Not My 9/11

I found the magazine in the library in the English Department last week.

Right away a glimpse at its slightly fatigued cover told me it wasn't new, but vintage like many of the books and journals our profs have squirreled away on the oak shelves to free up some much-needed space in their cluttered offices.

But in my instant glance I knew more. This copy of People was almost 10 years old. It has been that long.


On the Nature of the Media
Often people who ask me about The Van Winkle Project are curious as to why it began on Sept. 11th last year and will end that way in just a matter of days.

I point out that when I conceived of the project in late August 2010 a September 11th date seem like an made-to-order marker date. With a date like that, I'd be able to easily remember when I gave up the news, entertainment, sports, and weather and look ahead to the exact month and day when I would again be free to access them.

But there was another reason.

It occurred to me that Sept. 11, 2011 would be different this time around. Even typing it is different:

9-11-11

With the tenth anniversary of the "worst terrorist attacks in the nation's history" in store for all of us, I anticipated that the media would "play" and "re-play" that terrible day (and its aftermath) as if it were the re-release of the blockbuster movie of a season past.

Image by V.W.

Count me out.

No, it's not that I fear that we have such bad taste that 9/11 Firefighter Hero toys will be given out at McDonalds or images of the blazing Twin Towers will be put on T-shirts.

What I do expect is a series of talking heads appearing on TV and the Web, all of them all of them ever-so-sincerely feeding us a combination of nostalgia, reliving the grief,  "making sense of it all," and pondering the unanswerable question: "How have we changed in the ten years since?"

Old news will become new news for as long as it's convenient and people can be induced to pay attention.

And what could be more of an emotional draw? 9/11. Have two numbers ever had more poignancy when pronounced?

I'm guessing the 9/11 revival has already begun. Perhaps weeks ago. I don't know. Van Winkle, as planned, has set me free of it.

On the Nature of Memory
For anyone who does want to remember 9/11 in his or her own way for however long suits them, you mustn't think I disapprove. I speak only for myself.

It's not that I'm of the mindset that "it was a long time ago and I've moved on."

Neither am I keen on the idea that "I and my country changed forever on that day." Historians far down the line will have to decide that.

And I do believe there are memories worth keeping about that time as long as I don't fondle or make a fetish out of them.

Going for a morning run, coming around the corner to my street, in a cool-down, walking mode, and seeing my wife on the front lawn waving at me to hurry into the house. Our son is three years old. I start running again! Something might have happened to him. I just run! And find the TV on (why? we never turn the TV on until the evening). It's showing a fixed view of the North Tower burning from the first airplane strike.

Over the next few days, I watch more TV than at any time in my life.

 I open my mailbox one day during the anthrax scare and I see a package with a return address I don't recognize. A feeling of creepiness and icy dread comes over me. Inside the house I stand at arm's length as I open the packet. A rational voice tells me that no one is going to pick me out from the entire population of the planet to poison or blow up in a fiery explosion, but at a deep animal level I've never known before I am spooked. Then I have the package open and with relief hear myself say, "Oh that! From that person! Why didn't I guess?"

 I put a flag decal on the back window of my car. I've never been the patriotic sort, but it feels like it is a way of saying something in the only available channel I have: "We're not bad people. This shouldn't have happened to us" and "We're going to bury our dead, praise them, and rebuild what's been destroyed, and do it together."

 I move through an airport, almost completely empty except for National Guardsmen who stand apologetically with their M16-A2 rifles. Everyone seems so nice and speaks soothingly to one another. The message: "Sorry about this, but we're getting through this together."


Those are my memories. All of them are passing away.

Ten years later the flags have become much less numerous, even here where I live, which happens to be the most flag-waving of small cities with its military base and its proud remnant of silver-haired World War II veterans.

Along with the vanishing flags, the images of the burning Towers and a blackened Pentagon wall have dimmed. Like old photographs bleached by sunlight.

Long ago they made the movie about the heroes of United Flight 93 who really were heroes in the original sense of the word because they put their lives on the line to try to stop something. That film opened in theaters, got reviewed, was released on DVD, and then I watched other movies.

As far as I can tell, 9/11 was a season. Seasons end. What followed were two wars. And then came another kind of war engendered by an economic collapse that was like a bomb falling on millions of people around the world.

Those wars have not been seasons. They are more like eras. My memories of 9/11 are crushed beneath everything thing that has happened since.

On the Nature of a Legacy
All this is to say that the extent of my 9/11 memories has just taken place out here in the open in the naked space of a blog post.

When I awake up literally on the morning of September 11, 2011 as well as metaphorically (The Van Winkle Project ends) I will turn to other considerations.

What has happened to the world and America over the past 365 days?

Still, my thoughts and analysis can't help but be informed by 9/11. I did glimpse something there of worth. It's become a standard by which I'm perhaps tempted to measure people by. Because I now know what we're capable of.

9/11 was a reminder that humans can be together. During those gray days I found out that violence, which is a great uniter of peoples, doesn't have to be part of the equation.

