Here is the next (and hopefully final) chapter in the saga of the anti-homework-crusade: today, Alex's teacher made some concessions on the assignment, including:
1) removal of the 150 minimum for each entry;
2) time in class each day to do one entry;
3) she pushed back the due date;
4) the kids get to select their best five journals and they comprise the bulk of the grade;
and then Alex met with her after school and thanked her for revising the assignment; I talked to her on the phone after school and she confirmed what I figured was the case-- she inherited this assignment from her mentor (and then she added the 150 word minimum in an attempt to make it more rigorous, perhaps not fully quantifying the consequences of that choice) and she swore that she would read "thirty percent" of the journals for each child-- so seventeen journals per student-- and since she teaches two honors classes, this adds up to 850 journal entries; I am skeptical of this, but some teachers are gluttons for punishment so perhaps she will wade through all this pre-sophomoric writing . . . I also explained to her that in my district, we don't do any analytical writing at home because the kids cheat and plagiarize, so we make them do the analytical stuff in class-- usually with pen and paper-- and have them read and do more creative stuff at home; she understood this temptation and said that they were going to try to put the journals in to Turnitin, an anti-plagiarism website-- but they were just starting that this year (so anyone with an older brother or sister that took honors English is still set because their work is not in the database) and I couldn't resist expressing how perfectly ironic I found it that this stream-of-consciousness novel of teen disillusionment was being used to make students embittered about education; she countered that some students later expressed that they were glad that they really pushed themselves on this assignment, but it just seems odd to use this particular book to institutionalize kids and I told her that J.D. Salinger is probably turning over in his grave because of the way his novel is being used . . . aside from that monologue, which she endured without complaint or comment, the phone conference was civil and I'm happy that the assignment has been amended . . . the principal and superintendent also got back to me-- as they did through the entire process-- and they're really taking this seriously and meeting with the English department about writing expectations, revising the homework policy, revising the writing assignments, and really revamping how this large scale assignment is being done-- so I guess I really opened a can of worms, and possibly helped to foment some real change in how writing is assigned and assessed and the takeaway is that it was exhausting to "be the change that you wish to see in the world," especially since the change Alex and I wanted was to do less work . . . we ended up putting in a concerted, laborious, and organized effort to advance the principle that we should all be doing less work, and that may be the greatest irony of all.
Surreal Kitchen Accessory in the Guise of a Band Cheers Up a Soggy Version of Dave
I was sitting outside at Pino's-- beer-soaked and annoyed, because I put my pint of Guiness down on a very tilted, rather slick table and it slid off and when I tried to catch it, the glass shattered on the ground and the beer flew all over my pants-- but when I went inside to go to the bathroom, the band was just finishing their set and the lead singer said, "We are Psychedelic Oven Mitt . . . thank you for listening to the noise we make!" and that made me very happy, despite my sogginess, and the next morning I looked the band up on the internet and that made me even happier because they spell "psychedelic" in their own particular style: PSYKIDELEC.
The Continuing Saga of the Anti-Homework Crusade
I've now written several thousand words to administrators and my son's 9th Grade Honors English teacher about the district homework policy-- and despite the fact that I'm a veteran teacher, I'm starting to feel like a crank-- but let me lay out the assignment and the situation so you know what I'm dealing with; my son is reading Catcher in the Rye and he generally has to read a reasonable amount, three chapters a night or so . . . but along with the reading he needs to complete two literary analysis journals per chapter . . . each journal must be at least 150 words and must analyze language, rhetoric, style, metaphors, similes, imagery etcetera-- these aren't free response journals-- and so if he's got three chapters of reading then he also needs to complete 900 words of literary analysis, and there are 26 chapters in the book so this adds up to 52 literary analysis journals . . . or 7800 words of literary analysis . . . 26 pages; in a few weeks, he's doing more analytical writing than we draft in the entire Rutgers Expos course . . . Zman recognized the fact that the assignment is more than ten percent of the length of The Catcher in the Rye . . . and the journals are due at the end of the book and she doesn't give feedback along the way or use them in class, the kids just grind them out (or copy stuff from the internet or steal their older sister's journals or write dream diaries, it doesn't matter because she can't humanly grade them all) and once I really understood the length and insanity of this assignment and how cavalierly disrespectful of time and intellectual energy it is, my only recourse was to find the district homework policy and see if I had a leg to stand on, and it turned out I had three legs to stand on . . . as the assignment is in flagrant violation of three parts of the policy:
4. The number, frequency, and degree of difficulty of homework assignments should be based on the ability and needs of the pupil and take into account other activities that make a legitimate claim on the pupil's time;
