawling corpulence, one spreading pandemonium from below, the other sprinkling chaos from above: it's the Plodding Terror and the Bibbed Avenger tag teaming Carl the Weary Dad sitting slumped in his breakfast chair. The Visiting Lifeforms erupt in simultaneous cackles, and I feel my skin crawl as the alien presence weaves its nets, draws me in, sucks me into its vortex of inhuman experiment....

Birthday resolution: find a job as a banker so I can afford childcare.

El Beso

2009-04-21T18:21:00.001-07:00

There are moments (usually at three in the morning when the kid has woken up for the fifth time and is howling like a mountain banshie with a toothache) when one wonders how the human race survived the terrors of its own offspring.

And then there are other moments when the answers are obvious. Click here to see Zoogle reenact the basic, primal gesture that tipped Neandramom's decision from "barbeque the worm" to "give him another week."

Spring!

2009-04-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Today is the second sunny day in a row. For Pittsburgh, this represents a Joe DiMaggio-style streak, a wildly improbable, hold-your-breath-and-hope-it-lasts accumulation of good fortune that defies both hope and the law of large numbers. Even the birds feel it. Newly returned from their winter walk-about, these fair-weather friends are warbling and clucking with shrill urgency, as if the village were erupting in flames and they were the alarm relays, sounding their shrill sirens until, at last, Man the Oblivious Animal raises his slow head, smells smoke, and lumbers into action.

One of the pleasures of having an autumn baby is that by the time Spring rolls around, the child is just getting into full discovery mode. Spring represents not just an end to the much-detested snowsuit, but an introduction to a whole new concept of space. The world is not framed by walls. When I take Zoogle for a walk these days, he looks at the sky, at treetops, rooflines, chimneys and telephone wires, anything high up. His head is tilted at a crazy angle, his brow holds its usual quasi-cranky furrow, and his mouth is wide open, aghast, as if he's blown away by the idea that the world extends beyond the boppy pillow, and that objects can reach even higher than the green-plumed posts on his jumperoo. That's right, kid: the world is a big place. It has clouds and neighbors and the gritty taste of park grass, dogs that will lick you in your stroller, scrofulous wild cats which we will choose to ignore, chill breezes, dogwood blossoms, bright clothes waving on a line. And this is just the tip of the iceberg (wait until you find out about girls.)

Thinking about speaking to Zoogle in these terms is a useful exercise, for it reminds me that I've lost track of some basic principles. By nature and by will, I have always been an Expansionist, a believer in the outward-opening, life-advancing power of new experience. I have staked a good portion of my emotional and intellectual capital on the idea that there is no end to the number of ways in which man can conceive and mold his life, and that the world will yield its treasures to anyone with the faith, heart, and drive to follow his sense of wonder. Yet in the depth of this year's winter, when I hadn't seen the sun for months, when the trees stood dead and leafless in the park, when the boarded up row houses leered at me as I rode to work amid ice and road rage, I forgot about this idea. I forgot that winters end, that birds return, and that new life emerges. I forgot that what I was seeing was a vision framed not by some objective present, but the fact that I had allowed this present to become a stiff, dead thing, an object whose ontological limits began and ended in itself, instead of a dynamic conduit to other modes of thinking, being, and acting.

Spring is a good excuse to revisit those principles. Here it is: eruptive, cacophonous, radiant, demanding. Long oppressed, it riots in the streets, and threatens the old gray order with nothing less than total regime change. It brings beauty and a sense of opening, and as I watch Benjamin rubber neck the tree tops and mouth-trawl for flies, I feel that old, holy sense of motion again, the sense that though the center might not hold, and things will fall, that they can fall together in new and life giving ways. For Kafka it was the Book, for me it is Nature: the ice-axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. Time to start connecting.

Just Another Rabbit in the Road

2009-04-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Every Saturday from 7 to noon Minneapolis public radio plays a show called "Bluegrass Saturday Morning." We got hooked during my postdoctoral years, and continue to enjoy the show via live web-stream now that we have drifted south. We find it reassuring to know that even though many things in our lives have changed (jobs, cities; dinners for two), that announcer Phil Nussbaum's exegetical genius is still sharp as ever, and leveled with all the old fury at the one literary subgenre which admits no interpretive wiggle-room: namely, the bluegrass song.

Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Laying around the shack
'Till the mailtrain get's back
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms.

Phil would have a lot to say about this song. "Back in the days of the frontier," he would begin, in the crisp, quick tones of a male holding forth within his limited sphere of technical expertise, "mailtrains would pass between Chicago and St. Louis every 4 hours." (This is the same voice you offer hear men use to give directions, or discuss engine mechanics, or describe the precise location of a certain pub in a foreign city they visited ten years ago to a stranger with whom they have nothing else in common but the fact that the stranger is about to visit the same city.) And Phil would go on: discuss the fact that shacks were set up at track intersections, that those shacks needed occupants, that women were scarce. "Occupying those shacks must have been a lonely business" (and here he would give his Minnesota chuckle, a short nasal snort that means he has just said something spicey.) "In this song, the narrator wants to get in and get out before the next train", and with an exhuberant "hang on, here goes!" he would set loose some blazing Bill Monroe mandolin solo whose insistent catchiness would totally erase from our minds the fact that of all the songs in the world, few are in less need of an introduction than the one we are listening to.

This is not to criticize Mr. Nussbaum. I like his style. He seems to be a man who genuinely hopes to find meaning in the words of the songs he plays. Even when those words are Honey let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all, honey let me be your salty dog. Like any display of genuine interest, Phil's doomed but endearingly earnest quest for narrative coherence makes me wonder if he's on to something. If perhaps my own sneering ridicule is an artifact of a closed mind and a hard soul.

I should confess that Phil's influence is spreading. Not only do we listen to him every Saturday morning, but we've been edging ever closer to that most ridiculous of entities, the Bluegrass Family Band (think Big Mama Blunderpox in curlers singing harmony with her buck-toothed twin daughters while Pa shakes his scragglebeard over a plywood six-string.) Last Christmas I bought Catalina a mandolin, in the hopes that she would take it up and play the Monroe doodles behind my three chord chunking on the guitar. She hasn't touched it yet, but we've got time: I don't intend to hit the road until Zoogle masters the washtub base, and I probably won't start him on that until he can, say, take a bath (a useful backup skill if he loses interest in the instrument.) But little by little we are being won over, and I must say, I'm glad: Phil preserves some essential, doomed, naive enthusiam that I consider an essential feature of the good life. He is a glacier full of polar bears, with no signs of melting.

Committee Work

2009-04-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

Among the many pleasures of being a tenure-track college professor, perhaps the best known are low wages, relentless research pressure, and the need to dupe bad students into giving good teaching evaluations. But there is another one, obscure but fundamental, whose basic odiousness beggars description: namely, the pleasure of doing service work.

"Teaching, scholarship, and service are the three pillars on which the case for tenure is built" intones the venerable, ridiculous Provost Pearson to this auditorium of unsmiling junior faculty. Many years of toeing the party line have worn Pearson's soul to a thin strip of rubber. He is a short, stick-figure of a man, with droopy skin, leaden eyes, and a sartorial flair that evokes molting lizards. His mouth is surrealistically large, an Aladdin's Cave stretching black and mysterious into a granite hillside, and from the gaps in the artificially white stone at the entrance escapes hot steam: the breath of a genie who has lost his cork and is going flat. "And let me tell you this" he continues: "service will not get you tenure."

Which is very interesting, Mr. Provost. For it implies, among other things, that service has only negative value: it can prevent me from getting tenure if I don't do it, but though I build outreach programs, revamp the university curriculum, lead a hiring committee, and forge a new vision for future generations, my efforts as far as the university is concerned are wasted. A fact that leads to the following interesting paradox: namely, that even though 'service' is the part of the professorial job-description that aligns most completely with the institutional mission and goals, the cycles of promotion, ranking, and money have conspired to render it totally superfluous. In other words, even within this value-centric, socially conscious mecca of free thought and liberal morals, the value of service is exactly the value it would have in the rawest of freemarket economies : cheap, disposable labor.

Ugly as it sounds, that happens to be the nature of the game I'm playing, so when my colleague asks if I want to join her as an "adviser" to Lambda Sigma, the Duquesne student service group, and tells me that the position is a total sinecure, I agree to do it. And for the most part, her description was apt: this year, we met with the incoming officers once, for five minutes, at the beginning of the semester, and we didn't hear from them again until two weeks ago, they apparently having been off tending to the needs of the poor, the sick, the gimpy, etc. But two weeks ago I get an email "inviting" me to the annual banquet (university policy requires that at least one faculty adviser attend), and three minutes later I get another email from my colleague telling me she'll be out of town that day. Oh God. It's Toews alone in a roomful of 20 year old service zealots.

What I did not know was that Lambda Sigma is not just a group; it's a mixed gender fraternity. The tip-off came in the form of clothing. I, the math guy, come bursting in late, sweaty from my bike ride, my trousers flecked with chain grease and my untied clod-hoppers caked with mud. And as I plow through the swinging double doors, what should greet my wondering eyes but a line of 40 undergraduates decked out in formal evening wear. There are slacks, collars, and ties for the boys, corsages and debutante dresses for the girls, and everyone is nervous, awkward, expectant, as if they were conscious of some sharp eyed and iniquitous authority in constant watch. Most of the girls are struggling to stay within the bounds of their attire, and they wear their heels like high wire artists on vicodin, while the boys talk conspicuously and furtively among themselves. It suddenly dawns on me that the last time I saw this dynamic was at a frat party I crashed with my boorish sociologist friend back in my tomcatting graduate school days. Oh Jesus. One minute down, 119 to go.

The rest was unexceptionally horrible. Lunch is a lump of laboratory chicken set in a petroleum pepper sauce. The girl next to me (Lambda Sigma's official historian) discusses with missionary zeal the mechanism by which members garner their service hours (in contradistinction to, say, serving.) I listen to names being read in a flat voice by a flat woman in steep shoes: Debbie Heaves, Katelyn Porkrind, Michelle Scaley, Michael Ballin. Is it system shock, or did these kid's parents really have a sick sense of humor? And this we know, reads the poetaster laureate, only through striving can we hope to grow. The president discusses recent activities: soup kitchen, craft night with cancer kids, care packages to veterans in Iraq, harmony singing at the nursing home. Jesus, do they never rest? Candles are used to light other candles, yellow cords are placed around sallow necks, there is a quick and schmaltzy slide show providing documentary evidence of how much fun everyone had. I dimly hear some mention of 'leaving footprints on our hearts', though I am too stoned at this point to know if this is was quite as painful as it sounds. The afternoon ends with tepid applause, a slow shuffling, hasty retreats.

Two hours of torture. One line on a CV. Next time I'm going to bring my kid.

The Magus

2009-04-04T18:39:00.000-07:00

Consensus seems to be building that Benjamin has special powers. Armed with only puff, sparkle, and droop, he weaves his wild snares, fly-casting for souls with smile upon wail upon wide-eyed bovine gaze. His nature is sweet, but beneath that lovable, dopey fatboy exterior lies a dour, dyspeptic homunculus, a small George Burns who in his crotchety and opinionated way is forever wondering where he left his cigar. In the chaos of his passage, stewardesses forget their dignity, committed dog-owners consider upgrades, and passers-by stall and gawk. He is, in short, a kind of micro-magus: a wielder of arcane and potentially dangerous power in whose wake madness, passion and black pinfeathers eddy in ominous circles.

The Magus Theory of Benjamin (MTB) did not materialize from nowhere, of course: I have been reading the John Fowles novel of the same name. Actually, I'm not reading The Magus, I'm reading The Magus: A Revised Version, which is not quite the same thing. We (I) tend to think of literary productions, once published, as fixed things: we can decide if they are good or bad, but we don't expect to be asked to adjudicate that question twice. There are notable exceptions to this rule: Whitman's Leaves of Grass grew from a small chapbook into the sprawling compendium of man-love that today we consider the standard edition, and as far as I know, both posterity and coetaneity were cool with that. But there is a basic difference between a collection of poems and a novel. Adding new material to a compendium makes it an expanded compendium, unread portions of which can be quickly flagged by scanning the table of contents. But sharpening up a novel just produces a book you're not sure if you've read at all, and probably don't want to (if you liked it before, you are outraged that it has changed, and if you didn't, you're hardly about to give the author a second chance.)

Fowles, in my opinion, is about as great a novelist as one can be while having no sense of finish. His track record on endings is horrible. The French Lieutenant's Woman was a mesmerizing novel about the pleasures of being a dilettante (a theme dear to my heart), and it had me in its grip until the last page. And then Fowles, horrible Fowles, he dropped the curtain: he started talking about himself, his 'imagined' characters, the ineluctable indeterminacy of formal narrative. How very modern. How very wretched. I either wanted to know what happened, or to be left artfully hanging, but under no circumstances did I wish to be reminded that this was only fiction, and that I was just a reader, and that's how the world works, blah blah, ad vomitum. And now I'm 50 pages into the Magus, and though it's a fine book, I'm nervous. The title betrays a fatal stutter, a basic indecision: a crippling obliviousness to the fact that once a story is in the public domain, it is no longer yours to correct.

This is not just about stories, of course. Can you imagine Jackson Pollock asking the MOMA for one his paintings back so he could add a little more magenta spackle to the upper left hand corner? Or saying to a girl you've been wooing hey, would you mind scratching last night's soliloquy, I've refined the phrasing and would like all your impressions to be based on this new (and much improved) version? There are some productions which, once in the public domain, sever themselves completely from any proprietary relation to their producer.

Interestingly, as much as I curse Fowles when he pulls these stunts, in my dark heart I enjoy them. Perfection is a cold and seamless chamber: flaws open up the world, admit light, suggest change. An aging Leonard Cohen grumbles "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," and I believe him, precisely because of his stripped voice, his cheesy backup, his simple melodies. None of these flaws is essential, just as Fowles' pecadillos don't compromise his basic gifts as a story-teller: knowing he will piss me off, I continue to read his work, and find it great. Nor is this some sick literary co-dependency. Rather, it suggests (to my mind) Art's robustness to cosmetic perturbations. We can polish a piece until it shines or leave it cracked, caked, and grimey, neither has any essential bearing on its status as Expression.

The Magus is the creator, the weaver of pretty illusions. But it is also the creation itself, the Pygmalian pull of a beauty that bears the fortuitous imprint of the self. And the challenge, in art as in parenting, is to know when to cut the bonds. Whitman had only one child and kept it in the house forever. Fowles tries to get his works to comb their hair long after they've left home, married, and reproduced. Toews worries about his kid every time he leaves it alone with the Nanny. All these worriers, these clucking, revising, self-enthralled parents: why can't they just call it done, hang it up, step back and admire?

Benny in Boston

2009-03-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Zoogle, it seems, is something of a skirt-chaser. At check-in he chats up a trio of flugelmarms, a droopy collection of forty-something gate ladies decked out faux-attractive, per industry standards, headscarves, droopy blouses, lipstick that could double as traffic control. "Leave the kid, drop the bags," they tell us, "we'll take care of everything." We smile our excuses, beat a hasty retreat to security, sigh in relief as we drop into our seats. But halfway to Boston Benny strikes again, weaving his lovenets around a thirty year old flaxen haired stewardess in heavy warpaint. "You are so fortunate" she exclaims, and though we agree, we have a hard time understanding why that luck should translate into one blue-slacked airservice professional imitating a red-tufted warbler everytime she happens to pass our aisle. "Hey, baby, want to come back to the hotel with me tonight?" she laughs. Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah. An hour later we beat another hasty retreat through another security, stuff little Casanova beneath our coats and hightail it for the monastery.

Actually, there are two monasteries in the plans. The first is a condominium owned by our friends Scott and Alison, two of the most brilliant, kind, always-game kind of people we know, who in spite of being knee deep in tenure track jobs at Tufts and MIT, respectively, have agree to put us up for a couple of nights and even babysit Benny, should the occasion arise. The second is a groovy Bohemian dive owned by our friends Kelly and Weston, equally brilliant, kind, and game, and who have not only agreed to put us up for two nights, but have sacrificed their bed in the process. Moving from one place to the other other creates certain logistical difficulties, but Catalina and I agree that it's better to deal with the hassle of moving than risk testing our friendship on four straight nights of wailing baby.

Technically, Catalina made the trip so she could enlighten some congress of literary luminaries on the latest creations of her lurid imagination, while I made the trip to change diapers. Perhaps Scott intuited that Conference Husband was not my favorite role, for he kindly extended an invitation to speak at the Tufts mathematics colloquium once he knew I was going to be in town, a charge that I, with my fragile ego, eagerly accepted, as I would have accepted any task that held forth the promise of disguising my true one. As it turns out, however, our various holdings forth, while satisfying, represented a relatively minor portion of our energies: we reconnected with old friends, ate at Punjabi Daba, broke Chinese lobster, molded modernista action figures, and reminded ourselves how nice it was to live in an ethnically diverse and culturally sophisticated city.

Benny was a hit, of course, ogled and coddled into a farthewell. He was so charming, in fact, that Catalina thinks he may have duped various (unnamed) cronies into believing that having kids is not such a catastrophe after all, and that maybe they should give it a whirl. Which would be perfectly lovely, of course (no one wants to be only couple in the crowd who can't stay out after 8) but which sweeps under the rug some of the thornier aspects of the process (the nuits blanches, the worry, the expense, etc.) Maybe we should warn these guys about Benny the Heart Breaker before they fall for his wiles and do something rash?

Swan Dive

2009-03-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

Benjamin's chum Henry flew from his crib this afternoon while both boys were in the care of the nanny. The nanny was with B. in the other room and thus did not see the sequence of events that produced the plunge, so whether it was provoked by boredom, anxiety, or clumsiness is anyone's guess. But whatever the motives, the nanny swears that there was a thud, followed by a shriek (or was it a shriek, followed by a thud?) and that the crib, which not five minutes ago had held sweet baby Henry securely behind padded bars, now lay empty, while the floor, which not five minutes ago had lain empty, now held screeching baby Henry, newly initiated into the ways of the world, unharmed but pissed and anxious to make sure everyone knew it.

Zoogle, meanwhile? Who knows, there are no reports. As fire-engines roared, crowds swelled, and the wail of thwarted animal filled the air, he probably just slipped into his usual low level hysterics, I imagine, though the Amazing Plummeting Henry was too engaging to allow confirmation of this theory. This afternoon he seemed happy. We played Twist the Whisker with Ezekiel the Cat, chewed on a few plastic scoopy things, exchanged a volley of old man style emphysimic howls (Zoogle's latest addition to his ever growing repertoire of odd sounds.) He ate cold green pea mush for dinner, bathed with his usual soddening ardour, soldiered through a dull tale about Pliney the Pig, and dozed off quietly in his crib. I forgot to lift the safety wall. He did not seem to be traumatized.

Both boys are fine, then: it was a minor incident, one of many, I'm sure, that will puncture our children's life and slowly pepper our hair with gray. But though on a rational level it is easy to understand that hard knocks are an inevitable part of life, on the level of raw, visceral image, the picture of the Baby Swan Dive continues to haunt me. Accidents happen. But I can't help thinking about D., my colleague many years ago at the American School in Bilbao. He was ten years my senior, a hard drinking, hard working, writer-teacher-hellraiser type who happened to be a single dad to a beautiful 10 year old boy. That boy took a swan dive too. His happened to be from a 4th story window, carelessly left open by some construction workers. And neither the knowledge that accidents happen nor sincere friendship with the father helped me find any words at the wake.

I just finished reading "A River Runs Through It", by Norman MacClean. It's a lean, well-crafted piece that reminds me of how much I love good storytelling. It's a story about the West, about drinking, fishing, and the challenges of family. It's a story about losing something beautiful. Is there nothing else you can tell me? the old preacher keeps asking, years after the body of his boy Paul had been found beaten to death in an alley. Yes, says Norman, most of the bones in his hand were crushed. Which hand? asks the father, as if knowing his son went out fighting could ease the burden of his absence. It's a sad, pathetic question. And that old preacher, that pottering old figure who tends his garden, drifts from his wife, reads and tries to remember, he has rooted himself in my imagination. He was beautiful, the old man would say, helpless, rubbing his hands in his hair, staring at nothing. A sad, ragged canvass with its central image ripped out.

I worry that I worry too much.

21lbs 9oz

2009-03-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

By all accounts, our child is a monster. At his six month pediatric appointment this afternoon, Doctor Schneider confirmed that he was off the charts for height and weight, and suggested that he was showing signs of "unusual mental agility" for a child of his age. I have this second hand, unfortunately, our current deadline crunch allowing only one parent at a time the liberty of gallivanting with the pediatricians. "But what does that mean?" I ask my wife, delighted to hear the news but genuinely puzzled by it. After all, talented though he be, his tricks are limited to smiling, clenching, vomiting, howling, and staring with the same bug-eyed open-mouthed vacuous stupor that he probably inherited or acquired from me. Which among these is the mark of genius? The wife couldn't tell me, alas, having apparently agreed so completely with the doctor that refining questions appeared superfluous. We'll see if he still has the signs at nine months, when it's my turn.

The child has definitively made the transition from larval blob to b0nzai humanoid, i.e. from the sort of creature you expect to find under a wet log to one you might reasonably expect to see on a living room floor. As the above photo shows, sitting up is now routine. In peak form, he can hold that position almost indefinitely (the 'almost' part has caused a couple of tears) while systematically passing every toy within reach through the laboratory of the mouth. (I think it's a question of limited tools, the old 'if all you got is a hammer, you see a lot of nails' business. Perhaps when he has other methods of probing material objects, the Tooth Test will seem less compelling, but the moment, everything goes in, from juggling balls to fingers to the tails of the cats.) Still has trouble sleeping through the night ("He absolutely does not need to be eating at four in the morning at this age" admonished Dr. Schneider. Well well. Maybe so, but who wants to listen to him grumble?) and can't crawl yet, but his nap schedule is regularizing and he seems to have made a reluctant peace with the nanny. (Could it be that we have made a reluctant peace with leaving the premises when the nanny is here? Strange how those two phenomena coincided.) He has taken well to solid foods (avocado, mango, pea, banana) and his poo has transformed from delicate light brown milk stains to round oversized rabbit turds. Hurray for clothe diapers.

