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Glaciers melting in the dead of night
And the superstars sucked into the supermassive . . .
(supermassive black hole)

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I was a quick wet boy, diving too deep for coins
All of your street light eyes wide on my plastic toys
Then when the cops closed the fair, I cut my long baby hair
Stole me a dog-eared map and called for you everywhere

Have I found you
Flightless bird, jealous, weeping
Or lost you, American mouth
Big pill looming
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Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

---Mary Oliver

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by Walt Whitman:


A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
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This one courtesy of colleague Matt Seccombe. Thanks, Matt!


Emily Dickinson, Letter (1858)

I hope your cups are full.
I hope your vintage is untouched.
In such a porcelain life
one likes to be sure that all is well
lest one stumble upon one's hopes
in a pile of broken crockery.

My friends are my estate.
Forgive me then
the avarice to hoard them!
They tell me those who were poor early
have different views of gold.
I don't know how that is.

God is not so wary as we,
else He would give us no friends,
lest we forget Him!
The charms of heaven in the bush
are superseded, I fear,
by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.


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Am loving their album The Shepherd's Dog.

Thanks, Kristin Stewart!

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We saw some great art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. I particularly liked a lot of the 1930s government funded art projects. They had a glow about them and strong compositions. I liked the folk exhibit too, with all those landscapes of bare trees. Below are some public works pieces by Max Cohn, Beulah Bettersworth, Martha Hennings, Martha Levy, and Pino Janni.

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All fiction is the same:

1. Goal
2. Obstacle
3. Resolution

When it comes to love stories of the past, the goal is true love, the obstacles are many, and the resolution some sort of miracle that, in its way, mirrors the miraculousness of love itself.

But now things are difficult---or, rather, easy. The traditional obstacles are all but gone:

Family feud
Class differences
Money problems
Marriage status
Previous promises
Terrible misunderstandings that a lack of open discourse in traditional societies keeps from being resolved

Even the most intractable of these---one of the protagonists being married---is no longer an issue.

Some have said that the love story is dead, but this is crazy. In the eternal ingeniousness of human creativity we've come up with a solution: vampires. Or shapeshifters. Or werewolves. Or even wizards. In the absence of societal barriers we're erected supernatural ones, and this has turned out quite well. Just looking at one of these stories (Twilight), we have not one barrier but a plethora:

1. Edward has to stay away from Bella because her smell is so alluring to him
2. Edward can no longer stay away from her, but has to hide his nature, which becomes increasingly difficult as he shows up to save her from thugs and careening SUVs
3. Edward confesses his nature but tries to talk her out of associating with him
4.Bella continues to associate with him but he won't let their relationship progress physically
4. Their physical relationship slowly becomes more comfortable but his nature becomes a magnet for outside threats to her
5. The outside threats are defeated, but their relationship may be doomed because Bella will age and Edward will not

Each of these obstacles are logical and progressive, and most of all real, given the imaginative universe in which they take place.

A book published a few ago was called The End of the Story of Love, and its author proposed that the love story has lost its effectiveness as a potent cultural narrative. Her reasoning was that major authors no longer write love stories and that her coterie of fifty-something divorcees in New York no longer look to romantic love for transcendence. My reaction to this was that her divorced, middle-aged friends are perhaps not the best test sample for this theory but also that serious literature is not the only or best indicator of cultural relevance (there's also popular literature, movies, and so on).

More important, though, are two other things: (1) As noted above, realistic love stories now lack a cultural context with requisite obstacles. And (2) writing a love story directly, rather than symbolically, requires a rare talent. What I mean by that is that the obstacles in love stories, at least in part, are analogies for the real, persistent psychological obstacles to love. We may not know what it feels like to be married to a rich but cruel count while pining for the young, handsome gardener in 18th-century England. But we do know what it feels like to be a 25-year-old college grad in an entry-level job, going on blind dates, cruising bars, feeling hopeless, and battling despair over ever finding a soul mate. And if we are lucky enough to find that soul mate, it feels as miraculous as if that gardener had gathered us up on a borrowed steed, spirited us away to a country cottage, and then found out he was a duke separated from his aristocratic parents at birth.

