Van Winkle Goes Wild

Well, I made it this far. I have crossed the big "3-0-0 days to go" signpost, as you can see from the counter on the right.

At this point I have to report that honestly this project is becoming harder every day. I'm starting to have two to three second lapses when I allow myself to read a headline here or there.This is bad because it just makes me want to know more.

The latest instance happened when the newspaper was lying open on the kitchen counter and my eyes fell upon...
  

I swear I only read the headline!

 
I thought, "You know, it wouldn't really hurt to read Will's column to get a very brief summary of how the mid-term elections went. And then he'll go on to predict what will happen in the wake of the elections and that's not really news, it's just speculation."

I started building a case for George Will. He's not so much an ideologically-driven conservative as just a very skeptical thinker whose worldview centers upon the belief that almost anything humans attempt to do they will muck up; therefore, they should be discouraged from organizing and attempting grandiose reforms or projects, especially when it comes to that large entity we call "government."

And I've always appreciated that Will has a formidable vocabulary and knows his history and when it comes down to it the only thing he really believes offers redemptive value for humanity is baseball.

So I should check out what George Will has to say...

No way. I can't!

But I already did, or at least I had read three words, and now I couldn't get them out of my head. The transformative election. The political landscape had changed while I was "asleep." My own speculation was ready to start up like a rusty machine thrown into gear and and dying to clank back into action.

Further Symptoms of Personal Regression

The other sign that I'm not handling my news deprivation well is that I try to quiz people in a sneaky fashion in order to peck at a pathetic news crumb here or there.

The other night my wife and son came to the dinner table beaming because they had seen quote unquote "one of the best pieces that has ever been broadcast on the evening news." It was on CBS, they said and it was almost like a mini-documentary. It was at least twice as long as the usual evening news segment.

They were wondering if they could at least tell me what it was about because most of it was centered on the past, i.e., history. Then they remembered there was one current event aspect to it. They whispered to each other. Tell him or not? Conference conclusion: Not.

I went nuts! Tell me, tell me!

They refused. Likewise I couldn't pry any information loose when our son began talking about a TV commercial for something that he said might be "a game changer."

"What is it?" I demanded. "A piece of new technology? Improved laundry detergent? You should at least tell me the category. I mean, game changer is not a word to be thrown around lightly."

"Sorry, Dad."

Sorry indeed. This is when a fantasy occurred to me.

Van Winkle Goes Wild

I get myself a mask and a cape and...I become the News Peeper.

In the early morning, before the sun rises, I go out onto the lawns and slip newspapers out of plastic sleeves and read them. Then I put them back so no one knows.

During the day I'm passing by offices and leaning in doorways to see if I can overhear a radio or TV or YouTube video playing.

At dinnertime I'm edging along the neighbors' flowerbeds until I find an open window through which I can glimpse...the evening news!

Later that night I'm seen standing outside the cineplex, reading all the film titles and looking at the movie posters, jotting down information.

My sickness is such that I won't admit to myself what I'm doing. I'm cheating on my project. I might as well go all the way and turn on the TV at home, read my own newspaper, surf the Internet all I wish.

Instead, I creep, I peep. If you see me out there, someone please get me some professional help. But please don't unmask me. I don't want the neighbors to know... - V.W.

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Review of Bare Naked Books

In my house I'm surrounded by books.

Stacks of them stalagmite the floor. Bookcases assert themselves from the walls in four different rooms. When I go to sleep, books keep watch on nightstands.

The other day I’m sitting in the room we call the library which also includes a flat screen TV, a DVD player, and a replica 1930s radio. I guess it's the media room, but library is easier and more satisfying to say.

I look at the books on my shelves and I think to myself, "You know what? You guys could use a makeover."

So I did it.

How to Arrange Books

Before I got out the step ladder and started moving things around, I decided to seek seek some help from experts. A bit of googled investigation turned up this advice.

- Put books of a common size together

- Align the books and don't shove them all the way to the back

- Keep books off shelf edge which makes them resemble cliff divers
- Mix in some horizontal stacks of books

- Place the larger volumes on lower shelves

- Leave some open spaces between book rows and fill with art objects

As tried out these tips I was in a sort of on-task bliss. Over the next few hours I was handling some of the things I valued most, including books going back to my childhood. All of them had given me hours of pleasure and often life-changing illumination. I was handling old friends like Catch 22, Anna Karenina, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath. And I was getting somewhere because visually things looked neater, but still—

That’s when I found one more tip.