Under the dual dietary regimes of breast milk and raw fruits, fat is gradually filling in the convex hull of his body. Soon he will physically instantiate the following theorem: let B denote the set of spacial points coinciding with Benjamin's material body. Let x and y be two points in B, and S the straight line segment that passes from x to y. The all points in S are contained in B. (Preliminary proof: see photo above right.)

A few recent quotes:

"That kid don't miss no meals, do he?" (woman working the checkout counter at Home Depot)

"That child looks...healthy!" (random dog-walker in the park who witnessed B.'s cheek jutting from the sling and tried to suppress a smile as she passed.)

"Be nice to Benjamin, he might decide to sit on you." (The mother of the child with whom we share a nanny, speaking to her child.)

The Dean Is Dead

2009-03-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

The first email raised no flags. Good morning, it began, crisp, fresh, businesslike. Dean Labriola has been hospitalized in Florida since Thursday night, March 5th. The diagnosis is acute pneumonia. Sad, but in character: who but Dean Labriola comes down with a chest cold in the warmest state in the union on the first day of Spring Break? Poor devil probably out tippling with his literary chums until the wee hours. He will be in the hospital until Wednesday, March 11th. He expects to gain clearance to fly home on Friday, March 13th and plans to be back in the office next Monday, March 16th. That's my dean, baby: I see him now, smiling his sly smile at Nurse Wackelsticks, pressing her pudgy hands as he blusters on about transmigration, no man an island, tolling bells, oh yes, but not for me. And with a yawn he looks at his watch, smiles again, schedule me for checkout Wednesday morning, that's my doll, and how about a little of that boef a la port reduction tonight...?

So the second email, when it arrived three days later, blew me out of the water: I regret to inform you that Dr. Al Labriola, Interim Dean of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, has died. Has what? We are indebted to him for his leadership in the College and his dedication to our students.

Thus was the life of one Albert Labriola, scholar, teacher, administrator, and all around nutcase, summarized by President Dougherty. Has died. Not even a passed away, never mind winged his deanly way into the bosom of that good night. Labriola, for all his common sense and steelbelt pragmatism, would have been outraged.

This has been a bad year for literary deaths. First there was Foster Wallace, then Updike, now Labriola. There is a difference, of course, between the first two and the last one. The fiction writers were iconic figures, and their deaths hit me hard because they represented a material shift in something that I had implicitly begun to view as immutable: just as there are good writers and bad writers, so there are live writers and dead writers, and when I pick up a book, I like to know who is who. Like most dilettante gathers of loose ends, I use these facile taxonomies as a sort of crude topographical map of the World, and resist any bursting of categories with dutchboy ardor, eyes closed and thumb in the hole. Labriola's death, on the other hand, represented an assault on a taxonomic line drawn not just through life, but through my life: it was the barrier between people that were sick and people that were well, between people I knew and people who were dead, between people I had joked with last week and people I would never speak to again.

What can I say about Dean Labriola? He belonged to a category of one, had a touch of the old sui generisitis, he would say, his fleshy lips concealing a smile, crows feet forming at the corners of his eyes, his whole carriage an invitation to revel in the double meanings, ribald implications, and arcane references rife in his every utterance. He greeted me at the beginning of the semester, asked about my child, flashed me a smile. Three weeks ago he signed my reimbursement forms for expenses incurred in the line of departmental duties. And in a not unrelated matter, two weeks ago he interview my good friend D. about a faculty position with the math department, and gave her a glowing report, D. and K evince an infectious good energy, and would be valuable additions to the college; the other two candidates are acceptable. D. and I had a long good laugh about this man (is he unwell? she asked, he seemed a touch ashen. No, no, just a touch of prostate cancer, nothing to worry about. He's much too jovial to succumb.)

Really, what do I know about his guy? He wore elbow patches. He kept his meetings short. He dropped lines from Donne and Shakespeare, he touched his thumbs to his middle fingers when he spoke, and spoke very slowly, with perfect Oxfordian timing (though he would lose it upon occasion and start cackling like hyena when he found his wit too pregnant to bear.) He embodied the basic ridiculousness that is being an academic in a minor American university, and carried that charge with pride and dignity. He was ,in a way, our standard bearer, and we loved him because he reminded us that the line between being and play-acting is one of perspective. He was the most vital man in the college, 69 years old, sly and wiry and decadent and polished. He made me laugh. He was kind. I still haven't thanked him for remembering that we had a child.

Hombres de Estufa

2009-03-06T19:19:00.000-08:00

I hear them long before I see them, and see them long before I speak to them. Their arrival is heralded by the flat staccato of a big diesel engine, followed by the hiss of hydraulic breaks and the pulsed shriek of a company truck in reverse. From across the room we can just make out the beast's dull white dorsum, a long slab rimmed above with a thin steal truss that glides above level of the sill. Easing towards the window we see the monster itself, a 24 foot stub-nosed box van grazing at the barren branches on the far side of the road. It is a generic member of the species, dingy and unmarked except for the phrase 'Reliable Movers' stencilled with wind-blurred spray paint on the runners. It moves forward and backward in small steps, like a pig rooting for a place to lie down. When it advances, it roars, when it retreats, it shrieks, over and over until it finally finds a suitable spot on the sidewalk, far enough up that cars can pass but no so far as to crush the Japanese plum trees extending over the neighbors fence. Pop, hiss. The beast vomits up three men and lays still.

We had known it was coming. Our landlady had called us ten minutes earlier to tip us off and make sure we'd be around, and I had told Benjamin to keep a sharp eye out for these hombres de estufa, I not knowing how to say 'Mover' in what we have decided is the official language of the house. Actually, we had hoped to see these guys six months ago, but six months ago we had played our tenant favors to the hilt and didn't have the heart to request a new stove on top of the $300 refund we got for moving into an uncleaned apartment. Never mind that a new stove option was included in our lease, never mind that the old stove, a 1950's vintage Kalamzoo with narrow oven space, a rusty cabinet for pots, exposed steel tubes going every which way and a tendency to turn off with a bang, had been vaguely stressing us out since the beginning. "Ah, a little bit of gas" my damn-the-toxins-full-speed-ahead wife had responded to my comment that the device emitted an evil odor, "what harm can it do?" After all, we had installed a carbon monoxide alarm in the kitchen, and as far as we knew, it had never made a peep. But we recently realized two things: one, that carbon monoxide alarms only go off if the CO levels are high enough to fell a mastodon, and two, that the device keeps a record of peak CO levels, and the one stored in memory was off the charts. Maybe not mastodon-slaying off the charts, but definitely I-don't-want-my-child-breathing-that-shit off the charts. So from Bohemian delight in this match-ignited antique my wife passed to total raging protective-mother paranoia.

Everyone talks about the protective instinct of new parents as if it were some supremely powerful human impulse, a force capable of converting a wispy young mother into a towering pillar of lion-slaying rage, all within the span of a careless gesture. This may be true, but there is another instinct that is just as powerful: namely, the tenant's instinct to have nothing whatsoever to do with the goddamn landlord. I can offer no biological or evolutionary motivation for this impulse, only my assurance that it is true: ask any long term renter, and they will confirm. I have had good landlords and I have had bad landlords, but I have never had a landlord I trusted, and never have I called a landlord with anything less than sticky black dread in my heart. "Yeah, we should really call the landlords" has become a joke in our house, a codephrase that we use to acknowledge the Fall of Man, the inevitable and ubiquitous presence of evil in the world and our basic inability to do anything about it.

Which perhaps partially explains why, with the CO threat level Flaming Red, a new child, and a provision for a new stove written into our lease, we make the outrageous decision that maybe we should just cook a little less. And for a few days, this is exactly what we do, eating cereal, Chinese takeout, pasta in the toaster oven: a true adventure in dormroom survival. But I am a man who likes his bread. I like it fresh, warm, and sour, and the only way to get that is to have either a very good relation with the neighborhood baker (there is none) or bake your own. Thus, at last, the question: "Do you want to make this call, or should I?"

It is not a neutral question. It is a question rife with insinuation and consequence. Every trick of marital diplomacy goes into asking this question with just the right mixture of intention, indifference, threat and goad, and to answering it in a way that blends self-pity with the illusion of gameness in a way that is neither committal nor noticeably evasive. The who-should-call-the-landlord question is a question on which relationships founder, converge, fuse and explode.

My gaze fixes on something well outside the room as I heave a long, sputtering sigh, a sigh that dispels the accumulated bad gasses of 32 landlords over 18 years of renting life, landlords who have failed to present lead-paint disclosures and failed to fix leaky faucets and for whom, nonetheless, my monthly checks have been building slow equity. (Full disclosure: both my parents are landlords, and I like them. It is not the Landlord as an ontological entity that is the problem, but rather MyLandlord, as a syntactic structure and economic implication.) "Well, if you don't mind...?" Silence. Yes, rather disingenuous, I will need to do better. "All right, how about this: you call, and I'll give you a beer next time we go out?" A slight smile, a shake of the head: nice try, but we've got joint finances and we never go out. Touche. I think for a moment. "OK, how about the following: you call, and I'll wash dishes for a week?" Ring, chat, schedule, done: 3 minutes work on her part for a week of menial labor on mine. And the interesting thing is, I feel that I have never made a better deal in my life, and I continue to believe this, even one week and what seems a thousand dishes later, as I stand in the window watching the great white boxwhale sputter to a halt and three hombres de estufa stagger from its mouth.

The first to emerge is The Driver, a tall middle-aged man of medium build, shoulder length black hair, and a shuffling gate. He wears a baseball cap with the initials YH. "Up?" he asks when I open the door. A man of few but well-chosen words. He tells me he is from Boston, up in the Salem area, and doesn't do any of the heavy work. YH stands for Yankee Hater. He asks questions whose origins and intent lie far from the surface, like "you like living here?", and "what street is this?". The second man is a Popeye knockoff, 45 years old, ripped arms, a barrel chest, his chin covered in a manly shag. Like his cartoon Doppelganger, he directs all speech through a small teardrop-shaped hole in the side of his mouth: he talks quickly, constantly, endlesslessly, yet not once does his jaw show vertical motion. He wears a redsocks baseball cap, but denies that he hails from Beantown. "Naw, that's the Driver. He's real proud about that." Popeye take a shine to little B. "Hey buddy, you gunna help? Har har. Stay in school, buddy, you don't want to become one of us." The third man is an aspiring guitarist in his 20's, short cropped hair, clean shaven, delicate, almost feminine earrings. He probably thinks of himself more as a starving artist than a stove guy, but he and Popeye have a nice schtick, take turns with the dolly, curse the size and ridiculous antiquity of our stove, express grave doubts about the geometric possibilities of getting it out the front door.

I watch these guys at work, and marvel at the genius of the guy who assembled this team. Larry Moe and Curly don't hold a candle to these three. Their bonhommie casts stove schlepping in a whole new light, and makes me wonder if perhaps I acted hastily when I made that youthful decision to pursue a career among the non-hauling professions. I watch these guys appreciatively, and try to enter the Spirit of the Great Mover. I offer water, a few self-effacing jibes, sailor curses: they smile, but stiffly. For the most part I remain an outsider.

At the very end of the episode I sense a slight opening, however. The Kalamazoo Death Machine gets stuck in the stairwell. Popeye and the guitarist stand around wiping the sweat off their arms, throwing ugly looks and pacing the kinks out of their backs, prophesizing failure in loud and repetitive terms. To lift or not to lift, they ask. Lift, say I, and let me help (I'll be damned if we don't this stove out of the house today.) So I grab a corner, hoist on three, and oh miracle of miracles, the stove rises like a roc, flaps up over the obstructing ledge, and lands thudding on the second flight. From here its a mere question of coaxing this monster down a couple more steps, wheeling it to the street and letting it be absorbed back into what can only be its mother, that white leviathan snoring beneath the Japanese plumbs.

They slap me on the back, these stove men, smile their rough smiles, thank me profusely: for a brief moment, I bask in the glory of a job well done, in the triumph of muscle over mind, in the enduring power of the Grunt as both as a philosophy and an agent of change. I become, briefly, a member of the Team. They never go quite so far as to call me a regular hombre de estufa, of course, but then again, who would?

8 Seconds

2009-03-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

Hemingway famously said that "there are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are games." I would like to add a fourth to the list: child rearing.

I have come to see the raising of a child as a kind of rodeo sport, a surrealist and prolonged sort of bull riding which starts with the breaking of the waters and ends with the breaking of the mind. Aside from the length of the ride (8 seconds vs. a lifetime) the differences are mostly cosmetic: bull riders start their charge ringed by chiseled men in identical Stetsons, baby rearers start theirs ringed by frumpy women in identical blue scrubs; bulls go charging and snorting into the ring, babies go kicking and wailing into the night, every night, starting at 3 a.m. and ending at 6:30, when they are finally awake for good, and the parents, bleary-eyed and exhausted, are free to glare at their merrily chirping little calf with some groggy mixture of mirth and resentment; bulls are judged by their surliness, babies by their sweetness. The structures of these games are identical: in both case, it is the raw power of the beast that makes for the sport, and in both case, the sportsman hangs on by a thin chord, contorts himself reflexively, leaves one hand grasping for clouds. How odd that Hemingway, with his three children, failed to see the sportsmanlike dimensions of this activity! Is it possible that we have divergent notions of child rearing?

Benjamin has reached a problem stage. In practical terms, all this means is that his parent suddenly find themselves chin deep in deadlines, and Bensoosco, for all his seemingly cheery demeanor and bonhommie and who-could-ask-for-a-better-baby veneer, doesn't give a shit. He gets up at 3 a.m., and 4 a.m., and 5 a.m., on the hour, every hour, sometimes to grumble, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to say hello and drift happily back to sleep. His nap schedule is a disaster: some days its down at 9:30, others it's 11, sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes for half an hour. Nothing throws a thesis-driven, deadline racing parent like hearing the telltale wail ten minutes after settling into her writing desk. Often he'll take a bottle, but just as often he refuses, point blank, no, absolutely not, get that thing out of my mouth you horrible creature you. The latter usually happens with the nanny, of course, and the result is total meltdown, a chorus of wails, stress, distraction: all productivity is syphoned off into Operation Save the Baby.

So we go flailing on into the ring, our one hand thrown to the heavens, our other clutching for life, our bodies writhing, our muscles clenched. We the baby riders rise and dodge, buckle, recover, struggle to lock with the rhythms of our beast, while off in another world, the bull rearers, their eight measly seconds elapsed, lie exhausted and triumphant on the ground, their work done, their ride over. We look at them, surpress a slight sportsmanly sneer: what are doing on the ground there, buddy? Look at us. 15552000 seconds down, 1261440000 to go. You call that a sport?

Fortuna in Febraio

2009-02-28T13:29:00.000-08:00

In Pittsburgh, February 28 is recognized as a kind of meteorological milestone: the ungainly death-swoon of what is locally recognized as the longest month of the year. February is the Hector of Winter's army: admired for the strength of its resistance, but reviled and spat upon once slain.

Classical mythology may provide a reasonable starting point for describing my sense of this city, with its grim circle of seasons. I'm thinking of the basic structures that form the grammar of Greek drama, the sense of cycle and return. Both the ancients and their modern adherents like to say that Fate moves in a cycle, that birth follows death follows buying a lemon from a shyster named Fergus in one, long, relentless and unalterable sequence that started before the bat flapped its wings over the waters and will continue until the earth erupts in flames. Fate's cycle should not be confused with Fortune's wheel, of course: these two concepts, cycles and wheels, could not be more different, for a cycle is a mathematical abstraction, while a wheel is a mechanical device invented by some lazy and clever Mesopotamian gravedigger. The abstraction is subject to statistical analysis and formal proof, while the concrete image remains just that: a hard, blob-like, unwieldy.

In applications it is difficult to differentiate between true cycles (characterized by repetition) and stochastic ups and downs (characterized by persistent singularity.) A certain level of oscillatory behavior seems to be built into the structure of biological existence, in the sense that if I am dead broke, homeless and hungry today, either my fortunes rise or I quickly die and remove myself from the game. Even on a psychological level, a certain undulatory behavior is inescapable: I prove a theorem, and for five minutes I rejoice; but by minute 6 I'm wondering if there's an obvious corollary, by minute 7 I'm second-guessing a technical detail, and by minute 8 I'm scuffing my heels, wondering if I've wrung dry the Theorem Gods and if I'll ever have a good idea again. This pattern (exultation to despair in under 10 minutes, following by a slow re-pooling of hope, energy, and ambition) seems an almost universal feature not just of the mathematical psyche, but of the creative consciousness in general. But is this a true cycle or just the random bit-flip in the texture of Organism?

As mentioned, February is the dog month in Pittsburgh. The sky's have been gray for four months, and while the temperature still feels bitterly cold, what falls from the sky is not snow but rather some gritty concoction of water, ice-chunks, acid particles and soot. The streets are empty, save for angry drivers and chunks of trash that blow like tumbleweeds through the alleyways and along the riverbanks. All animals have left town, birds to the Gulf of Mexico, fish to the ocean, stray cats to the sewer pipes and dogs to their dumb dreams by the hearth. Trees stand skeletal and resentful again drab hills, flowers are nowhere to be seen, shopkeepers nod stiffly instead of saying hello, and the daily mail turns up wet and crumpled. Pittsburgh is in the dumps just now, and so, by extension, am I. Whence the question: cycle, or random draw?

The implications of the answer may be nil: if it is a cycle, then it will happen every year, and unless I wish to sign up for a lifetime of seasonal depression, I need to get the hell out of this city. If it is a random down patch, on the other hand, I in my infinite mysticism would be inclined to interpret it as Nature's Goad to go do something new, and would probably pull up stakes just in case. Either way, February is a great month to start planning The Next Thing.

There may be more to this than the weather. When I took this job, Benjamin wasn't even a blip on the radar, and the choice boiled down to finding a city with a vibrant cultural scene and ample opportunities for research. Fancying ourselves urbanites, we felt that Pittsburgh would be an excellent option, with its affordable housing, its status as an air hub, its major research universities, and its large population of Starving Artist Types (with whom, of course, we would stay up carousing ‘til the wee hours, swilling absinthe and spouting Shelley.) Pittsburgh loomed in our imaginations as a Down City on the Upswing, a hub of intellectual and artistic activity and a convenient way-station in our relentless and eternal bushwacking through all facets of the American Experience.

Well, turns out a couple of estimates were wrong. Firstly, housing, while cheap, is still too expensive to afford easily on a single professorial salary, especially if you add things like child-care to the mix. Moreover, air quality is among the worst in the nation, something I never thought to check before moving here but which, it turns out, I care rather deeply about. Add to this the fact that local drivers have no sense of how to deal with cyclists, that the rivers are both polluted and inaccessible, that city remains deeply segregated, and sports and drinking are the preferred local pastimes, and suddenly the reasons for my rocky relationship to this City seem absolutely transparent.

These days I'm dreaming of mountains, clean air, sandy coastlines. I'm dreaming of wide spaces and laughing children and abuelos and music and warmth and sunshine. I am possessed by the spirit of The Great American West: mid-lecture, chalk in hand, a roomful of eyes staring with mild interest at my scrawling on the board, I suddenly smell the sweet scent of wild lowland hillgrass after a rainfall, feel the sharp, dusty leaves of the California oak, let waves wash over my body and watch the sun set over tide pools crawling with crustaceans and red algea. What am I doing in Pittsburgh?

The weird thing is, Benjamin seems to be dealing with this place just fine. He is he happiest baby in town. He gets up in the morning with a chuckle, he smiles through breakfast, and he pounces with pleasure in the jumperoo until his legs can't take it anymore and he retires to the ruana for another half hour of naked rooting and grinning. He tells jokes to himself and laughs out loud at his punchlines, he thinks Follow the Finger is a great strategy game, and he loves all food except for applesauce, which he tolerates with horrible gestures but stoic goodwill. Is that kid operating in a different micro-climate? Does he know something that I don't? Perhaps he is a prophet, Tiresias, miraculously transformed from a shrivelled old blind man to a bouncy baby boy with flush cheeks and a smile, who instead of prognosticating death, war, and incest, babbles his wonderous insights in a language only the pure of heart can hope to understand.

How far I am from that state! Perhaps a few Herculean labors would help: find Fergus the golden fleecer and return the lemon; clean the stable which I call my desk; lop a few dog heads and liberate the mango eater from her mid-eastern hell. Ah but for strength and cunning! Still, now that February's out of the way....

Growing pains

2009-02-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

So the nanny is a bit of a bust, it turns out. Last week, we paid for 8 hours of share-care, which in addition to costing us $50 also stressed out B. to such an extent that we had to spend about 7 of those hours calming him down, rocking his hysterically sobbing body in undulatory figure-eights as we cooed nursery rhymes and tried to edge him back from the brink of total systemic collapse. The experience also stressed out the nanny, who responded by not showing up for work yesterday. Oh, yeah, the babies, sorry guys, I guess it slipped my mind. Unfathomably, she's back on the job today, with Catalina running shotgun and I minding the gati and the bread at the homestead. I have a hunch, however, that at some point we will tire of paying upwards of $250 a month for the pleasure of waking up on someone else's schedule and watching our child explode.

