Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now"

A woman on the radio
talks about revolution
when it's already passed her by.
Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about.
You know, it feels good
to be alive.

Sometime in the latter half of the 1980s, my paternal grandmother bought my siblings and I our first Walkmans (which, regrettably, is probably the plural). They were our Chanukah presents.

The Walkmans had AM-FM tuners. They were metallic in color. The tuner dials were in the upper right quadrants of the devices.

It was on my Walkman that I learned about a coup in the U.S.S.R. that overthrew Mikhail Gorbechev. I didn't understand what that meant – the end of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War.

I knew it meant something, though. Even then, I understood energy.

I was in the basement of my maternal grandparents' house, across the street from the house my paternal grandmother owned.

I understood better a few years later when on cable television we got to see the Berlin Wall come down.

What I understood then: People matter. People make change.

Well, I saw the decade in,
when it seemed the world could change
in the blink of an eye.
And if anything,
then there's your sign
of the times.

The thing that's stuck me most over the past 20 years – from the fall of the Soviet Union through the murder of Benazir Bhutto – is how quickly everything changes.

One morning, we're sitting at our desks, and planes crash into the skyscrapers we're working in.

Another night, we're sitting down to dinner with out families, and someone launches a "shock and awe" bombing campaign against us.

Some afternoon, we sit down to lunch, and nothing happens.

You never can tell.

Right here, right now,
there is no other place
I want to be.
Right here, right now,
watching the world wake up
from history.

There are all sorts of warnings about history. History repeats itself. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The real warning should be this. Those who don't learn how to interpret the connections and evolution of historic events are doomed themselves to become history.

One morning, we put the bread in the toaster, and by the time we're done washing our faces, the toast appears on our plates, exactly the color, texture and temperature we like it, buttered and jammed to perfection.

One afternoon, we sit down to lunch, a server points a pen-like device at our eyes, and our bank accounts are debited for the amount of lunch plus a 17.5% gratuity.

One night, we climb in bed, and tomorrow passes us by.

Benazir Bhutto

I was just wrapping up some updates when the e-mail rang Thursday morning.

"Benazir Bhutto has died in an attack at a rally."

That was it, the first update from CNN.

Then my boss walked into the office.

"Let me finish this up, and then we need to talk Pakistan."

My boss, having just arrived at work, hadn't yet heard the news, so he caught up while he was waiting for me.

For those who don't keep up with international affairs the way I do, here's the plain English version.

Bhutto was Pakistan's first female prime minister. Her father was hanged in a coup, and she was exiled.

Pervez Musharraf, who is currently leading Pakistan with the blessing of the Bush administration, scheduled elections for January of 2008, so he could pretend to be running a democracy.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan with the support of millions to challenge Musharraf. She told CNN she was aware that there would probably be attempts on her life. She told her friends and advisors she wasn't happy with the security the state was providing her.

People rallied. Some of the rallies turned violent.

Musharraf declared a state of emergency and put her under house arrest.

The international community cried out – what sort of person running a democracy puts his primary competitor under house arrest and suspends the country's constitution?

Musharraf lifted the house arrest and the emergency declaration.

At a rally Thursday, Bhutto waved from the sunroof of a car. Supporters cheered. A suicide bomber blew himself up. Someone shot Bhutto in the neck.

This is something out of a novel. Or a movie. Turns out this stuff still happens in real life.

Wow.

Update: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

A lot happens in 100 pages.

As Mendelsohn progresses with his story, the language becomes first more flowery, then more friendly – he's not forcing the words anymore, he's telling a story (as opposed to setting it up).

The turning point, actually, is Mendelsohn's description of his grandfather's suicide. The story is told with admiration, and when you get done reading it, you go back and re-read it, because you're unclear on what you just read. You think you read it, then suddenly you're not sure. When you get done, it's a "holy crap!" moment.

The thing that's most striking about this is the amount of work Mendelsohn puts into this book. He flies across continents. He spends hours on the phone with strangers. He builds relationships with the parents of friends and co-workers. He learns languages.

This is not, "hey, I've got an interesting idea, I think I'll write a book."

It's not, "I think I'll try doing such-and-such and write about my experience."

This is, "I have to do this, and I will pass along the interesting bits."

Along the way, Mendelsohn is writing his own Midrash – Bible commentary. He names parts of his book after parshot – portions of the Torah (the five Books of Moses) read weekly.

The Lost is not something read, it's something experienced.

There will be an update in the not-too-distant future.

For all entries on Mendelsohn's book, click here.

Tear down Interstate 81

Back when we were doing Alive in CNY, one of my favorite topics was the removal of Interstate 81.