5. As a valid educational tool, homework should be clearly assigned and its product carefully evaluated and that evaluation should be reported to the pupil;
7. Homework should always serve a valid learning purpose; it should never be used as a punitive measure;
4. The number, frequency, and degree of difficulty of homework assignments should be based on the ability and needs of the pupil and take into account other activities that make a legitimate claim on the pupil's time;
5. As a valid educational tool, homework should be clearly assigned and its product carefully evaluated and that evaluation should be reported to the pupil;
7. Homework should always serve a valid learning purpose; it should never be used as a punitive measure;
and so I wrote several emails arguing that this assignment was incredibly time-consuming and onerous in nature-- kids were spending all weekend on it, staying up until 2 AM, etc, etc-- and that the teacher was not "carefully evaluating" the product, nor could she ever carefully evaluate the product . . . she was going to receive well over 1000 journal entries from her students, so she might spot check a few or grade a few at random-- and neither option is acceptable-- and the assignment was obviously punitive because she kept telling kids "if you don't like it, drop Honors and go to College Prep," making this some sort of hazing/initiation/badge-of-honor ritual to whip kids into shape and break them . . . so I met with the principal Friday and it was a positive meeting in regards to the fact that they were hearing my concerns and the superintendent and the principal and the head of humanities met today and agreed to discuss this assignment and expectations in general with the English department, but that could be everyone just humoring me and hoping this will blow over, so I told the principal and superintendent that they need to enforce the district policy and my son brought a petition to school today with the district homework policy on it and got a bunch of signatures-- he is going to meet with his teacher tomorrow and discuss the assignment . . . the teacher keeps asking me if Alex needs help on the assignment and I've told her he doesn't . . . he's actually done a great job and he's caught up-- he's done 32 journals, without feedback, which is shameful-- and I've advised him not to do any more writing until he gets feedback on every journal he's written . . . what a shitshow and what a sad way to read Catcher in the Rye (I wonder if Mark David Chapman Had to complete an assignment like this when he read Catcher and it sent him over the edge) and I'm sure this isn't over and I'm going to end up angrily reciting a lot of numbers at a Board of Ed meeting.
The Internet Has Already Thought of Everything You Think
After a fun night out in New Brunswick (and an ill-advised late night snack stop at Giovanelli's-- Whitney declared that would be the last fat sandwich he ever orders . . . we shall see) Mose, Whitney and I tried to catch an Uber, but we had some trouble finding the car, and as we searched Easton Avenue, we boozily riffed about taking a Druber-- a cheaper alternative that had no surge pricing but featured inebriated drivers-- and we all thought this would be a great comedy sketch, but -- the internet being the internet-- some dude (Steve Barone) already thought of this and made a video of the Druber conceit (with surprisingly decent production values) and while the footage definitely needs to be edited, Barone explains in the comments that he is "too busy partying to mix it and do color," which is pretty damn perfect for a Druber video: nice work, Steve Barone!
What Do Squirrels, Candy, and Acorns Have in Common? They're All Delicious!
Today was the first crisp fall day of the season and the squirrels were just brazen-- the acorns have fallen from the oak trees on our street and the squirrels are snacking on them (and socking them away for winter) and my dog desperately wants to snack on the squirrels-- which exhibit no chariness in the least and will barely deign to move from the sidewalk as we pass . . . and it seems unfair, kind of like the fact that we've repeatedly told my son Ian to stop buying candy at Rite-Aid before he goes to school, even though he passes right by the store on his bike and they're always having crazy deals and sales on candy . . . lawyers call this "an attractive nuisance."
Welcome to the (five day workweek) Jungle
I just completed the first five day week of the school year . . . brutal, just brutal, but listening to the smooth sounds of Jungle's new album "Forever" definitely takes the edge off . . . master commenter zman eloquently describes this album as "Zaratsu polished to impossible smoothness."
Dave Goes on an Anti-Homework Crusade
I'm exhausted from writing various emails about violations of my school district's homework policy, in the hopes of getting an extremely imperious and inflexible honors teacher to stop assigning so much needless busy work to accompany Catcher in the Rye . . . I closed out my rather vitriolic and litigious email to the teacher with this closer:
I'm sure the irony that you're taking a book about an anxious and overwhelmed teenager that is disillusioned with the adult institutions around him, and you are using it to make teenagers anxious, overwhelmed and disillusioned is not lost on you.
I'm sure the irony that you're taking a book about an anxious and overwhelmed teenager that is disillusioned with the adult institutions around him, and you are using it to make teenagers anxious, overwhelmed and disillusioned is not lost on you.
Dave Throws This Sentence into the Volcano
I hereby vow to sacrifice these very words and this very sentence to the irate, pus-filled, and vengeful Goddess of Canker Sore, in the hopes that mine will be gone tomorrow.