It is possible to subtract out the "hate" and achieve "one" by joining together in the sum of our "love," "compassion," "caring," and "bearing of sorrows" and a desire to restore. I was witness to how for a brief interlude we had:

• Gracious and freely given kindness toward strangers
• Prayer stripped to its Book of Job essentials: Help Us Whoever You Are because I don't understand what's happening and can't get through this alone or bear such pain!
• A quieting of the usual non-stop commercial voices that call us from our highest purposes and beg us to be small, craven, self-interested, isolated individuals day after day

If there were disasters and loss of life in the last year, as I assume there must have been, did people somewhere find strength in the behaviors listed above?

And I wonder will we ever as a species turn this direction without it requiring a great calamity that drives us to our knees? Because that seems too hard and costly of a means to get there, much too hard. To find love and our better selves and to learn what really matters only by walking on the smouldering bones of our dead? This is an appalling vision. Surely there is another way? - V.W.

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Van Winkle Cleans His Office

An untidy desk is only the tip of the iceberg...

At the university where I'm employed the Monday before the start of final exams is always designated "Dead Day."

Even though we call it Dead Day, it is not supposed to be an occasion of mourning, nor is it some kind of reprise of Halloween. What it actually denotes is a mandated pause.

As students frantically churn out end-of-semester papers and study for their exams, faculty such as myself spend this Monday in their offices.

Students can count on our being available should they want to drop by to see us for last-minute help.

It's a nice gesture. It's as if the students are travelers and they have a pit stop available where they can get gas, air in their tires, and a good map before heading back down the road. Come see your prof!

The Need to Clean
On Dead Day 2011,  I find myself expecting a couple of creative writing students to come by. Other than that, traffic will be slow. Which is fine with me. I have 21 faculty applications for summer research assistant grants to evaluate. I need to look at and grade some blogs that I had students create in my creative nonfiction class.

And I like to use Dead Day to clean my office. I mean, just look at this mess!

Mon., May 9, 2011 - 8:05 a.m.



Ad nauseum...




You get the idea...


Warning "College Professor Ahead..."
If college professors were to be differentiated by a single criteria, I suppose an obvious one might be "neat office" versus "messy office."

There's much to be said in favor of the messy office. Unlike the corporate world, professors tend to settle into a place and never move. Even as they achieve promotions from assistant to associate to full professor (at a glacial academic pace, to be sure), the enhancement in rank rarely brings any other apparent change in status. They don't get a bigger office or a shiny new desk or more shelving. They stay put. This is fine. It's historically part of the profession.

It's also a great opportunity to strive to pursue the legendary messy office.

Such offices are not rare. I recently read a novel set in the academic world. In 36 Arguments For the Existence of God one prof who moves from Columbia University to a new job at another university makes sure to carefully recreate his messy office:

"Also mysterious was how everything about his cramped Columbia office has been preserved, right down to the spiky plant on the windowsill, which had been dead for years. The very arrangement of the clutter on Professor Klapper's desk was duplicated, with space cleared for the photograph of his mother in its ornate silver frame. The wooden-slatted chair into which he was poured was either an exact replica of what he'd had at Columbia or had been transported along with the desiccated crown of thorns."

I don't suppose profs love dead plants, they just tend not to notice them. It's not surprising given the stacks of student papers that need to be graded. The piles of books they need for classes they teach. Poorly engineered tilting columns are made up of books required for the professor's own research. Then there are all the documents and advertisements and catalogs that arrive in the daily mail that no one wants to deal with during the full-throttle advancement of the semester.

Things pile up. And the legendary professor in a legendary messy office could care less.

Yes, yes, have a seat...uh...right here...

When a student comes to visit, the prof looks around for somewhere for him or her to take a seat. This means shifting a pile off a chair and onto the floor. Like a soldier proceeding through a mine field, the student maneuvers past books and paper piles and gets seated.

The professor begins looking for something pertinent in the midst of the rubble covering the desk, something that's needed to help the student--a pen, a scribbled sticky note, a reference book.  Dust wafts into the air as hand pats and probes try to make headway.

All this takes a while.

The student feels ill at ease. But the professor is completely in his/her element! This is why this kind of prof can be declared "legendary." They have raised the idea of messy office to the status of an art.

With their gross inefficiency and implicit announcement that "I'm a disorganized person" this sort of prof might not last five minutes in the corporate world. But this is academia. Academia is home of the true Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs still roam and do live, in many ways, exactly the way their ancestors did in the Middle Ages.

Have you seen faculty striding around in their silly caps and gowns at graduation?

Addressing the Problem
I think I'm a middle of the road academic. I came to academia relatively late in life when, like most writers these days, I realized a university was the only place that would pay me steadily for my relatively insignificant area of expertise. I know how to write and I can show others how to do it. That's about all I have to offer...

I actually don't make such a great academic. I refuse to speak the jargon (e.g., use words like problematic, dichotomy, liminal) and I don't wear tweed jackets or cultivate a salt and pepper beard. Likewise, I've never truly gone in for a messy office. All I try to do is my absolute best at my job because if I were a student that's what I'd want from a prof.

In the midst of my teaching efforts my office does tend to deteriorate. Rather than reaching legendary proportions of messiness, it simply becomes untidy and sloppy enough that it begins to distress me. I don't want to go in there until I do something about it.