But to write directly about the obstacles of love requires a patience and talent that few seem to have. It's not about gossiping society, strategic fortune-seeking, or secret rendezvous. It's about what goes on in the mind, and that's hard to write about. Two of the best writers in this vein are Marilynne Robinson and Ian McEwan. McEwan's On Chesil Beach is about the best novel I can imagine on the interior shifts of mind that constitute our progression, or frustrated attempts, toward love. The fact that the bulk of the novella takes place during one evening makes it even more remarkable. It's a play-by-play of human emotions, thoughts, defenses, cultural assumptions, stupidity, and desires---a real tour-de-force in a hundred-page package.
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Here is a great half-hour of dance music:

Time, Chris Cornell
Sweet Revenge, Chris Cornell
Put on Your Boots, U2
Stand Up Comedy, U2
Fez - Being Born, U2
Spotlight, Mute Math
Supermassive Black Hole, Muse

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I'm reading the Icelandic sagas right now, and here are some of the choice names from these sagas (written in the 13th century about events in the 9th and 10th centuries):

Gorm the Old
Snorri Sturluson
Odd Ofeigsson
Olvir Hump
Thorolf Blister-pate

and my personal favorite:

Ragnar Shaggy-breeches

You can really see the influence of these sagas on Tolkien once you start reading.
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Picking up from the last post . . . Neither private nor public sector will function well without a healthy culture of responsibility, thoughtfulness, economy, and so on. Obama appointed something like a chief efficiency officer to try to pursue his goal of funding programs that work and slashing those that don't. Two programs that work come to mind and also show that help for the needy doesn't necessarily mean a cash handout.

One has to do with parenting classes. I've often thought that a short course on parental support for students should be required in order to enroll a child in public schools. This is the kind of thing that is likely to draw fire from both liberals and conservatives, as liberals consider it to be paternalistic and conservatives consider it to be an infringement. But Julie was telling me about a study of low-performing kids from low-income families. The study followed a group of kids who had low cortisol levels in the brain at times when, with normal stimulation, the cortisol should be elevated. The researchers divided the kids into two groups, a control group and a group whose parents were given counseling on parenting. By the end of the study, the group whose parents had parenting lessons showed normal cortisol levels; the control study did not change.

Another program was one run by a neighbor of ours who works in a prison. He does drug counseling for inmates---something like three times a week until the inmate is released. But he received a grant to increase counseling to five times a week during jail time, and then several times a week for 6 months following release. The group with extended counseling after release had a much lower recidivism rate than those without.

I think this last study is particularly interesting because it shows how good programs (not all programs, but good ones) are not only charitable but economical. It's surely cheaper to provide 6 months of additional counseling than to have the offenders back in jail for an additional sentence.
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I had a great discussion with my Republican friend Julie today over coffee. We were discussing the pros and cons of government versus private sector, and it helped me clarify my views. I am very supportive of private sector, but also see a role for government. Any human endeavor is going to have a certain amount of waste and stupidity, and we have seen in the last few years---first with Enron, then with the subprime mortgage mess---that this is true of the private sector as much as the public sector. The trick is to try to create a culture that minimizes waste and maximizes effectiveness---not easy to do in either sector.

In addition, each sector has an advantage over the other: the private sector has the advantage of the profit motive, but the public sector has the advantage of a long-term perspective. While private companies have to look at their immediate profit, government can devise policies that ensure long-term well-being---though both profit motive and the long-term perspective only work with relatively wise and ethical leadership.

The Enron mess is the perfect example of short-term perspective and short-term profit motive adding up to a disaster. The Bridge to Nowhere is the perfect example of lack of profit motive gone wild.

Culture is at the root of everything. In the end, we will flourish as a society only to the extent that we can promote thoughtfulness and a strong ethical stance. The question of how to do this, how to change behavior and thought patterns, is the big question.
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From the Washington Post (but not my friend Desson):

"Zac Efron Charms in '17 Again'; Now If Only Our Boy Had Edge"
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Her name is Jasmine.
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Reading Desson Thomson's review of Fast & Furious with Vin Diesel for the Washington Post, I thought, "THIS is what the review of a genre picture should look like":

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“Fast & Furious,” which re-teams Vin Diesel and Paul Walker for the first time since 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious,” watches everything through a guy-calibrated telephoto lens. [. . .] The guy-centric principles remain the same. The things of beauty in the “F&F” universe? Nitro-jacked speedsters that do horizontally what the Cape Canaveral program does vertically. The six-pack-abbed guys standing next to those cars. And bullet-shaped Corona beers, so men can raise them to victory or—as one character so grandiloquently puts it—“to the ladies we’ve loved and the ladies we’ve lost.” As for the “ladies,” guys love ‘em, of course. But only the ones with 8 percent body fat need apply. The real love in their lives? Their rides, natch. And their fellow gearheads. [. . .]

As for the death-cheating, it’s still in full throttle. Take the breath-choking opener, for instance, as Dom and a team of dragsters attempt to hijack the gasoline cargo of a speeding truck. We can practically see oblivion in special-effect relief as a derailed tanker flips, pirouettes in balletic slow motion and hurtles toward Diesel. [. . .]