To Coddle or Not To Coddle
My take on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is that it's based on a fairly reasonable premise:
prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child
and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:
1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker
2. always trust your feelings
3. life is a battle between good people and evil people
and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.
prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child
and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:
1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker
2. always trust your feelings
3. life is a battle between good people and evil people
and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.
Am I THAT Parent?
I'm out of words . . . yesterday I wrote a six paragraph email to my son's Honors English teacher about the amount of homework he has been receiving along with the reading assignments for The Catcher in the Rye, and my screed contained references to Alfie Kohn's book The Homework Myth, a link to a newspaper article about how many districts are easing up on the amount of homework given to honors students, my teaching credentials, the fact that I'm the Middle School soccer coach, some ideas on how to mix up the homework assignments and this insane gem of a sentence:
The “default setting” of always assigning homework is a vestige of the Puritanical and industrialized origins of our education system.
which was also Stacey's favorite sentence in the letter . . . I did exactly what you're not supposed to do-- I wrote something and sent it in the same day (although I did get it approved by my wife) and, of course, after I pressed "send," I thought of a few other ideas that I should have added-- such as the fact that I understand that the assessments and rigor of an honors course should be more intense than a regular class, but just because it's an honors class doesn't mean that you need to do a ton of grunt work . . . anyway, the teacher responded promptly and with a clear explanation of how things would work in the future, and her explanation was reasonable enough to mollify me (for now) but it looks like I have the potential to be that parent.
The “default setting” of always assigning homework is a vestige of the Puritanical and industrialized origins of our education system.
which was also Stacey's favorite sentence in the letter . . . I did exactly what you're not supposed to do-- I wrote something and sent it in the same day (although I did get it approved by my wife) and, of course, after I pressed "send," I thought of a few other ideas that I should have added-- such as the fact that I understand that the assessments and rigor of an honors course should be more intense than a regular class, but just because it's an honors class doesn't mean that you need to do a ton of grunt work . . . anyway, the teacher responded promptly and with a clear explanation of how things would work in the future, and her explanation was reasonable enough to mollify me (for now) but it looks like I have the potential to be that parent.
Bedeviled by the Beverage
A weird Sunday . . . my mind felt foggy and possessed all day, perhaps because I was in the thrall of that dirty old Jersey devil . . . or perhaps because last night I over-served myself Cypress Brewery's new Pale Ale, Dirty Jersey Devil; this aptly named concoction got me into several vociferous gender debates-- my wife had to warn me that I was getting obnoxious-- but I blame the beer for my devilish behavior, and then today, both Ian's team and my travel team lost (1-0 and 2-0 respectively . . . and it's always weird and dreamlike when you play an entire game and it's close and you don't score) and then we went to lunch in the oddly named New Jersey Food Court, which has an unassuming entrance in an Old Post Road strip mall, but once you enter, you're in a dreamy and colorful Asian food wonderland, with fifteen food stalls (and more to come) but while I found some delicious ramen and dumpling soup, Ian and my wife struck out with their food-- they had to wait forever, all the stuff they wanted was sold out, and they didn't like the sticky rice shumai-- so they went next door and got pizza and then we watched a special episode of Sherlock called "The Abominable Bride" and Catherine and I fell asleep in turns, which was perfect for this dreamy time-traveling Inception-esque mindfuck of a story, which ricocheted back and forth between the drugged mind of current Sherlock and a possibly fictitious narrative set in the Conan Doyle era . . . it raises the question of which Sherlock is "real," and the answer, of course, is neither.
Hey Jack Kemp . . . The NFL is the European Socialist Sport!
The new episode of Freakonomics (How to Stop Being a Loser) is another reminder that the NFL-- the world's most lucrative sports league and the symbol of everything right and good about America and capitalism-- is more akin to a socialist monopoly . . . an exclusive cartel featuring profit sharing, aid for failing members (draft picks), subsidized stadiums, and-- thanks to our fearless leader-- a lack of competition . . . meanwhile, soccer at the highest level consists of relegation, competition among multiple leagues (Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, etc.), the fear of bankruptcy if you are relegated (although the Premier league offers a capitalist style "parachute" payment which acts as severance pay, but the team will still have to sell off all it's great players) and the general feeling that you are playing in an enormous market place, where Ronaldo goes to Italy in search of tax relief . . . and you can push the metaphor to the sports themselves; a football team is run by a central authority, and everyone contributes their bit for the good of the whole--individuality is swallowed up by the organization and it is far from a democracy-- most of the players are disposable and replaceable and only as good as how precisely they obey orders; soccer is played by small committees, who do what they want and vote with passes and touches, the coach has little control once he puts the players on the field, everyone thinks their own thoughts, engages in creative destruction, and makes their own autonomous contribution to the victory . . . and so when Republican Jack Kemp called soccer a "European socialist sport" he was wrong on all accounts and it is in fact far more capitalist than it's American homograph.
To Veal or Not to Veal?
