Joyce Carol Oates Has Got the (Good Book) Look

A few days ago I coined the term "man-ecdote" . . . it's a short tale told by a guy, from a masculine perspective, and if a lady is present, she might chastise him for expressing his outdated chauvinistic views in a post-gender/post-feminist world; here is a real example, recounted by yours truly-- a man-- in the office yesterday . . . at some point when I'm reading a hardcover book written by a woman, I turn to the inside of the dust jacket and appraise the photo of the author, and if she's bookish and frumpy then I'm pleased (as I was with Nancy Isenberg, the writer of White Trash: the 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, who looked exactly as I imagined a chick who would write a dense, polemical history tome would look) but if she's inappropriately good looking for the subject matter (God knows why, but I allow mystery and chick-lit authors a higher attractiveness to credibility ratio) then I'm slightly annoyed and wonder if what I'm reading is worthy of my time, and I think this stems from two (possibly intertwined) reasons:

1) I don't think it's fair that someone who is fit and sexy and put-together has also managed to write a quality piece of literature and/or non-fiction . . . that's monopolizing all the good stuff;

2) I think homely women with weird hair and glasses (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates) are smarter and more pensive than super-hot bombshells and thus they are more likely to have deep and profound thoughts, and so I trust their intellectual discourse more;

while Susan Sontag has alerted me to all the paradoxes and contradictions and stupidity of this kind of thinking, it's still hard to avoid doing it, because I'm a stupid man, full of stupid "man-ecdotes," and-- as a tangential bonus-- I'd also like to point out that if you tell a little story about some caramel glazed egg custard in a flaky and delicious pastry shell, then you've just recounted a "flan-ecdote."

Mortgage Interest and Appreciation

I like when the weather gets cold and rainy because then I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of my house.

You Got Some Bubba Bona Fides?

Nancy Isenberg's treatise White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is a detailed slog through the swampy history of class in America-- in many ways this tale parallels the story of race in our country, with plenty of cultural division, desired separation, but also the paradox of romanticized identification and appropriation-- she starts with the british colonizers dumping the "waste people" in America, and makes her way to Jimmy Carter running a redneck campaign to defeat George Wallace, Burt Reynolds defeating the hillbillies in Deliverance-- the city boys contending with feral rednecks and learning to be "real men" in this country crucible, but then in his next film (Smokey and the Bandit) Reynolds becomes the rednecks he was fighting, and leaves the shackles of society with runaway bride Sally Field . . . scalawags and squatters, indentured servants and trailer trash, they've been with us since the formation of this great nation, and while they were often derided, romanticized, alienated, and disenfranchised, you can't ignore them . . . Honest Abe Lincoln was called a "mudsill" and "Kentucky trash" and Andrew Jackson a "rude ill-tempered cracker," and Bill Clinton confused things the most-- he was deemed "our first black president" by many notables, but also had the reputation as Slick Willie, a fast talking Southern snake oil salesman . . . from Dolly Parton to Daisy Duke to Tammy Faye Baker to Sarah Palin, there's been no easy way to draw the line between white trash tramp and American treasure . . . we all know the tropes, from The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies, on up to Swamp People and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo-- and Isenberg ends with the typical lessons that we all know-- we referring to the educated middle class . . . if you help the poor, there will be a political backlash, and the poor will often vote against their best interests because the people trying to help are portrayed at Northeastern liberal elite bureaucratic monsters, who want to take money from the hard-working salt-of-the-earth and give it to the undeserving, and that real men and women don't need socialist government hand-outs and the men to be admired are those who did it themselves, outside the system, without the sympathy of the city folks . . . and Donald Trump figured out a way--despite his lack of Bubba bona fides-- to appeal to this crowd; it's a load of bulshit, of course, as it's very hard in America to make it out of the trailer or the swamp-- though we espouse the American Dream, we talk the talk but we don't walk the walk (we hand our money down through bloodlines much more than European countries, and we have low rates of social mobility) and there is an element of Social Darwinism and eugenic breeding to American class lines that runs deeper than it should, considering our ultimate aim as a nation-- Isenberg explores this topic in the middle of the book, and she ends by discussing the plight of Billy Redden, the iconic banjo-playing inbred from Deliverance . . . he was chosen because of his odd look, did not play the banjo in the film, and wasn't paid very much . . . in 2012 he was interviewed and talked about his job working at Wal-Mart and how he was struggling to make ends meet, a mythic figure turned mundane . . . this is a comprehensive history, a book that is fascinating and boring by turns, full of detail, but it comes to an end a little before you think, because there are 120 pages of endnotes-- whew-- and while it was a fascinating journey, I'm glad to be out of that world . . . if you want something shorter, try Hillbilly Elegy.