Galloping separation anxiety aside, Bensoosco's latest developments have been uniformly wonderful. He happily nibbles his way through the entire spectrum of Allowable Baby Foods, which at this juncture consist of only two items, bananas and rice-goop. At first he thought that the approaching green spoon was being offered as a toy, and he would reach up with both hands to grab the mush-covered tip as soon as it got within lunging distance. Since he shoves everything in his mouth (which is where we wanted the spoon to go anyway) this independence streak should have been fine, but it ended up producing some curious psychological dynamics on our part: we seem to have wanted the spoon in his mouth exactly as long as he didn't want it, and as soon as he started grabbing for it, we started pulling it away. That was the cycle, then: spoon goes forward, chubby arms go up, spoon goes back, chubby arms go down, repeat ad-impatience, da capo. Feeding became something of a basketball game, Parents vs. The Blob, and our goal was to send the spoon racing past the waving hands of the defense into the gaping hole before the blob got wise and closed the basket. Fun, but tedious. Just as we were on the brink of letting Benjamin feed himself, however, he learned that it was actually easier to cease resisting and have us do all the work. So these days he keeps his arms conspicuously pressed to his sides and plays the Obedient Baby, happily opening his mouth on queue and smacking his lips when he's done.

Actually, this lip smacking seems to be morphing into lip blowing, though we only noticed this behavior yesterday and it may be too soon to add it to his permanent repertoire. Here's a video clip of the Lip Blower in action. Observe the social and gastronomic commentary implicit in the gesture, the ho-hum, another meal of mushed grains and vapid conversation forcibly expressed with the spittle and airplane sounds. The child has a gift for communication; I expect him to be a great artist some day.

Other developments: Catalina assures me he is 'babbling', which is apparently a very particular phonetic exercise children do to loosen the palate and prepare for speech. If I didn't know any better, I would say he's been babbling for about six months now, but I'm willing to follow C.'s lead on this and pronounce this a milestone. (There is something of the Emperor's New Sound in all of this.) He can sit up by himself quite well, when he puts his mind to it, but he often forgets himself and goes toppling over, his great pumpkin head bearing him down and no bracing impulse to shield his landing. The art of inserting his own chupo is old hat: we hand him the device, and he can find a way to get it in his mouth, sometimes even even with the right orientation. His enormity has not ebbed: recently graduated from the 6-9 month clothing size, he now clads himself exclusively in 1 year +'s. He likes to read with the family. He wiggles his legs when he's happy. He chuckles like a hyena in his sleep.

Topology

2009-02-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

Topology is the branch of mathematics that deals with surfaces. It attempts to describe whether or not an ant at point A could crawl to point B without crossing any boundaries, sidestepping any holes, or getting totally lost in a sea of white space. (Full disclosure: not every topologist would recognize this as a description of his day job.) From the root concepts of "Near" and "Far", the topologist builds dazzling theories of geodesics, fundamental groups, genus numbers, and cohomology, but the casual reader should take these theories with a grain of salt: for all their splendor, they are all just comments on the nature of distance and proximity.

Although it would be a mistake to take Topology as a paradigm of the soul, the field (like most fields in mathematics or the physical sciences) is packed with metaphoric potential, and has been much on my mind lately as I contemplate why exactly Pittsburgh feels Far Away, au sense moins mathematique du terme. From what, precisely? The mathematician in me cringes as I admit I don't know (define your problem! rages a vision of my old advisor.) Sunlight, perhaps? Family? The smell of the sea? Some core vision loosely coalesces, but comes apart when I turn to look it in the face: a serious voice droning on, the ghost of my old dog, ten screaming piglets, the ball-shrivelling cold of the Sierra lake water, a particular sadness to the afternoon sun as it sets across low hills of wild barley and dusty oaks. Like everything that penetrates the threshold of our perception, these images entered my imagination alone and without fanfare, but, unlike all the other one-night insights that streak into our lives and high-tail it out by dawn, these images stayed. They threw down roots, cross-pollinated, and now form a Landscape, never known and perhaps never to be known except as a gnawing discontent with the present.

There are many measures of distance. In mathematics, you can consider distances imposed by an arbitrary topologies, but in life, distances are imposed by experience: memories, relations, hopes, ambitions. In spiritual terms, we might say that each consciousness endows the earth with its own topology, its own set of geodesics and distances and genii and components, and from these concepts it derives others: Here, There, Close, Far, Native, Natural, Us--all the basic units with which we define Home. Perhaps this Landscape I'm dreaming of seems far away not because I'm in Pittsburgh, but because the suite of daily impressions to which, e.g. my job, social circle, and general lifestyle expose me are so far removed from those that first gave structure to my psychological world. In this conception, my Heimweh is not so much a response to this particular place and time, but a yearning for one in which opportunities dropped like ripe mangoes, and were gathered by the hatful into the structure of our daydreams.

Make no mistake: topologists are a weird lot, and in general I don't trust them. They avoid eye contact and spend a lot of time looking at the ceiling out of the corner of their eyes (seriously: their heads are usually pointed to the back of the room, their eyes are pointed to the left. I have never seen a right-looking topologist.) They ruminate on matters like how many intrinsic dimensions characterize a given material object, or what p-forms such and such a manifold might support; their shirt fronts tend to sport crumbs. But let us take the charitable view: perhaps the reason that topologists are so messed up is that the nature of their subject parallels the great movements of the human heart. Perhaps it is the attempt to formalize something that lies so close to the essence of Life that thwarts the usual mathematicians' game of Stonecold Technoblizzard, and leads to gimpy, quivering men and woman, spinning half-baked theories about impossible worlds. In a formal Gimp-off, it's not clear to me who would win, the topologist or the sociologist.

Be that as it may, somewhere on a Klein bottle sits an Ant, stewing in his own juices. He is sitting at the point of self-intersection, a place called A. A, for Another rusting city, A, for a town Ass-savaged by industrialism, A, for can Anyone remind me of why I took this job. He grinds his mandibles, wrinkles his antennae, takes stock: curvature, slope, texture, temperature. It all pisses him off. Somewhere, he suspects, maybe West of the Ohio river, there is an imaginary, impossible, chimeric Landscape in the Sky, a place of surpassing beauty, where cottontails dance in chorus-lines and cats smoke hookahs. In his dreamvision that place is called B, but he couldn't swear to that, he's never been there. He growls (as much as an ant can growl.) Discontent is his metric, his probe: he uses it like a riverman uses a leadline, heaving it here and there, plotting a course according to the rags and weeds that get dredged from the bottom. Somewhere in Fine Hall a group of ceiling-starers has proved beyond all reasonable doubt that if he just follows the right geodesic, he'll get there, but it remains to pick one, the right one, and to follow it bravely: to trust that he won't get snared in the boundaries, and that he won't disappear down a hole, and that the churning sea of white space will leave him as it found him, heading West under full steam.

Two-Tooth Baby

2009-02-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse....

One-Tooth Baby

2009-02-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

One of the cool things about newborns is that they are practically self-sustaining: biology has sent them off into the School of the World with a six month supply of free lunches. Whether this provisioning represents one of manifold ways in which the species might have evolved, or is simply good business sense on the part of nature (psst, you there, parent-to-be: how about a brand new semi-you, no money down for six months? One condition: no throttling...) is a question for scientists and/or theologians. But it is a fact that kids come with most accessories included. Sure, you might throw a few bucks at clothes, or buy a stuffed bear, and it's probably inevitable that at some point you'll crack and splurge for something that is cute, expensive, and totally useless, like pair of baby driving gloves, or a mini zoot-suite, or a shaving set. But in the grand scheme of things, these expenses are incidental: the basic paradigm is that kids come along for the ride. Mom eats, milk materializes, and the children go about their business of thriving. Sounds supremely easy. Why not have two?

Well, the free lunches are about to end: Benny has sprouted a tooth. And he is thus, if traditional tribal wisdom is to be believed, ready for solid food. Non-tribal sources (i.e. pediatricians) have told us that technically we should wait until the six month mark before attempting anything other than breast milk, but the fact that Benjamin physically wrestled a ripe red Anjou pear from Catalina's hands the other day in a desperate attempt to get it into his mouth suggests that, as usual, he occupies an unusual place on the statistical curve.

Childcare Complexity has suddenly shot up by an order of magnitude. There used to be a single alimentary decision variable. It was called t, for time, and the optimization routine boiled down to deciding if the the Creature should eat now or later. The consequences for guessing wrong were nil, of course, since if we flubbed the estimate, Moosco would let us know, with his usual ear shattering tact. But overnight, it seems, the number of variables has skyrocketed. Suddenly we need to calculate not just when, but what, and how much, and in what ratios. We need to worry that if he eats too much X, perhaps he won't get enough Y, with all the associated unknowable but uniformly terrible consequences for the long term development of his pineal gland or his mordant wit.

Perhaps we worry too much. Do I really need to devote several days to writing an object oriented linear program that taps every NIH nutritional database to devise an optimal fruit-to-starch ratio for Chupo's first three months on food? Probably not. Especially as, for the moment, he is really still eating only breastmilk. (Mashing a half inch of ripe banana into a gooey paste and inserting pea-sized portions on the tip of our pinkies is what we're calling the Supplemental Feeding these days.) But let us give the paranoid imagination its due: soon, he will be onto things that are bad for him, like ice-cream and animal crackers, at which point suddenly we're playing the discipline game. And at his rate, I imagine it won't be too long before he'll be vying with me for my own favorite things, like tenderloin and hefeweizen, at which point I'll need to remind myself of what it means to be a team player who shares limited resources (getting married was the first time I was introduced to this painful exercise.) So it seems that starting on solids is rife with consequences. We lose peace of mind, we gain messier diapers: we start down the path toward Parenting Proper, au sense plus noir du term, where the talk will soon be of limits, sharing, balance and principles. Did I sign up for this?

I feel a bit like Faust on the day the Devil returned to claim his soul. Oh. So this is what you meant by "coming due." Or like Bob Bigelow the Aging Sloshball Champ, who bought himself a Truck over there at Fast Freddy's Whee(d)ls, no-money down, but that was August, and now it's February, and those once fat $400 bi-weekly checks from nights at the Fry Guy are looking leaner and leaner. Hmph. So that was the fine print, eh? Oh, cruel fate. Let the days of Sticky Pooh begin.

The Great Nanny Hunt

2009-02-08T20:11:00.000-08:00

At the ripe age of five months, Benjamin has already traveled to two continents, four countries, at least seven states, and countless cities (some of these, admittedly, in-utero.) What is obscured by his status as International Baby of Mystery, however, is that he has almost never spent any time away from his mother. From a care-and-nurture perspective, this sort of proximity is doubtless a wonderful thing, but it's not so wonderful from a finish-the-thesis or a get-tenure perspective. The neighboring Scheid Tribe, whose community holdings include one doctorate, one doctorate-pending, and one rambunctious 9 month old, apparently agree, for they met us last week with wampam and warpaint to plan The Great Nanny Hunt.

As the smell of slow-simmered Chili worked its maddening way across the commons, and the elkskin drums sounded their boom-boom bahs in the background, the Elders congregated in the living room to discuss Snaring Stratagems. As the pipe passed from lip to lip, each elder held forth, each according to his dignity, vision, and interest, each with a different plan for bagging the elusive western Pennsylvania nanny. Some advocated posting or responding to ads on craigslist; others objected that this opened up the search to Any Old Body and that we should make some effort to run a first-filter, either by seeking recommendations, plumbing the local church bulletins, contacting the university, or advertising in organic food stores. Others felt that the best approach would be to save ourselves the hunt (and the money) altogether by turning ourselves into a kind of nanny collective, with each of the four adults taking both children one of four weekday mornings, and maybe hiring some bespectacled and earnest theology student to help out on the fifth. Still others felt that the idea of a nanny-share really only worked with older kids, and that the only real solution for two infants would be two nannies, independent and unconnected, each at full local rates.

The Snaring Stratagems Subcommittee dissolved without a resolution. The chili had worked its insidious magic, and instead of focusing on solutions, the Elders were eyeing the 4 gallon pot with the cracked lid and the cloud of steam, from which visions of tomato-stewed pig flesh rose like peyote dreams and drew them to the stove. Baby, what baby? Pass the onions, and if you could sprinkle a little cheese....

The failure of the Snaring Stratagems Subcommittee cast a shadow over the Hunt. The old warriors chewed anxiously at their gums; the young warriors sharpened their spears and looked glum; the chili lay heavy in their guts, and no one moved much. Days passed. Consensus began to build that this would never happen. But one day the village idiot tripped over an email and lo! what should he see but the four toed track of the Nanny. Ring, buzz, hello, anyone? Suddenly, the village was alive with Nanny hunters, touching up their war paint, reworking the sinews on their arrowheads, smiling and working as the drumbeats came faster and heavier, and dreams of the fatted Domestic hummed lightly in the soul of the village. Emails were sent, ads were answered, responses parsed, phone calls made. Soon we had an interview.

L. was the first specimen, a middle aged California girl with a low key vibe and reasonable rates. Lots of experience, a degree in childhood development, flexible schedule: spears bristled from every bush. Problem was, the woman didn't really seem to be that into kids. She held Benjamin for a thirty seconds and gave him back; she made no moves on little Henry, poor devil, who feeling himself slighted began to speak in tongues and cover the floor in large pools of sulphurous saliva. L. had never heard of a cloth diaper, nor could she conceive of babysitting without a TV, nor was she experienced in children of this age, nor, it turns out, was she really interested in the job, for long after we had decided not to take her, but before communicating this decision, she called back to say she had reconsidered the amount of work and would be obliged to charge much more than she had suggested. The arrows went back in the pouches, the spears were lowered, and somewhat glumly, the warriors marched on through the Listings.

Without warning, M. broke from a shrub and made a run on our confidence. As she streaked across the landing, every warrior caught his breath, for here she was, as fine a nanny specimen as roamed the foothills, friendly, affectionate, equipped with every soothing bounce under the sun, intelligent, eco-conscious, engaged, and motivated. In a trice, every spear flew heavenward, each trailing a fine silk web, and as the spears crossed paths, the webs wove through one another to form a complex and extended net, of solidarity, of decent pay, of youth, of forward thinking, of convenience, and as all these threads caught together, the net plunged from the sky, wrapped the nanny around the heart, and held her to the spot.

The Great Nanny Hunt is over, at least for this season. The warriors returned spent and happy to their houses, and the Nanny has agreed to join the Tribe, at least for nine months out of the year, at five hours a day, two days a week. A wage has been set that may or may not prevent her from breaking that promise immediately. All is ready. It only remains to see if our two children, neither of whom has even spent a night away from his mother, are even remotely amenable to being cared for by a Stranger. To say nothing of sharing their toys. I have a sneaking hunch that we haven't seen the last of that Chili pot this year.

Dile a tu papá...

2009-02-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

Early in our marriage Catalina and I were visited by a Vision of our old conjugal selves. The senescent Catalina is a happily carping fishwife, thick of ankle and sharp of tongue, tenderly wagging on about my indolence, my idiocy, my thick waist and my bad cooking, while I, a jaunty old crank with a shock of electric white hair, shoot it right back, blow for blow, an unvarnished and unrepentant old coot who sings his passion in an endless stream of petty slander. Our dream house is filled with flying frying pans, the sounds of shrieking and tinkling glass, ritual Arabian curses that touch on the other's mother's strange passion for camels, fierce looks that brim with love. A couple whose intimacy has been codified and preserved within the grammar of insult.

The household shtick has a ways to go, of course, before it reaches these levels: we still slip into straight talk, still dig for sense and intention within the semantic (rather than the gestural or intonational) nuances of speech. But for reasons that I don't fully fathom, Benjamin has brought us one step closer to the Carping Old Couple In The Sky. Not as an object of contention (quite the contrary) but as a Third Voice, an Objective Other, a cool and neutral consciousness capable of relaying messages of protest, indignation, and instruction in ways that mimic the affectionate detachment of the Old Couple in the dream, but without actually committing us to the flying frying pans.

That a child who cannot talk should be considered a Third Voice may strike some as odd. But Benjamin's silences are very different from the empty silences of something inanimate or insentient; they are long, spiralform spaces that absorb echos of the future, and buzz with the promise of projected dreams. When Catalina discovers one of my mud-speckled stockings on the kitchen table and cackles, not at me but at her beaming baby boy, "dile a tu papá que no deje sus medias sucias en la mesa", laughing and pulling faces as she hurls this horrible, caked black monster from the table, she is placing a seed-signal in the spiral, one that will be amplified and transformed with the passage of years. She is communicating a message whose true meaning has nothing to do with socks or hygiene or order, but rather with the joy of language itself, the pleasures of telling, and telling to tell, and the transformative human potential that lies at the heart of these iterations. She is speaking to Benjamin, but really she is speaking to me; she is speaking to me, but really she is speaking to the future Benjamin. It is in the tension between the me-through-Benjamin and the Benjamin-through-the-excuse-of-me that abstraction is born, and with it, the cultural traditions to which, for better or worse, we seem to have pledged our lives.

At the moment, the ritual intercession of our pre-babbling son is mostly for laughs. "Dile a tu mamá", I tell this bug-eyed blob on returning home and finding plates strewn like freeform floral arrangments in every nook and cranny of the house, "que el agua no hace ningun daño a los platos." And with fire-rimmed eyes the wife shoots back "dile a tu papá que á los matematicos tampoco", wrinkling her nose as she blows me a welcome-back smooch. Benjamin, meanwhile, does his job perfectly: every message is relayed with neither alterations nor omissions, bounced directly from fat cheeks to chuckling spouse. They come crashing into the ear canal, this succession of tender jibes, spurious outrage, and mock indignation, and as they rattle the tympanic membrane, some small fraction of the signal power gets redirected into those spiral spaces in the soul, strange, secret cavities in which the integrated self slowly echoes into being. And there, with any luck, they will continue their slow, ripening resonance, building and reinforcing one another so that the signal that emerges in 30 years is a perfect pan wave, a harmonic skillet that we can hurl with amorous rage from one end of a marriage to the other.

Sports Fans

2009-02-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh is a city of sports fans. When we moved here we were warned, in clear and prophetic terms, that to live in Pittsburgh was to align one's karmic energy with the fortunes of the Steelers, and although we had our doubts, the facts soon spoke for themselves: the ubiquitous bumper stickers declaring that "Pittsburgh is a drinking town with a football problem;" the Terrible Towel (a $5 dish rag with the team's logo) placed conspicuously in every sitting room; the plague of black-and-gold jerseys that flood the streets on game days, names like Roethlisberger, Holmes, Ward blazoned on the shoulders of everyone, but everyone, young, grimy, professional, dishevelled, rabbinical, diminutive, monstrous, shrunken, and old. Predictably, we have taken a while to adapt: "how many points for that goal?" we continue to ask, not understanding why the point values vary between 1 and 6, nor that the term "goal" (without a "field" prefix) really refers to soccer and that maybe we should just shut up and drink our beer.

Cultural incompetence aside, we found ourselves invited to a Steeler's bash at the residence of two Pitt biology professors. Always game to sneak a peak at the indigenous tribes, we accepted. With Ben, a six pack, a loaf of fresh bread, the carseat, the diaperbag, the pack-n-play, a handful of chupos and a half-dozen toys, we descended on what we assumed would be a gathering of 25 low-key, mild-mannered professional adults. Turns out we caught them them in their Hyde phase: one of the professors was wearing a miner's hat with a Steelers logo, snuffling around the house like a shrub bear, emitting occasional hoots and snarls long before the game even started, as if to find his form, or complete his transformation, in time to be the Beast Itself when the chips were down. And he was on the tame end of things: our good friend J.P. had enormous black and gold bulbs dangling from his ears which were so barbarous that upon seeing them Benjamin burst into tears and had to be taken upstairs for half an hour to calm down. There was a chocolate cake with 'Steelers' spelled out in sprinkles; the au-pair girl from Austria who had arrived two days earlier was sporting a team jersey, eye-paint, two beers, and a fiery look; the cat was nestled in the bedroom on a Terrible Towel, watching the game with studious detachment.

In general, Benjamin is a trooper when it comes to parties, but Superbowl Sunday chez the biologists proved to be a little more than he was ready for. After recovering from that vision of J.P. the Zulu Warrior, Ben maintained a spotty cool, but every five minutes or so, something would happen (a fumble? a first down? a three-pointer? damned if I know), the crowd would erupt, Benjamin would freak, and we'd be back upstairs in the quiet room, singing lullabies and playing Follow the Finger in desperate attempts to regain some composure. The upshot of all this is that I actually only saw about three minutes of the game, which was, by all accounts, one of the finest in Superbowl history. In some ways, this is fitting: after all, am I not the very man who, while living in Boston, was woken up from slumber on the night the Red Sox broke the Curse, crushed the Yankees, and headed for the World Series? At the very least I'm getting myself to a TV these days.

Snowed

2009-01-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh has been under meteorological assault for the last month: an empirical histogram of January weather patterns would be a straight line, with equal tallies for Snow, Arctic Snap, Freezing Rain, and Otherwise Shitty. For a while there I was taking it like a hero, rising at dawn and swaggering to the window to sneer at nature's Torture of the Day, all smiles and contempt, of course, what will it be today, mon vieux, black ice and howling winds? most excellent, I'll take a double. Gradually, the weather assumed a face, an intention: it was Nurse Ratched, and I was McMurphy, jaunty and unrepentant after a brisk turn with electroshock, or it was the erudite, smooth-talking Nazi torture master, and I, I was the unflappable, unbreakable British spy, all stiff lips and understatement. But even McMurphy had a hard time with the lobotomy; even Zweig's Dr. B. hit the wall. These days, I ooze instead of leap from my bed, and my sallies to the kitchen window are accompanied by an unmistakable twitching, of the fingers, of the soul. Let us hope the Punxutawney Marmot has a bad run of it on Monday.