Not the whole thing – about a 3-mile chunk that runs from I-690 to I-481, dissecting the city and keeping the university area separate from downtown.

Anyone who wanted to stay on the highway through the city could do five miles on 690 and 481 instead of those three miles on I-81. I don't think an extra two-to-three minutes is two much to ask of people, to help reunite the city.

Also, I don't really think Syracuse should be in the business of making sure people can leave the city as fast as they can. Services like that should be reserved for Las Vegas.

This debate is getting renewed, now that Upstate Medical Center (a teaching hospital affiliated with the SUNY system) has said they can't expand with the highway there.

Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor has also said she'd like to see it taken down.

This latest is causing a lot of stir over at Sean Kirst's blog. Ellen over at NYCO also weighs in.

Another reason to unplug: The DTV transition

It's seemed so far away for a long time, but the transition to digital TV is happening in 2009, and that's coming up soon.

"Wait, what transition?" I hear you cry.

Exactly. Half of American television watchers aren't aware they'll need new television sets soon. The full report is here (PDF).

With so many television stations, radio stations, cell phones, wireless networks and emergency systems using our airwaves (what's called spectrum), Congress has mandated that television stations stop broadcasting over the airwaves and instead use wires.

That's why, if you own an older television, the picture on some of your broadcast networks is starting to look a little choppy.

If you own an older television, you won't be able to pick up digital signals. You'll have to either buy a converter, or buy a new TV set.

At this point, I'm not really inclined to buy either.

Unfortunately, I'm in a small minority.

But, better TV has to switch to digital than to force some other industry to do it. Can you imagine if police and fire departments had to re-tool?

What we're reading: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

This is going to be a long, slow read, but we'll check in with it occasionally, because it's interesting.

The Lost is Daniel Mendelsohn's search for a branch of his family that was killed during the Holocaust. He's heard stories about so many members of his family, has inquired in letters to older relatives about cousins and great-aunts and so many others.

But his Uncle Shmiel, his wife and his four daughters, decided, after emigrating to the U.S. for a time, to return to Eastern Europe, where they were subsequently killed by the Nazis.

People don't really talk about Shmiel and his family.

Due primarily to the layout of the book (small text, tiny margins) and the language (fairly formal – something you might expect from someone who regularly writes for the New York Times Book Review – which is just not something I typically read for leisure), I'm making very slow progress on it, and am reading other books simultaneously.

But like I said, it's an interesting book. I've made a note to go back and read Genesis, to try to see the people as people, rather than upright, uber-holy Biblical characters.

More on the book next week.

Let the endorsing begin!

Well, it's started. The Des Moines Register and the Boston Globe have made their endorsements for the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, respectively.

The Register endorsed Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side and John McCain on the Republican side. The Globe endorsed McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

I hate when newspapers do this, for a few reasons.

First and foremost, the papers are coming right out and saying, "No, we're not going to be neutral in this race."

Second, not all people do their research. Since they know their local newspaper will endorse a candidate, they just vote for whomever the paper tells them to. I don't feel so much like the papers are cheating those people out of learning about candidates, as much as I feel like the papers are cheating the people who do their research.

Lastly, you give fuel to candidates you didn't endorse. If Mike Huckabee wins the Iowa Republican caucus and goes on to win the Republican nomination (God help us), when the Register comes along looking to do an in-depth profile on Huckabee and sell him some ads, the candidate can just look at them and say, "You endorsed McCain. Go screw." And then the paper's not able to properly serve its readership.

I know endorsing candidates is a time-honored tradition, but it's one that needs to stop.

What we're reading: Factotum by Charles Bukowski

I'm going to ruin the end for you right this second. If you're not OK with that, skip the next paragraph.

The novel ends with Charles Bukowski's alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, getting drunk while waiting online for a shot at a temp job. He gets kicked out of agency, goes to a strip show in a theater with a live band, and he can't get an erection. The end.

Bukowski was clearly drinking when he wrote the book: the grammar errors pile up near the end of the book, a sure sign that someone's brain is degenerating as the writing goes on.

In case you're wondering about the editors: Some publishing houses have a short list of authors whose work is untouchable. If you've read Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs, you understand why – they intentionally twist the language so much, that you wouldn't dare correct what you think is an error in the prose.

By 1975, Bukowski had certainly become one of those writers.

Bukowski's prose tastes like cheap whiskey and stale cigarettes. His characters are wholly unlikable assholes. You don't feel good at the end of his books. So why do I read him?

Well, because it's damn cold outside and if the prose burns going down, maybe nothing else has to.

Or maybe it's because Chinaski just makes me feel better about myself. Nobody's perfect, but most people aren't that much of a fuck-up into their 40s.