During a recording session, Cunningham, Stacey and I all proudly virtue signaled the fact that we don't eat veal . . . but perhaps this isn't as benevolent as it seems; in fact, we might be all the more monstrous because while we don't eat baby cows, we're not vegetarians-- all three of us eat beef-- before we eat a cow, it lives for a longer period of time-- probably suffering in terrible conditions-- and also, due to the longer life and larger size, this cow has time to release many more clouds of methane-laced flatulence into the atmosphere . . . so maybe if we're going to eat cows, we should eat veal and kill them while they are young, small, and haven't farted all that much.
Dear People Who Still Read Books
Dear Readers,
I'd like to give my highest recommendation for Julie Schumacher's novel Dear Committee Members (and while I know that's not saying much, as I realize that I spit out "must see" and "must read" endorsements like a demented Pez dispenser . . . has anyone watched Detectorists yet?) and I'm not espousing this novel simply because it's written from the point-of-view of an irate Creative Writing and English professor who might have a heart of gold (or maybe silver or brass . . . but a good heart nonetheless) who resides in a building that is decrepit in a department that is undermanned and underfunded (while the sciences and economics departments are showered with praise, money, and facilities) nor am I enamored-- as a Creative Writing teacher might be-- by Schumacher's use of the epistolary form: the novel is written entirely through Professor Jay Fitger's rambling, candid, sincere and sometimes confessional letters of recommendation-- and he is called on to write many many letters, for a variety of students, colleagues, graduates, etc. and he uses them to try to have some control over a future which dismays him more and more . . . anyway, the main reason I am recommending this book is it is very very funny . . . I've been doing a lot of heavy reading and listening lately, and this book was a breath of fresh air, a gem and a prize-- it took me two days to read . . . if you remember Richard Russo's Straight Man fondly, you will love this novel even more, and Schumacher has just published a sequel, which has good reviews, so I'm sure I'll read that as well-- anyway, I'll end this LOR with some random lines from Fitger's letters so you can peruse the tone and decide if you want to take a break from partisan politics, Supreme Court hearings, immigration snafus, and heinous weather events . . .
Bombastically Yours,
Dave
The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.
Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.
Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved
(Ms. Frame faithfully taking minutes) during which a senior colleague, out of his mind over the issue of punctuation in the department’s mission statement, threatened to “take a dump” (there was a pun on the word “colon” which I won’t belabor here)
My own writing interests me less than it used to; and while I know that to teach and to mentor is truly a calling, on a day-to-day basis I often find myself overwhelmed by the needs of my students—who seem to trust in an influence I no longer have, and in a knowledge of which, increasingly, I am uncertain—and by the university’s mindless adherence to bureaucratic demands.
you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive.
I'd like to give my highest recommendation for Julie Schumacher's novel Dear Committee Members (and while I know that's not saying much, as I realize that I spit out "must see" and "must read" endorsements like a demented Pez dispenser . . . has anyone watched Detectorists yet?) and I'm not espousing this novel simply because it's written from the point-of-view of an irate Creative Writing and English professor who might have a heart of gold (or maybe silver or brass . . . but a good heart nonetheless) who resides in a building that is decrepit in a department that is undermanned and underfunded (while the sciences and economics departments are showered with praise, money, and facilities) nor am I enamored-- as a Creative Writing teacher might be-- by Schumacher's use of the epistolary form: the novel is written entirely through Professor Jay Fitger's rambling, candid, sincere and sometimes confessional letters of recommendation-- and he is called on to write many many letters, for a variety of students, colleagues, graduates, etc. and he uses them to try to have some control over a future which dismays him more and more . . . anyway, the main reason I am recommending this book is it is very very funny . . . I've been doing a lot of heavy reading and listening lately, and this book was a breath of fresh air, a gem and a prize-- it took me two days to read . . . if you remember Richard Russo's Straight Man fondly, you will love this novel even more, and Schumacher has just published a sequel, which has good reviews, so I'm sure I'll read that as well-- anyway, I'll end this LOR with some random lines from Fitger's letters so you can peruse the tone and decide if you want to take a break from partisan politics, Supreme Court hearings, immigration snafus, and heinous weather events . . .
Bombastically Yours,
Dave
The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.
Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.
Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved
(Ms. Frame faithfully taking minutes) during which a senior colleague, out of his mind over the issue of punctuation in the department’s mission statement, threatened to “take a dump” (there was a pun on the word “colon” which I won’t belabor here)
My own writing interests me less than it used to; and while I know that to teach and to mentor is truly a calling, on a day-to-day basis I often find myself overwhelmed by the needs of my students—who seem to trust in an influence I no longer have, and in a knowledge of which, increasingly, I am uncertain—and by the university’s mindless adherence to bureaucratic demands.
you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive.