Benjamin, a well-adjusted type, seems impervious to the weather system: his laughter rings from the rafters. What is startling about his laughter is its range, which includes, among other things, a Falstaffian Guffaw, a spasmodic giggle-shriek that sounds a little bit like a pentecostal preacher, and a long slow chuckle that suggests a wounded torero, or a hyena in waiting. Life is good, why worry about the weather, he seems to ask every evening as my frazzled form crests the top of the stairs, wind-burnt and road-savaged, why worry when there's so much to laugh about? And he shows me how to do it, erupting in giggles as I set my gloves on the heater, chuckling at the rattiness of my facemask, tittering at my goggles, my rakish helmet, my soggy coveralls, my spattered jacket my crusted socks. All very well, I retort bitterly as I dandle him on my knee, why should you care? You, after all, are a hydroponic animal, heated, lit, and nourished in an artificial ecosystem whose parameters are finely tuned to optimize performance: a creature, in sum, that does not need to ride seven miles through ice-crusted slush on roads with potholes the size of minivans and drivers who belong in anger-management therapy to get a bite to eat. Har har, he responds. Oh, my beautiful boy, how can I argue?

The kid is changing. His temper is, if anything, sweeter than before: he is beginning to understand the cycles of hunger, curiosity, exhaustion, sleep, and even as he's stuck in the bitter end of one round, he seems to be able to anticipate the next, which soothes him. He can concentrate. We set him in his tropical Jumperoo, and he will spend half an hour trying to perfect the hand motion that will send the plastic spinny-thing with the smiley-sun on a spindle into exactly the right rotations. He will grab Paco el Pajaraco by the beak, stare into his glass eyes, and wrestle him, psychologically, into the Mouth (where else?) I'm still trying to make my peace with this, reconcile my hypochondriac's heart with the fact that my son will cram any old grimy floor-sodden sock into his mouth and suck on it happily. He's a kind of slow moving Tazmanian Devil, and everything (especially breakable things) are meat, to be set upon and devoured. His charm is his leisureliness: he will suck a stuffed chicken to the bone, but slowly, savoring every subtle combination of floor mank, polyester, glass, cotton, and synthetic product label.

So many stories to tell: The Eruption of the First Tooth, The Curious Case of the Scream in the Night, Mark Toes and Life on the Baby Bath. Not tonight, but soon: February is official Blog About Baby Month. January was ruinous. With wife and baby gone, I doubled my mathematical efforts, with wife and baby back, I doubled them again. The month is a blur of late nights, early mornings, black beverages, endless meetings, vain pursuits, and formal motions. December made an attempt on my ear, which I resented, but January made an attempt on my sanity. Let us hear it for February, which, if the current climate distribution holds through Monday, and the Marmot doesn't do anything stupid, will be a month of sudden thaws, exuberant growth, spontaneous song, and copious outpouring.

Benny's Back!

2009-01-18T21:01:00.000-08:00

Woah, move over, Inert Slug Baby of Yore (ISBY)! There is a new monkey in town, and he can do all the tricks you could not. Let me list them:
* He can flip from back to front and front to back, at will, clothed or unclothed, happy, sad, sucking, drooling, laying on the carpet, squirming in bed, or dangling precariously on the couch in the Infantino straightjacket.
* He can heave the long, world-weary sighs of a career burocrat at the end of an especially dull work week.
* He can sleep an hour in the afternoon, alone and with no special inducements.
* He can grab the green widget in his tropical jumperoo and shake it, really give it hell, as if it were Phillip Marlowe and he was Mugs the Tough, Bumbling Expendable Goon, but so much cuter, and executing leaps and pounces all the while, lips stuck forward in a beak, eyes hard and narrow, the ponderous bulk of his cheeks rising and falling like the Tecoma Narrows Bridge in November, 1940.
* He can flap his arms like a chicken with Turret's syndrome.
* He can wake up at midnight and stare at his madly blogging father with cool eyes, pressed lips, and no panic.
* Woah, cancel that "no panic" part--more anon.

Features

2009-01-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

When Zoogle left home almost two weeks ago, he was a generic blob of baby flesh, indistinguishable (except in size, and perhaps curvature) from any other swaddlable entity: cute, sweet tempered, and not particularly nap-inclined, that was Z. But to judge from the pictures I've received, features are beginning to coalesce rapidly. Exhibit A, Child Left: the intentionality in that look is palpable. I do not know if this is Bennie the Scientist on the cusp of a eureka moment, Benny the Player on the brink of a score, or Benny the Evil Genius taking stalk of his race, but there is a nefarious intelligence in that look that speaks of Wild Times in the future.

I, in contrast, am losing features. For every additional hour I stay up and work on my paper, I lose one more feature. Like rats on a ship: they can sense the shift in ballast. Perhaps this is my connection to Cosmico these days. When features leave me, they head over to him, a scurring, piecemeal Trasmigration that takes them under the waters, past customs, into the eucalyptus groves and up to the fourth floor apartment, where they dodge the suegra and scamper past the traps of language to cast themselves likes sprinkles on the moist frosting-soul beyond the Cheeks and the Lone Tooth.

Trasnochada

2009-01-16T22:13:00.000-08:00

It is two in the morning and I have been working for twelve hours, obsessively trying to finish off two horrible piddly pissant projects that for reasons unfathomable refuse to give up the ghost. My eyes are seared flesh, my back is twisted in knots, my hands are jittery from the Bottomless Mate Gourd I've been nursing all day and my brain is a charred circuit, one synaptic pathway flaying loose and uncontrollable against the wire fence of my volition. Dangerous territory. No position in which to be writing blog entries.

But. Open nights. Nights without limits, agendas, restrictions, or consequences: nights with no sense of day. Am I the only one who succumbs to these things, who willfully forgets the breaking point of the body and joyfully wrests every last volt of one day's bodily energy to the cause of This Night, so alive with the flutter of wings?

So I have the energy, at the very least, to post this photo, which my wife was good enough to send me, and which I find spectacular.

The Ba(t)ch

2009-01-11T18:47:00.000-08:00

On reviewing my last two blogs entries, two things trouble me. The first is that a self-professed third-generation carpet designer (whom I naturally do not know) was kind enough to leave a comment drawing my attention to the fact that carpets are not designed by committee, but rather by l'artist, a lone mind in the thrall of a vision. This, I admit, was news, and though I'm thankful for the insight, I now wonder how many other people have found this blog through random google searches, how many fourth generation hat makers, second generation lutiers, hereditary sous-chefs or seminal sommeliers now know all there is to know about Benjamin and the twisted workings of the mind of his father?

The second thing that troubles me is that in Bye Bye Benny, nowhere did I mention that it was also Bye Bye Wifey. In retrospect, it is not clear to me why not: did I overlook this fact? If so, it may mark the beginning of the long plunge into Spousal Blurring: life lived ever more vicariously through the antics of the child, identity slowly obscured by the shadow of an Agenda, Presence fragmented into timetables. Troubling.

What is more troubling is how naturally I slip back into Bachelor Mode: my first stop on the way home was the beer store, where I picked up a 24 pack of hand-crafted Michigan porter. It's been that and beans and rice for the last four days, Clarence White style guitar in the evenings, dirty socks on the radiators and dawn bedtimes. A batch of whole-wheat, half-sugar chocolate cookies eases the tedium of my solitude.

I do think of my wife. I think of her each time I eat a cookie. I think of how she would be horrified at my attempt to mix healthy and decadent eating, how she would throw her hands up, sputter, and in the shrill tones of fish-mongress begin to enumerate the viable vehicles for germ-bearing wheat, the artisinal loafs and the cultured johnny cakes and the various sorts of English puddings, and at the end of this Homeric incantation, when she had finally run out of breath, how she would point out, in quiet conclusion, that nowhere on this universal, cross-cultural, trans-temporal list would I find the Cookie. I think, too, of how quickly those cookies would disappear were she here, and I smile, and thank God for the small pleasures of marriage.

Bye Bye Benny

2009-01-10T18:03:00.000-08:00

The next two weeks will be slim pickings for the Benny Blog, the Ostensible Subject having been boxed up and shipped off to Colombia in response to what was billed as "overwhelming family pressure." Catalina took charge of the delivery, of course, and I would have accompanied them were it not that overwhelming family pressure stops just shy of the nuero: we are welcome, but in the last extremity, expendable.

Benjamin, it turns out, is a natural traveler. Catalina decided to leave from Washington D.C. instead of Pittsburgh so that we could indulge in the nostalgia of a return to our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, a dive in Adam's Morgan where we used to get loaded on mead every time I'd pick her up from the airport back in our courting days in Charlottesville. The allure of the return was strong enough that we decided to risk pissing off Zoogle with a five hour car ride. But Z. took it like a champion, sleeping four hours and delivering unintelligible traffic reports for the remainder. That was Sunday. On Monday, Catalina undertook what I assumed was going to be 12 grueling hours of solo plane travel with a howling baby who would be dropping his binki on the ground, dirtying his diaper, swearing at security, and generally causing pandemonium. But once again, Zoogle surpised: he flirted shyly with security, made cute faces at the seatmates, smiled coyly at the stewardess and watched in meditative silence as the sun fractured into pieces on the clouds over the Carribean.

The bad news is that I may never see him again. Several days ago Catalina gave me a frantic call at midnight, sputtering something to the effect that the new Child Abduction Law stipulates that no child, regardless of nationality, shall leave the country except in the presence of both parents, unless he is also accompanied by a signed, translated, and notarized permission note from the other, along with an original copy of the birth certificate. I think the case is hopeless: even if I comply, what Colombian official will believe that such a beautiful child belongs to a gringo?

Hotel Carpets

2009-01-06T20:05:00.000-08:00

What amazes me about swanky hotels is their miraculous power to turn tack into pomp. Consider the carpets: where but in the Village People's summer home or the Hilton could you hope to see such a cancerous fusion of color and geometry? But for some mysterious reason, what in a private residence would seem an assault on the senses comes across as lush and exotic in the setting of a hotel. Is this because in a hotel, our senses are already so bludgeoned by the scale of our surroundings that only something truly shocking can touch them? So numbed by the chandeliers and the brass and the flagstone and the uncanny civility of the guy at the door that any less-than-vomitous floor covering would come across as drab and weak? There are numerous ways to ‘explain’ these carpets: as the unfortunate artifacts of design-by-committee, as the aesthetic overhead of killer bulk-discounts. But like other things that occur with suspicious regularity (certain headaches, disappearing witnesses, small transfers) these carpets have begun to assume a significance disproportionate to their strangeness. I begin to suspect that they harbor some secret, some clue to the nature of the world: that they bear witness to a profound truth about biological visual systems, or reflect the dark workings of a nefarious cabal.

Mathematics conferences are good for paranoid, speculative thinking. I am at the Joint Meetings at the moment, the biggest mathematical hoe-down of the year. It is a wild affair, non-stop lectures, continual social events, and a Job Fair eerily reminiscent of a livestock auction: fast talk, a ticking clock, finger motions that carry the weight of contract. In principle, I am here with the sole object of finding a young firebrand to fill the shoes of a recent retiree, though in fact I volunteered for the assignment because it represented an opportunity to get sent to a conference at departmental expense. I admit frankly that my presence on the hiring committee is a little twisted: not only am I a short-timer in the department, but I seem to lack the basic respect for the Career Path on which this whole academic process is predicated. Add to this an absurdist streak and a tendency towards polemic, and it seems clear that the department had no idea what they were doing when they chose me for this mission.

Not surprisingly, my stint as a headhunting 007 got off to a horrible start. The conference is in the Marriot, but having registered at the eleventh hour (of course), I ended up with a room in the Hilton, another ‘official conference hotel.’ Since I assumed that ‘official hotel’ meant ‘a hotel that is within easy walking distance’, I left my room for the first interview with about 15 minutes to spare and headed to the place marked ‘Marriot’ on my city pocket guide. Nary a mathematician in sight, naturally. Another look at the map revealed that Washington D.C. is lousy with Marriots, at least one every other block. How that detailed escaped me the first time will never be known, but the concierge at the Marriot-Washington apprised me that I was not the first person to come in this morning looking lost, and that the previous chap had been directed to The Rennaisance across the street and hadn’t returned: would I care to do likewise?

In The Rennaisance, both the bellhop and the concierge looked at me like I was mad. No mathematicians here, they said in the same tone in which they might have responded had I stumbled in reeking of gin and demanding to know where the weebies be hidin’. They sent me to a Marriot three blocks up. At this point, I was desperate: three calls to my co-worker had gone unanswered, and a frantic search through the phone-book on Catalina’s cell revealed no names that might know the right address. Meanwhile, the time slot for the first inteview was quickly evaporating. It eventually occurred to me that my very own ‘official conference hotel’ might, perhaps, know something about the conference. Sure enough, they knew the name of the hotel: Marriot Wardman. And though they couldn’t give me its address (let’s not expect too much) I figured that any cabbie ought to be able to work his mojo with the name alone. Armed with more hope than cash, I hailed a cab, issued the name, and breathed deep as we sped toward that nest of learned astronomers. En route, I tried to break the ice with the cabbie, laughing as I explained what a jackass I was for not checking the address first. The cabbie, jaded on tourists and perhaps not so confident with his English, seemed disinclined to banter, just nodded tersely and kept his eyes on the road. It was only as we were pulling into the valet parking spot and I said “ah, at last, the telltale mismatched socks” that he cracked a smile. God, what a relief: even the D.C cabbies know about mathematicians! I tip lavishly and hit the interview center at a gallop.

The interviews are a blur. They’ve been going for two days, and continue tomorrow, one every half hour, starting early and running late. How is one to keep this stuff straight? Over 500 people applied for one position. Most of the applicants look pretty good on paper, but all have their quirks: Wingfin Zhu from China published 17 papers in three years, but has a thick accent and a visa that would be cumbersome to work with. Priscilla Pentergeist ‘feels drawn to remedial courses’, but can’t say anything meaningful about her research. Slava Kreuschelheim is promising, but plays his cards close to the vest: does he really want a postdoc, or his secret ambition just a nice stable position in a third rank college? We hem and haw, ask questions, raise eyebrows, feign smiles, take notes. Our dossier grows. Everyone is ranked. One will be chosen.

I find it very odd to be in a position that everyone but myself considers to be one of power. Many of these candidates will not get jobs. They will panic, mope, consider their professional career undone, finally find something temporary, slog on. People kill years this way, carefully grooming themselves at each step, always conscious of the tyranny of the CV, keeping meticulous track of what counts and what doesn't. It can take the better part of a lifetime, and exhaust the better part of one's spirit, to realize that there were other things one could have done. I keep meaning to ask these people, 'hey, have you considered a career in a carpet design?'

The Flip

2009-01-03T19:43:00.000-08:00

There is an internet entity called the Baby Center that sends out a weekly email to expectant or recent parents. If you register for the service while your baby is still just a date on the calendar, you get detailed weekly updates on how the belly worm is advancing. "Your Baby at 20 Weeks," reads a typical message, "sleeps between 18 and 22 hours a day, is growing hair on its toes, and moves in response to the sound of your voice." Of course I, in my usual perversity, always found the omissions more interesting than the inclusions. After all, what do these guys know about this kid, in particular, who, in contrast to all the other kids, is not just a rapidly bifurcating cellular mass but, rather, Benjamusco the Magnificent, a dour and opinionated vieux precoz? Do they know that he curses every time pa pulls out the guitar, shudders every time mom eats broccoli, and dreams of algebraic varieties?

Once the child is born, the messages continue. Since Benjamin came a week late, all the post-partum messages seem to come a week early: we were told his umbilical chord should be falling off when in fact it was still fresh; we were wished a happy one-month anniversary when in fact Benny was still a larval three weeks; and so on. The dissonance between the Word and the Flesh was mitigated by the fact that Benjamin always seemed slightly ahead of the curve: he was sleeping through the night long before the Baby Center began spurring us on to hope, and he was singing Baroque arias at a time when the Poster Baby was just beginning to experiment with clucks. So when the message arrived advising us that our child might start flipping over, we were puzzled: for all his talents, Benjamin had never shown the slightest interest in changing position. Perhaps he was too fat too move? Perhaps he had muscular dystrophy, or was born paralytic? The speculative paranoia of the new parent needs very little seed material.

I am pleased to report that the paranoia is vanquished: the child has mastered the flip. Perhaps mastered is too strong: he has 'demonstrated competence' in rolling front to back, under the additional hypotheses that he starts from the praying mantus position, isn't too tired, feels like flipping, is naked, and wants to show off. Catalina gave me the proof this morning: three times, in rapid succession, she set him face down on the ruana, arms pinioned under the body, a captive to his own bodyweight. Then, like an obese salamander in some ancient Mayan harvest ritual, he lifted his fat face to the sky, puffed out his body, and rolled free, capsizing in a slow, graceful roundabout until he was all the way over, the earth firm on the backside, the heavens mercifully fixed, the strain vanished: a huge motionless upside-down amphibian with a smile and a case of the giggles.

Year in Review

2008-12-31T14:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at midnight Uncle Andy was carried off by a white whale. He was not strapped to its back, like Ahab, but nestled in its bowels, like Jonah: an Uncle of Faith, not an Uncle of Wrath. The beast came belching to a stop outside the A&W Food Emporium on Meyran street, a milky, toothless leviathan with foul breath and a timetable: it blinked its yellow eyes, opened its mouth, swallowed my brother and a few other krill, and then it was off, plunging wild and free along dark highways into the cold heart of the urban east. This morning Catalina got a text-message: PROVIDENCE MERCIFUL: ALIVE IN MANHATTAN. WILD. -A.

Tonight we sacrifice the fatted Cabernet. We crack its skull, and splash its innards on the living alter of the tongue, a sanguinary celebration of divine providence. And we are not just drinking Andrew's successful skirmish with the Chinatown bus: we drink for a whole year, a wild year, in which providence has been wreaking strange and wonderful change in our lives. We drink to experience, that looming, cetacean body that appears without warning, swallows you whole, and delivers you to a far shore, dazzled, displaced, transformed. We drink tonight to the ritual destruction of the five year plan; we drink to the forced reinvention of the will; we drink to the fluid boundary between acting and being acted upon. We drink, in a word, for Benjamin.

Was there ever a time that we weren't parents? Life before the Visitation is a dim memory. I do remember the Call. I was settling down for a quiet night of work, Catalina out of town, the cats at peace, the whole night before me: projects stacked like Johnnycakes on the back burner of my imagination. The phone rang, and I let it go, vaguely registering the beep of the message machine, burying deeper into my books, into my Fausthood, relishing the beatific solitude that visits any man prepared to work deep into the night. Later I found out: just Gabriel, who with his usual diplomacy said "Blessed are you among men. Call your wife asap." I remember breaking the news to my brother of his impending Unclehood a week later, walking the streets of Brooklyn, past blasters of stereos, vendors of hats, men with yarmulkes, women with burkas, Puerto Ricans, homeless veterans, a drunk, a trash-talking four year old. "Well shiiiit," drawls a stunned A., kicking a crushed soda can into an open gutter. A moment of disbelief. Then a warm smile, a sly look, his usual merry twinkle. "You son of a bitch." We made burritos, watched fireworks from a rooftop, looked with rheumy eyes at the wounded skyline across the river. How were we to understand all this?

Soon there was a tightening of the belt. Eight months until doomsday, all right then, let's get organized: make a list, figure out what you've got to get done, work, run, produce. But a funny thing happened. Catalina returned, she started to swell, and almost immediately, the pending life began to exert its hold. We found ourselves reading things like "What to Expect When You're Expecting", pissing away time meditating on some artist's conception of what a child looks like at 17 weeks, (a cucumber, for the record), fretting about whether our favorite teas might injure the fetus. I found myself wanting to enter this experience, to do my research, to worry: to gather twigs and can worms. I ended up searching through the strange patterns of nest-making for some clue, about myself, about the species, about the Eternal Return and the Cycles of Life.

And then there was the summer, which we planned like a condemned man plans his last meal. First a lavish two week jaunt to Buenos Aires, the Paris of the South. We went in hot pursuit of literary ghosts (Cortazar, Borges, Sabato), but when we returned, we ourselves were ghosts, wan, overspent, underproductive: tourists, unrooted. We threw down tendrils in the dome, a luxurious six weeks of doomed tomato farming, squirrel husbandry, book editing, paper writing, reading, cooking, and general disconnecting with the events that loomed large on the horizon. The madness of our return, the chaotic search for an apartment, the growing panic that we wouldn't find our manger, throwing around that cash like we had it, all of this skin-of-the-teeth, all of it just-a-little-too-late, a harrowing sequence of last-ditch improvisations. Finally! A manger. And as my eight and a half months pregnant wife waddles around with leaves in her beak, patching a few small holes here and there, we are overcome with an uncanny sense of having just made it. Breath deep. Let it come.

And come it did. And when it came, it came after so much prolonged pandemonium, so much outlandish dithering and indecision and flapping and squawking, that it came without much noise at all. Just a baby. Relax. How hard can it be?

The noise level, it might be admitted, has not vanished. We still fret. We still read baby books. We still spend way too much time trying to figure out how to optimize this experience, both for ourselves and for the child. The other day, Catalina was amazed to learn, after three months of assiduously rocking the child to sleep every night for half an hour in her arms, that just throwing him in the crib and hitting the lights worked better: he calmed instantly, like a lobster with a nose massage, no fuss, no problem. Revelation! The child is like our new coffee machine, equipped with secret gizmos that heat him up and turn him off in ways that fit the lifestyle of the Modern and/or Prehistoric Parent. But the analogy to the coffee machine runs further, alas: too many knobs, and only the sketchiest of instructions, poorly written and machine translated.

Can we figure him out? Can we somehow manage to shower this child with all the love and attention and energy he needs to grow up into a mature, productive, self-confident adult, while at the same time spending enough time and energy on ourselves that we stay faithful to our own Guiding Spirits? Figuring out the Autobrew is definitely high on the list of projects for 2009.