This book did, by the way, provide the inspiration for one of my favorite recurring characters in fiction: the Emperor of San Francisco, who appears in some of Christopher Moore's novels. He gets a passing mention in Factotum, but in Moore's work, he is a homeless man with a scepter and two dogs. Everybody knows him, and he and his pups frequently save the city.

What we're reading, what we're not reading

What we are reading: 52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard

Yeah, yeah, I know. I've finished books three of the last four days. Yes, I'm still going out and being social. I'm just picking good books. Mostly.

Elmore Leonard, in combination with Charles Bukowski, has me wondering if writers give characters all their bad habits, or if they just want to live vicariously through their characters.

Leonard's protagonist, Henry Mitchell, drinks too much, smokes too much, shot down two allied planes during World War II (and got off because he said they fired on him), and runs his own manufacturing company.

He also single-handedly busts up an extortion ring that was trying to get him for $105,000 after he cheated on his wife.

Henry Mitchell is basically superman in a gray suit.

52 Pickup is a wild ride. I'm just not going to get too into it because, well, you should be reading Leonard's work. At this point, I've blown through at least a half dozen of his books, and all are quick, enjoyable reads.

What we're not reading: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max

Tucker Max describes himself as an asshole. Specifically, he's a drunken, womanizing asshole, who also, through most of the episodes in the book, is a law student at Duke. So they were training him to be an entirely different kind of asshole.

I was assured by a clerk at a reputable shop that I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is a fantastically funny read. She even called me, "my friend," in making her recommendation. That's usually a good sign.

I got through three chapters. There's not enough frat boy in me for those three chapters to be funny. At all. There are also enough writing errors to make me think that thanking his editor in the acknowledgments is just Max being an asshole again.

If you're entirely unlike me – that is, frequently truant punctuation doesn't bother you and you find waking up in your car without your pants and still over the legal blood alcohol content level somewhere between endearing and admirable – you'll probably like this book. I have a copy here with your name on it.

Intelligence

I took an IQ test on Facebook this week.

Doing something like this is always a dangerous proposition. Do I really want to know how smart I'm not? Also, I know my score in second grade was in the low 130s – it was either 132 or 134. If I score lower than that, what would it do to my self esteem?

Anyway, I scored a 137. They figured this out by giving me 30 multiple choice questions, giving me a limit of 15 minutes (it took me 10ish), and doing something with the answers I gave.

According to Wikipedia (always questionable, but often reliable), a genius has an IQ of 140, though it's now been weighted down to 136.

Mensa, the "genius society," doesn't use numbers to determine qualification anymore, it uses percentiles. You have to be in the top two percent of scorers on qualified IQ tests.

I'm positive the Facebook IQ test is not a qualified test, but according to one site, I would easily qualify with either my Facebook score or my second grade score.

I won't be joining Mensa any time soon. I don't know if there's a local chapter; the site doesn't tell me. What the site does tell me is that if I want to join, I am more than welcome to send them $40 to take their official qualifying test, $40 to have it judged, and another $52 in annual fees should I make the grade.

I am also free to send in $18 if I want to take a practice test at home, and $40 more to have it judged.

Intelligent and gullible aren't mutually exclusive terms, I guess.

So, a test said I'm smart, and now here I am, sitting alone in a dark office building on a Saturday night waiting to cover a basketball game, which I'll be watching on TV. It's snowing outside, but at least there's decent coffee in the kitchen. If I don't feel like driving home late tonight in whatever mess has been made outside, we have a comfortable couch in the office that I could wheel into the conference room.

Fantastic.

"All geniuses are drunkards!" wrote Chales Bukowski.

Ani Difranco on genius:

Genius is in a back beat
Backseat to nothing if you're dancing
Especially something stupid
Like I.Q.
For every lie I unlearn
I learn something new

When you see me creak out onto the tennis court tomorrow afternoon, dragging from my Saturday afternoon match and a late night at the office, be sure to yell "genius" as sarcastically as possible.

But make sure you mean it.

Fishing for history

Hey CNYers, anyone know anything about this time capsule?

I don't remember reading about it having been opened at this year's state fair, and couldn't find it in a brief search.

What we're reading: The Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Mike, you're a fucker, man.

Growing up, my brother wasn't really a reader. That started changing when he hit high school.

We never really shared the same taste in books, until Chuck Palahniuk came along, and even among Palahniuk's novels, we have our differences.

And I know better by now than to pick up something Mike has enjoyed.

Burroughs gave me just about the worst sun-stroke-and-paperback-novel trip in the history of mankind. Kerouac made me vomit and lost me two friends to the Pacific northwest. Hunter Thompson invigorated my pen but turned a landlord against me.

