A One Sentence Review of a 562 Page Book

John Franzen swings for the fences with his new novel Freedom, and in a sense his Tom Wolfe-esque survey of America-- through the eyes of a disaffected athlete/housewife, an angry environmentalist, and a holier-than-thou indie rock star-- is spot on; he lampoons, ridicules, and skewers pretty much everything about modern language, relationships, liberalism, conservatism, sex, and-- of course-- freedom . . . it's a very, very long version of the REM song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" but the book needs an editor, it eventually folds back unto itself and becomes repetitive and Franzen pushes a narrative trick too far, but even though I skimmed the last hundred pages, there is a wonderful set piece at the end about song-birds and feral cats and I will give the novel eight cerulean warblers our of a possible ten, for its realism, its scope, and its archetypal characters that invite you to compare your own modern philosophy to theirs . . . but I should warn you, although there's a bit of a pay-off at the end, most of the book is mired in an existential irony that will make you question the significance of your life, and perhaps the significance of any human life on this wonderful green planet we inhabit.

Is This A Joke?

A Jordanian, an Indian, a Cop, a Slovakian Chemist, a Sicilian, and Red Headed White Guy walk into a bar . . . but it's not a joke; it is my adult league soccer team out for beers after a 10-3 win: improbably, we are now 5-0.

Kids These Days

So I'm eating lunch in the English office and this kid walks in without knocking-- which is totally unacceptable-- and he picks up this huge oblong case with a handle and a faux-alligator skin exterior, and I say to him: "Hey, what is that? An accordion?" and he says: "Yeah, it's an accordion," and he walks out without complimenting me on my correct guess, and-- in my eyes-- not acknowledging my guess was even ruder than not knocking on the office door because there could have been anything in that case, it could have been a type-writer or a set of silverware or a geode collection . . . but I guess that's how it is with the kids these days . . . or maybe that's how it is with accordion players these days.

Listen to Uncle Genghis

In Imperial Grunts, a fairly positive review of American special forces around the world, Robert Kaplan does remind us that we could have avoided our misadventures in Iraq if we would have remembered what Genghis Khan said: "Conquering a country while mounted is easy, but dismounting and building a nation is difficult."

Sometimes My Wife is Retarded Like Me

My wife had a long stressful day at work on Monday (she went to the wrong school for her work shop, and then when she finally found it, it turned out to be boring and useless) and then we had to coach our K/1 soccer team (and they were especially insane, perhaps because it was Columbus Day and they didn't attend school) and then she dumped the silverware all over the floor, and then-- despite her long and stressful day-- she set up at the kitchen table and started grading papers-- and after a few minutes, I asked her what she was doing with the chicken and she said she was going to have it for dinner and then five minutes later her mistake dawned on me, and I asked her if she thought she had put the chicken in the oven and she said, "Don't tell me I left it on top of the stove," and I said, "You left it on top of the stove," and she said, "Dammit, can you put it in the oven for me?' and I did and I was glad to do it because once in a while it's nice to see her act as retarded as me.

Fifty Percent Canine/ Fifty Percent Feline

In the early chapters of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Guy Deutscher contrasts the difficulty children have obtaining the names for colors with their powerful pattern recognition algorithms . . . they may have trouble discerning the difference between blue and green but they never mix up a car and a boat, or a dog and a cat; this makes me recall a particular example from our adventures in Syria, we were staying in a hotel at the foot of the largest, most impregnable, and best preserved crusader castle in the world, the Krak des Chevaliers, and, once darkness fell, a weird, keening screaming began echoing in the hills-- it sounded like hordes of frightened children-- and when we asked one of the hotel employees what produced the wails, he said, "the chucker . . . it is half dog and . . . . . . . half cat," and though I loved imagining these cryptic and impossible creatures, we later learned they were jackals.

A Wheelbarrow?

Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there was standing water full of goose-shit all along the near sideline-- but luckily there was a pile of sand near the goal . . . so all we needed was a way to carry the sand over to the puddles so we could fill them in; I asked my players what we could use to move the sand and one of them suggested "a wheel barrow," which I told him was a great way to move sand, but unfortunately, we didn't have a wheel barrow (and honestly, would I have even asked that question if I had a wheel barrow?) but then in a flash of coaching brilliance I realized I had enough orange practice cones to give every player two, and so we formed a cone brigade and filled the puddles fairly quickly, but apparently this wasn't the best way to warm up for the game because we gave up three goals in the first half (we were playing into a strong wind and trying to score on the muddy side of the field and they had a big fast kid with a mustache, but that's still no excuse for giving up three goals) and then we gave up a fourth goal early in the second half and I was getting ready to call it a day when we finally knocked one in . . . but 4-1 in soccer is still pretty much insurmountable (even with some wind) but then one of my players literally ran a ball into the goal with his chest and our kids realized that they could score and so we knocked in two more to tie it up, and had the ball on their goal line twice in the last minute, and you've never seen kids so happy about a tie.