'Tis The Season

2008-12-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Monday an arctic snap sent Pittsburgh temperatures plummeting to the low single digits. Late for a dental appointment, I charged from the house with wet hair and no hat, leaped on my bike, and pedaled for 15 minutes directly into the face of gale force winds. My right ear is now, quite predictably, frostbitten to a farthewell, and as I hobble around the house in my red longjohns, rustling up grub, pouring drinks, dandling the baby, dispensing cheer, I find myself, on the one hand, hoping against hope that the old adage "frostbite in January, surgery in June" will prove wrong, and on the other, imaging the suite of Russian bear-skin hats I will need to acquire in the future to conceal my missing ear.

Uncle Andy is in for the holidays. As usual, he got himself run over right before showing up, so instead of taking the town by storm, we are committed to yet another quiet convalescent leave. He pulled in on Wednesday night, having weathered 11 hours in a greyhound. This feat proved both aesthetically and physically injurious: tired and bus-savaged when he arrived, he was chain-vomiting in the bathroom the next day, having apparently caught the same Bulgarian Death Flu that laid me and my wife low a couple of weeks ago. He is still on the mend.

My Aunt sent us a Christmas card the other day. It begins as follows: "No matter what our circumstances, we all have much to be thankful for. On March 12th, in my home, I broke my right ankle on the stairs, then fell two stairs down onto the cement floor." She goes on to describe, in lurid detail, how she spent two weeks in the hospital, lost mobility in the foot, eventually returned to her job at Walmart, lost her basement to a freak flood, and is now forced to inhale the moral fetor from the new Miwok tribal casino a few miles down the road from her home. The letter ends with the sentence "It seems the Casino's do well even in a bad economy", no final period, no seasonal greetings, and no signature.

For obscure reasons, the spirit of the holiday seems to have left Benny totally untouched: he ogled the Uncle, blinked happily at the Christmas lights, stuffed gift paper in his mouth, chatted up the turkey, and sat happily in his papasan as his parents broke bread with friends, the distant dry-heaving of the uncle yet another coruscating novelty in a day of bright sparklies and rapturous rituals.

Hackwork

2008-12-21T13:08:00.001-08:00

In 1990, the redoubtable trio of Avijit Banerjee, Cheickna Sylla, and Somkiat Eiamkanchanlai publish a five page tour de fource titled INPUT/OUTPUT LOT SIZING IN SINGLE STAGE BATCH PRODUCTION SYSTEMS UNDER CONSTANT DEMAND in Computers ind. Engng., Vol. 19, Nos 1-4, pp. 37-41. (The caps are theirs, not mine; what exactly Computer ind. Engng. might stand for in plain English is a secret known only to the editors.) In the tail end of 2008, a certain P., Professor Emeritus in the Duquesne school of business, decides to delay his retirement in response to a bear market. As employ presupposes publishing, and publishing (in operations research) presupposes a strong show of mathematics, Prof. P. launches a discrete inquiry: does anyone in the math department know anything about optimization? Soon Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai's slender gem is sitting on my desk. It bears a handwritten sticky note: 'Carl, I haven't read this, but I think we can improve on formula (5). Regards, P.'

It is a statistical fact that the average academic article is read by a total of six people. There is a reason for this: the average academic article is very boring. When you consider the fact that most academics spends months, even years preparing these things, that the articles are sent through a review process that takes just as long and sucks up energy that every reviewer would rather invest elsewhere, that the editors spend considerable resources in assessing the article's relevance, and that the typesetters invest hours trying to figure out how to fit things like pictures and equations within the narrow limits of the journal's margins, it makes you wonder: why all that work for six people? Especially when the author, the reviewer, and the editor represent three of them?

The answer, in my opinion, is that academic journals were never designed to produce beautiful things. Rather, they were designed to serve the very narrow requirements of the university system. For young faculty, an academic journal is where the battle for tenure, grants, and recognition is fought. For the university, a faculty publication record is a convenient way to tout its qualifications as a research center and thus justify charging its undergraduates $40,000 a year. For the reviewers, assessing peer work is a chance to show goodwill to the community, and increase the likelihood that their own papers will get published. The academic journal thus plays host to a cycle of petty advancement. Small wonder, then, that its contents end up being so ponderous: the academic article tends to emerge from a mind in the thrall of tenure, rather than beauty; to be read for omissions, rather than contributions; to be cited piecemeal, for specific ends, and when those ends are met, to be forgotten completely. Should it surprise us if these misbegotten creatures should have such shabby careers in the public imagination? If they manage to live at all, it is only because God is careless, and leaves traces of his smoldering presence in dry places, souls that have long ago have shut their shutters, extinguished their lights, loaded their shotguns and are waiting for death.

In The Gift, Lewis Hyde has a chapter called 'The Gift Community'. Though the focus of the chapter is on science and its practitioners, the arguments easily extend to a broader academic community. Hyde's point is that science, at least good science, is done not for lucre, or even for prestige, but as a kind of gift. The sense in which a work of science can be understood as a gift needs to understood in context, of course: the claim is not that leading scientists don't covet any of the social or material fringe benefits that their scientific success commands, but rather that these things alone don't explain the work. "In science", Hyde claims, "it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge." In Hyde's view, good science emerges from a deep and sustained sense that the Individual can have meaningful relation with the Universe. He claims that real science develops within a community whose whole ethical and aesthetic tone closely parallel those of tribal gift societies.

What is a gift society? In some ways, the answer to that question represents the entire content of Hyde's book, so I won't attempt to do it justice here. But one metaphor that can help us think about the problem is what Hyde calls the 'vector of increase'. In capitalist societies, one enters into mercantile exchange with the explicit intention of increasing one's own wealth. Personal enrichment is the essence of the transaction, and it thus doesn't make sense to suggest that one shouldn't expect it. In gift societies, on the other hand, transactions are also carried out with the expectation of increase, but there is no expectation that the increase will come back to the giver. The increase diffuses into the community, and only as a part of that community can the parties of the transaction expect to reap its benefits. The difference, then, is that in the one case the vector of increase points back to the self, whereas in the other it follows the gift.

The problem with bad science is that it assumes the form of a gift, but is accompanied by the wrong vector of increase. In other words, bad science is done for personal enrichment, not community enrichment, and as the gift goes out, floats innocently into the arena of public discourse, fat and slow moving, it gets caught in the cross-fire of self-enrichment, impaled by a vector of increase that's going the wrong way. Is an accident that journals labor under the dead weight of their contents? That an article that takes six man-months to write languishes unread in a thousand page annual compendium buried in the basement of the stacks? Perhaps this crisis of paper, this ever more torrential output of unread and unreadable results, this wild expansion of the Unknown, is connected, in some formal way, to the acedia of intellectual capitalism?

I explain all this to Zoogle. With his usual wisdom, he only looks at me with his bug eyes and smiles. Zoogle knows too much about hackwork to knock it: true, he's not reading Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai, but he's reading us, our canned laughter, our false excitement, our lullabies that are out of tune, our forced smiles. Zoogle doesn't care. He reads everything we publish, and every time he turns a page, he smiles, takes notes, jots down a few comments. Perhaps he knows that if doesn't hear the consonant 'p' at least 3000 times he'll never say it on his own. I don't know. But whatever his reasons, he's made his peace with the system, and with Zen-like calm he lets his education ride on his parents' perfunctory daily performance. Perhaps I should pay closer attention to this boy. He may have something to teach me.

GBC '09

2008-12-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

Zoogle has begun his official winter training regime as a sponsored contestant in the Great Baby Crawl, 2009. No one actually expected him to begin preparing so soon, but it is beginning to seem that the only thing that could be more surprising about this boy is if he failed to delivered his steady stream of developmental surprises. Here he is, at the ripe age of three months and change, and already he's got those great piggy thighs in fighting form, grinding into the ruana at first contact, digging desperately for a toe hole in the llama hair, his back arched, his rump high, his face clenched in furious concentration, churning and pumping and grinding in heroic pursuit of forward motion until, at last, the body exhausted, he dissolves, a quivering, shrieking mass of tears and sailor talk.

One of our crack surveillance agents caught this barbarous spectacle on camera, and you can watch it here . The sounds track is as interesting as the footage: listen as the Crawling Coach showers the lad with just the right mixture of irony, ridicule, and encouragement. What soul could fail to flourish under these conditions? The stock holders are still waiting to see if the coach will prove her salt and lead this little guy to victory, but early signs are promising. The boy has a natural sense of form. He has the drive. Grit, talent, and a coach who's hard as nails: what more goes into the makings of a champion? True, there are few wrinkles. The hand part still needs a little work (right now he's just driving his nose into the carpet) and he needs to improve his psychological game (ending every practice session in tears is hard on both the athlete and the coach.) But most observers agree that Z. has a very real shot at the title.

In every venture of heroic dimensions, of course, there is a cynic. Some guy who stands in the corner of the room and mumbles out the reasons the plan might fail. In Z.'s case, two troublesome questions have been posed: the first is whether or not, in purely Newtonian terms, his body mass invalidates the possibility of self-propelled physical motion. Mostly people point to the NFL and say bah, but others aren't so sure. The second question is whether Z. will be able to make the transition from his Greek-style nudist training regime to the onerous but unavoidable clothing regime of the public games. At the moment, when the diapers come off, the legs get going, but while the diapers are on, he is a rag doll, limp as my spinach souffle. There may be something of a Ferdinand in that boy (Ferdinand being the wonderful bull who preferred to smell daisies than fight picadores, and was retired to blissful pasture after enraging an arena of bloodthirsty sportsfans.) But these are the chances we take. Who invited the cynic, anyway? Take it from me: the smart money for GBC '09 is on Z. Pigglesworth Toews. (See www.madoffspigglefund.com for betting opportunities.)

The Gift

2008-12-14T20:45:00.000-08:00

The spirit of Scrooge runs strong in my family. Not that I grew up on cold gruel, lumps of coal, and sealed chimneys, exactly: my memories of childhood Christmas are warm and vivid, our tree a chaotic pastiche of popcorn chains, glass bulbs, blinking lights, and stuffed angels, the scent of cinnamon steaming from the gluehwein, the piano and the recorders and Oh Little Town of Bethlehem sung bravely and shyly by a family that guards its voices, the strong rumballs, the gospel of John, Midnight Mass, the sleepless night, the dawn rising, the stockings full to bursting, lavish gift exchanges amid hugs, kisses, profuse thanks, a rich breakfast.

But I also remember that at some point there was a shift. The spirit of Christmas Cozy gave way to the spirit of Christmas Efficient. Midnight mass was pronounced "too inconvenient"; the 8 species of holiday cookies were condensed into three; we abandoned the advent calendars; the holy candles were lit intermittently, if at all. When the seasonal rallying cry eventually became "let's make this a gift-free Christmas", everyone knew that the Shadow of Toews had at long last blotted out the holiday, and that those golden days of Ritual and Feast had become a permanent, irretrievable part of the past.

Scrooge works in mysterious ways, however. Since leaving home almost 20 years ago, I have tenaciously defended my tradition of Holiday Crotchetiness. I rarely return home, I usually work Christmas day, I exchanging few gifts, and I bake no cookies. Indeed, my sociopathic currents run so deep they have weathered the usually fatal assault of a Relationship: most years I manage to wiggle out of the holiday festivities and pack Catalina off to Colombia alone, while I, cackling in my Scroogehood, hole up at home, swill beer, work feverishly. But this year something happened. Last Saturday I found myself catfooting it home with a Christmas tree slung over my back, a unilateral and spontaneous purchase that had me berating myself for frivolousness even as it warmed my heart and brought back a flood of memories. And as Marijuana is to the Heroin Addict, so the Christmas Tree is to the Reluctant Celebrant: not so bad in its own right, but a small step in the wrong direction that opens up the transition into worse. Need I mention that I also bought a set of Christmas lights? That we are researching cookie recipes? That debate is raging as to whether Santa's reindeer prefer cake or carrots?

Exactly what is going on is hard to pinpoint, but my suspicions cluster around a small group of Probable Agents, a loose-knit, street-hardened band of Spiritual Insubordinates whose mug shots litter the gallery of my reflective memory. First among them, of course, is Benjamin, who for all his apparent innocence is as hard boiled a rabblerouser as ever Wailed Upon a Midnight Clear. Children need amusements. Pretty lights, tales of elves, cookies, rituals: all these are to capture the hearts of the young, bind them to our customs, imprint their young, flexible minds with patterns of behavior that will seem native and natural once they calcify into adulthood. I as a young man was assimilated by the Borg. Now it is my turn to assimilate my son. If I do it well, he will assimilate his own children, and the collective will endure, with its vast arsenal of pageants, rhythms, patterns and relations intact for many years to come.

A second suspect is a book I recently picked up. It is called The Gift, and was written by a certain Lewis Hyde, grad-school drop out, free-range poet, and winner of a McArthur Grant, whose lucid, offbeat writings are beloved by writers, artists, and academics alike. In The Gift Lewis is writing about the relation between art and the free-market economy. Approaching the issue more as an anthropologist than as a revolutionary, Lewis examines societies in which it is the Gift, rather than the Commodity, that forms the basis of community cohesion, and explores some of the social, spiritual, and material tensions that arise when the gift is stripped of its ritual significance, or understood as a transfer of capital. Art, In Lewis' view, is a Gift in the sense that the energy and attention that go into its production are in most instances contrary, or at least unaligned, with the hallmark accretive impulses of capitalism. "When I speak of a labor...I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior than work." Work is the Spirit of Christmas Efficient, Labor is the Spirit of Christmas Cozy. And as it is precisely because the Gift lies at the heart of vibrant community, a healthy planet, and a sustainable identity, that the implications of non-giving, or of wrong-giving, are so far reaching.

I am not proposing that buying a Christmas tree has the power to re-immerse myself in the nurturing ambiance of other-centric, expectation-less exchange. But I do feel that perhaps the tree is symptomatic of a deeper, more gradual change in my view of how Giving holds the world together, and why it is that our "no gift" Christmas was such a horrible idea. For years we held off on children because we felt we didn't have enough time to give, that it would require resources of energy and patience that we had earmarked for ourselves. Then the child came, and instead of finding ourselves flat and empty, we found that the world responded by lavishing us with gifts. Our house is rich in laughter, good food streams from our kitchen, our friendships are strong, our work advances. Benjamin is an object lesson in the counterintuitive, sometimes uncanny economics of the Gift.

Other examples abound. My sister keeps a marvelous blog of her adventures in Turkey (interested readers can find it here .) As I know from writing this blog, finding the time to sit down and produce intelligible prose is not easy, especially when, like my sister, you are teaching full time, traveling like a maniac, navigating difficult relations and learning a foreign language. Her writing is a gift, without which I would have no idea of what she was experiencing, how she was growing, or how we were diverging. It helps bind a diffracted family. My mother does something similar with her pictures, her letters; my brother has a genius for catchy beats; my father weaves magic on the piano. These gifts, which trickle out sporadically, aimlessly, spontaneously, are not presented to anyone in particular: they emerge from spirits in abundance, and devolve, in an emotional trickle-down, to anyone within a certain radius. As in the potlatch of the Kwakiutl, there is some ineffable reward that attends the giving; there is Wealth in wealth reduction, Time in time-waste, Love in self-reflection. These are gifts that aren't counted, can't be priced, and whose engendering spirit renews the soul.

Which is not to say that I have stopped counting altogether, alas: the only two gifts under the tree at the moment are both for little Benny, of course, who, in his three short months of life, has received more letters, packages, emails and phone calls that his two parents combined. The old Spirit of Scrooge raises his hoary head, scratches his armpits, shakes off a few fleas: what's this, one new baby and suddenly everyone forgets about ma and pa? Bah humbug.

Hühnesuppe

2008-12-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

We live right on the border between the part of town your can't afford to live in, and the part of town you don't want to live in. Coming back from the post office today I see a billboard at the local hospital that says "This is the hospital for people who don't like hospitals." I presume that what this means is that, contrary to federal law, they don't report gunshot wounds. After all, who likes hospitals?

Catalina was down today with a touch of the same Bangali death flew that had me clutching the porcelain god for mercy last week. I stepped to the plate and took over Zoogle duties in the morning. Around 2 o'clock Zoogle and I both had cabin fever, so we decided to make a run on the market, get ourselves a little chicken, see if together we couldn't produce a little of that famed Toews' Hühnesuppe for the missus. So I plop Z. in the carseat, and feeling a little waggish, I decide to leave all baby accessories at home, just head off, Vater und Sohn, into the vast unknown, alone and without resources. (For those who have never attempted this, incidentally, let me highlight the magnitude of the consequences should the wee one get hungry. It is an act of recklessness on par with Tchaikovsky's swilling of tap water in a time of cholera, or Byron's relentless bedding of prostitutes in a time of galloping syphillus.)

We come screeching into the parking lot and as I try to barrel through the double glass doors with the child in the carrier, my way is blocked by two elderly Krumpelfrauen standing in the middle of the passage, arguing in German about the proper use of the handcart. Though it is raining, and cold as hell, I bide my time. They eventually see me, nod curtly, and allow me to pass. I smile.

With the baby-clock ticking, I have only a few moment to choose my route, my groceries, and my checkout line. I make commendable time in the fruit department, instantly spotting organic Braeburn apples at $1.69, choosing six at random, and, with leaderly coldness, squashing all further interest in matters vegetative. There is the matter of salad fixings, however.... Just as I swoop on a head of purple cabbage and prepare to sprint to the meat counter, a young black man with crooked teeth, who has hitherto been unobtrusively stacking cucumbers, takes a look inside my car seat and says, in a heavy foreign accent, "great baby." I agree. He tells me his name is Daniel, comes from Sudan, and would like to have ten children. "Because when you are old, it is like having ten versions of yourself," he explains. I don't mention overpopulation, I don't mention Darfur, I don't mention that I don't have a bottle, but I do mention that Benjamin is too young to respond to his playful teasing, so he shouldn't take it personally. "No, yes, too young. Of course. No problem. Maybe when he grow up he come here work with me." We smile, I pocket the cabbage, we're off.

At the meat counter whom should I encounter but the Krumpelfrauen. This time they are discussing the price of veal, and trying to understand it in terms of Kilos instead of pounds. My sprachlust gets the better of me, and I astutely announce, in strongly accented but intelligible German, that they, in fact, are German. "Ja", they reply, smiling. Ja. I smile back. "Schönes kind", says the one, and I agree, he is a beautiful boy. And we talk about the vaterland and the family and the difference between this dry amerikan wurst and the real, juicy, blood-and-guts german sort, when out of left field the lady comments, "er sieht ja ein bischen ueberfuttert aus", which, loosely translated, means it looks like you've been feeding your little piggy too much corn. I etch a german smile on my face, and with clinical dexterity explain the benefits of being fat when one is young. She nods sagely. And then from even further out in left field: "Er ist denn gestillt?", which I misunderstood to be "Er ist denn gestollen?", which means "He is of course stolen, right?" And when I ask how she knew, she says yeah, you know, from the mother. At which point my confusion my have been quite palpable, for her partner quickly steps in and, in perfect English, explains that while gestohlen (from stehlen) does indeed mean stolen, gestillt (from stillen) means breastfed.

Past the cheese, then, ducking below the dairy cabinet when I see the Krumpelfrauen coming the other way, deftly resisting the olive bar, and I'm done, chickenfleisch, a few onions, a couple of potatoes, and all the other secret ingredients that go into the Welt-famous Toews Huhnesuppe splayed out on the checkout counter. One slow-poke lady in front of me, don't look but there are the Frauen in next line over, come on dude, do you really need to change your drawer? Of course he does. Five minutes tick by as the Chuck the Checkout Guy counts his quarters and Zoogle sings increasingly frenzied arias from Don Giovanni. On the way out I dodge the Krumpelfrauen one last time, wave goodbye, hit the car at a dead run, gun the engine, and I am back at the house just as Zoogle passes into a hypoglycemic coma.

Catalina ended up making her own damn Weltberuhmtetoewshuehnesuppe, naturally.

The Company Party

2008-12-10T19:39:00.000-08:00

For months Joanne the Irascible Secretary had been asking when Benjamin was going to make an appearance in the office. My responses were always guarded. Partly, this elusiveness was due to the fact that arranging a family outing downtown, in the middle of the work week, with a wife and a child and all the attendant prodding and swaddling and cooing and coaxing, the traffic, the parking, and the general pandemonium, had become an Enterprise of such gargantuan dimensions that I felt it beyond my powers. But partly too it was because the grandmotherly Joanne is batty as a spring loon, and some primal protective impulse suggested keeping kids in one place and madwomen in another.

I have, I should admit, a weird relationship with secretaries. In some way it is a lot like Fellini's relationship with clowns: they are sources of sociological fascination, epistemic angst, metaphysical curiosity, and spiritual disquiet. I ride the crest of their goodwill with an abiding sense of escape, and as we exchange pleasantries, discuss deadlines, find forms, or curse the copier, I watch them for signs that the my reprieve has ended, opinion shifted, sins been exposed and all the goodwill gone. At the root of this pathological conception lies, doubtless, a kind of class consciousness: having always pegged my identity to that of the underdog, there is a sense of guilt that goes with 'having a secretary', even if she's doesn't work for me personally and even if I don't ask her to do anything. Men who have secretaries are men who wear fat yellow power ties, close big business deals, cheat on their wives and have dysfunctional relations with their children. Perhaps it is the nagging conviction that in spite of my best efforts to live la vie bohéme, I'm linked at some deep and irredeemable level with exactly the sort of the blind, upward guppy-thrust of the bourgeoisie that I have always detested. No one sees this motley, unwilled double life quite as nakedly as the Secretary.