-Remove dust jackets, let the books bask in their cloth glory

Hmm, I had not thought of that. Aren’t book spines rather boring? But at that point it became another excuse to prolong what had become an entire afternoon “off’ in which I was going up and down the ladder, pulling down books, temporarily stacking them on the floor, thumbing a few and reading at random.

I began carefully taking off the dust jackets. (Note: Brits like to call them "wrappers.") I did this for all the books except some that were the most collectible or were former library copies and their dust jackets were glued onto what they call in the business “boards.” This led to a discovery.

Dazzle the Eye of the Beholder

With dust jackets removed, the garish glare of the typically glossy cover went away,  presenting the shelves with a new subdued library-like effect. But there was something else that happened on a regular basis. Most books au naturel were beautiful. Rich gold or silver lettering graced the spine. Wonderful soft blue, green, or black cloth submitted to my respectful finger touch.

In the case of series in which the covers were rather pedestrian and faded to boot, the differences were night and day.

For example, my James Bond matched set had been wrapped in a cheesy, loud, Miami pastel color palette. Stripped down to their essence, the books boldly declared a 007 evening attire gravitas with black spines and gold lettering. Ian Flemming looked as if he had produced a collection of Shakespeare plays.

Civil War historian Bruce Catton’s three-volume set on the Army of the Potomac, a work that had fired off the cannon of my historical imagination when I was a tween, went from bland and blah dust jackets to a stiffly proud, regimented red and black presentation.

Some of my Hemingway collection now “popped,” especially the Caribbean green of Islands in the Stream and the recent posthumous release, Under Kilimanjaro with its copper designs on the spine.

I fell in love with how Nathaniel West’s and William Faulkner’s final novels declared “must read me” in columns of red.

Bird Lives!, the wonderful bio of Charlie Parker that reads like the greatest novel ever written about jazz (and served as the basis for Clintwood’s fine 1988 film Bird) revealed a surprise. The book's artistry went beyond the jazzy typeface on the spine to offer something on the cover. A gold saxophone player lurking beneath the dust jacket. All this time I had no idea.

Tom Wolfe’s collection of ground breaking "New Journalism" winked at me with it’s mega-title abbreviated on the front: TKKTFSB – The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby.

Isak’s Dineson’s collection of Africa stories shared a delicate line drawing.

Isak Dineson offered another surprise. The spine of my 1938 early (first?) edition of Out of Africa is elegant...

...but I also have a gorgeous facsimile dust jacket to go with it, obtained from a wonderful source who goes into private libraries and makes high resolution scans of classic dust jackets, then sells them wrapped in protective mylar for $22 each.

Then there’s a number of books I wouldn’t consider removing the dust jacket from. These  New Directions books from the 1950s are ones whose cover design was done by the famous Alvin Lustig. In the Lustig style, they're lean and graphically arresting.

Rating

My books are tangible, caressable evidence that with some things in life what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s a matter of probing beneath the surface. If you really want to know something or somebody better, stay there long enough to establish a mutually trusting relationship until they're ready to slip into something more comfortable. Less is indeed more.

Bare naked we come into the world and bare naked bears cultivation in all aspects of my day-to-day life. As for books, I will continue to haunt garage sales and library clearances or even splurge at my local purveyor of same. I won't resist picking up a hardback from time to time, used or new, because at their best they offer a weighty surprise that cannot be replicated by any eBook known to humankind. Such sweet eye candy will always merit four stars. **** - V.W.

Bonus Bibliophile Goes to the Movies Feature: Here's a shout-out for possibly the best documentary film ever made about the love of books, even a mania for books and their attendant pleasures. It's Stone Reader by Mark Moskowitz (2004). My favorite scene: Moskowitz pans the camera over the books on his shelves and gives voiceover commentary about his favorites.


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8 Things to Do (When You're Not Watching Football)

She’s 35 years old, brunette, petite, still maintains the cheerleader figure that belonged to her in high school because five days a week she jogs around the neighborhood. She’s smart, too, has an M.A. in Psych, although at present she’s not a practicing counselor which enables her to stay at home with her three- and five-year-old. 