A Poetic Celebration of Yom Kippur (and the fact that most New Jersey public schools have off today)
While the Jewish folks in Jersey atone for a year's worth of sin
the rest of us Gentiles enjoy sleeping in . . .
except for me, I just can't seem to sleep late,
I woke up this morning at 5:08.
the rest of us Gentiles enjoy sleeping in . . .
except for me, I just can't seem to sleep late,
I woke up this morning at 5:08.
Life is Disgusting: Dawn to Dark Edition
We were practicing showing and not telling in Creative Writing this morning, and I like to practice what I preach, so here goes: we've been mired in humidity here in central New Jersey for the past few weeks; giant fungus is sprouting in weird formations (see the above photo I took at 5:45 AM this morning) and my classroom-- which does not have air-conditioning or a cross breeze and only has windows adjacent to a stagnant courtyard-- just might be the most humid place in this swamp-ass state . . . the desks are slick with a weird viscous scum, the carpet is moist, the laptops are slimy, and soon after entry, the teenagers are coated with glistening teen spirit; at 7:30 AM this morning my knees were already stuck to my pants and my boxer briefs were soaked through . . . you can imagine the rest of the day; it's also been raining every afternoon, so soccer practice has been a muddy mess and all my equipment smells of damp and mold; in the evenings, I've been trying to fix two dodgy toilets in the upstairs of my house, and while I finally conquered the commode just off our bedroom, I couldn't fix the American Standard in the hall (despite a stream of constant profanity) and ended up having to order a different part on Amazon-- my hands were inside the tank so long, as I tried to rebuild the flush valve apparatus, that they pruned-- and were also caked with the black rubber sediment from the flapper-- and then this afternoon, the finale, I tried to cure our dog's proclivity for carsickness by taking her on a couple of short car rides, but when I ran into the beer store to get a six pack, she threw up all over the soccer corner flags . . . the smell was particularly vibrant because of the barometric pressure and the already pungent smell of all the wet fabric in my van, so I unloaded everything, tried to get all the chunks out of the car, washed off the corner flags and then loaded the equipment-- aside from the vomit stained corner flags and poles-- back into the car beofre everything got even yuckier from the impending rain.
Soccer Triathlon
I completed my first soccer-triathlon of the fall season yesterday: I played soccer, watched soccer, and coached soccer . . . I played pick-up with the usual suspects for 90 minutes in the morning, then watched my son Ian play for his club team from in the early afternoon, and finally coached the town travel team-- Ian's old team-- in the evening . . . I could have hit for the soccer-cycle if I did color commentary for a game (or filmed a game? or refereed a game?) so that's something to shoot for, and while it was fun and entertaining, my legs were sore this morning.
R.I.P. JJ McClure (and his Masterful Mustache)
Sadly, Burt Reynolds has taken his last wild ambulance ride and finally joined his buddy Dom DeLuise at the Great Cannonball Run in the Sky . . . and while the Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run movie franchises make me nostalgic for my youth and simpler times, I just learned that Reynolds turned down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars . . . I can't imagine how much better that movie would have been if it contained a shirtless Reynolds ambling around the Millenium Falcon, his chest hair rivaling that of his sidekick Chewbacca . . . anyway, in honor of the man, the mustache, and the legend, I'm revisiting OBFT XVI-- the year of our mustache contest and my award winning 'stache-- and posting a photo of me at my most Burt.
Primer for the Clueless
Charlie Sykes tweeted this image with the caption:
Kind of amazed this pr campaign wasn’t enough to save Alex Jones on Twitter
and the podcast Reply All #126: Alex Jones Dramageddon does a fantastic job explaining what it all means . . . to get the joke in all of it's glory you need to know about: Alex and Jones and Marco Rubio nearly got into a fistfight; the irony that alt-right-trollster Laura Loomer got drowned by an auctioneering Republican congressman in a hearing about letting idiots like her have freedom of speech on social media; Colin Kaepernick is the face and voice of a new Nike ad campaign; our government briefly entertained the idea of making a "gay bomb" . . . but only in the sense that the idea came up in a brainstorming session for theoretical speculative weapons; Alex Jones believes that the government is drugging us with chem-trails and hormones in the water and that the proof of this is that there are pesticides that can turn male frogs into female frogs . . . he links all this together in a wild and entraining conspiratorial rant . . . before this podcast, I had heard of Alex Jones and knew he was some kind of alt-right figure, but had no idea of how he operated; this episode is an excellent primer into that strange and wild world of right-wing-conspiracy nuts.