On this Dead Day I begin. After little over an hour I think the photographic evidence is clear. My office now looks worse.

Mon., May 9, 2011 - 9:27 a.m.

But no pain, no gain, correct?

Lowering the Bar (for a Tidy Office)
So I spend several more hours throwing papers into my portable dumpster, a handy cardboard box. I straighten and move piles. I find a few things I thought I'd lost. Hurray! But I am running out of time and will soon have to leave for the day. Things are better, espeically within the perimeters of my desk, but...

Mon., May 9, 2011 - 2:18 p.m.

I shift into high gear. I throw papers away in a blur. I cheat and shove messes back far enough so they won't fit into the photo frame (I have placed my camera on a tripod). I take the most wimpish of courses: I opt for a cosmetic clean...

Mon., May 9, 2011 - 3:29 p.m.

And then I shut the door. Big difference? I wish it were so. Maybe I'm more academic than I realize... - V.W.

BONUS FEATURE: The World Class Cleaning Prof..

Okay, tell me the fellow below doesn't have one of the messiest offices imaginable. Legendary! Watch what he does to rectify the problem in "four minutes". The before and after of this law professor's office are truly breathtaking.

EXTRA BONUS FEATURE:
Prof. Albert Einstein's study as it was at the time of his death...

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On Not Being a "Blog of Note"

Are the folks at Blogger watching VWP? Not likely!

When I began this blog it was a logical way of keeping track of the mental and emotional ups and downs of my project of avoiding the news. I went into it mostly ignorant of the larger world of blogging.

At the same time I was excited by the opportunity to write in perhaps a new way in a medium that allowed me to combine pictures and words. As I saw it, I would be publishing my own digital magazine articles reflecting my life and my sensibilities.

Because this "blog-zine" is solipsistic at heart, i.e., about me, I initially never expected very many people to come to it, much less read it. Hugh Hefner has Playboy, Oprah has O, and I have VWP. Come on. There's no comparison! I do not have what one might call a "competitive lifestyle" that will attract avid, loyal readers.

But early on there was a surprise.

Blogger allows one to peer behind the scenes using the almost magical "Stats" tab. I could see how often people were coming to my site hour by hour. At first traffic was slow, but I never found myself staring at an insultingly flat line.

This is where I was tempted to become grandiose. My favorite writers seem to prove over and over that if you write well enough you can make almost anything interesting. And if it's interesting, people will find it and read it. That became my goal. I would write so well that I would magnetically attract more people.

I spent hours polishing my prose. Upwards of eight hours per post. And I began dreaming of becoming a Blogger "Blog of Note". If I achieved such an honor, perhaps my pageviews would spike in an Everest-like fashion.

At that point somebody needed to slap me. I was out of my mind.

WELCOME TO REALITY, VAN WINKLE
The growth in the blog phenomenon is stunning. According to the people who have the electronic means to achieve a rough count, in  2001 there were 2 million blogs. By 2005 we were up to 50 million. In 2009, according to BlogPulse, there were126 million blogs.

Take all the bloggers in the world...
try to fit them into the UK. Ugh!

This is more than three times the entire population of the United Kingdom.

Since the Van Winkle Project has placed me more squarely on the Web than ever before, I've become aware of just how widespread blogging is. There are blogs for everyone, including companies and corporations. When I tell people about my blog, they usually mention they started one, too. If I go to their blog and click on their "About Me", I often find that they're being modest: they've started multiple blogs to reflect different interests and audiences they want to address. 

So out of this rising number of blogs that has become an ocean of language and imagery, each week the wise, innovative, and very nice folks at Blogger (no, I'm not sucking up) choose a handful to join their "Blogs of Note" and  they post the links on Blogger In Draft.

If as a blogger you seek pageviews, becoming a "Blog of Note" is the equivalent of winning the lottery or lining up five cherries on the slot machine. When it happens, your pageviews and followers will jump as if a 9.0 earthquake has rocked the sensitive needle on the graph.

As I continued to fantasize about the Van Winkle Project becoming a "Blog of Note" (because no one had yet slapped me) I saw cause for hope. My Blogger data showed where my pageviews were coming from. What was this? Slovenia? India? Singapore? Columbia? New Zealand? Wow! Van Winkle had gone global!

Blogger's helpful visual about where people who have visited this blog are located.

The wheels began to spin in my mind. If I became a B.O.N., I could put it on my curriculum vita (this is the name the university world gives a "resume"). I could tell my friends! In the midst of his own newsless project, Van Winkle would have fabricated his own news!

                      

THE TANTALUS FACTOR
After a while I began to realize how out of reach the entire fantasy was. Blogs that are truly "of note" get as many pageviews in a day as I've accumulated in six months. Why movie critic Roger Ebert had 104 million pageviews in 2010! How many per day is that? Never mind; you do the math...

This is when I thought of Tantalus. He was the son of Zeus who was given special dining privileges and could eat nectar with the gods.

But one day he offended the gods (the accounts vary as to why). Because of this, Tantalus was perpetually punished in a most devious fashion.