And now whenever we talk, Mike is reading something by Bukowski.

Thing is, I've read Bukowski. At least short stories and poetry. I've read Bukowski because every now and then, I'm into self-immolation, and books don't require fire department assistance (except that one collection of his that had me pacing the roof of my office building yelling to the masses below...).

With all the reading I've been doing, I needed a little torture. So I picked up a copy of Bukowski seminal novel The Post Office.

Here's the scene. It's 6 a.m. Friday. Fast forward to 10 a.m. Saturday. I'll save you the math: 28 hours.

- 8 hours at work
- 1 hour at lunch with a colleague
- 8 hours of sleep
- 6 hours at a party
- 1 hour commuting

Figure in general hygiene, cooking a couple of warm breakfasts, and general stretching, pacing and resting, that doesn't leave me much time to have knocked down this novel.

But I did. And I think I enjoyed it.

Crap.

Worse, I think I enjoyed it for the same reasons I enjoy Palahniuk. Conversational prose – even if it tastes like cheap whiskey and stale cigars. Sympathetic protagonists who really are unlikeable people.

Henry Chimanski is a womanizing drunk, rotting away on the night shift at the post office for 12 years. He doesn't like his job, he's not good at it, he hates his co-workers, and nobody likes him for more than a few months at a time.

Why should we care?

But we do.

Mike, you're a fucker, man.

What we're reading: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

When I was writing for a newspaper, I met a man who, in trying to memorize a complicated mathematical proof of his own concoction, wrote his equation on the inside of a paper bag, and walked around his attic apartment with the paper bag on his head for four days until he had it down pat.

He is what we call a wingnut. This is not the medical term. Nor is it, I imagine, the politically correct one.

I think of wingnuttery as working on a V-shaped spectrum. My paper-bag-wearing friend, strange but benign, might be the bottom point of the V. As we head up the right side, we get political wingnuts like George W. Bush and, further up, Joseph Stalin. Along the left side, we get pontificating wingnuts like Eric Hoffer and, further up, Noam Chomsky.

And pretty much anyone who blogs because they feel like they have something interesting to say. Hi, pot. Meet kettle. Anywho...

The story on Hoffer goes like this. When he was seven, his mom fell while carrying him downstairs, and young Eric went blind.

When he turned 15, his eyesight magically reappeared, and he began reading as much as he could as fast as he could, lest his eyesight go away again.

Hoffer never graduated high school, but he read. A lot.

His first and best-known book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements came out in 1951, when the world was reeling from World War II, Hitler, Stalin and the vague beginnings of the Cold War.

The True Believer reads like a how-to guide for any pretentious human who wishes to start and maintain a revolution, then oversee the final result when it's done being a revolution.

With the perspective of 50-plus years since the book's publication, the guide still holds up. To run a revolution, you need people who can write, people who can convince (oratorically and forcefully) and people who can organize.

To get people on board with your revolution, make sure the past looks glorious and the present looks bleak (but not desperate – people who spend their days hunting for scraps of food aren't going to get behind a cause). Also, people who are bored make great revolutionaries.

To keep people on board after you've reached critical mass, make sure they don't think too much.

To me, the most striking point makes a lot of sense: Someone prone to revolution will get behind pretty much any revolution; it doesn't matter what the cause is.

The book is going to appeal to a narrow cross-section of people: Those with a large vocabulary (words like religiofication and renascence pop up every other paragraph) who don't mind specious citations (the one source I was interested in exploring was in Section 8; when I got to the footnote, it told me to refer to Section 111 – not only is he using the current work as the source, he's using something 100 pages after what you're reading as the source).

How ignorant do you have to be?

Biblically speaking, there are two major differences between Jews and Christians. Jesus, obviously, is the big one. The other is food – some items are kosher based on what they are and how they die (and how they're prepared), some items are kosher for Passover, some mixtures are not kosher, and some things just aren't kosher at all.

Horses, you might not have known, are not kosher. They do not have cloven hooves.

Pigs on the other hand, I think even the most secular, religion-proof Westerner knows are not kosher. Like you'd really really have to not pay attention to anything to not know that.

So why an upscale New York – yes, New York, home to an awful lot of Jews – decided pushing ham for Chanukah was a good idea, is absolutely beyond me.

Maybe someone didn't know ham comes from a pig....

CNY winter meme

From NYCO.

1. What’s the winter tool you can’t do without?

Clothing. Specifically a hat, gloves and boots – if my ears get numb, I'm just positively miserable; I use my hands too much to skip out on the gloves, and decent boots can make outdoors entirely bearable.