Maturity is Admitting You're Stupid
This is hot off the press: so fifty-four minutes ago . . . at the end of middle school soccer practice, my son Ian and some of his friends decided to bike up to the Okie Pokii Cafe and get some bubble tea-- they took off while I was packing the soccer equipment into the minivan, but when I drove the 200 yards up the hill from the park to my house and turned onto Valentine Street (our road) I saw Ian biking the wrong direction, back to the park . . . so I rolled down the window and asked him what was going on and he said he thought he left his phone down at the field and was going to find it; then I drove up the road and crossed paths with his friends, and I told them to wait a moment at Ben's house because Ian had to retrieve his phone and I went home and pulled a cold mug out of the freezer-- Friday!-- but before I could fill it with beer, Ian came storming back in the house, looking for his phone-- he had really lost it-- and this totally pissed me off because it was finally Friday and time for a celebratory beer and now I was on this (mock) epic quest with my son, using Find My Android, calling his phone, searching the house and the soccer equipment bag in the van-- all fruitless-- and then he decided his phone was at the park so we drove back down, and he had to suffer through several tirades and some profanity on the ride but instead of his usual routine-- denial and argument-- he finally realized how to soothe the savage dad, and he acknowledged that his behavior was stupid and insane and the work of a lunatic, and then we found his phone, in the grass behind the goal, and he willingly admitted that he was disorganized and wanton and profligate and he needed to take the time to pack a bag and he couldn't rush to practice and he would accept any consequence and it made me think of how I left my car door open for 90 minutes two days previous (with my wallet on the console) and I told him that I was also insane and constantly losing things and an absolute idiot and then I grew very calm and told him we just had to think of a method to prevent this from happening again (especially on a Friday when dad wanted to kick back and have a beer) and I told him he was lucky to have good friends that would wait for him when he did something stupid like this and then he rode off on his bike to go get bubble tea and all-in-all, it was a pretty decent parent/son interaction and I'm proud of both of us for working through it.
Bunnies on the Border
In Jeff Vandermeer's second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, Authority, it feels as if the British version of The Office has moved from Slough to the edge of a wilderness contaminated by an alien civilization, and while in the first book (Annihilation) there was no escaping the menace of Area X, in the second novel there is no escaping the byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth of the Southern Reach-- until the two settings begin to merge . . . and then there are all those border-bunnies; I'm sure I'll be just as confused when I finish the third book, but then I'll read the internet theories and watch the movie and perhaps that will clarify things.
Brain Melt
School has truly begun and my brain is taxed . . . I'm teaching four different classes this year (or preps, as we teachers like to call them: Creative Writing, Philosophy, College Writing and English 10) and our family is juggling four different soccer schedules (Alex is playing for the high school, Ian is playing for the middle school team-- which I coach-- and a higher level club team, and I am also coaching the town travel team) and this is probably why I left my driver side door open for the duration of soccer practice, despite the fact that it was raining and my wallet was in the glove compartment; though the rain soaked my seat and the door, it deterred any thievery and my wallet was where I left it.
The Test 115: Good Fences Make Good Podcasts
This week on our podcast The Test, Stacey quizzes us on various and significant walls and we perform admirably (aside from when Cunningham accuses me of stealing her thoughts . . . also the voice of God returns to correct some stupidity).
Two Lightbulbs in a Week
While I still can't peel a hard-boiled egg (even with this "genius" spoon method . . . check out the photos) I did stumble on two life hacks recently, and, both times, I did it the old-fashioned way-- without the internet-- so if you were viewing the animated version of my life (which you should) then you would have seen a lightbulb appear over the top of my head, twice this week:
1) I was blowing the yew branches and berries off my sidewalk after my massive trimming project and I decided to stick the leaf-blower into the gutter-spout spout and-- up at roof level!-- a bunch of leaves and sticks and junk flew out of the gutter drain and into the air, unclogging the gutter with minimal effort;
2) I always have trouble with spillage when I'm pouring the water from the coffee decanter into the coffee-maker but I realized that if I put the filter and the ground coffee into the top of the machine before I poured the water into that weird little oblong hole, then I could be sloppier and hold the decanter directly over the coffee-maker and the grounds and filter would absorb any water that doesn't go into that small and awkwardly placed hole that is the ostensible target of the pour (and a difficult bulls-eye for such an early morning activity).
Hey NFL! Dave is Taking the Proverbial Knee
This season (and perhaps for the rest of my days) I am taking the proverbial Colin Kaepernick knee in regards to the NFL: I'm not watching any games, I'm not playing fantasy football, I'm not reading about the Giants on ESPN.com, I'm not buying any merchandise, and I'm going to try my best not to consume any advertisements associated with the NFL . . . in this polarized political environment, I'm choosing Colin Kaepernick over Donald Trump, clarity over CTE, brisk fall afternoons over television, and leisure time over the monetized soulless drudgery of "managing" a fantasy football team.