The Test 99: Super Numbers (and Their Origin Stories)

This week on The Test, I give the ladies a numbers quiz with minimal math (although things still get fairly ugly, numerically speaking) and there's plenty of bonus material: I give some parenting advice, Stacey confesses to another crime, and Cunningham says some words that may or may not pertain to the answer . . . so tune in, keep score, and if you don't learn something, I'll give you a full refund.

I Look Generic (and So Does My Car)

I was stopped at a light on Woodbridge Avenue today, and I heard a short "BEEP" but I didn't think it was intended for me; at the next light, I heard the same short, lighthearted "BEEP" and I turned my head and the beep was coming from a postal truck-- the driver, an African American dude that I did not recognize, smiled, flashed me the peace sign, and then drove off . . . I think he thought I was someone else, which is understandable, as I'm pretty generic looking and I drive a gray Toyota Sienna minivan.

Intelligent Life, on Earth and in the Universe

My son Alex has been on my case to read Invincible, a comic series co-written by Robert Kirkman (the writer of The Walking Dead comics) and now that I've finished the first volume, I can see why-- it's excellent: smart, funny, and surprising-- but it's difficult playing the role of the student-- usually I'm telling my children to read this or watch that, and then checking to see if they got it, but now that dynamic is reversed . . . when I asked Alex about a plot-point I didn't understand, I had to suffer his disdain and disappointment over my sloppy reading: he grabbed the book and turned to the page I missed-- a single wordless panel that explained everything I didn't understand, and I immediately knew what it was like to be a student in my Shakespeare class . . . I know where all the key quotations are in the sea of Elizabethan English, and I'm always pointing them out to lost students; anyway, I can see how Alex relates to the story-- it starts as a typical father/son adventure in the framework of a superhero milieu, and it seems the father has an archetypal escaped-from-an-alien-planet-Superman backstory but then you find out that the comic is playing with that trope, and the father is something of a lunatic, from a lunatic alien civilization, and he has a bizarre and abstract master-plan for Earth, his son, his alien people and culture, and everything else in the universe . . . and the son has to grapple with the fact that his dad is a callous overblown maniac in the guise of a father . . . perhaps I'll learn some valuable lessons from reading it.

There is Intelligent Life on Earth

Though Sam Harris often comes off as a pretentious douche (and his podcast has absurdly bombastic theme music) but despite this shortcoming of charm, I really like him and appreciate what he's doing for intellectual discourse; his 100th episode (he makes the Spock-like claim that the number has no special inherent meaning to him, of course) is fantastic-- Harris doesn't speak much, instead he lets Nicholas Christakis do the talking-- Christakis directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale, and he attained some viral video prominence because he was at the center of the Yale Halloween videos with the shrieking African-American girl who had some serious misunderstandings about free speech in America . . . Christakis discusses the current attacks on the first amendment that are happening on college campuses, mob mentality, and some of the clever AI research they are doing at his lab and he comes off as rational, extremely intelligent, empathetic, and compelling . . . so much so that Sam Harris makes an orgy joke!

Of Soccer and Bugs

Sunday we played in Philipsburg and it was ungodly humid and we were assaulted by gnats, and then at practice yesterday I got all bitten up by mosquitoes, and today, despite the fact that we were on a turf field, I got eaten alive by blackflies . . . where is fall?

Dave Unboxes Something!

The Rutgers Expository Writing class stresses the importance of "unpacking" the prompt-- the students need to really mull over the question being asked and carefully analyze all the implications of the language of the assignment-- and so in honor of the first "unpacking of a prompt," I have made an "unboxing video"-- if you're not aware, these videos are extraordinarily popular (and super-weird) . . . I watched a few to get the tone down . . . I also think this is a good time to celebrate the life and exploits of Henry "Box" Brown, a slave who mailed himself from Virginia to freedom in a small wooden crate-- he endured 27 hours of wagon, steamboat, and train transport before arriving in Pennsylvania, to be "unboxed" by the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.