He was placed in a locale where every time he tried to bend down and drink from a pool of water it receded. If he reached up to a tree to pick fruit, the wind blew the luscious, juicy orbs beyond his grasp.

He would always be close but never quite able to satisfy his basic desires.

From the tragedy of Tantalus we get the verb "to tantalize." It's a verb that applies to me. Every time I think of being a "Blog of Note" I am tantalized. It's a crazy way to live.

HOW NOT TO BE A "BLOG OF NOTE"
Rather than live a life of being constant, unfulfilled craving, I've decided I do not wish to attract mass followers by becoming a Blogger "Blog of Note." Should you blog from time to time and feel inclined to follow in Van Winkle's nearly invisible footsteps, here are four sound tips on how to achieve this kind of ideal non-recognition.

1 - Simply exist.
That's right. As soon as you create your blog you virtually guarantee that no one of significance, including Blogger, will get around to visiting you. There are way too many blogs out there.

2 - Have a laissez-faire attitude about graphic images.
Every time I upload an image to a post, Blogger gives me a message that some images are copyrighted blah, blah and I should take this into account. For that reason I prefer using my own photos, but frankly that's not always possible. If I violate anyone's intellectual property rights, I will cheerfully remove the image when they request. But this is the Web. Images are strewn like confetti in a wide city street. Who can resist picked up a few pieces? So my blog is not "pure." Can I still be a "Blog of Note"? Does Miss America have to be a virgin?

3 - Write posts that are more than a few hundred words in length.
This is a great way to guarantee that even if someone lands on your blog they won't read it. When they see that it will take more than a few seconds to find out what's there, they're on to the next website. I've decided because I'm a writer, what I have to do is write. I'm not going to write more than is necessary, but I'm not going to ration my words or truncate my thoughts any more than a composer would try to alter a twenty-minute sonata for piano forte to conform to the length and format of a cell phone ring tone.

4 - Start a year-long project.
Come on., Van Winkle. This has been done! No one likely cares about a year-long project unless one's life hangs in the balance. If a person wants to attract notice, he or she is better off blogging about popular niche subjects: music, movies, food, travel, crafts, hobbies, politics, pets, and pole dancing.

AT OCEAN'S EDGE...
At the Van Winkle Project I blog because I gotta blog. Each time I post I think of it as being like building a sand castle at the beach.

As I look up and down the beach I notice nearly everyone is building their own castles. But this is not about them or the rare visitor who strolls along and compares our sand castles and says one is "of note" and, by implication, the others are not. In the great scheme of things the incoming tide of time rolls over each person's castle and he or she must build/post a new one as soon as the tide goes out again.

So why do this? Because those ephemeral castles are are a result of one's best thoughts and creativity. Within the sandy digital walls I erect, I place the essence of my hands, breath and heartbeat and I communicate, "I'm alive. I was here." - V.W.





Get yours at Toysplash.com
and start digging...

  
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The Worst Super Bowl Ever

This is how the world looks outside my front door today.
The temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind is blowing, creating an effective "wind chill" temperature of -10 F.

Closures for all schools and universities have been announced for the second day in a row. This is unprecedented in these Sun Belt parts.

None of this has anything to do with the Super Bowl V, the 1971 contest between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys, my nominee for "worst Super Bowl game ever played."

Please, Don't Call It "Super"
The funny thing that occurs to me about Super Bowl V is how little I remember of the details surrounding the game and yet how sure I am of my distaste for it.  I felt halfway in that this was the most boring "big game" I'd ever tried to sit through.



Mercifully, the winning kick by the Colts in the final seconds
ends this numb-fest.

Super Bowl V  was a threshhold experience for me. Football would start to change on that day. For example, the Dallas coach Tom Landry preferred to play at quarterback a fellow named Craig Morton over young former Navy, Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. Though Staubach was destined to be a future Hall of Famer, at that point Morton would obediently call the plays that the coach sent in and Staubach sometimes didn't.

Coach Landry, like all future NFL coaches, wanted to call all the plays.

Can't play football without the ear goggles...

Yes, we were moving toward the era of the Motorola headset, the technicalization of the game of professional football. As coachng staff and trainers proliferated, it felt like the players had walked onto a cruise ship with an enormous uniformed staff who watched over them and scheduled their every movement.


It would become unimaginable that on the NFL game-day cruise that a player might try to think for himself. Instead, he had become like a piece on a chess board. It was all so complicated that you now had separate coaches for the offense and the defense who called the plays when each unit was on the field. You still had the head coach, but I'm not sure what he did...

The wonders of technology. You could now buy a football field
and have it delivered...just like a rug.

Super Bowl V was also the first Super Bowl played on plastic grass, euphemistically called "artifical turf." Another switch in atmosphere and ethos: "This game is made possible by the 3M Corporation."

The game was becoming less a contest than an entertainment in which the goal was to eliminate risk and tweak every imaginable movement in a massive choreography that might even include injecting drugs into players to enhance what they did on the field. It didn't matter that this meant adopting what could seem at times an arrid, technical style of play. You did what you had to do because the money invested in this production had become enormous and you had better win so you could keep on selling tickets to the show.