Whatever my relation to some Secretary-in-the-Abstract, however, it had become obvious to me that my relation to Joanne was fast deteriorating, and that my days of grace were numbered. So last week, when after another tense conversation in which she made very little eye contact and seemed deeply entranced with some icon in the upper right hand corner of her screen, she happened to mention the Departmental Christmas Party, I seized the opportunity for redemption. "Hey, Josie," I ask coyly, "would it be OK if I brought little Benji to that party?" Her eyes light up, her mouth dissolves into a smile, she looks me in the eye for the first time in months, and says "that would be lovely" with such warmth, energy, and obvious goodwill that I'm convinced my days in the doghouse are over.

Absence being the better part of prudence, however, I keep a low profile for the next couple of days. In spite of this precaution, I find myself growing increasingly nervous that something has gone wrong. Some small voice in my gut is whispering words of warning, telling me that my good credit had slipped, the karmic debt collectors are after me, and that merely sacrificing my son will no longer cut it when it comes to appeasing the primal pagan deities of the secretarial underworld. My doubt reaches the point that I almost decide not to go. But though the day of the party dawns gray and miserable (like most other days in Pittsburgh), and I get cold just glancing out the window, at the last moment I summon my resolve. Wide eyed Benny in tow, and Catalina out parking the car, I enter the party.

Math company parties are not the same as Company company parties. Company parties in real companies involves gimlets, toothpicks, swanky music and at least the possibility of embarrassment. The aforementioned deal maker in a yellow tie watches patiently as the boss hits on his wife. Deals and promotions are worked out in between paté runs. In a math company party, on the other hand, there is barely conversation, let alone dealmaking. The food consists of one vat greenbeans, one vat potatoes, and two vats chicken (one thick cut, one thin cut, just for variety.) There is no alcohol. Stanislav's wife makes her famous creampuffs, of course, which everyone formally praises. A half dozen forlorn graduate students stand in the hallway talking among themselves and trying to look involved.

Joanne is seated on her swivel stool when Benjamin's left cheek crests the sill of the door. She rises like an Egyptian priestess, dignified, semi-smiling, fully conscious of her ritual function as she moves toward the offering. Her hair is a grumpy red cactus, parched and spiny, the only one of its species for miles. Earrings that could double as clappers in the village bell oscillate wildly, trying to find some native frequency in the bedrock that separates them. Her fingernails are lacquered lollipop red, her eyeshadow is visible from ten paces, and her blouse is decorously loose. "May I?" she breathes in the husky voice of a Pittsburgh lifer. My brain is reeling, my hands trembling. With trapped-animal cunning, I blurt "hang on, give this little guy a moment, he just got up from a nap." The God-head moves back, stunned, confused. And I, I stand by the counter, a faithless Abraham, my Isaac unoffered and my covenant broken, I stand by the counter breathing the cool air of the outcast, feeling my Cain-hood spread and darken, stand and watch the gawdy angel of death beat a howling retreat to her cubby hole, and my spirit shivers, and my heart is at peace.

It occurs to me that I may need to see a shrink at some point.

The Break

2008-12-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

In the last five days Zoogle has changed from Marlon Brando into Dorian Gray. His endless rolls of tummy chub have evolved from undulating hills into a luxuriant sloping tundra, i.e. the coherent, well-proportioned pot-belly that is the trademark of any man in serious pursuit of sustained overindulgence. His face, which was once a pear (photo left), has become a heart (photo right), with high, ruddy cheeks and bright eyes reflecting a spirit that has sampled, and is confident in its ability to continue to sample, the fruits of Life's basic abundance. And his hair, once wispy and fine, is now a coarse, tangled mass of snaggle-heaps, little fibrous thickets that shoot up irregularly across the scalp; in short, the hair of a man who is losing his hair, and is sufficiently rich in Life's graces that he doesn't give a damn.

Like many of the slow changes that we never notice (the ebbing of a water line, the death of a relationship) I imagine that the transformation did not, in fact, occur within the last five days, but has been happening for a long time, finally becoming substantial enough that we took note. Of course, the trigger for such sudden recognition could be a shift in reality, or it could be a shift in perception: in this case, there are a couple of reasons our perceptual apparatus might be more open than usual. On my end, the semester just ended (modulo final exams), and as usual, there is a concomitant rush of energy, a simmering, excited lull in which I hash plans, connive, dream, and unfold. The world seen through the filter of Another Beginning is very different from the world seen through the filter of Another Day at the Grind. The end of the semester also means that those among Catalina's fellow graduate students who were not hijacked by a baby are now applying for jobs, a potent reminder that, if the five year plan is to hold, she has only 12 more months in which to finish planning, reading for, and writing her thesis. When the life of the mind must be seized in small snippets, summing up to no more that two or three hours of good, focused time per day, the organism reasonably responds by employing its sensory minions more efficiently.

Of course fate gives with the left hand and takes with the right: in what should have been a grand week of explosive advance, I was struck with a violent stomach flu, Zoogle has been cranky and irritable, and Catalina has been reeling under the responsibility of simultaneously caring for an infant and invalid. So while both our eyes were open enough to see that Zoogle is changing, the wife is currently roaming the house like a Zombie, I am prostrate in bed with brain fever, chills, and serial vomiting, and Zoogle, mercifully flu-free but cranky as hell (teething?) continues to lord our home and actions like Max WildThing.

In a curious sense, however, it almost seems to me that the Perception Broadening properties of a good Breaking Open are identical to those of a Breaking Down. It is exactly in these selve oscure, when the body and the spirit have given all that you thought that they could give, that you discover yet another streak of energy, yet another glimmering of willpower that allows you to drag your broken, feverish body from the bed at 7 in the morning, to feed the cats, to tend the child, to ruminate on a set of measure zero, or to behold with bleary, ecstatic eyes the wonders of the natural world.

Turkey Boy

2008-11-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, a ragtag bunch of career graduate students, professorial misfits, homeless grandparents, and dotty neighbors converged for a Romanesque evening of overindulgence. The turkey weighed in at 17.6 pounds. So did Cosmico. We were happy there was no confusion.

Most of us crapped out at about 11, too booze addled and turkey bludgeoned to care anymore. But Zoogle, still at the top of his game, urged us to stay, his beautiful bug-eyes bulging with excitement. Quiet, attentive, he took in everything: weather-carved faces, strange accents, candles flickering against crystal, glorious cornucopias, a strangely lethargic cat, the smell of cinnamon, Gillian Welch's ripping guitar accompanist. He was neither vocal nor demonstrative, just very interested and extremely focused, observing with what seemed the sustained concentration of a first class mind. He sat high in the purple sling and let himself be carried, from the kitchen to the table to the rocking chair and back, and as he went, he stared, all night, sans cesse, like a little sociologist micro-pasha, issuing no directives, knowing his will would be known, letting the world pass through him. He sat and he soaked it up and when he saw that we were truly beat he said 'wah' and took us home.

The Five Year Plan

2008-11-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

Last December Catalina and I made a five year plan. We took as our model the third five year plan of communist China, whose stated objectives were 1) to solve food, clothing and housing problems, 2) to strengthen national defense and make breakthroughs in technology, and 3) to build an economy of self-reliance. Not an unreasonable agenda for a young and crunchy peacenick couple with ambitions of world transformation, it seemed to us.

Suitably inspired, we taped a piece of newsprint to the kitchen wall and drew a black line from left to right, a fat timeskewer on which to fix, order, and slowroast our dreams. And after cracking a bottle of good wine, opening a little fromage tres forte, and setting Mariachi Madness at full blast, we got to work, heaving black and formless hopes from the unexplored recesses of our psyches, shaping them into appetizing forms, and setting them on the clean page for skewering. All sorts of dreams came out, big and small, wild and domestic, dreams about ourselves, about others, about the world; there were trips, deadlines, wendepunkte, nows-or-nevers, crises, resolutions, ripenings, and retractions. Each was written down, circled, and pinned in place by a thin black tether that connected to some particular spot in time. And on the very tip of the skewer, at the far right hand side of the page, surrounded in a big cartoon cloud and marked through with a red question mark, was the picture of a baby. Baby in five years, we decided, exchanging sly winks and a little tender innuendo: what the hell, maybe by then we'll have our lives in order.

Well, that was the plan. But someone tipped the kid off about his place on Life's Shiskabob and he wasn't happy: he called his buddy Bruno over in production and two days later Catalina was pregnant. Back to the drawing board. The Protozoogle had to be moved from the far right to the far left hand side of the picture, and all the other dreams had to be de-skewered, one by torturous one, to let us get the Baby where the Baby wanted to be, right at the beginning of things. And there we were, two bumbling novices, lost and confused in the kitchen, all those dreams just lying around the page, leaking their juices, drying out, unpalatable and disorganized. Start over? We thought about it, but got nervous: what if there were other secret orders that we didn't know about? What if we re-organized the dreams, only to find once again that we'd made some critical omission, or an ordering error, and had to take them all off again? Was this any way to run a dream kitchen?

The answer, curiously, seems to be 'yes'. I don't think it is a coincidence that the relentless failure of Mao's policies did nothing to persuade him to abandon them: his five year plans continued, the state slogged on, he died, things changed. If nation-states have these problems, what can we expect on the level of the benighted hippy couple? Error seems to be a fundamental part of this activity, as if there were a kind of visionary quantum principle that set some lower bound on the product of a dream's importance and its accuracy. Planning, especially radical planning, is a hit and miss sort of affair: unless you limit yourself to purely achievable ambitions (in which case you miss out on the exciting ones) some reshuffling is guaranteed.

So last night, almost precisely a year after the first, abortive five year plan, we sat down to draft a new one. Older, wiser, a little chastened but no less brazen, we chose once again to take our lead from the author of the Little Red Book and ignore the gross failures of the central planning committee, plunging boldly ahead with new ideas, new visions, new timescales. Five years is actually a good timeframe for human planning. It represents about 7% of the average lifespan, a considerable chunk but not so much that everything blends into some hazy contemplation of the The Future. It is a span that permits concrete actions (trip to the Riviera, Spring 2010; first child, Summer 2012), but extends far enough into the future as to allow speculative thought to play a guiding role (indeed, concrete actions typically expire in a year or two, at which point you've either got speculative thought or nothing at all.)

For all its value as an exercise in fusing hard practicalities with free meditation, however, the five year plan forces some hard questions. In five years you can make your fortune, get a doctorate, write a novel, drink yourself to ruin, become fluent in Russian, take holy orders. In five years my child will be talking, dancing, throwing baseballs, fluent in two languages, conscious of how bad my guitar playing is, clamoring for a brother. Certain parts of the world (both internal and external) will be fundamentally different in five years time, other parts (both internal and external) essentially the same. Do I wish to control that change? Respond to it? Be it? Ignore it? Time moves at different rates in different places; the difficulty of the five year plan is in choosing which temporal stream to commit to.

But by God we were committed to something. We took out the usual paraphernalia, the wine, the snacks, the music. The paper went up on the wall. This time we put a child on the left, a pudgy bear of a boy with a sweet but concerned look, from whose karmic center a number of lines emerged and headed right. Each line was to represent a possible future, a set of independent sequences of contingent events. Ha ha, we said. Let Fate try to thwart us now. And crossing our arms, smug in our cleverness and invulnerable to turns of destiny, we sat, still and smug, sipping our wine, beating time to the mariachi's, chewing our brie. We sat, and we stared, and we thought, and we stared some more, now with hope, now with sinking heart, stared into the vast expanse of empty newsprint that was to hold and nourish our dreams, and wondered what color we should make the links.

Language

2008-11-23T08:21:00.000-08:00

Unless you spend a lot of time reading academic criticism, it is easy to forget that language originates in the torrent of undifferentiated cries, grunts, and howls that Man the Animal produces in his quest for survival. Why these grunts eventually evolve into expressions like Hamlet, jive, the Declaration of Independence, and the Tractatus seems to me a source of rich speculation: if we could find a scientific justification for the claim that the Australian tree sloth achieves its highest literary expression in the gutteral snarl-screech of the ovulating female, Harold Bloom’s next text on subtextual intertextualism might actually have something to say.

Zoogle is learning to talk. He’s not quite at the level of Elizebethan revenge tragedies, but he has acquired a range of sounds that can be strung together in different ways to express a small but growing suite of complex ideas. (The semantic range of the word ‘idea’ may need some light stretching to accommodate what Zoogle has to say.) Although a thorough classification of Zoogelian morphemes would require more time, energy, and expertise than I can muster for this blog, the following list contains a few of the more recognizable language units, along with hyperlinks to audio field samples:

* the glooble
* the schnorfelwail
* the Marvin Gay wah
* the short sigh of complicity
* the triple squak of indignation

He ocassionally puts these sounds together into complete sentences:

* an example sentence, where he asks us to turn down the volume on the canticuentos.

And, very rarely, he produces a complete narrative:

* the wacky misadventures of the dog Wagglepox and his sidekick George the Chicken.

Again, this list represents a short sub-sample of the Zoogelian lexicon; anyone interested in a more comprehensive reference would do well to consult the forthchoming Definitive Field Guide to Calls of the Wild Zoogle, currently under contract with American Fauna Press, issue date TBA.

Of course it is one thing to play the scientist, observing and taking notes on a set of phenomena that are designed and presented by nature, quite another to play the creator, guiding and transforming those phenomena into shapes of your own devising. Our ambition is to produce a bi-lingual child, a creature who can formulate complete, syntactically correct sentences in both Spanish and English. However, in light of the fact that a typical sentence in our household sounds something like ‘buenas mañanas, chicalica, come va mi furry round pepino?’, there is a very real chance that Bensoosco will end up being totally unintelligible in five languages, a pentatonic illiterate at equal odds with all his tongues.

To avoid this sad eventuality, we have tried to tighten the ship of our daily discourse: father-son conversations are to be in English, mother-son conversations are to be in Spanish, and mother-father conversations are to be in Spanish unless non-Spanish speakers are present or we are speaking about art, love, or finances, in which case we can use whichever language seems appropriate (preferably sign language in the latter case; all we need is the sign for death by strangulation.) The idea behind formalizing the language-setting rules is to provide a clear division of context so that the baby can sort out the various idioms. It’s not totally clear to me how the system is supposed to work, unfortunately. Apparently, consistency is key, and if you are consistent, your child can learn an arbitrary number of languages. But is there no upper bound on the complexity of the system to which one is supposed to be consistent? Could we stipulate that terms of affection will be in Italian, cream-based sauces will be in French, cries of despair will be in Pig-latin, and still entertain any hope of producing a child who can talk?

Like every other specimen of biological life, our evolutionary success depends on how well we can leverage the stimulus-response circuit to our own advantage. A baby who creates the ruckus of a five alarm fire when it is hungry has a better chance of being fed than one who merely whimpers his displeasure (noise abatement may not be love, but it works in a pinch.) The evolutionary advantages of emitting squeals of delight upon experiencing pleasure are not so clear-cut, however: one could conceive of biologically closed systems designed under purely negative principles. Though ill-qualified to judge the merits of this argument, I do know that nothing lightens the load of parenting more than hearing a happy coo, perhaps with a side of bright eyes and one of those twisted, toothless baby smiles. At which point I don’t care what the program is, all bets are off and formal language is dropped as the parents descend into an imitative chorus of coos and giggles, each outdoing the other to produce the Word, the Sound, that will strike the tocsin of the Childsoul and send a signal of Love peeling across the courtyard of the psyche. These parents are like pet lovers who say 'miao' when they see a cat: both undone by the mimetic fallacy, the doomed attempt to use low-level phenomes to capture high-level language structures. The cat stares dumbly; the baby laughs at our ineptitude; my wife laughs at my basic, instinctual ridiculousness; and the alien psychologists in the sky once again just scratch their heads and write it all down in their notebooks.

Tuesday is my long day

2008-11-18T20:18:00.000-08:00

Today I left for work just as Cosmico was opening his eyes, and returned long after he had closed them, already off in the world of dreams and snuffling in his sleep like some truffle pig in hot pursuit of a fungus. Let us hear it for the absentee father. Let us hear it for a work schedule that keeps a man at the office from 8:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night. While we're at it, let's hear it for that crustaceous krankelweib who greets me in the kitchen upon my return, and that rich sense of venial omission that rumbles in my gut an hour after getting up from the table, and that creeping dread at the prospect of getting out of bed tomorrow. Let us hear it for long hours in the company of truth and beauty, or at least in the life-consumptive pursuit of peer reviewed journal articles with an impact factor of 3, and for that noble committment to the training of a new generation, a generation that doesn't do their homework and doesn't ask questions but pays their yearly forty thou with clock-like regularity and expects in return to get B's for having stood the course, shown up day after pointless day, a pulse in a room of pulses, all keeping meticuluous track of Time Served, ticking it off, watching it go, like that bank of cessium clocks at the NSH, only more consistent and better polished.

Bonding

2008-11-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh is covered in its signature November slush this evening, a half inch of dirty snow that makes the roads slick as hell but does nothing to disguise the relentless industrial gray of the city. This is not a town that takes a snowfall gracefully. But the flakes, while they were still flakes, still bright and radiant and unique, still riding the soft currents that pass between the houses, still heading down in those slow, stately spirals, these were beautiful to behold, and I decided that Zoogle should behold them, he being a lad of strong body and restless curiosity. So I and Young Goodman Z., both in our skivvies, stepped onto the steps of the front porch, where we stood and gazed in all our billowing manliness at the sky, and I, with great gaiety, caught flakes on my tongue, and he, with great seriousness, caught flakes in his eyes, and his cheeks, and his ears, and his mouth was open with wonder and his hands were clenched in delight, and we were having a great time until the neighbor lady screamed 'get a coat on that kid!' and that pretty much wrapped up our adventure.

Three Bears

2008-11-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Chris and Mimi arrived last Thursday on a late night flight out of Las Vegas. I would like to imagine that they let their hair down on the layover, maybe dropping a few C notes in a high ante game of roulette and smoking doobies in the VIP lounge, but knowing what I know of those two, it's more likely that they did the old leche-vitrine in Smokey Pete's Old Thyme gift shop, or read books quietly by their assigned gate. (They refused to divulge details.) I had volunteered to pick them up once they hit the City of Pitts, but at the last minute they decided to rent a car and find the hotel under their own steam, so I stayed home and practiced pentatonics on my steel string. A quick call at 11:30 p.m. confirmed that they had arrived without incident and would meet us at some leisurely hour the next day. So much for biting their nails to see the baby.

Cosmopolitan cool aside, Old Man Higgins is clearly very conscious of Zoogle's dual status as lovable alien and generational symbol. Not only is he Higgin's first biological grandson, but his arrival breaks what had begun to seem a generational decision to forgo family ties. With most of the brood in their mid to late thirties, it had started to appear as if baby-creation had been permanently and suggestively struck from the agenda, with everyone in such hot pursuit of a glorious future (or panic flight from a dark past) that the present had become permanently unavailable for long-term, responsibility-infusing projects. Not that Baby Z. represents an intentional departure from this policy: as an unplanned love child, Z. has been an agent, not a consequence of change. But change is to stodgy old academics as mountains are to Mohammads: the basic reciprocity of motion defies reason, expectation, hope. Oppressed by a present he viewed as a weak copy of a vibrant past, Rilke tells us that "there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." But the you that reconfigures itself in the gaze of history is not the same you who falls into the hands of a restless creation, the you to whom Life concedes the the vain illusion of being Captain and Master. There is no place that does not seize you. You will be changed by Life.

So life struck, our position changed, and the older generation came calling. The paranoia of being a nuisance runs strong in those two, unfortunately: it was hard to drag them from the hotel and get them to hang with us. (Yes, I agree, a hotel is odd. Who stays in a hotel when the sole object of the trip is to spend time with the new grandchild? There was some mention of cat allergies, of an aversion to hard futons, etc. I think the real reason is that they didn't want to be a pain in the ass. Hah. They have no idea. What they need are some good Colombian in-laws who move in for weeks or months at a time, swilling beer 'til the wee hours of the morning, carousing and talking politics and cooking all manner of unmentionable delights from the time the sun rises is the morning to that dark dawn moment when the last screech owl circles to a silent stop.) One day they decided to take a field trip to Falling Waters, a Frank Lloyd Wright house about an hour out of Pittsburgh. We couldn't accompany them because the house refuses to admit children under 6 (a policy that must be in violation of some equal access law.) They left in the morning, spent all day on the road, and called in the evening to let us know that they would be returning to their hotel at 5pm or so and would see us the following day. I had to call them back and sell them on the manifold pleasures of Time With Zoogle, tempting them back with promises of good food and copious drink. (Thereby blowing my Baby-ace, which I should have reserved for sitting favors.)

Teeth pulling aside, the visit was wonderful. In honor of Catalina's birthday, Mimi produced a batch of her world-famous fish stew, a murky vehicle for everything under the waves, including scallops, the flesh of seven kinds of white fish, shrimp heads, shark ears, manta tails and monster fins. We gobbled it down late on a Friday night, after a thwarted attempt to attend the Gist street poetry reading and before an impromptu birthday party that included a handful of good friends, a few glasses of vino, and the traditional Toews family cake (with the conventional whipcream replaced by a suspicious caramel-pecan spread that ended up being surprisingly popular.) We took walks in the park; we ate at the Piccolo Forno; we took pictures; we shot the shit; we cooked, we sang, we sat on our asses and we twiddled our fat thumbs. Must say, this is a life style I could get into.

