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Happy Fathering Day
Just back from a transformative and less debauched gathering of men at Hidden Falls. The focus was fatherhood; biological, emotional, spiritual. We shot guns, roasted whole hogs, and acted like wild-haired buffoons...except when we didn’t. We talked about what we desired in our own fathers and how we could use that desire as a sort of compass in our own lives. Simple, I know. But powerful. And so understated in our own lives as we live them. Many of us sons are fatherless, either estranged, abandoned, or simply distant from the men who raised us. Many fathers feel diminished, useless, lost, confused. Our own President is fatherless, raised by his mother and grandparents.
As my Father’s Day kicks off, I wanted to offer up a prayer for all us fathers and sons and also harken back to a recently-recovered biograph entry that highlights all my jumbled emotions.
Even as a divorced dad, I still have the opportunity to influence my children for good, to seek out the opportunities to be with them, to hold them, to guide them, to be the father I had only too briefly. The central tenets of life still hold true. It’s never too late. You can break the cycle and reconnect the distant chords. You can make a difference.
Addendum:
Thomas posted his own blog entry on Father’s Day (or Children’s Enslaved Day as he calls it). Like he said, he and William made me breakfast (all by themselves) and they got me a brand new Weber BBQ grill (fancy). I really could not be happier.
You forget what you want to remember...
...and you remember what you want to forget.
Dimension Films has released the first trailer for The Road.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
Esquire, known for its understatement in all things entertainment, has declared it the most important movie of the year.
I'm sorry, the page is out of order
In other news...
Bud Shrake passed away earlier in the week. After Poodie and Stephen Bruton, this comes as hard news for Willie I’m sure. Too many damn good Texans are dying up in here.
And...
Some good advice from a new book for parents, The Idle Parent:
Drink as much beer as you can and lie in bed.
Children actually have an inbuilt self-protective sense that we destroy by over-cosseting. They become independent not so much by careful training but in part simply as a result of parental laziness. Last Sunday morning, Victoria and I lay in bed till half past 10 with hangovers. What a result! And the more often you do this, the better, because the children’s resourcefulness will improve, resulting in less nagging, less of that awful "Mum-eeeeeeeh" noise they make. They can play and they will play.
So lying in bed for as long as possible is not the act of an irresponsible parent. It is precisely the opposite: It is good to look after yourself, and it is good to teach the children to fend for themselves. Our offspring will be strong, bold, fearless, much in demand wherever they go! Capable, cheerful, happy. It is also the task of the idle parent to ensure as far as possible that all members of the family are enjoying themselves here and now, in the present moment. There is far too much emphasis on that imprisoning capitalist abstraction "the future." There is no point in sacrificing pleasurable todays for the promise of more prosperous tomorrows. So stay in that bed as much as you can.
You're Fine, Don't Look
Why Twitter is evil.
To quote the over-quoted Shawshank Redemption...
"Get busy living or get busy dying."
BTW, and apropos of nothing other than laying out my life for people who take the time to come here:
I’m getting married to a beautiful woman who is everything I ever wanted and needed and loved.
I know it may be hard to accept for those who know me nominally, but love does find you in the oddest of places and in the oddest of times. Trust me on this. I’ve been busy living the fulfillment of that notion.
I’ll write more. I promise. After Costa Rica and after I’m settled back into this grand and wonderful life.
edgar allan piamp
"Poe was also a player of hoaxes, a plagiarist, had a substance abuse problem, and couldn’t keep a roof over his head. Poe was a proponent of slavery, the worst sort of would-be social climber, and married a 13-year-old girl in his cousin Virginia Clemm. None of this information is new, of course — these fun facts are probably the answers to a fill-in-the-blank quiz given each year in some sixth-grade classroom in Ohio. The problem is that Poe has been so completely taught that he is very rarely read with the eyes of a reader."
Poe at 200.
Another writer that the American classroom killed.
rabbit at rest
“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”
John Updike is dead at 76.
my give-a-shit spring is about to bust
He has lived here, on and off, for two years, ever since the island was built. How do you build an island to put an oil rig on? You wait until the ocean freezes. You can’t dig water, but you can dig ice. You dig to the bottom and excavate a foundation, about eleven acres in all. You find a source of gravel—in this case, a pit ten miles away—because you need a lot of it. Crews built ice roads and started hauling. They kept hauling, 20,000 truckloads, traveling a total of 400,000 miles, the equivalent of about sixteen trips around the world. They had to hurry. They had to get it all done before the ice roads melted. They dumped gravel, dumped and dumped, sculpted a six-acre rectangle out of it, then got to work on a retaining wall: more gravel—8,000 sacks of it weighing 13,000 pounds each—one on top of the other, bam, bam, bam, a barrier to fight back the summer sea. They had to hurry. They had to connect the island to shore, six miles away. They dug a trench, a crazy-long trench, in which a subsea flow line would carry oil. It cost $500 million to build this island, not to mention the brawn of constantly revolving crews of as many as 600 people working in temperatures cold enough to kill.