Sure I would find future football highlights, some of them occurring in Super Bowls even, but overall nothing would match the days of fiery, principaled coaches like Vince Lombardi and the players making about the same annual salary as a lawyer instead of the gross national product of some small republic.

Stinking Up the Orange Bowl
Super Bowl V, variously called "The Blunder Bowl," "The Stupor Bowl" or the "The Blooper Bowl," stands out as an example of how even with the best laid plans and high expectations by players and coaches you can still flop.

I only vaguely (and uncertainly) remember that I watched the game at a high school friend's house in Anchorage Alaska. It was in the basement where they had a color TV.

Color didn't improve what was taking place on the field in Miami. The Colts and Cowboys would combine to lose the ball to the other side 11 times, 7 of these turnovers by the Colts, an appalling record. The Cowboys' own ugliness came in the form of 10 penalities, another record.

Chuck Howley, the MVP who didn't wanna be...

What this meant practically speaking was that it was like watching two people take turns trying to drive a car with a manual and neither of them could manage the shifting. They'd lurch forward, then go backwards. Then they'd stall the engine all together. Then the other one would try.

It was the only time the Most Valuable Player award was a matter of massive head scratching. Everyone who took part in the game, as we'd bluntly put it today, sucked. So the award was given to a player on the losing team, the Cowboys' Chuck Howley who intercepted two of the opposition's passes.

Howley, God bless him, refused the award.

I Bench Myself
That Super Bowl was a game changer (pun intended) for me vis a vis my football watching habits. Thereafter, I would enjoy the NFL regular season and perhaps some of the playoffs, but the Super Bowl seemed to me less than worthy of my attention.

This placed me outside the mainstream culture which responded to the increasing hype surrounding each Super Bowl as if it had to be the best and most compelling football played. The viewership in America and around the world, with a few annual blips, kept going up.

In the meantime, I'd circle that Sunday on the calendar, then to go to the grocery store while everyone was inside their houses having their cocktail meatballs, beer, popcorn and watching the game. The grocery store was empty. The checkout clerks looked like the last people left on board the Titanic. Working on Super Bowl Sunday was the last thing they wanted to do.

A Crack in My Super Bowl Boycott
In the early eighties I married my wife who was an executive in advertising. Of course, she was into ads. We began taping the Super Bowl and fast forwarding it later to get to the TV spots. Here was a whole new way to appreciate the event!

Also, our son came along and I thought I ought to give him a chance at seeing what the Super Bowl was about. He could then make up his own mind.

The year I decided to initiate him (2003) happened to feature the Oakland Raiders playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Pirate Bowl. How cool is that, son?

You like the logo, you'll love the team!
So the theory goes...

I decided to root for the Raiders. I've always liked their black and silver uniforms and that football pirate on their helmet.

So we went shopping for Raiders' wear the day before the game. Problem. Nobody in this part of the country cares about either coast. There was nothing for sale except for Dallas Cowboy regalia. Talk about irrelevant.

No problem. We'll make some snacks and wear non-logoed black T-shirts and sit down and watch the game, father and son.

Within minutes of  the kickoff there was a problem. The Raiders put on their own Blooper Bowl. The awesome passing game we expected from Raider QB Rick Gannon never materialized. Every time the ball was snapped to him, it seemed like Tampa Bay poured through and sacked him or harassed him into throwing interceptions (5 in all).

The Raiders had no chance. Final score: Tampa Bay 48, Oakland 21. Son now hates football.

Conclusion: A Bowl of My Own
The fact that I'm Van Winkled and this means I can't watch Super Bowl XLV this year isn't exactly breaking my heart.

But I'll wish for the commercials, which are often clever and lavish.

And I will regret not seeing moments like some offered us in recent years: the Titans' last play lurch that fell one yard short of winning the game in 2000, David Tyree's "helmet catch" that put the Giants in a position to upset the Patriots at the very end of Super Bowl XLIV, the "Aint's" showing last year that they had what it took to keep coming back until they had the Vince Lombardi Trophy in hand.

Still, looking a few days down the road, I'm totally all right with not seeing the game. I'm planning to sit down and spend a couple of hours with the Tax Bowl. Yes, I'm going to use the Super Bowl time slot to perform the annual ritual of striding onto the gridded lines and boxes of Form 1040A. It's a challenge. As everyone knows, Uncle Sam has a tough defense and he doesn't like for you to score. - V.W.

The Big Lebowski and the Whole Brevity Thing Cont.

I was feeling good that I had tentatively decided to model myself after one of the ancient Spartans and resolve to become more laconic in my speech and writing in the new year. (See: The Whole Brevity Thing)

But soon I hit a bump in the road. I had so much to communicate about brevity that I couldn't be brief in my written disquisition upon the subject.

It was all part of an ongoing situation. As much I wished for it, I never seemed able to write a short post for The Van Winkle Project.

This puts me at odds with our overall culture.

Aren't we people who desire these days to keep everything as short and condensed as possible?

A sound bite, not a speech? A song, not a whole album of songs? A tweet in place of a tome?