With a Baby in Tow

2008-11-06T20:50:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago a couple of friends proposed heading out for a night of latin dance. Manfredo's magic congas start pounding late Wednesday night, but in spite of driving work schedules and imminent deadlines, resolve was strong. The most enthusiastic voice came from my wife, whose genius for for social dance stems from a rare combination of impeccable rhythm and profound patience. Unfortunately, her principal partner is stuck with a raging self-consciousness, a dogged perfectionism, and a terminal goofiness, with the predictable result that they rarely hit the dance floor. "We can play pass the baby" she laughed, and we excitedly wove a picture of Benny on the sidelines, slumbering in a succession of arms, snoring like a borracho de tres dias and totally impervious to the pepper shot from the bongos, the driving martillo of the congas, the piercing tenor, the rusty clave. I suggested that maybe we could even incorporate the baby into our dance routine, some exotic pastiche of LA-style twirls with names like Bebé Around the Back, Chico Por las Piernas, perhaps even a little Triple Baby Flying Flip if we needed something special for the finale.

Alas, 'twas not to be: once the preparatory emails started flying, and we began the transition from fantasy to logistics, I realized that the noise level in any salsa bar would deafen most adults, and were definitely inappropriate for baby ears. Not that solutions were impossible (baby earmuffs?), but they seemed so convoluted and involved that we quickly cut our losses and abandoned ship.

So I can't take my baby clubbing. What was strange about this revelation is not that it came so late (though this fact does suggest some basic, utopian woolly-headedness on my part), but rather that it represents the first time we have had to materially modify our social agenda in order to accommodate the Zoogle. Which is interesting, because it suggests that the subset of activities to which new parents traditionally limit themselves is far more restrictive than it need be. Conventional wisdom (among 30-something young professionals) is that once you commit to propagation, you can kiss the rest of your life goodbye. What I find amazing about the small slice of parenthood I've experienced thus far is how patently untrue this idea has turned out to be. When he came home from the hospital, Zoogle partied with the Ocampos for a solid month. He has subsequently attended at least half dozen social gatherings, not that kind in which adults seek refuge from screaming children in small huddled groups in the kitchen, but hipshooting professional young urban ones, with nary a child in sight, only Zoogle, in all his glorious chub, snoring in his sling, head thrown back at that crazy, horrifying angle, tossing out smiles like Jack Nicholson, his eyelids sagging under the weight of exhaustion, those thin, glauco crescents slowly sink under the weight of dreams. At the election party last Tuesday, he hung with the democrats, wincing at the blast of red from the midwest, cooing at the blue counter-blast from the West, fascinated by McCain's concession speech, erupting in tears during the last five minutes of Obama's address. And tonight he celebrated Catalina's birthday in his usual style, falling unconscious five minutes before the first guest arrived and slumbering through soup and toasts and cake until at last, at 2 in the morning, just as the last guest was leaving, he woke up, hoisted a smile, ordered milk, and returned to land the Nod.

We've got a sweet kid. And there's only one of him. And he can't yet crawl off and get into trouble. So I admit that the equation may change if we ever find ourselves in a custodial relation to multiple little monsters all howling like banchies and gnawing holes in the carpet and playing 'Bean the Goldfish' with the host's remote control. Under these circumstances, it is possible that our social agenda will look somewhat different. But for the moment, Benjamin is a social accessory, not a liability. And he's a social accessory that has the marvelous property of doing great things for my ego. I walk into a restaurant and every woman present turns and stammers "My God, he's gorgeous." Is it my fault that English is graced with those lovely, ambiguous pronouns?

All Hallow's Eve

2008-11-03T19:21:00.000-08:00

If we had chosen to go as zombies, our work would have been easy (two months with Zoogle=no makeup necessary.) But it's one thing for two haggard, sleep starved parents to pose as undead, quite another for a cherub cheeked infant in the bloom of perfect health. Who would believe that blood and worms could produce fat rolls like that? (N.B.: if you do hope to catch sight of the elusive Buddha zombie, Pittsburgh, as the home of the cult classic "Night of the Living Dead", is a very reasonable place to start looking. That film, incidentally, featured a cameo by the father of Annie Dillard, whose "An American Childhood" is a beautiful portrait both of this city and of a sensitive soul in the flush of self-discovery.)

So we scrapped Plan Z and decided to go existential instead. Behold: one Cosmico Z. Toews, as The Reader, a Sartre-like figure with beady spectacles and a perpetual pipe; one Piccola C. Ocampo, as The Armchair, an ambulatory seat for The Reader's repose; and one Gargantua C. Toews, as The Lamp and Table, a shaky repository for The Reader's texts and pens. We sat on the porch and passed out candy until the kid stream ebbed to a trickle, then blew out the pumpkin, crawled into bed, and passed into weird collective dreams of childhood, nausea, radical freedom and death in the soul.

The prize for best costume goes to my brother, who apparently tore around NYC all day dressed as a sunflower, delivering neatly packed boxes to burly men named Mugs and Bruno, who threatened to grind him into wormpaste if he and his kind ever came around that way again. God that kid rocks.

Face Recognition

2008-10-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

In the five days I was out of town, Benjamin's weight shot up 10%, his cheeks lost their acne, he perfected his roundhouse and he learned to warble like a Black Capped Thrush. If Catalina weren't here to vouch for the boy, I'd swear he had been abducted by Chinese pirates and replaced by a crude Fatboy knockoff. As it is, I'm still a little sketched: perhaps they took only the chassis, left the paneling?

It is ironic that my difficulties in recognizing my son come hot on the heels of a conference whose driving concern was facial recognition. Machines are still very bad at this task, it seems, at least relative to humans (which, in light of my struggles to absorb the changes in Benny II, makes me wonder where exactly I fit on the Andropoid-Thingamajig spectrum.) Part of the difficulty may have to do with the level of mathematical hocus pocus that is brought to bear on this problem. Vast realms of theory are distilled into simple algorithms any unbaked sophomore can implement but whose intuitive connection to the task remains totally opaque to all but a handful of hoary old fossils at Harvard. The result is a raft of special purpose recognition schemes whose domain of applicability extends exactly as far as the artificial conditions specified by the author ("potential application" is a phrase one hears a lot), with spotty performance and inscrutable convergence properties. Though I shouldn't admit this, I actually view the relative lack of progress as a good thing: it means, among other things, that there's still a lot to do, i.e. more papers to write, more theorems to prove, more opportunity to play in what the greatest mathematician of the 19th century called a "paradise", the realm of pure structure, severed from function and inured to responsibility. It also means that the Artist still trumps the Processor in certain privileged spheres, and that an effective police state is still at least several years off.

The conference itself provided another opportunity for facial recognition, in the form of that favorite game "find the luminary." Context: the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications is one of a handful of federally funded, university-affiliated institutions across the country designed to support collaborative interplay between mathematicians and their quantitative counterparts in science and engineering. As major repositories of NSF funding, these institutes draw high powered people, so that any given conference is likely to be studded with a luminous cast of optimizers, implementers, purse-holders and theory-mongers. Even among this technical glitterati, however, a truly powerful mind stands out: it charges the air, polishes the dialogue, raises the intellectual temperature. I had never met Charles Fefferman, and never seen his picture, but I knew his story (full professor at 22, Fields medalist for work done by the time he was 24) and knowing he would be present, I sought him out. It took me all of about five minutes: there he sat, bearded and smiling, his speech formal, his wit shy. He sat calm and erect, just listening, not taking notes, and seemed at times to sleep, or dream, or perhaps just take a mental walkabout, zooming off in the spaceship of his imagination, dipping a wing to reality before blasting into a galaxy where the life forms have six-eyes and rubbery tentacles. He asked "what is M?" twice, in fifteen minutes; he diffused an increasingly shrill argument about mathematical models with an arcane reference to epicycles; he said "I assume, of course, that a computer is a Turing machine." Now in his late fifties, the man spoke with the kind of reckless modesty that is the hallmark of a psyche totally untouched by doubt or failure.

Watching Fefferman was a welcome reminder that there are many ways to be a mathematician. I trained in the austere environment of Pure Theory, under mentors who had bad haircuts, mismatched socks, and no computers. I learned to say irrefutable things about irrelevant objects in a syntax that was both spare and bulletproof; I subscribed to the Suessian ethos that "a question's a question, no matter how small;" I inferred that it was better to delay publishing until you had worked out a considerable body of theory, and that it was OK to spend your life in a dark office contemplating sets of measure zero as long as posterity judged you well. How different this new world! This real world, of real applications, real money, all those realtime pressures for real results. The haircuts are sharper, the shoes are black and polished, and most people carry their laptops to the talks, either to fine tune their code or check their email, but in any case so as to occupy themselves with something more fruitful than listening to other people's theories. In this charged ambiance of powerful people, all striving to prove their relevance with a torrential publication record, multiple grants, invited addresses and commercial contracts, it is difficult to remember why I entered this field in the first place: a love of form, a talent for dreams, a belief in beauty. At the core of the original dream lay the idea of noble failure, a vision of the mathematician maudit in dogged and doomed pursuit of the Truth.

Most people who leave their radical roots to become Republicans once they accrete property and power end up saying that it was the political landscape that shifted, not their views. As I reflect on the shift in my mathematical environs, I wonder if I would be falling into the same trap if I were to suggest that the shift is symptomatic of a broader disciplinary trend? I think most mathematicians would agree that the days of insouciant theorem proving in a vacuum are gone, or at least ending: even at undergraduate institutions, the movement is towards student research, with tenure-stingy deans wanting to see if you can lead it, how well, and with what federal backing. Ultimately, the race is for grant funding, it having become well known that grants determine rankings, rankings draw people, and people pull in grants, in a vicious, money-and-power centered circle that threatens to overlook a basic, utopian mission of the university. But even as I condemn what I see to be a national shift towards an ugly and stultifying pragmatism, the good praktischer mensch in me sympathises with its motives. The world is melting. We need mathematicians who are capable of solving intractable technical problems, people who are both good theorists and able experimentalists, who can formulate the pressing problems of the world in clean mathematical terms and solve them in polynomial time. Why shouldn't governmental structures be set up to support such things, and why shouldn't mathematicians step to the plate? Thus rants a small but shrill voice in my higher conscience. From across the brain, there is a counter volley, also a small voice, but subdued: the risk, it warns, is that this pressing sense of mission can arise only in exactly the sort of arcadian environment in which it has no hope of a practical solution.

It's a lazy Sunday. My plans to reprocess conference threads, read papers, and start projects were mostly eaten up by the new-and-improved Zoogle, whose main link to the old Zoogle are an insatiable appetite and a binary watched-or-crying mode. We went for three walks in Frick Park today, and each time I was dazzled by the change in the look of the ravine, once a shock of impenetrable green, now a kaleidoscope of color in which dotty and garish old leaves hold on by their fingernails, defying the Great Plunge for a few more days. Like my son, and like my discipline, these woods are molting. My associated sense of loss betrays my susceptibility to the Fallacy of Perpetual Form, the idea that there is something sacred and intrinsic in the appearances of the moment, this sun-drenched knoll with its moss and catepillars, this nook in the stacks among the original sources, this clean smell of sweet milk. Under pressure, I would agree that there is something like ontological continuity, but for me identity is increasingly fantasmal, a whispy object of syntax and statistics. I am back with Heraclitus on the banks of his river. And though I though I've been forbidden to bathe again, I get wet, soap off, and I recognize the bank and the willow and my reflection, everything, indeed, but Recognition itself, the meaning behind this whirlwind of labels with which Man the Namegiver builds his kingdom. It will be many years, I believe, before a computer can imitate this sort of incomprehension.

First Snowfall

2008-10-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

At 8:45 this morning I kissed Zoogle goodbye, hugged my wife, and boarded American Eagle flight something something something for Minneapolis, site of a mathematics conference on multi-manifold data modeling. The technical details of the trip are a blur: after two months of fractured nights, I collapsed like an old souffle, unconscious two minutes after takeoff and prodded into reluctant wakefulness only by the ghastly recorded voice of some frumpelmarm saying "please stay seated until the seatbelt sign has been turned off." Seated I stayed. In Chicago O'Hare I met a young Hasidic Jew named Lipa who was carrying an acoustic guitar. We talked chord structures and commandments before boarding, and parted on confused but amiable terms. Mid-flight he approached my seat to announce that he had remembered the remaining two commandments: no idolatry, and no eating of live animals. This revelation sparked a lively debate among my rowmates, one of whom was a churlish program director at a Catholic University, the other a jolly church administrator for a fusion Baptism-Lutheran congregation in suburban Minetonka, both of whom admitted that they would be hard pressed to recite the ten commandments in order. (I did not reveal that Lipa was working with a measly set of seven: too nice of a guy to ratfink like that.) Snow was falling by the time we touched down in Minneapolis.

This will be my first Zoogle Leave, and I confess it makes me nervous on multiple levels. First because Catalina is stuck with exclusive Zoogle duties for five days, and I fear for her sanity. I also wonder if Cosmico will remember me when I get back, and forgive me my gadabout if he does: he seems to have no head for anything but the teta, and though he doesn't seem a boy to hold grudges (how many times have I played Cosme Cohete when all he wanted to do was sleep?) it is entirely possible that behind those placid glauco eyes and ponderous animal cheeks lurks the soul of an accountant, silently taking stock of who was where, when and for how long. I also fret about missing milestone moments. It's not just that the kid gains weight like a prizewinning boar; his gaze has focused, he produces new sounds daily, and his neck muscles are as strong as a Soviet powerlifter's. I'm afraid I'll return and find that he has a full set of teeth, can flip over at will, and commands a vocabulary of 100 words.

It's good to be in Minneapolis. The bracing cold is good for the spirit, and the place has character, with its riverfront, its flourmills, its ubiquitous bars and their grungy denizens, tall headband toting blonds with Judas Priest paraphernalia. And I confess that it will be nice to sleep through the night, talk research, and have some uninterrupted time for work. But as I pull the heavy drapes over the sealed window, and contemplate the inoffensive, forgettable wall art in its thick gilt frames, brush my teeth and think about sinking into my king size bed, I feel a certain chill in the air, an absence of vital energy and a distance from the warm center of life. My intuition says that it has nothing to do with the first snowfall of the season.

Of square pegs and round holes

2008-10-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

In what is destined to become a classic training video for military aptitude tests, Zoogle seeks, and finds, a relation between mouth and thumb. Like many great scientific discoveries, the path to eureka was neither short nor straight. When Edison was asked if his 100 failed attempts to invent the light bulb had discouraged him, he is reputed to replied "Discouraged! Why, I am 100 attempts closer to a solution!" Zoogle tries first the fist, then a finger in the nose, then a thumb in the nose with his finger gently scratching his eyelids, then his palm, then his knuckles, then his forearm. Discouraged? "Drop dead" a peevish Zoogle fires back, "I know this bastard has a solution." Summoning his resolve, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work: he adjusts the position of his arm; he observes the rotational asymmetry of the hand; he interpolates the mouth between nose and chin; he regularizes the 3-D reconstruction of that 2-D visual projection, invoking some apriori knowledge of handedness. One percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration. Edison would be proud. He nails it. You can watch the process here.

This cat ain't got no snoozebar

2008-10-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

The good news is that Benjamin is sleeping through the night. The bad news is that 'sleeping through the night is a technical term meaning he makes a milk run no more than three or four times in any eight hour period. The boy is killing us. Not that I'm in a position to complain (all I need to do is snatch the boy from the crib and feed him to the teta, which I can accomplish almost without waking up), but my poor wife is running on empty, her physical resources taxed to the point of metastatic protest, her new phenotypes huge ojeros, a zomby shuffle, and an absolute incapacity to understand anything I say.

This last feature is perhaps the most interesting. I bound from the kitchen trumpeting the glories of my new loaf, she dreamily responds "I think Zoogle will have blue eyes." I have scoured the Baby Books for references to spousal aphasia, and am astounded that nothing has been written about the topic. Can we truly be the first family to suffer total communicational atrophy within two months of having a child? It is as if the gremlins that run Catalina's language filters had issued a no-pass order for my particular pitch and cadence, allowing all the other language slop to pass unimpaired but cracking heads when they catch the slightest whiff of me. All the restrictions are on the antenna side, curiously: the transmission side seems fine (she's still doing criticism, still translating, still writing poetry. Still telling me to wash diapers and do dishes.)

Meanwhile, Gloobel's blooming language skills are causing the opposite problem in my own speech centers: my transmitters have been corrupted by baby noise so horrible as to result in an almost totally unintelligible signal. How I have always secretly detested these "oochy coochy" kinds of guardians who dangle dolls, screw up their faces, and speak in that horrid high pitched I-am-a-moron kind of tone that betrays a total lack of both self respect and social consciousness. Yet here I am, returning from my oh-so-sober day job, seizing Cosme Cohete by the armpits and making rocket sounds as I whirl him to the ceiling and back, cackling like a gypsy, screaming "goy goy goy" through puckered lips in perfect, inane imitation, fishing for a smile, or a look, or a sign that he finds me amusing. How can I have fallen so low? Where does this kid get his corrupting power?

The cats feel it too. They stand outside our door at night and yowl like Minnesota timber wolves. They know that the days of little mice on strings are long gone, as are the meticulous combings, the nail trimmings, the ear rumplings, the glam-shots in cardigans, the special treats. The hands that once lingered soft and loving on their bellies are now nowhere to be found, and they sing their loss to the moon, to the walls, to the downstairs neighbor, at night, behind the door, cold and in unison. And when morning comes they are still howling, and continue through the pounding of every goddamned shoe I can hurl against the door, shoes that go thudding like iguanas on tin rooftops, shoes that bore into the neighbor's dreams and wake my son and piss off my wife, but that do nothing, absolutely nothing, to silence the anguish of the cats.

Redeye

2008-10-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Benjamin's right eye seems to be mildly infected. A colony of yellow barnacles has set up permanent residence around the perimeter, the upper and lower lashes are connected by a web of white stringy mucus, and the area around the iris has turned a dull red. Fearing early stage river blindness, we have chosen to follow doctor's orders and apply antibacterial drops, "directly in the eye, four times daily." If we're interpreting the corresponding display of howls, shaken fists, and bodily convulsions correctly, Benjamin is not a huge fan of the drops.

So the boy looks like something of a cyclops right now, a one-eyed hairless micro-sumo with Parkinson's and an attitude. He is surreal in other ways, too. He now weighs 15 pounds, exactly as much as our friends' five-month-old. Random people who see him in public are confused: they see the face of a newborn, but the body of a toddler. They respond as if they had just witnessed some really cute version of the mythological Chimera, with the lion's mane replaced by wispy baby hair and the goat body by a beer belly. "Cute, but still a freak," I can see them saying to themselves.

Catalina has decided that the boy will be an art critic when he grows up. His vision has improved to the point where his gaze focuses on things beyond the breast (already miles ahead of most men), and though vast spaces of blank wall continue to exercise a strange fascination for him, he seems especially drawn to a large water color collage Catalina made for me as a gift back in our courting days, a playful fusion of symbol, scale, and color. He also seems to ogle the crappy watercolors that line the walls of the Make Your Mark Cafe, a child-and-laptop friendly coffee space to which Catalina and I make ritual pilgrimage every Friday morning. It should be admitted that his choice of subject matter is rather idiosyncratic; for example, he will choose to look at objects exactly 37 degrees to the right and 15 degrees above straight ahead and level, and he will enthusiastically absorb everything within that line of sight, turn him as we will. At times, this approach seems to place undo emphasis on traditionally undervalued objets (e.g. the space three feet above the frame) but Catalina thinks it is a decidedly modernist approach whose time will come.

Other interesting behaviors: the Mystery of the Green Poo continues, with roughly every eighth diaper a spectacular mass of fluorescent green goo. We have turned these random color shifts into a kind of household game show: whoever rolls green on a diaper change gets one free pass on washing dishes. (Needless to say, we are both competing to change as many diapers as possible.) Yesterday he used his own hand to take the glombus from his mouth, bringing it to the level of his navel before he realized what he was doing, panicked, and let it fall. We were impressed. (Now if he would just move it in the other direction.) He often suffers acute squirminess, especially when he's trying to sleep, his fists clenched, his arms swinging, his legs bicycling frantically. Perhaps his is training too hard to become Baby Heavyweight Champion of the World? We need to talk to him about separating his professional and his personal lives.

There is new baby media: a batch of photos (all captions courtesy of Catalina) and a short video showing this heavyweight contender in the agonies of one his training regimes (the famed Stomach Time.)

Class Conflict

2008-10-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Catalina and I took Cosmico for a hike in the woods. We went out to McConnell's mill, an old wooden framehouse on the bank of a small river about an hour north of Pittsburgh. Built in the 1800's, the mill was active until the 1940's, at which point it was closed, refurbished, and turned over to the state as a tourist destination. These days, visitors can walk freely among the old machines, following little signs that explain how, e.g., the function of the Thresher differed from that of the Crusher, and why this rust covered medieval device in front of you, with its seven gears and five pulleys, is of such supreme historical, technological, and economic relevance. It's a tight space; you have to duck to avoid getting clocked by beams that run at crazy angles, and at every turn there is a gear or a chute or a piston, ready to smash fingers and devours hands. One sign said that the mill had been run by a black man named Moses Whorton, who was paid $14/month for his services and had to supplement his income by grooming horses at 5 cents a hoof.

Benjamin was unimpressed by the mill, so we left and hit the trail. But as we made our way through the woods, with leaves of every color luminous against the sun, wildflowers rioting on the hillsides, and lichen-tufted rocks preening in the stream, my mind was not so much on the beauty of my surroundings as on the industrial icon we had just left. How many fingers had those gears swallowed up, back in the day? How many arms? Moses was reputed to be a 'merry fellow, much loved by all.' Was that because he was willing to work 60 years at slave wages, supporting with his one meager portion of life a system whose basic inhumanity runs so deep that it becomes as invisible to us as the air we breathe?