Stirring and sad article about oil rigs in Alaska. [Yep, you read that right. They’re already drilling in Alaska in case you missed that part of the argument.] However, it’s not so much a hatchet job on oil companies as a human interest story about the people that go out and do this kind of brutal work.
it's just like the great depression
Daniel Gross surveys the financial crisis and finds most comparisons to other economic downturns come up wanting:
In 1933, some 4,000 commercial banks failed, causing depositors to take huge losses. (There was no FDIC back then.) The recession that started in August 1929 lasted for a grinding 43 months, during which unemployment soared to 25 percent and national income was cut in half. By contrast, through mid-November 2008, only 19 banks had failed. The Federal Reserve last week said it expects unemployment to top out at 7.6 percent in 2009. Economists surveyed by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank believe the recession, which started in April 2008, will be over by next summer. (Of course, back in January the same guys forecast that the economy would grow nicely in 2008 and 2009.) But don’t take it from me. Take it from this year’s Nobel laureate in economics. "The world economy is not in depression," Paul Krugman writes in his just-reissued book The Return of Depression Economics.
reductio add cheezburger
The lolcats phenomenon deconstructed.
In fact, there’s a whole species of the genus Lol devoted to the tragic: the "lolwalruses," or "lolruses." If lolcats are incorrigible little rascals, lolruses are romantic heroes, born to suffer, whose lives are dominated by the exquisite misery of love lost. The lolrus meme originated with a single diptych. The first panel displays the walrus lovingly cradling a bucket, a look of absurd delight on its face. In the second panel, a trainer is ripping the bucket away as the walrus looks on in helpless panic. And the saga of the lolrus and its beloved bucket takes off from there.
Clearly, I’m moved by these pictures. But what is it about the lolruses and the sad lolcats that is so gut-wrenching?
My former co-workers and I got a lot of laughs out of these pictures at one time. I think there were two levels to the laughter. The first is the gut reaction. Some of these are retardedly funny. But the other was sending around emails with the pictures and having a few people on the list who went from not getting the joke to becoming mildly annoyed. We enjoyed being in on a joke that other people thought was stupid. It was almost as if them thinking this was stupid made it funny in the first place. I’m sure I’m overexplaining the obvious (as I’ve been told I do over and over and over), but it deserves some stating. I had a similar experience at a company called Netpliance. My friend Rob and I started a board with a bunch of absurd quotations and pictures. Every day we’d add some other piece to it. None of it made any sense except to us. But the greatest laughs were generated by executives walking by the board and attempting to discern it. They couldn’t figure out a way to process it. Not only was it not funny to them, but it sort of offended their sense of the universe. What is this meangingless stuff? And yet, at heart, that is what made it all the more funny. I might even go so far as to say that we put stuff up there and laughed at it even prior to them seeing it, knowing what their collective reaction would be.
And, to have the snake fully eat its tail, I think that ultimately there is pathos and shared hope in that experience. The experience of absurdity in the face of ignorance and unknowingness. The experience of having the shared experience that makes death and ignorance and loneliness and desperation something common, something shared, and, ultimately, something that can be triumphed over.
Don’t worry. I won’t get preachy. But I have to say that this sharedness is what I believe the Christian concept of love to be all about. Yes, we’ll all die. Yes, times can be hard. This is not in dispute. What is in dispute is if it means anything at all. And if so, to who?
Gosh (and not Gosh)
David Foster Wallace, dead at 46.
It will take a while for all these apparent "clues" in Wallace’s work to stop pulsing like neon signs when we stumble on them. But that work will outlast the garish particulars of his death. In years to come, no one will be able to dismiss it as the symptomatic productions of a depressive head case: the dread to which he gave artistic shape is too real, too universal. True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we’re all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant."
I’ve linked to this before (or so I imagine), but I do think his commencement speech for Kenyon is well worth reading.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
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