Befuddled, flummoxed, and metaphorically bloodied by my failure, I did what any reasonable 21st Century person might do.

I sat down and watched The Big Lebowski. Again.

Enter the Dude

Long ago the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski (1998) reached cult film status. A cult film is, of course, one that you watch repeatedly like a monkey eating another banana and soon you start to memorize all the funny lines. Which can come in handy as you start to plug them into everyday speech and thus amuse your friends who are on a lifelong quest for the Kingdom of Mirth.

So the film is rolling (or spinning in the age of DVD and Blu-ray) and I am still trying to figure out if and how I can be a sterling example of brevity and scale back these Van Winkle Project posts.

I'm into the first half hour of the movie when the Dude (Jeff Bridges) suddenly speaks to me. Actually he speaks to the Big Lebowski which is not the same as the Lebowski who is the Dude because the Big Lebowski is a millionaire in a wheelchair whereas the other Lebowski is the Dude...

If you haven't seen the movie, it's a tad complicated.

But the point is that the way the Dude seemed to offer something special just to me, a guy sitting in a room watching a movie about him 12 years after the film was committed to celluloid, is not unusual or startling. This is what the Dude does. This is just one example of how "the Dude abides."

So here's what the Dude said that threw sudden halogen headlights on my dilemma concerning brevity.

Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not "Mr. Lebowski". You're Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

The Dude discourses on nomenclature

You only have to watch the first minute of the film and see the Dude in bathrobe and shorts slopping along ,sniffing his way down the dairy aisle of a Ralph's grocery store and then writing a check for .69 cents at the checkout to know that, personally, he is a major fan of brevity.

You can also see this predilection for brevity in how the Dude seeks the least complicated solution to his problems in contrast to his ever elaborating, scheming, heat-packing friend Walter (John Goodman).

 But, more than that, the Dude's a fan of whatever works. Be brief if you want, his life illustrates for us, but if you'd like to tack on a few more syllables he's cool with that, too. It's the same flexibility he shows when at Maude's house he finds no half and half to add to Kahlua to create his signature White Russian, so he uses Coffeemate.



The 69-cent check. Financial brevity a la Dude


Thrilling Conclusion
The Spartans' cultivation of the laconic phrase serves as an example to me that brevity can be a beautiful thing. If what I want to say in conversation can be condensed and said with the fewest possible words, it can have more impact than an over-garnished torrent of language. And it leaves me more time to listen to the other person.

The year 2011 seems to be beckoning me to do this sort of thing in my verbal communications.

I wish to speak less and listen more.

As for writing, it is the Dude who has given me permission to go the other way. To not necessarily always be into the whole brevity thing. Here's why.

Certain human thoughts, insights and passions seem to deserve more respect than what can be offered by a string of words that are short enough to fit on a bumper sticker or the screen of a mobile device. They require more than two intakes of breath and a sign off on a blog post to do them justice. What they need is elaboration, meditation, and extensive relocation of one's mind to a mental space where one can dwell with them.


Meet the Culture Bandit

As slam poet Vanessa Hidary says in her classic Def Poetry Jam Season 1 performance of  "The Culture Bandit":

"Some people think more is less. I say more is more. Less is less!"

The hard truth is that as much as we extol its virtues, brevity at some point offers diminishing returns. Eventually what wishes to pass for brevity begins to approach vacuity. You get what you pay for.

Make no mistake. I hear the outcry of those who say no one has time to read anything l-o-n-g anymore. Perhaps this is so, but I'm reminded of an old phrase used by customers of honest butchers or other tradesmen who sold their goods by using a scale to acquire the size  portion the customer wished to buy. The customers said, "He (or she) gives good weight."

Writing that is brief, and seems to offer content but leaves the reader with a minute or so of eyeball movement, nothing they'll even remember an hour later, and then the reader moves on, is the modern equivalent of the writer putting his or her thumb on the scale. See right here? It's ten pounds of real mental sustenance (wink, wink).

It's not giving good weight.

It's a promise of sixty-nine cents inscribed on the piece of paper, a promise that ought to be for much more or why go to all the trouble to use ink and write a check in the first place? Instead, put down the pen; just lay your handful of coins on the counter and go.

I believe I'd rather say something at a bit greater length and not have anyone read it, than write down-sized, lightweight fluff and be one more soul around the globe stuffing the Great Internet Fortune Cookie with slivers of what passes for human thought and feeling.

So, El Duderino, thanks for showing me. That I'm not really into the whole brevity thing.

Brief in speech, but not always brief in words. That will be the Van Winkle resolution for 2011. - V.W.


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The Whole Brevity Thing

For the new year I thought I might have just one resolution. Limiting myself to a single resolution ought to be do'able.

Honestly, the downfall of my resolutions in the past is that I always have too many. I come up with the top ten things I want to change or improve in my life.

Absurd ambition. An overloaded ship of foolish vows. My good intentions sink by February.

But I still faced a problem. If I were to apply myself assiduously in 2011 to only one thing, what should this most condensed and briefest of resolutions be about? That's when it came to me.

My brief resolution could be to embrace brevity.