Cute Cuter Cuterest
I used to think our dog Lola was cute, but not anymore: we met a nine week old black lab puppy today that was so adorable it made me want to vomit (a situation reminiscent of the classic Simpson's bit from "Lisa the Vegetarian" that some jerk absolutely ruined on YouTube).
Another Italian Economist?
I'm not sure if I'm biased because of my heritage or if Italian economists actually have got it going on, but I loved what conservative economist Luigi Zingales had to say about free markets, capitalism and corruption in America, and I just listened to the new episode of Freakonomics (Is the Government More Entrepreneurial Than You Think?) and I found Mariana Mazzucato's reimagining of the American free market venture capitalist narrative totally fascinating . . . indicative of her revision to the idea that the government is a bumbling, wasteful organization that can never the fact that we pay double for drugs in America, as we subsidize a great deal of the research for the drugs (through the NIH) and then we pay the drug companies through the nose-- despite the fact that the high prices are to fund marketing and share buybacks and dividend payments, and not research and development (as the story goes) and to explain this, drug companies say their premium pricing indicates the value of the drugs . . . which were often funded by taxpayers; Mazzucato touches a number of examples in the podcast and it's worth a listen, but I'm going to read her books and then I'll write a much longer sentence about her.
Some (Especially Trump) Like It Hot
Schools in my area without A/C sent the kids home early today because of excessive heat, and if you think that this global warming thing is purely anecdotal, and it wasn't any cooler when you were a kid, if you're prone to agree with our fearless leader and think human-induced climate change is a Chinese hoax, and our best bet is to drop out of the Paris Agreement, burn more coal, and rollback auto emissions standards, then this tool might open your eyes . . . it doesn't take into account humidity or temperature averages or anything fancy, it just shows you how many days per year were over 90 degrees, on a year-by-year basis, for any town you like-- and, no surprise, the number has been growing-- and the chart the tool provides also gives a glimpse into the future, which you will be spending indoors, watching Netflix, in your air-conditioned filtered bubble.
I Can Get You a Toe by 3 O'Clock This Afternoon
After a long day of meetings on Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the rest of the day went: my kids were home alone all day and they did all their chores, supervised the dog, played together without argument, and willingly did some reading; Ian had a good soccer practice-- he distributed the ball to one-and-all, hustled, and set a good example in the drills for the younger players-- and then we watched the absolutely perfect finale to Detectorists and decided it was a fantastic and fulfilling ending to a rare and brilliant series, noted that there is a metal detecting club in New Jersey (Deep Search Metal Detecting Club . . . The Deep Searchers would certainly get along with the Dirt Sharks) and we all started making our way up to bed . . . moments, while I was turning the lights off downstairs, I heard a pained screaming not in all in character of the previous events, ran up the stairs and discovered that Ian had jumped off Alex's bed and gotten his ring toe caught in the hole of the laundry basket, which resulted in his nail being ripped from the bed, a wicked cut along the rest of the toe, and a lot of crying . . . I thought I had previously enacted the rule: no one is allowed to get injured right before bed-time, but obviously I hadn't reinforced it enough (like the one about hanging your wet towel up after showering) and this infraction-- which was particularly close to bed-time on the night before the first day of school for Cat and I-- needed a lot of tending and care, including a soak in the tub, some minor surgery on the nail, and some staunching and bandaging . . . so I'm going to really reiterate the rule tonight and remind everyone that the curfew on injuries that need first-aid is 7:45 PM.
The Art of Article Humor
When my kids are playing Magic: The Gathering with their friends and I (invariably and inveterately) ask them, "Is this Magic . . . the Gathering . . . or just a gathering of people playing Magic?" they get the joke but don't find it funny.
Summer of Tomatillos
The one benefit of this unseasonably hot, humid, and wet summer is that my wife's garden produced obscene amounts of peppers and tomatillos . . . in fact, I ate so many tomatillos this summer-- every morning with my eggs and every afternoon in green salsa form-- that I googled if it was okay to eat a shitload of tomatillos . . . apparently, it's fine.
Dave Belabors Labor Day
I have concluded my Labor Day labor: I worked from 8 AM to 1 PM trimming trees in our backyard; I started the morning using my circular saw-- which was dangerous and not particularly effective-- then I borrowed my friend Alec's electric chainsaw, which-- as promised-- had an extremely dull chain-- and I finally walked over to my buddy Ashley's house and got his industrial strength Sawzall, which was the best tool for the job; I had to do a lot of sawing and trimming while standing on a ladder, I had to thoroughly clean the debris because yew berries and needles are poisonous to dogs, and I had to drive three loads of yew tree branches to the dumpster in the park, so I'm (pun intended) bushed but unfortunately, I'm not done expending energy today, and so I have begun drinking beer in the hopes that it will assuage my sore muscles and imbue me with berserker strength for our annual aquatic greased-watermelon rugby match.