Horrible working conditions are much on my mind these days: I'm reading Howard Zinn's classic People's History of the United States, and finding it a fascinating lens through which to look at some of the basic suppositions, ambitions, and lifestyle choices of my contemporaries. The basic tenant of the book is that the history of America has been one long story of capitalist aggression, with Have's squeezing Have-Nots with the consistent, merciless brutality that is the antithesis of the egalitarian humanism that we (mistakenly) associate with the essence of the country. Zinn's thesis is that reforms have been introduced grudgingly, at a great price of blood and suffering, wrung from the ruling class again and again by a class so oppressed that death and defeat became welcome alternatives to perseverance in the status quo; he claims that the middle class was constructed as a protective buffer between the leisure classes and the explosive discontent of the labor classes.

Zinn writes with fervor. He believes (correctly) that he is saying something true and important. "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is", he quotes, and his book becomes a long litany of these cries, the cries of tortured slaves, of indentured servants, of workers and natives and woman and children. His objective: to keep sharp the memory of suffering, not in the abstract form in which it finds expression in periodicals and government documents, not even in the subdued objectivity of the scholar, but on the level of story, of a narrative with engaging characters. "My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is...that we must not accept the memory of the states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been." What Zinn is really writing about is collective, community memory.

One of the pleasures of reading indiscriminately is that one is always surprised when things link up, i.e. two authors who should have nothing in common end up saying something similar, which then becomes a kind of personal key, a gift from the heavens, a sign that you should go away and reflect that this matter and not come back until it has cracked and yielded its secrets. In this case, it was Ernesto Sabato, writing from a very different perspective in a very different place, who provided an echo to the message I was getting from Zinn. In an essay on fascism, Sabato notes that "individual memory can be good or bad, but collective memory is bad," and goes on to connect the development of fascism with a strongly capitalist agenda, ultimately claiming that "one can... legitimately sustain that far from being an anti-capitalist movement, fascism began as the most brutal and cynical manifestation of a regime in bankruptcy." Writing in 1947, Sabato was alarmed that the world had already forgotten that at the heart of the holocaust lay a crude and cynical capitalism.

Sabato sees socialism as a solution. "Socialism", he claims, "is something more than the nationalization of production and consumption. It is a profoundly moral movement, destined to ennoble man and raise him from the physical and spiritual mud in which he has been submerged during the course of his slavery. In some ways, perhaps, it is the secular interpretation of Christianity." In light of Soviet abuses, Sabato eventually abandoned this stance, just as I suspect Zinn rejects it, recognizing, as Camus does, the fluid, universal interchange between Victim and Executioner. Still, here we have two men ruminating on capitalism, who agree that the central problem is one of memory, either of its absence, or, perhaps worse, its standardization, wherein the grave injuries to body and spirit that are the necessary counterpoint to institutionalized self-interest get reduced to a few buzzwords, or glossed in headlines like "Bomb kills 10", "Strike turns violent", or "30% of all black men are in prison."

As the Soviet experiment makes clear, of course, this memory loss (which may in fact be a perceptual loss) is by no means limited to capitalism, which makes me wonder to what extent economics ends up being the scapegoat for the raft of spiritual and intellectual ailments whose real roots lie elsewhere. There is no doubt that conditions of state affect conditions of mind, but to subsume the basic moral disposition of a people to a structure of government seems reductionist and dangerous. Avarice does not require wide margins to thrive. Cruelty rides the coattails of social service. "Without enthusiasm, we have chosen enthusiasm over truth", says Benjamin Lerner in his recent book of poems 'Angle of Yaw', an obscure, kabbalistic verbal blitzkrieg over the boarders of syntax into the black heart of modern America. I am part of this we: it seems reasonable to ask when and what have I chosen?

A friend of mine writes a blog for the Handord Sentinel, and he recently adressed the increasingly trendy issue of acedia, which is a latin term that refers to the ossifying of spiritual energies, a terminal sloth in matters of the soul. He quotes an article citing Walker Percy, one of my favorite American novelists, saying what concerned him most about the future of America was "probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom… gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated...by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems." Acedia is nothing new, of course, but I begin to see how it plays itself out. I look around and I see how Pittsburgh has been messed up by attention to the bottom line, how what could have been a beautiful city ended up with gray industrial bridges, a massively polluted river, little pedestrian space, narrow roads with no margins for bikes, and, at least in the poorer areas, no trees. I see my friends that live in million dollar houses, and my other friends that live hand to mouth, and I ask, who has chosen what, and how consciously? I contemplate my soulless job for the DOD, with its ridiculuously high paycheck, and my current job, with its medium size paycheck, and the job I would like to have, with its vanishingly small paycheck, and I wonder if my shifting relation to liquid capital can have any bearing on my relation to the dynamics of class conflict? Did I choose something bigger than I knew when I chose to take a salary cut and get back to teaching? How many of our allegiances are accidental? And might it not be this very sense of accident that lies at the root of our acedia, a sense of being beset by forces so large and ungraspable that we seek refuge in our own small burrows, cashing out to support the dream of The Family, building our retirement accounts with the dumb industry of beavers?

These were dark thoughts for what was undoubtedly the most spectacular day of the year. As I waded through the thick piles of leaves, capered with sun motes, chased salamanders, and rattled pleasantries at every oogling mother in the grip of my son's charms, it occured to me that perhaps it would behoove me to enter into the spirit of my surroundings, to accept graciously what limited reprieve nature has to offer, to set aside these ponderous and intractable issues of social utopia and find meaning in natural beauty. Perhaps I should just focus on my son, take notes on his quirky behaviors and put them in my blog?

But maybe the real question is this: in twenty years, will Benjamin want to be reading about how he clenched his tiny fingers around a leaf and stared riveted at the river, or about how his father came to grips with some of the basic issues of living in a capitalist society? Probably neither. But within the framework of doomed writing, let me suggest the following: that when I write about him, I do so for my own pleasure, in order to create a register of facts and benchmarks that I can later hold up against normative elements in babybooks and help answer the question "who is this guy, and what's his relation to me?"; and when I write about myself, perhaps I do so for him, so as to create a register of thoughts and impressions that he can hold up much later, when he is an adult and casting about for meaning, setting it against the backdrop of the World as he has come to know it and using it to gain perspective on the same difficult question.

I tried to run all this by Benjamin, but he wasn't interested. He was also unimpressed by the trail, unfortunately, except for one brief moment by the river when we stopped for lunch, at which point he woke to roar his anger at the trees, poop, snack, and roar one more time before falling once again into a milk coma. The boy has no real feel for class conflict.

The Deep Pocketed Uncle Andy

2008-10-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

In the poker hand of life, no role rules supreme: kings stew under the weight of state while paupers idle peacefully. But some hands (connected healthy professional) tend, in a statistical sense, to beat others (pock marked pig rustling pariah.) Fatherhood is one of the Great Hands: if it shows up in your cards, the smart money says double down. But beware, for it can be trumped: what you really want is Unclehood.

Understand: I like being a father. The role fits me, a dotty, potterring figure with graying temples, slow humor, and steady presence. But I have long understood too that the day I come into my alterego is the day my siblings have kids. That's when the fangs will grow, the fur thicken, and the nose turn nobby and moist, when I will at long last howl loud and free beneath my fool's moon of prank and eccentricity. Until then, all I can do is watch my younger brother, listen for the telltale cackle, lay traps, take notes; hope that he doesn't use up all the Uncle tricks before he begets me a nephew.

How does he do it? He is a presence: cock-sure, wise-cracking, a crazy cackling jackle-man in ripped jeans and lace. He never arrives, he materializes, suddenly, amid smoke and flames, the sound of shrill laughter preceding the first dull padding of paws, the thud of the Giftbag hitting the chimney, the "hey ho merry oh" rattling the house like a natural calamity. He's got merry eyes, a quick smile, shiny teeth, more battle scars than skin and more ailments than function. He has been places, done things, places and things of which you and I only dream, or dread, or know from books: off the roadway, on the sauce, behind the bar, inside the body. He's got more stories than a haremful of Scheherazades.

I have a vision: Christmas day, 2015. Young Benny Toews sits stewing in his own juices next to an evil smelling stove in a gnarled cabin on the crest of a mountain, curled up on a sofa with Ma and Pa. The stove is no match for the bitter cold; everyone wears multiple beanies, three sweaters, wools socks, hand-knit mittens. They are playing the traditional Toews Christmas Game, Reading With the Family: Pa looks looks up from his math book to contemplate the ceiling, Ma mutters verses, Benny plods through the sordid but predictable misadventures of the Hardy boys. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door, and before anyone can get up to answer, the door flies open and there is Uncle A., covered head to toe in snow, snowshoes in hand, gift sack already open, roaring hellos and scattering snow as he bounds towards the bench, kisses the missus, bearhugs the bro, and spins wide-eyed Benny in wild circles around the room, winding down like a crazy top until he sputters to a stop by the stove, setting the boy gently on the mantle, dizzy and delighted and precarious, the Magic and Splendor of Christmas restored.

This is just a vision; it may or may not come to pass. But in some ways, something similar has already come to pass, on numerous occassions and in multiple forms: Andrew arrives, and our lives lighten. Smiles that haven't been seen in years find their way to our faces; toasts that have lain dormant find themselves paired with shots; capers long overdue find themselves being drafted, armed, and set in motion. Example: Francisco ribbed Andrew and Juana that one of their responsabilities as godparents would be to send a monthly check to the Benjamin Fund, a liquid reserve for Moral Betterment and Cultural Enhancement. Andrew's first check arrived a couple of weeks ago, $61 dollars, to be drawn from a real account in a real bank, with the memo "cash this fucker quick, I run a tight bottom line." Puts me in a quandry, of course: how the hell can I justify cashing my broke-ass brother's charity check, when he lives in one of the most expensive cities in America and makes sustenence-level wages? So I stalled, and now Uncle A. is riding my back, saying "I did NOT ask you to examine your damn conscience, I asked you to cash the damn check: get that bastard in the bank." So I will, of course, and we will dedicate the money to supplying invigorating Spirits at the next Powow on Benjamin's Moral Betterment, which will be a marvelous time for everyone except Benjamin, of course, who won't be able to sleep through the blasting of the mariachis and the clanking of glasses and the sound of bodies hitting the floor.

Andrew is a wonderful Uncle. And he's got a blog which is a lot better than this one: check it out, http://angrydrew.blogspot.com/.

Confraternité

2008-10-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on the way to watch 12th Night in the park, Zoogle, Babe and I found ourselves surrounded by dog owners. (I confess that I don't actually don't know that they were owners. They could have been borrowers. Let's call them Dogowners, au sense plus grande du terme.) I find the Relationship between Man and Dog a source of endless fascination, not as an evolutionary abstraction, but as it plays itself out concretely on the level of particular pairings. The eery mirroring between the chubby jowls of the accountant and the slack gumtissue of his hound represents for me a kind of Weltschlüssel, a key that opens a door into the soul of the world. I don't wish to exaggerate my powers as a psychologist (or expose my weakness for stereotype), but I feel as if one glimpse of such a pairing reveals the whole romantic, economic, and social history of the Man (I judiciously make no attempt to analyze the Dog.) In this sense, watching dogowners is like watching Shakespeare: if you do it well, you regain the entirety of the human experience, played out within a small but complete subset of the species, filtered by circumstance and costume (doublets and codpieces; leashes and frisbees) but undistorted, microcosmically preserved in all its essential, secretious squalor.

If I ever write a book on the topic, I will call it something like "Woah, Cover Up: How Your Beast Exposes You." The slack jawed setter with gingivitus, betraying an old house, rusting firearms, family money, and in some cases, kindness as weakness, though it depends on the context; the socially ackward techie with his robust shorthair, a sign of functional dexterity, comfortable bottom lines, limited wants and achievable dreams; the hoary cigar smoker, name and fortune in the bag, allied to one of the Noble Rats, a miniature grayhound or some such abomination, because he can, because his dignity is ossified enough to take it; the financial analyst with her terrier, small but expensive, an ostentatious constraint; the adolescent girl with the family mutt on a leash that's just a little too tight. The list goes on. Oh what fun.

Normally, I would wince hello and walk on. After all, what do I have in common with urban dogowners? The only reason to live in the city is to devote all your time to a job, or art, or culture; the only reason to have a dog is to devote all your time to the dog. Urban dogowners are fundamentally confused; they pursue ends that are mutually exclusive and psychologically injurious. Lfe is quite complicated enough without these doomed, quixotic dogfriends.

But yesterday, for the first time, I found myself looking at dog owners with new eyes. As I crossed paths with a thirty something, long haired, unshaven bohemian in the tow of a joyous golden retriever, I tried to take his measure with my usual unerring mixture of scorn, irony, and contempt. What I noticed was that he was taking mine: that he was looking at the thirty something, long haired, unshaved bohemian going the other way with a baby boy stashed in a garish purple sling, and thinking, ah the old Maya wrap, clearly a hippy math guy. Our eyes met, two smiles bloomed: spotted people spotting. We passed without a word.

I bet that guy is writing a book. I bet it's called "Whoa, Cover Up: How Your Baby Exposes You". I wonder if we could collaborate?

First Slump

2008-10-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

For the last six days a shattering cough has been sending shrapnel into the walls of my skull. My eyes burn, my throat has white spots, and Fevers vie with Chills in a vicious turf war for my interior thermostat. A touch of the old Mongolian Death Flu, it seems, and about time, too: five weeks on five hours a night has finally caught up. But why now, precisely, on the heels of the in-laws? It is as if in their wake they had left a power vacuum, and all my agents of resistance, suddenly underemployed, had scattered to the four winds, abandoning the capital to the barbarian hoards.

These are the Dog Days of parenthood, the end of the Rush, the beginning of the Slog. Everyone has been sick. Benjamin continues to wheeze and splutter in his sleep, with small shrieks rising like arias above a symphony of bleats, snores, groans, and gaspings, always resolving to that falling down gutter drunk rasp hack rattle breath that has become his signature. His breathing is a Soundman's sample box: it includes breaking glass, surf slapping against a reef, fists against jawbones, flesh against blacktop. And on the rare occassions he isn't busy running through his sound effects, he gets vertigo, hands shooting into the air, eyes suddenly wide and fingers stiff and spread, the gesture of a man falling off a cliff backwards, or a vampire taking virgin blood: the Moro reflex. Does it help that Wikipedia assures me that the Moro phenomenon is apparently the only unlearned fear in human newborns, and that "its absence indicates a profound disorder of the motor system?" Fact: the boy is afraid. The boy is afraid, and I'm sick, and Catalina is tired, and our cats are neglected, and our friends are bored, and the neighbor is exhausted from listening to diaper changes and everyone that was going to congratulate us on our child has already done so, and now winter's coming and it will be six irredeemable months of gray slush until finally, sometime mid-may, we can finally think about going outdoors again, at which point Benjamin will be too big to carry and I'll need to wait until he can carry a pack before I even think about hiking again.

Worry is something I like to consider containable, if not totally extinguishable. If by some motherly afflatus you think that bilirubin comes heralded by a diaper demon in greasy green curds, well, don't worry, just find out: talk to the doctor, look online. To my surprise, turns out that the Worry problem is promulgated as much by too much information as by too little. Our pediatrician takes calls seven days a week, we have massively knowledgeable friends to call on (some of them doctors), we have access to all the information on the web, we are awash in technical books on Babies and their Multifarious Travails. But just as a hypochondriac will subject the Merck Manual to the most liberal and creative exegesis to convince himself with near certainty that he suffers half a dozen tropical ailments, in spite of the fact that he's never left the continental United States, so the new mother will tax the powers of her creative imagination in weaving a web of potential illness around the natural, statistical variations in her baby's functioning. Dr. Sears says "do no worry if your baby has the occasional green diaper." Hey, did you see that green diaper today? Think we should call the pediatrician? Further questioning reveals no reason, formal or anecdotal, to suspect that the green diaper is any cause for alarm, nor that the boy has had more than one, nor that there is any sign that the boy is feeling bad. Still.... It's those "Still..."'s that get you, the lingering suspicion that you're missing something. This is exactly the kind of suspicion that the academic is trained to cultivate, is rewarded and published for cultivating: we are professionally conditioned to detect obscure and unfathomable patterns amid reams of dense information (novels and criticism, on the one side, math texts and journals, on the other.) Though in context this skill set has its points, it happens to coincide with a clinical definition of paranoia: the finding of patterns in places no patterns exist, the seeing of structure in the void.

So that's where things lie this week. Benjamin is fine. Monstrous, but fine, a blooming, melon-cheeked boy with powerful lungs, intelligent eyes, and a whole suite of coos and clucks he breaks out in his moments of 'quite attentiveness' (baby book term.) He slays church ladies by the dozen. Catalina is fine. Tired, and a little paranoid, but doing well, heroically managing a few pages of Jameson and the New Marxism between diaper changes, sneaking out to poetry readings, catching Shakespeare in the park, tutoring ESL, a beaming, radiant woman in the full bloom of first motherhood. Even Carl the Grouch is fine, a little grimy, perhaps, in need of a shave and haircut, but basically, in spite of his cough and his deadlines and his ennui, a man who feels lucky to be where he is, a lumbering oaf a dad who secretly loves the chance to coo and glooble with his child. This Slump isn't so bad. It's just a trough between crests, a topological corollary to the fact that those crests exist at all; an artifact of being able to ride those long rollers with style and pleasure. And this is how we're taking them, sputtering, mouths full of salt water, Need whipping the surf, the Steady State looming like a reef, as we cruise from novelty to familiarity and watch adrenalin dovetail with endurance. Grouchy as fishwives. Tough as urchins. Happy as clams.

Feliz Cumplemeses

2008-09-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

Today for the first time in five weeks Catalina and I woke up to a house without visitors. I feel like a man trying out his mended foot after weeks in a cast: I'm excited to be walking again, dreaming of dancing, a little bit nervous that maybe those feet weren't so good to begin with. (I should add that my in-laws are about as cool as in-laws can be. The cast analogy is a consequence of my own limitations: my addiction to walking around in boxers, my passion for drinking milk from the bottle, my penchant for silence. All of which are hard to indulge with visitors, cool though they be. )

So today is a big day for us. It marks the beginning of independent parenthood. Having served our internship under the watchful (and permissive) eye of the abuela, we are, at long last, hip-shooting Independents, Writer, Director, and Producer in one (or two, as the case may be); or, more soberly, we are autochthenous agents of biological continuance who are free to flub the physical and moral upbringing of this creature as we see fit. It's kind of exciting. It's kind of scary. It kind of makes me want to get that abuela back and ask her to show me one more time how give the kid a bath.

Today is also a big day for Benjamin. It marks one month since he made his debut as a human being, entering the scene stage center as a screaming purple conehead who already had a bagful of tricks, who already knew how to latch and suck, who picked up breathing on the first try, who could say "I'm hungry" in perfect dialect. But these days his skill set is vast beyond imagining. This morning, for example, he seized my index finger with his left hand, eyed it critically, and then thrust it in his mouth. Perhaps not so hygenic, but pretty cool. Another trick: he likes to pluck molecules from the air and set them delicately on his palate, pinching them between his thumb and middle finger and hohlding them in his mouth until he is sure they are disolved and can't escape. His eyes are starting to focus: one of his favorite games is 'watch the spot', and though that spot is still sometimes high on the ceiling or somewhere in the middle of a vast expanse of white wall, more often it's a face, ideally his mother's, but failing that, anything with two eyes, even the ugly mug of his father will do. And he's a grasper. He'll pick up anything from fingers to blankets to synthetic plastic buckey balls, and though he isn't really into holding anything for long (an anti-materialist streak that I hope extends into his adult life) he is hungry for touch and experience. And the clincher: his sleep schedule has almost normalized. For the last week, he has eaten at 11, 2, 5, and 7:30 (why 7:30? Isn't nature suppose to follow patterns? The intervals are 3 hours, 3 hours, and 2.5 hours. There's something perverse in his getting up at 7:30; I think he knows his parents are night-owls.)

This new, improved, extended, craneologically rounded and socially polished Benjamin is asleep in a basket at the foot of my desk as I write this. His lips are working in autochupe, a mode where all processes save the suck turn off, the eyes are closed, the hands unclenched, the breath soft, but the chupo is bobbing up and down in his mouth, which contracts five or six times in quick succession, then relaxes for breathing, pauses and repeats. (The sucking is hilarious, incidentally; his cheeks are so fat that the motion sends ripples running across his face. His face is the surface of a lake.) I decided to waste the morning today, stay at home, graze, write, think, process: I don't teach, and though I've got grants to write and papers to produce and classes to teach, it's more important to me to spend a little time clearing my head. It takes a while to purge five weeks of being polite from the system, to rediscover what a man alone can do with a morning.

What can a man do with a morning? In my days as a young buck, I would hit the office early, firing raging in the belly, tearing tooth and claw into whatever lay between me and a result. This was the primal feeding on which the mathematician lives and grows, the crude, savage hewing of fact and form. How different with a baby on hand! Between bouncings, cooings, comfortings, feedings, and plain old fashioned delightings, I've managed to devote about twenty minutes of the last three hours to writing. Where is the fire? Where is the rage? Where is the long trail of formal truths that comprise the mathematician's sworn conduit to life and beauty?

I don't have an answer to this question, but curiously, I'm not worried (though the great David Hilbert did recommend that this students wait to get married and have children until they had already given their best to science.) For many years I refused to think about babies because of all the things I wanted to do and to be. But for reasons that I cannot explain, life with Zoogle seems more open, not less. Partly this feeling has to do with the natural, unreasonable optimism that is my nature, but partly too it is the renewed sense of mission that a baby brings. I'm not tearing into theorems today, and the world of science will certainly have no memory of my morning's labors. But I do have an acute sense of tearing into life, of grappling with the basic facts of our biological condition, of grappling with something that will sustain me as I contemplate age, death, a life's work. I may not get any math done today, but Zoogle's toothless oldman smile leads me with very little doubt that I am getting something done. Google "Zoogle" twenty five years from now to find out what that was.