Of course, it made sense. I'd just spent an entire week at The Van Winkle Project meditating on the three-line news items (called fait-divers) that the Parisian Félix Fénéon wrote in 1906. That experience had served to send a fresh breeze of brevity wafting over me. I was ready to believe in less is more as the new guiding principle of some important area of my life.

The Search for Brevity
As I began to seriously consider brevity as my strongest candidate for a New Year's resolution, I had to narrow down my choices. Where in my life could I strive to be more brief?

I decided to back all the way up and think about the word and its meaning:. Brevity means, well, to be brief. So I went looking for some examples to inspire me.

Let's see. Lawyers write what are called briefs. Unfortunately this proved to be no help. Is anything a lawyer writes actually brief and to the point?

Page 1 of a 70-page "brief" filed in Sept. 2010


   
In fact, a large container the approximate size of a year-old calf had to be invented so that lawyers would have a way to transport all their not-so-brief briefs. Thus we have the bulging briefcase.

The next thing I thought of was in the world of clothing. There are, of course, men's briefs.

Calling this undergarment brief is somewhat apt when one considers what men wore in the not so distant past:

19th Century men's undies

Still, if we want to talk brief, then we'd be looking at:

Wait. This was a horrible tangent. I wasn't getting anywhere!

Seeking a Synonym
I told our son what I was doing. That I was trying to find an image that would lead me to the best way to be brief in 2011. He immediately turned to a something he learned last year in sixth grade World History class.

"Dad, that would be like being a Spartan wouldn't it? And you can find a picture of a Spartan."

Our son was right about those Greek guys who paraded their pectorals and chucked spears while wearing those cool helmets with face shields. I hadn't thought about them being  brief, just violent and having liberal views on sexual orientation, but now I recalled a further meaning of spartan in the dictionary.

The next step was to search for information on how the Spartans were spare, how being brief contributed to what fearsome, disciplined warriors they were and the militaristic rigor of their society. That's how I learned more about an especially important aspect of Spartan culture, their trademark style of communication. Verbally, the Spartans dined on rations of brevity.

Contrarians, the Spartans rebelled against the style up north of Athens where the philosophers and rhetoricians regaled crowds with their expansive explanations of life. The Spartans were the original cut-to-the-chase guys, the people demanding "Where's the beef?"

We have a name for the sort of speech which models itself after that of the people of the polis of Laconia which was the center of Sparta.

It's called laconic.

In the interest of brevity, here's just one laconic example from the Spartans themselves:

My Own Personal "If"
The Spartans' laconic speech resonated with me. Since I spend a fair portion of each day engaged in communication. I realized that if I could cultivate the laconic, it could save me considerable time. Especially if I applied it to what currently consumes the most hours of my day.

Writing.

It was so obvious. What I needed to do was pare down my writing to an absolute minimum.

In fact, much of the world has already embraced this mode. Facebook scrawls on the wall, tweets, texts.

In my exploration of blogs I've noticed this, too. Quite a few bloggers' posts consist of a picture and perhaps a caption. Or the blogger will settle for what amounts to a paragraph's worth of discourse. I'm guessing that at the average blog the writing clocks in at less than 500 words per post.

I tend to write posts that are 1000-1500 words long. They take minutes, not a minute to read. (And, side note, they require hours to write and rewrite.)

So there I had it.  I would write shorter posts. I would become Mr. "If", a master of the laconic. I would save time, readers would save time, the world would be a better place.

Or would it? - V.W.

To be continued...

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Monsieur Fénéon's Tragedies



M. Félix Fénéon

NEWS LEAKAGE: For various reasons that I won't go into, I have a sense there's been a recent violent tragedy in America. Nothing that follows is intended to be an indirect comment on the event, whatever it was, and I remain "asleep." - V.W.

He was a thin man with an outrageously sharp nose and a beard like a goat's. He slipped in and out of Parisian society, striking others as gifted in language, but austere in his use of it.

It was his destiny to become a person of some influence in the late 19th century at a time when artists and political activists flocked together.

This man, Félix Fénéon (prounounced fay-nay-own), would discover the pointillist painter George Seurat and soon be promoting the work of other post-impressionists.

Likewise, he became an advocate for many important writers within the pages of literary magazines he either started or edtied. One of these publications became the first to print the work of an obscure Irish writer in France. The writer was James Joyce.

Fénéon also was, in his early years, an anarchist, There is hearsay evidence that he may have planted a bomb during a time of unrest and anger that makes our own age of terrorism seem mild. In 1892 alone, for example, 500 bombs exploded in the U.S. and over 1000 in Europe.

Fénéon had a reputation for writing a great deal, but true to his self-effacing disposition, and also in order to keep a low-profile because of his anarchist activities, he tended not to sign his articles.

He once said, "I aspire only to silence."



Paul Signac's psychedelic-looking rendition of his friend Fénéon ,
lily in hand, which Fénéon did NOT like...

Later in life he found himself working for newspapers. In 1906 he was assigned for six months to cover brief stories for Le Matin.

It is with his short tenure with the newspaper that Fénéon makes his lasting mark as a writer. His mistress clipped out his stories and saved them; otherwise, we would not know they were the work of Fénéon as they were printed in the standard way, without a byline.