2. The winter tool you could do without (i.e., find unnecessary or silly)?

I can't think of anything, actually. I have a shovel and a snow brush/ice scraper (which probably could use some replacing – it's 11 now).

3. Your favorite music to listen to when stuck in the house in a snowstorm?

Silence. There's so much noise in our lives that we don't even notice anymore, from traffic to the buzz of the street lamps. When that first big storm hits, everyone's off the street, and maybe the power goes out, it's just so intensely quiet that the one person shoveling sounds like a symphony screaming in your ear.



4. The winter sound you least like to hear?

Snow plows scraping on the street.


5. Your driveway shoveling pattern: vertical (up and down)? horizontal (pushing from side to side)? Or any which way?

It depends on my mood, and the amount of snow. The more chaotic the snowfall, the more chaotic the shoveling pattern.

Noonchi (updated)

I spent a good deal of time yesterday editing a chapter of a dissertation.

The writer interviewed American and Korean elementary and preschool teachers about how they work with autistic students (the industry-standard politically correct way to say that is "students labeled with autsim").

One element of Korean interpersonal communication really struck me. It's called noonchi.

Based on the writer's explanation, I would translate it as "the ability to read your conversation partner's mood."

We use noonchi to a small extent here in the U.S. – if you sensed someone was in a really bad mood, you wouldn't ask for a favor.

But it's so much deeper than that.

It involves the overall context and environment of the conversation; where and when it's being held, etc.

In the U.S., it's the responsibility of the speaker to communicate a clear message. In Korea, it's up to the listener to understand what is being said.

One of the stories told by a U.S. teacher was of a child who yelled "spider" at seemingly non-sensical times. After a long period of observation, she figured out that the child equated spiders with discomfort or danger, so if he said "spider," he meant that he was feeling uncomfortable or threatened.

Fascinating.

Navy 38, Army 3

The Navy Midshipmen beat the Army Black Knights today in the annual Army-Navy game.

I watched some of it from a barstool, going between a Smithwick's draft, my Elmore Leonard novel, and the game.

I'm not a college sports guy, but I appreciate this game every year.

The way it works with college athletes is this. Seniors play the final football game of their college careers, they wave to the fans, they shower up, do their press availability. They go back to their pads, have a few drinks, maybe get laid, and go to bed a bit drunk and a bit sore.

They wake up late Sunday morning, start studying for finals, and over the next couple of weeks, they take their final exams and head home for their winter break.

Some will practice for bowl games, which they'll play before riding out their final semester at school. Some will go home and trade stories with their high school friends. A lucky couple of hundred will consider offers from agents who want to represent their interests in negotiating with NFL teams.

Not the people who play the Army-Navy game.

Those seniors, they go home for winter break, they come back for their last semester, go off to training camp, and by the time the next academic year rolls around, they're in desert camouflage fighting in Iraq, or they're in giant parkas freezing their behinds off in the Afghan mountain winter.

Thanks, gentlemen.

Fictional difficulties

I have lots of trouble writing fiction.

It's not for lack of imagination. It's for my lack of ability to quit rambling and get to the point.

If you've ever had a verbal conversation with me, this probably surprises the crap out of you.

The thing is, I write great characters. Fantastic characters, even. People you'd want to drive cross-country with. People you'd want to hitchhike across Europe with. The kind of people you want to surround yourself with.

I give them great back stories. They're super-interesting people. And they do awesome things.

Thing is, I can't get them to meet in scenarios that aren't clearly contrived.

After plowing through Thomas Harris' Hannibal Rising, which gives us Hannibal Lecter's full back story (awesome, quick read), I picked up Elmore Leonard's Freaky Deaky.

I'm not a Westerns fan, but Leonard's done some really fine work. I got hooked on him with Be Cool, and totally hopped on board with Pagan Babies.

Freaky Deaky is a bit over 400 pages long, and is a clearly contrived situation by the time you get to the meat of the plot.

But in the first 100 pages, you get to meet all the major characters (a couple of fairly important supporting characters are introduced later), learn where they came from, and you understand how their paths are all going to cross.

In a very natural progression, all things considered.

Black Panthers, ex-hippies, ridiculously wealthy alcoholics, explosives experts and actors, all coming together in a way you understand.

I'm jealous.

More on unplugging

Looks like I'm not the only one unplugging these days.

Arianna Huffington – who is making the bulk of her money doing things related to the online world – recently scolded a bunch of marketing professionals for not diving full-throttle into the online world.

And then she said people are getting so overwhelmed with all their gadgets and everything that the next technology trend is (drum roll please)...

Going offline.

Huh.