So how is it an intelligent, fit woman finds herself bumping around the house like some kind of displaced person, just her and the kids, for great swaths of Sunday and Saturday afternoons and into the evening? How is it when she relates to her man during these times she’s like some throwback version of ultra feminine person, walking on soft feet and bringing to him in the Royal TV Den a refilled bowl of chips or a fresh foamy beer, all of it presented with a lovely smile which he doesn't even notice?

The explanation is simple. It’s football season. She’s become a Football Widow.



Hut! Hut! - Game Day 

And throughout the house there resounds from time to time the husband’s guttural outbursts of Yes! and Man! and Stinking, lousy! and Oh my I don’t believe this! and Did you see that? and Hurry up with the replay! and Just throw it! and Not up the middle again! and Go for it! Go for it!

How did she not notice before the wedding?

It’s not like she doesn’t understand football. When she was a cheerleader she dated a nickelback. (Of course, the guy had great hands, but his kissing? Left something to be desired.) Then she met her beloved. She knew he liked football, but something happened after they got married and bought the 52-inch screen.

He pats the couch space beside him and invites her to join in, but she just can’t do it. She understands his desire to see 22-men at a time strive for perfection as they struggle mightily against gravity and their own and other bodies and they collide at high speed and also there's the drama of not knowing how it will turn out.

For sixty minutes each game is so much more a heightened reality than anything he experiences at his dull place of work. Still, how many times can you watch it?

I Go Over to the Other Side

This season, as a result of being Van Winkled, I’ve joined the Football Widows. My project compels me to make do without the NCAA or NFL until we reach the great end zone of Super Bowl on February 6, 2011 and then, mercifully, it will all be over.

So I’m learning some of what the Football Widows do on game day.

1 - Hang out with other women in the kitchen and make snacks for the men.

2 - Deliver snacks, return to kitchen, eat some of the snacks themselves.

3 - Talk to other women about diets.

4 - Depressed, change subject to the kids, then how much the men watch football.

5 - Go shopping together (this is another way football is good for the economy).

6 - Come home, talk about what they bought, talk about the kids and how they hope the boys don’t grow up to watch as much football as their dads and how they hope the girls don’t marry someone who watches as much football as their dad.

7 - Clean up the TV room which now looks like an apocalypse of beer bottles, beer cans, pretzel crumbs, spilled chips, every surface well salted.

This routine is about as expected and formal as the refs in striped shirts, the chain markers, the goal posts, and the big men lining up in formation. That’s why it occurred to me to shake things up a little

One More Thing To Try

Here's the thing: gender need not keep one out of the game. The Football Widows can create their own powerful collisions, their own moments of unexpected grace when arms reach in and haul in the precious prize, or racing heartbeats lead one past obstacles into the brighter light. No need to put on pads and helmets. The women can go into the living room and read poetry together.

What did I just say?

Yes, this is a radical response. Bringing up the subject of poetry is like going for it and throwing a bomb on fourth down and long at your own twenty-yard line. It’s like putting in the third string quarterback. It's like trying for a 70-yard field goal. It’s like—Well, perhaps you know what I mean. Who in America reads poetry anymore?

I for one and I think I have some pretty good reasons to do so, too.

That's why for one moment I'd like to consider a certain short poem and what it might do for the Football Widows. It’s by the late James Wright.

Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

What amazes me about Wright’s poem is its brevity. It’s only 73 words long, yet I feel like I know his people, their dreams and their sorrows. Wright accomplishes this through the use of a part of speech that can prove disastrous in less talented hands: adjectives.

But there’s no piling up flowery descriptors here. Wright’s an emotional poet, not a sentimental one. Each adjective is designed to shape the rough noun it modifies until it becomes three dimensional to us.

I notice how Wright adds a "ruptured" to "night watchman" so it's no longer just some man. I'm looking at a stooped figure who has had more than his share of losses, physical and spiritual. His being "ruptured" even as he seeks solace at the football game moves me. A similar effect is achieved by the application of adjectives elsewhere: long (beers), gray (faces), proud (fathers), starved (pullets), and (beautiful).

And there’s that wonderful adverb in the last line.

Terribly.

Was James Wright a football fan or was he on the side of the Football Widows? I’d love to hear my collection of Football Widows discuss that. And maybe after that we could read a lovely nature poem by Mary Oliver. Then it would be halftime. We could drift back into the kitchen. You know, I’m not adverse to those little meatballs with toothpicks poking through them. The longer I live, the more I realize--poetry can take on many forms. Who made those anyway? The cheerleader? Does she have a recipe she can give me? Oh, that would be great! Give me a pen, I'll write it down. - V.W.