Years later the merits of these little, true and tragic news stories, so poignantly and artfully expressed, were recognized. They were collected in a volume called Novels in Three Lines and published in English in 2007.

Life and Death as Filler
The great daily  newspapers were an invention of the 19th Century. In many countries, including France, the news of the day included a column of miscellaneous accounts that were judged not to merit in-depth reporting.

In France they were called "fait-divers" (pronounced fay-dee-vair) which might roughly translate as "various happenings."

Each item has to fit
in 3 lines of text.

The fait-divers are an interesting, non-fiction type of micro-narrative. They inform the world with the briefest of descriptions about domestic violence, suicide, assault, murder, brawls, vandalism, theft, accidents, deaths, and sometimes political unrest.

They also capture the dangers of the new industrial age as many of the subjects meet their ends through some encounter with a locomotive, automobile, or piece of steam-driven equipment.

Today we might see some of these notices placed under the "police blotter" or in a toned-down version within the obituaries.


Fénéon was assigned to write the fait-divers on p. 3 of Le Matin under the title "Nouvelles en Trois Lignes" (news or novellas in three lines). Fénéon set out to exploit his natural austerity, choosing his words so carefully and arranging them in such a way that each item became an exceptional example of minimalist prose style in which the aesthetic is "less is more."

 

The writer assumed that what was left out could imply a larger whole. In Fénéon's hands some of the fait-divers even achieved the poignancy and profundity of poetry or haiku.

Writer and translator Luc Sante enthuses in his introduction to the book:

"They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush."

Fénéon's effort to obtain the maximum effect from the fewest number of words, a notion that was popular in the literary movement that would later be labeled "Modernism," reminds me of the kind of incredibly compacted short story Ernest Hemingway tended to write.

According to a possibly apocryphal story, Hemingway once bet someone he could write a complete story in ten words or less. He penned on a napkin a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

          For sale: Baby shoes.
    Never worn.

This is exactly the kind of thing Fénéon wrote multiple times a day, every day, for six months in 1906.


Fénéon's Miniatures
Since, per the parameters of this project, a person who is Van Winkled is not allowed to read today's news, I've decided to compensate by reading a bit of the news from 115 years ago...

Over a thousand of Fénéon's fait-divers are collected in Novels in Three Lines. Here's a trio of typical ones that even in translation bear the imprint of Fénéon, whether it's his sarcasm or sense of the ironic or his way of unexpectedly carving up sentences.

Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up.


It was believed that work would start up again today at the steelworks in Pamiers. A delusion.


A thresher seized Mme Peccavi, of Mercy-le-Haut, Meurthe-et-Moselle. The one was disassembled to free the other. Dead.

Some of the fait-divers are rendered in such a way that they register as very darkly, even morbidly, humorous:



A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.


At Sainte-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.


The 392 from Cherbourg to Caen halted; the engineer dislodged from the cowcatcher the corpse of Thiebault, 2, and gave it to the boy's mother.

Some I appreciate for how Fénéon has paced them and focused on a perfect detail:

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.


Equipped with a rattail file and deceptively loaded with a quantity of fine sandstone, a tin cylinder was found on Rue de l'Ouest.


Finding her son, Hyacinthe, 69, hanged, Mme Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she could not cut him down.

Some are simply bizarre:

The parish priest of La Compote, Savoie, was walking through the hills alone. He lay down, naked, under a beech tree, and died of an aneurysm.


Portebotte got 12 years in the penitentiary. In Le Havre he murdered the exuberant Nini the Goat, on whom he thought he had claims.


All the News That's Fit to Print? or Just Some of It?
Fénéon brings news of the relentlessly downbeat and depressing. These are tragedies, many of them as old as Cain and Abel.

The dispassionate reporting of all this malfeasance and misfortune actually has a paradoxical effect upon me. I see the event more vividly than if Fénéon had been allowed to indulge himself and use many more words, burying the heart of the story in voyeuristic detail and editorializing or melodrama.

The faits-divers are like crime scene photos in prose; they do not allow gilding of the awful. As in the following:

Medical examination of a little boy found in a ditch on the outskirts of Niort showed that he had undergone more than just death.

I cannot help but feel devestated when I think of the little boy lying in the ditch. I am forced by the absence of details to I think of the life he had, all that's implied by "little boy." Then I consider the cruel way he may have lost his life. By the time I reach the end of this simple 24-word sentence I mourn.

At the same time this is a clear case of what passes for "news" being the result of a highly selective and even biased process.

Six months of the faits-divers are not representative of the totality of French life in 1906 or most places on earth at any time in history.

Left out are the weddings, the births, the good food, the children playing, the teachers teaching and all the other unspoiled fruit in the barrel.

If life were composed mostly of the sort of things we find in these grim news tidbits, it's hard to see how we could go on living.

Which has led me to wonder: Could someone utilize Fénéon's highly compressed method to convey other news of the world? To possibly bring us some good news? C'est peut-être, M. Fénéon? Stay tuned. - V.W.

  COMING FRIDAY: Monsieur Van Winkle's Comedies  

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