Terry Recalls the Best Story About Dave

Like all people, I am both intrigued and apprehensive about how others perceive me, and so-- during an office conversation on the interplay of genetics and socialization in establishing gender roles-- Terry asked to the new teacher: "You want to know the best story about Dave?" and though she didn't seem to want to know The Best Story About Dave, it was intriguing to me, because I didn't know The Best Story About Dave, and so I asked Terry to enlighten me (and I was hoping it was one of my great teaching moments or when I saved that crippled kid from the rampant bear) but unfortunately it was one of my more embarrassing moments (in a long string of them) but the point of this sentence is not to recount this embarrassing incident-- an incident that Terry had a particularly good view of, so that he saw my face when I screwed it into the grimace of an angry three-year old-- the point of this sentence is that Terry said, "And that was pre-Sentence of Dave, so you should write a sentence about us talking about what happened so you can tell the story," and I agreed that it was a good idea, just the sort of content that I put on the Sentence of Dave, but the incident was not pre-Sentence of Dave . . . it was post-Sentence of Dave and here it is.

Some Kids Just Don't Get My Brilliance

Last week I was teaching my students the importance of beginning their college essay with an engaging opening, and I decided to illustrate this with a contrary example; I began my class with an elaborately planned weak opening: I drew an inscrutable diagram on the board, gave vague advice, asked nebulous questions, ignored students when they answered, sorted a folder, took an awkwardly long drink of water, asked a student for an example and then while they read it I rummaged through my cabinet looking for a non-existent hand-out, complained about how late the Giants game went, asked the class if anyone had gum, took a piece of aforementioned gum that a student proffered and took my time unwrapping and chewing it, sat down in my chair and took my glasses off and rubbed my face, stuck my finger in my ear and then looked at the wax while a kid was trying to talk to me, and then-- finally-- started laughing and told them what I had been doing and had them connect the way they felt during my weak opening to how a reader might feel when reading the start of their narratives (they were especially cluttered, vague and weak) and I was quite proud of my brilliance and my convincing acting skills until one girl said, "I really didn't notice anything different than normal."

Sometimes Music Makes You Feel Guilty

Ian has learned how to work a CD player and loves to listen to music, and so I gave him my CD collection (which is housed in one of those giant black books full of plastic CD sleeves) and, of course, he found GodWeenSatan: The Oneness and played "You Fucked Up" and I had to confiscate that one; during his explorations, he had a musical epiphany-- he came into the kitchen and told me, "Different songs make you feel different ways," and then he left the room several times to queue up particular songs, and for each he reported back to me on how they made him feel: "This song makes you feel cool . . . and this song makes you feel sad . . . and this song makes you feel like you did something really bad."

Ian Likes to Move Around . . . A Lot

I did not go to Back to School Night for my kids (since I go to school every day, I don't have to attend) but Catherine reported that Ian's kindergarten teacher likes to teach using music and movement . . . and Catherine was early, so she had a few private words with Ian's teacher, and Ian's teacher euphemistically told Catherine, "Ian really likes to move around a LOT . . . I like to have the kids learn with movement, but Ian really likes to move around . . . a LOT," and this sounds a bit ominous as far as Ian's behavior goes, but-- as I pointed out earlier-- I'm trying not to think about what goes on in that building (although my wife did advise Ian to stop illustrating the demise of Jenny Jump at school so he doesn't get sent to psychological services).

Cold Weather: An Ode

I like it when the weather turns cold because then I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of our house.

The Usual From Zizek

I am making my way through Slovenian super-brain Slavoj Zizek's new book Living in End Times, and interspersed amongst the neo-Marxist philosophy are aphoristic gems such as "religious idealists usually claim that, whether true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people do good things; from recent experience, we should rather stick to Steve Weinberg's claim that while without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things," and then Zizek notes the violence inherent in the New Testament and he cites plenty of scripture to back this up; there are too many passages to cite them all, but here's an example from Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" and another from Matthew: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword . . . for I came to set man against his father, and a daughter against her mother-in-law and a man's enemies will be the members of his household . . . he who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" and this makes me want to read the New Testament again and see exactly what's going on in there.

I Am Not Vacationing in Colombia Any Time Soon

The ESPN documentary The Two Escobars traces the rise and fall of the Colombian national soccer team and drug king-pin Pablo Escobar; it is easy to see how both Escobars come to be venerated in a country without rule of law or government service, the poor will take money from anyone who will provide it, and soccer is their diversion; for an update on this country and what America is doing there, read Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground; it is typical Kaplan, he gets down and dirty in places few journalists dare to travel, and he has the connections to meet the most important (if not the most highly ranked) people and the interviewing skills to get them to talk: in Colombia, he's embedded with the U.S. Army Special forces that are training President Uribe's Colombian Army to combat FARC, narco-terrorists, kidnappers, and the jungle cocaine lords that have replaced Pablo Escobar, and it is a frustrating job because their ROE (Rules of Engagement) prohibit taking initiative . . . they can only fight if someone attacks them, but these salty Green Berets are ready and willing to sustain casualties in order to lead by example; fortunately or unfortunately, our government isn't as ready or willing as they are, and so the hyper-competent American forces have to watch the not so competent Colombian forces they have trained try to accomplish the impossible: bring order to a fragmented, bosky, mountainous and inordinately poor and corrupt land.