What blows our lizard brains is the possibility of fiery destruction—this subgenre’s equivalent of the money shot. If that somersaulting tanker hits Diesel in his juiced-up car, the explosion’s going to shoot out like a nuclear geyser. And if Dom and Brian wipe out in those crowded streets, well, boom baby boom! [. . .] So long as the filmmakers keep giving us vicarious access to the good, fast, sleek things in life, we don’t see this ride running out of fuel for a long time.

***

There's no "it's all very silly" or "it's a tween male fantasy" or "I'm embarrassed to say I kind of enjoyed it, for what it is." No sir. Not to say that there's no review like that, but there are reviews like this as well.

What I like about Desson's review (and I can call him Desson because we've emailed) is that it is exuberant and that it focuses on the positive. And by "positive" I don't mean sunshine and rainbows. I mean it in the sense of bas-relief: You look at what IS there, and you acknowledge that what is not there (the negative space, what has been left out or carved away) is what makes the positive possible.
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As I told myself that a certain policy at work was "corporate proceduralism gone berserk" I remembered that a berserker was a a type of Viking warrior. This type of warrior would work himself up into a frenzy before battle, such that he wouldn't feel pain in the midst of it. Berserkers were feared warriors back in 9th-century AD northern Europe.

It's crazy to think that the term for this small group of warriors in a small society has endured 12 centuries and is a common word today, even if most people don't know where it came from. It's as if, 1200 years from now, the term "couch potato" had endured and become the term, all over Asia, for a lazy dropout.
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I like this Brazilian artist:

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I just watched the season finale of this incredible show, which has been renewed for a couple more seasons. It was perfection: there was joy and difficulties and strength. Plus, Coach Taylor Smiles! (cf. Garbo Laughs!) I love the final scene at the wedding where "When a Man Loves a Woman" plays while the camera goes from couple to couple, highlighting all the different ways that love expresses itself: from holding on to letting go.
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I've been thinking about what might endure in modern art---only very superficially, and I have to admit to only a light grasp on the values at play in the type of art below. But here are a handful of pieces featured in Art in America magazine recently:

This painting by Julie Langsam is pretty and even interesting. But even with its modernist band of color blocks at the bottom, it seems too embedded in established tradition to be of lasting interest:






















Then there's this piece by Nayland Blake. This kind of art (not pretty, using everyday objects, especially referencing childhood) is a break from tradition and so can make a claim to furthering art history. But it's really hard to imagine anyone taking an interest in it aesthetically in years to come:
























Then there's conceptual art, like the famous canned feces by Piero Manzoni. This doesn't even seem like visual art to me. It's really narrative art: You write/hear/think the phrase "the artist canned his own s**t" and that's really the artwork. You don't need or want to see the object itself:


























This piece by Sterling Ruby is what I like best in modern art. It's new, it couldn't have been produced in an earlier era, but it's also a truly interesting visual object:



















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My friend Ratul sent me a link to this article about street children in India watching a screening of Slumdog Millionaire.

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Fun weekend. On Saturday we celebrated Eve's birthday with (1) some play time with the kids, (2) a long, lingering afternoon of chatting at Sherwood Gardens, soaking in the sunlight and beauty, and (3) dinner at Petit Louis, which fell short for me this time.

On Sunday we had book club, discussing 1984. One thing that impressed me, rereading the novel after all these years, was that Orwell created an enduring imaginative world. If you say Big Brother or Doublespeak, it conjures an immediate image---not just a political situation but a visual world of windowless monolithic buildings, ubiquitous two-way television screens, dull flats, unappealing food.

After book club I met Julie at Ed and Tim's house, where Ed made a wonderful risotto primavera before we headed out for the Chris Cornell concert. Great concert---high energy, fantastic musicianship, and, needless to say, amazing performance by Chris. It is amazing that he can have screamed those high notes for the last twenty years and still have an incredibly beautiful and strong voice. He seemed totally immersed in the music and very connected to the audience, which in turn was very connected to him.

I got back from DC a few hours ago, took Rocky for a walk, then had a long soak in the bath. Pret-ty nice weekend.

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It is not my fault that the Twilight series provides a steady stream of obsession-inducing materials. The latest: the movie soundtrack. Two-thirds of the songs I'm not interested in, but there is:

Supermassive Black Hole, by Muse: great rock song
Full Moon, by The Black Ghosts: atmospheric
Never Think, by Rob Pattinson: could be Tom Waits if you didn't know better

and most of all:

Flightless Bird, by Iron and Wine: wow; beautiful song
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Thursday's Post

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For today:
Go back and look at Ronan Farrow's eyes again.
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