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I Swear It Was An...

If for some reason it’s been important to you that the news and you remain total strangers for about a month, here’s a spoiler alert.


Don’t read further. You’re about to find out what I just learned.

Notes From Under Ground

Really, I was trying to be a good parent. Our son’s school sent us an electronic school newspaper. The email note to which the PDF version of the publication was attached said it was a pretty big deal for the kids because it had been some years since the school had a venue for students to practice journalistic skills.

So I thought okay and I finally got around to downloading the thing. I felt unconflicted as far as the Van Winkle Project went. From the beginning local news has been declared “legal” for me whenever it is delivered from first-hand witnesses. So I'm thinking there should be no problem in letting the students tell me about what’s been going on at their school, right? It will be good for me to know what’s happening on campus.

I was just scanning the document, bumping up against and bumping beyond a bevy of headlines about football, volleyball, new additions to the art room, comparing and contrasting social networks (yawn), and then I reached page three. Wait a minute! I was suddenly staring at the blatantly verboten. A headline about world news. I was stunned. A publication for a school of 300 was for some reason deeming it apt to report on events in a foreign country nearly 5000 miles away. There it was in hard, cold print:

Chilean Miners Rescued 

In a Miner Key

That’s all I read. But the damage was done. I had planned to blog about the miners still being underground since the rescuers weren’t supposed to have a way out prepared until around Christmas. Last I had heard on Sept. 11 before I went to “sleep was that they were okay, but it was important that they exercise. Also, some of them might have to lose weight to be pulled up the narrow hole that was being drilled through a half mile of rock. I thought I’d offer some suppositions about how they might be passing the time.

- Card games, including Chilean Hold 'Em?

- Watching Three's Company reruns on small TV lowered down to them?

- Finally time enough to read Proust's Au Recherche de Temps Perdu?

- Writing screenplay about their adventure, Big Misters No Sunshine?
- Sweatin' to the Oldies?

And I’d wonder too if it might be possible to get wi-fi half a mile beneath the surface of the earth. (Preliminary answer to my own question: Probably not or Starbucks would have already opened in mines.)

I recognize that’s all a lost opportunity, but at least I learned a lesson from this. Assume nothing. Stay away from all publications. I don’t even trust the church bulletin or the KFC coupons that come in the mail.

And I’m left to wonder. How did they get the miners out so fast? It must have been exciting, right? Were BP execs there taking notes on how to deal quickly and efficiently with the aftermath of a disaster and do it way ahead of schedule? Inquiring minds want to know these things. But don’t tell me. I’ll find out the details in about, let’s see, nine months. Oh my. Anyone seen my deck of cards? - V.W.

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Mandatory Post-Election Post

 So I voted!  Or at least I think I did. I chose to participate in the early voting the week before the mid-term elections. I clearly remember sliding up to a little fold-out machine in the grocery store hard by the produce section and the in-store florist. I was particularly inspired by the leftover pumpkins, some cucumbers, and the bags of mixed nuts, all of which reminded me of various candidates I know.

But funny thing, it hardly seems like I actually exercised my constitutional right because by the time the actual election day, Tuesday, rolled around I found myself going  about my normal stuff (prepare for and teach class, work on my novel, cook dinner, do some reading) Because of the rigors of this project, throughout the day and into the evening I saw no evidence of an election, heard no conversations about it, read no headlines about the predicted results, or heard any election eve analysis.

It was just another day to me.

Believe it or not, Nov. 2, 2010, felt very peaceful. The sun was shining. The air was still. It was hard to imagine anything of consequence was going on.

As for my early vote, it had already become so dim in my memory it was as if I had scratched an itch and that itch was days ago and who is going to make a mental note of such a thing?

Of course, this is no way to participate in a democracy. It's as if Rip Van Winkle did a bit of sleepwalking and in the process he cast a ballot and then he went back to sleep. Are we supposed to let a vote like that even count?

But I did vote. I'm sure I did. I have this picture...

See? Now I feel better. Even though one, two, three, four days after the results of the voting were announced I still have no idea who won, and if I were to stop and think about that I'd probably feel...

Zzzz... - V.W.


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