Boot Tasting

As I was getting home from work last week, I caught the tail end of a message from the school nurse . . . something about my son Ian being bitten in school, and so I picked up the phone and the nurse told me what happened: my son Ian had gotten into a scuffle with another student and that student bit Ian on the foot . . . but Ian was wearing a rubber rain boot . . . so there was no harm done, either to my son's foot or his rain boot, but there must be some law where the school has to call if a child is bitten or something . . . and perhaps Ian has a little crush on the nurse because he was down there the next day as well because he got hit in the face with a jump rope handle . . . when asked about the boot incident Ian simply said, "he tasted my boot," and that confuses things further . . . is that a euphemism for something else? . . . did the other kindergartener actually want to see what Ian's boot tasted like? . . . and I'm thinking it is best not to think too hard about what goes on in that building.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Put Your Balls Back in Their Proper Place

Stacy needed my crate of assorted balls for a philosophy class activity, and she came to my classroom to remind me (but she could not bring herself to say "I need your balls" in front of my senior composition class, instead she said: "I need that box of sports equipment") and though she also called me over the weekend to remind me, I still forgot to put them in my car; so, on Monday morning, when she asked me for my balls, the only solution that came to mind was that I had a couple of flat soccer balls she could use in my Jeep (which is STUFFED with soccer equipment: cones, bags of balls, pug goals, discs, bags of pinneys, etc.) but when we went out to get the ersatz balls, we found what I was supposed to bring in the first place . . . the crate of assorted balls . . . it had been in my car since the last time she needed them: last year . . . and so the moral of the story is that sometimes it is best NOT to put your balls back where they belong.

Victory?

My adult soccer team improved its record to 3-0 the other night, and once again we beat a team that was younger, more fit, and more skilled than us (they were a group of Irish and British ladies and lads, and the ladies were as good as the lads/ one of them nearly nailed me with a shot in the nads) but two minutes into the game I stepped in a hole and hyper-extended my already bad knee (on a super-excellent move that froze the opposition, you should have seen it, it was graceful and explosive, until I stepped in the hole and my knee buckled and I angrily kicked the ball out of bounds and hopped off the field, muttering things about turning forty) but after some stretching I was able to return and play (though rather lamely) but my knee injury paled in comparison to what happened at the end of the first half on a fairly innocuous play in the box . . . the opposing keeper came out for a through ball and his own defender pushed our player into him and he somehow knocked his head, either on our players knee or the ground, and the play concussed him and/or hurt his neck and he could barely speak and the EMT's had to be sent for and they back-boarded him and taped his head to the neck brace and the whole nine yards and then-- after that long ugly, awkward, delay-- we continued the game but they were a man down and things had soured as far as having some fun on a Wednesday and the injured player's dad went into goal (I think his sister rode in the ambulance to the hospital with him) but then he stomped out of goal when one of our players came close to him (but did not touch him) on a play in the box and part of me was wondering: what the hell am I doing out here when I could be at home having a beer and participating in some safe activity like watching TV or playing my guitar or shingling my roof.

The Paper Heart

Last week, a large wasp found its way into my classroom and the students had the usual reactions-- panic, terror, and the rapid fluttering of arms-- but despite this flurry of activity (and my attempt to lure it out the door by shutting off the lights) the wasp landed on the sleeve of a sophomore boy . . . but he did NOT panic, he remained calm and gingerly held the fabric of his sleeve away from his arm so the wasp couldn't sting him and waited patiently until I flicked it off his shirt and then I swatted it dead with my folder (heavy from freshly collected essays) and so, for his grace under duress, the next day I presented him with what I called "The Paper Heart," an official certificate of bravery that I scrawled on a piece of scrap paper, but I'm not sure anyone got the joke.

When is the Last Time You Felt the Ionian Enchantment?

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's new book Why does E=mc² (and why should we care?) comes close to achieving their goal . . . making you feel that at its heart the universe is orderly and simple because has an underlying simplicity (this is the Ionian enchantment) and the book does it by deriving fairly simple formulas from the Pythagorean theorem to show that the general weirdness of relativity (time progressing at different speeds, nuclear bombs, the universal speed limit, motion affecting size, the four dimensions of spacetime, CERN ) does make logical sense and is a helpful in creating a model of the universe that applies to more than the tiny Newtonian sliver in which we reside (and though this sentence should not be compared to Einstein's earth shattering equation, I would like you to note that I did figure out how to make the two in his formula superscript, which is a pretty damned impressive accomplishment in itself).

Years Later, The Truth Comes out

While we were drinking beers at the local Hooters, my friend and colleague Stacy made a confession: her first year she asked me for a clever way to illustrate and teach personification, and I recommended playing the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse in Your Soul"  for her students . . . months later she played the song for her class and announced to the office that it was a success, and I said, "Wow, I use the same song for personification, what a coincidence," and she didn't really know how to tell me that I had told her to use the song and just figured I was a dopey, spaced out guy and then she forgot all about it and didn't remember until the other night, but now it is all straightened out and it turns out I don't even remember the first part of the incident, so perhaps I am a dopey and spaced out guy.