A Sentence in Which No One Gets Whacked

One night this summer, my kids and I began The Godfather-- a movie we greatly anticipated watching together, because we all enjoyed Goodfellas so much-- but then I left for a few minutes to pick up some pizza and when I returned they had turned off The Godfather; I entered heroically with the take-out, and they were sitting there giggling over an episode of How I Met Your Mother and so I asked just what the hell was going on, they said, "It got a little slow and mom said we could turn it off" and I took great umbrage at this, very great umbrage, I ranted and raved a bit about taste, aesthetics, the nature of art, the problems with the American youth, the short attention span of the cell-phone generation, the demise of the great film, and the fact that some things in life are difficult and require perseverance; my wife concluded that I was completely insane, but I shut off How I met Your Mother, sat my kids down with their pizza, and forced them to finish watching The Godfather and even though Ian said he enjoyed it thoroughly, everyone was pissed off at me and thought I was a lunatic . . . of course, the reason I wanted my kids to watch The Godfather was so that they could watch The Godfather II, which is a far better movie (the middle movie in a trilogy is usually the best because the characters are established, but you don't need to wrap everything up in a contrived bow . . . Rocky II and The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers are all good examples of this phenomenon) but I knew I couldn't reenact the whole Godfather enforced viewing fiasco, or I would end up divorced or worse, so instead I negotiated with my children . . . I told them if they watched Godfather II with me, then they could finally watch Deadpool, a movie which I had forbidden them to watch because my students described it as crass, gratuitous and disgusting, but I figured watching a cinematic masterpiece would balance out watching some perverse trash and I'm proud to say that everything worked out for the best: they loved and appreciated Godfather II-- or at least they pretended to do so-- and then they had a friend over and watched Deadpool on Friday night, and I stayed out of the TV room and never saw a second of it, which suits me just fine, and we solved our differences diplomatically, without having anyone whacked.

The Test 98: Brother Can You Spare a Bazillion

Cunningham leads our triumphant return with this extraordinary effort on the federal budget . . . her command of all things fiduciary will leave you breathless, and there's an extra-special heartfelt audio moment when I learn from Stacey that Tom Petty has passed into the great wide open; check it out, keep score, and enjoy our latest episode: The Test 98: Brother Can You Spare a Bazillion?

Make America Tough Again

The recent spate of awfulness-- the mass shooting in Vegas, floods and hurricanes, infrastructure and budgetary problems dealing with floods and hurricanes, the healthcare dilemma, the Equifax hack, the death of Tom Petty, etcetera, etcetera-- all this awfulness centers around a discussion that we seem to be afraid to have in America . . . we're fine talking about how we want to live, and many of us are living quite well . . . but we need to discuss how we are going to die; Republicans need to explicitly confess that they do not think healthcare is a right and that they are willing to let many people suffer and die so other people can have tax cuts . . . Democrats need to stop with all this Bernie Sanders bullshit and explain that if the government completely subsidizes healthcare, the poor aren't going to get great insurance-- they aren't going to have access to all the expensive procedures and drugs that "Cadillac" employer-provided insurance gives you, and so people are going to die-- there are only so many resources and every person can't consume an infinite amount-- it doesn't add up-- so we're going to have to put a price on life- and we're going to have to put a price on information as well . . . all of our information is out there, and if Republicans need to point out that if we privatize health care, you will be burdened by the lack of privacy of your information . . . we also need to discuss the price of having a Second Amendment and how important that is to Americans-- I think it's very important to a certain segment of the country and they have to realize the burden of violence and suicide that accompanies this desire . . . it's not a whole lot different than the fact that cigarettes and alcohol are legal and we tolerate an enormous death toll so we can enjoy those vices, but the discussion needs to be had-- everyone knows the cost of smoking and the dangers of drinking and driving-- but I don't think these other issues are being taught in school, perhaps because they are of a political bent and generally, school curriculums steer clear of politics, but it's time to address them, along with other political hot-button issues such as global warming and our budget for infrastructure projects: are we going to keep paying for houses to be rebuilt in flood zones or are we going to let these areas return to being wetlands? should we make people actually pay for privatized flood insurance? should we keep burning fossil fuels at this rate? should we incentivize solar? are we going to tolerate the massive death toll from having a transportation system based on big human-driven cars or is there an infrastructure alternative? . . . all these issues are existential and we're not tough enough to talk about them-- the Trump administration has actually forbidden the EPA to discuss "climate change"-- the Harry Potter series became insanely popular because it addressed death in a real and realistic way and kids appreciated that, and now the adults and the children in our country need to toughen up as well and have these discussions before it is too late . . . we all want a tax cut, but we've got to realize what that entails: people will die on bad roads, people will die in floods, people will die because they have no health coverage, people will die because of pollutants and carcinogens, people will die at the hands of terrorists and lunatics bearing arms . . . and this all may be worth the price of a tax cut (I really want a new computer!) but we should at least have a frank policy discussion about it before we decide on this course of action and this frank discussion should start sooner rather than later, when people are younger, rather than when they are narrow-minded and entrenched.

The Lament of the Ageing Sprinter

Once I was fast, but alas, that time has passed.

Dave Balances the Scales of Justice!

It's rare that a perfectly just punishment is meted out for a crime-- a reprisal not overly rash and vengeful but also not anemically sympathetic-- but I am proud to say I was able to dish out just such a comeuppance to a student this week . . . last week this particular student took an extra sheet of giant sized easel paper for his group and when he realized that his group already had enough giant sized easel paper and they didn't need this piece of giant sized easel paper, he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash, but I saw him do this and made him uncrumple the piece of paper and reattach it to the pad (this easel paper has a sticky upper edge, like a gigantic post-it note, so this was easy enough) and this week, when this student and his partner had to choose a quotation from "The Apology" by Socrates and then put it on a giant sheet of easel paper and hang it on the wall, I gleefully handed him the sheet that he had crumpled the week before, made him admit that this was the perfect punishment for his crime, and thoroughly enjoyed watching him smooth out the wrinkles so he could legibly write the quotation.

R.I.P. Tom Petty and Our Pet Lizard?

This has been a tough week in our house-- not only did rock legend Tom Petty's soul pass into the great wide open, but it also looks like its curtains for our pet lizard, a crested gecko named Bossk . . . he's been missing since Sunday and at this point, he's probably either died from lack of food, water, heat and humidity or he's been eaten by the dog; my stupid children are one hundred percent responsible for the probable death of Bossk-- which I've pointed this out to them-- because they took the lizard out of the tank (which is fine, he's quite tame) and put him on a toy truck in Alex's room (right by the crawl space door) and then left Alex's room for a moment to get something-- they both left the lizard unattended-- and when they returned (moments later they insist) the lizard was gone . . . and this led to a mad search on Sunday morning, Alex was late for his soccer game and the upstairs looked like Hurricane Maria had passed through . . . but no lizard, so then we set up heating stations and food and water stations in both rooms, but there's been no sign of him (and the dog kept eating the lizard food, a yucky reconstituted vegetable paste) and while I'm sad about Bossk's probable demise, I'm also sort of glad my kids learned this lesson-- because this is at least the third time they've lost the lizard in this manner . . . I found it once clinging to the wall behind a bookcase; so hopefully they've learned that you can't leave a loose lizard unattended (and it's hard for me to actually be angry about this, because my track record with lizards is absolutely awful-- my room mate Rob and I had one in college, which we tried to keep in a wooden bird cage because we liked the aesthetic, but it promptly escaped-- three weeks later it crawled out from wherever it was hiding and died on the rug . . . then, after college, when I was living in a shitty house on Route 18 with eight other people, I had a monitor lizard and when I was away on vacation, someone kicked the heat rock plug out and it froze to death . . . because we were living in a house with no insulation, not an ideal habitat for a tropical creature . . . so anyway, we'll probably replace Bossk with a similar critter and hopefully my kids will keep a better eye on his successor, but-- judging by their ability to learn from their mistakes, I'm not particularly optimistic).

Tom Petty = America

Some people prefer The Beatles, others go for The Rolling Stones (I'm a Stones guy) but everybody, every red-blooded American, loves Tom Petty (and Creedence, of course) and he'll be sorely missed-- not missed in an abstract way, the way people lamented losing the great "talent" of Prince and Bowie-- but missed as a songwriter and as a significant contributor to our shared sonic landscape . . . Tom Petty is the tolerable Bob Dylan, the guy whose songs you listen to if you need to remove a bad song from your head . . . he's the guy I'm most comfortable with on the guitar, and I'm sure that's true for many back porch strummers . . . I once claimed in some hyperbolic G:TB post that "Don't Come Around Here No More" is the greatest song/video combination in the history of music, and I'm sticking to that . . . I learned of his death from Stacey, while we were recording The Test and I was very sad, but then I learned that he wasn't dead yet and I hoped he would recover and make a great late life album, like Johnny Cash and Gregg Allman and Willie Nelson have done, but I guess that's not to be . . . anyway, I'm glad his last album, Hypnotic Eye, topped the charts and I hope another songwriter as talented as Petty comes around sooner rather than later.

Drinking and (Not) Driving

Once autonomous self-driving cars become ubiquitous, it might be time for the United States (and the 12 other countries with a drinking age of 21) to think about lowering that number to resolve the you-can-serve-in-the-military-but-you-can't-order-a-beer paradox.

If You Hate Trump, You Should Read Larry Summers' Blog

If you'd like some anti-Trump fodder with more policy analysis and less ad hominem rhetoric, listen to the new episode of Freakonomics:"Why Larry Summers is the Economist Everyone Hates to Love" . . . Summers is the abrasive genius who has acted as US Treasury Secretary, chief economist for the Obama administration and the world bank, and president of Harvard-- until some remarks he made were deemed sexist and he resigned . . . anyway, Summers explains why many of Trump's economic policies are misguided, why his credibility (or lack thereof) is important to economic issues, and why we can't streamline the government to the extent that conservatives would like; here are a couple of things that I liked:

1) Summers thinks Trump is right in principle about corporate tax reform, though the administration hasn't implemented any policy on this (and Summers has no confidence that they have the know-how to do so) and he uses this wonderful library analogy to explain what we've been doing for the past seven years with corporate taxes:

Permit me an analogy here. Imagine that you are running a library and that there is a substantial volume of overdue books. You might offer amnesty to get people to return the books. You might announce you will never offer amnesty, so people will take fines seriously and return the books. Only an idiot would put a sign on the door saying, “No amnesty now, but we’re thinking hard about amnesty for next month.

You laugh, but American corporations have $2 trillion-plus overseas. If they bring that cash back right now, they pay 35 percent. If you’ve picked up any newspaper in the last seven years, you’ll know that Congress has been actively debating changes to that policy—for seven years. Just like the sign on the door of the library saying they’re thinking about amnesty for next month. It would be hard to conceive a policy better designed to keep that cash outside the US and not invested in the US than the policy we have pursued. That’s why I stress business tax reform as important for economic growth.

2) Summers explains why the government can't be downsized . . . he has several reasons, all of which he explains on his blog-- the piece is short and worth reading-- but the most telling statistic is that the relative price of a TV and a day in the hospital has changed by a factor of 100 since the 1980's;

3) I also like this piece about how "America needs its unions more than ever" about how the balance in power has shifted dramatically from the employee to the employer, and that's not changing any time soon (case in point, my groceries were delivered at 4:45 AM this morning, it was pitch black and the dog started barking when a guy in an Amazon Fresh truck pulled up, got out with a flashlight, and exchanged the containers on our porch . . . all hail Amazon . . . but I hope that guy was getting some overtime pay).

Puns: Enjoy Them While You Can

Once the oceans and the robots rise up and destroy us, after the nukes and the supervolcanoes have exploded, and the straggling remainder are finished off by antibiotic-resistant pandemics . . . once the human race is wiped off the face of this planet, we will not be remembered for our intelligence or our foresight, but hopefully some future civilization will appreciate the thing at which we were the best . . . our sense of humor-- and it is for this alien culture that I write this sentence: yesterday in Creative Writing class I had my students play Scattergories as a brainstorming activity and then told them to apply the methodology to their own imagery piece-- go deep into your brain for details, avoid the obvious, and the sift through what you have and choose the best-- but one girl got obsessed with the game itself and kept searching for categories on her computer:

Student: Dairy products . . . that's a good category . . .

Teacher: That is a good category . . . but you can't just list dairy products for your piece, what kind of tone would that be?

Student: (without missing a beat) A little bit cheesy . . .

and we all rejoiced and then the kids taught me this joke:

why did the mushroom go to the party?

because he's a fun guy!

Stacey Again?

It's rare that an outsider makes my blog twice in one week-- I have so many fascinating thoughts and opinions that it's hard for interlopers to dent my consciousness-- but my friend and colleague Stacey  so perfectly described our hot, humid cesspool of a high school that I've got to put it in print . . . she said being in our school is like being at a crowded public indoor pool, perpetually, except of course there's no water to jump into . . . it reminds me of when my kids were little and they took swim lessons over at Rutgers in the wintertime, and I'd have to wait around for them, sweating and overdressed, everything moist and slick with condensation . . . I'd try to read but it was just too gross to concentrate-- luckily, the weather has broken and fall is here, but I'll happily (and indignantly) use the same analogy at the end of the school year.