Sentence of Dave: Two Paragraph Edition
Franklin Foer begins his essay collection of selections from the New Republic (Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America) with a piece from 1914-- World War I had just begun-- by Rebecca West (who wrote the massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue and history of the Balkans) and while she's ostensibly speaking about literary criticism, there's a lot more going on and I certainly agree that "the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before" to grapple with what's happening in our country and our planet . . . I feel like I have been stumbling across bad news everywhere I turn-- I don't really follow the news day-to-day, but when I catch up, it's all bad-- I hadn't heard about Trump's stubborn refusal to lower the flag to half mast for John McCain until after it happened and it just mad me embarrassed and sad, and then I listened to "The Measure of a Tragedy" about Venezuela's economic implosion-- inflation has been so rampant that working a day at minimum wage (which is the median salary for the country) can buy you 900 calories (in the US, working a day at minimum wage can buy you over 100,000 calories) and so Venezuelans have lost, on average, 24 pounds and there is a mass migration of Syrian proportions out of the country, and then I listened to the new episode of The Weeds, about how we've lowered all our immigration numbers-- despite what's happening (and I'm still angry and sad about what happened to my cleaning lady and her husband, who are being sent back to Nicaragua despite the fact that they've had work-permits since 2006 and have kids in the school system and parents and sisters who are citizens-- they are a hard-working couple and a boon to the economy, but the government is over a decade behind on dealing with citizenship applications) and then there's all the environmental stuff-- permanent ice in Greenland is gone, Trump is pushing coal despite carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, we could have curbed global warming back when George H.W. Bush was president-- he was a proponent and wanted the world to cooperate-- but then things got political and the lobbyists won out (listen to this episode of The Daily to learn about this lost moment in time) and --like with smoking-- we plunged into a corporate fueled era of darkness and denial . . . but like with smoking, there is hope that the science will eventually prevail, just not any time soon . . . anyway, here are the first two paragraphs of "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," her words are far more powerful than mine:
And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.
Encroachment, Both Avian and Feminine
Tuesday morning, I got to the East Brunswick Library at 9:40 AM and it wasn't open yet, though the website claimed they opened at 9 AM, but the sign on the door said 10 AM -- summer hours?-- and so I grabbed my book and walked across the parking lot to a bench by the little pond and sat down and started reading; two minutes later a heavyset woman with crazy hair pushing a stroller with a toddler in it sat down on the same bench as me . . . there were other benches available but this was the closest one to the library and, I quickly surmised that she too thought the library opened at 9 AM and I surmised this not because I possess a highly attuned sixth sense that enables me to read people's thoughts-- in fact, I was trying my best to ignore this woman (and her thoughts) but not only was she encroaching on my physical space, she was also encroaching on my auditory space: divulging all her innermost thoughts via a running monologue . . . or I suppose it was a one-sided dialogue with the non-verbal toddler, an apostrophic vomit of words: we thought the library was open, but it wasn't open was it? so we just have to wait here a few minutes . . . maybe awe can have a snack? okay but we're going to stay in the stroller, we'll stay put and eat a snack . . . not that, here you go, and look . . . there are the ducks, those are ducks, and those are the geese, no we're not going to go by the geese, we're going to stay in the stroller and have a snack while we wait for the library to open, we thought it was open but it's not open yet . . . and this prompted me to get up and move, but then I decided that not only would that look rude, but this was my bench and I was obviously trying to quietly read and I was in the right-- she should have taken a look at the context and found another bench-- so I wasn't going to move and i wasn't going to chat with her about how the website claimed the library opened at 9 AM but it actually didn't open until 10 AM, so I buried my head into my book, which was not easy reading (Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, book two in the Southern Reach trilogy) and tried my best to concentrate and then a dozen geese starting walking out of the pond, up the bank towards our bench, and she said, "We're out of here" and got up and pushed the stroller away and I celebrated (internally) because I wasn't afraid of a bunch of geese, in fact, these geese were my saviors . . . and so I settled back into my reading, certain that I would be able to focus now that the woman and the toddler were gone, but the geese kept coming, closer and closer, and eventually the geese got so close to me-- people must feed them-- that I couldn't concentrate on my book and so I had to get up and let the universe have it's way . . . because (ironically) the universe obviously didn't want me to kill the time waiting for the library to open reading a book, though that would have made perfect sense . . . and the universe told me this with three uniquely annoying and encroaching entities-- harbingers always come in sets of three: a rambling mom, a hungry toddler, and a rather aggressive flock of geese.
They Maced Me! I Cried! And You'd Cry Too!
Someday, I will tell the story of Pip and the Mace (it's set in Daytona, circa 1991 . . . a classic) but while today's post is about tears, it's not about Pip's tears in a portable cell at the tail end of a wild night in a sleazy spring break beach town, it's about my tears and how I had to stop reading a book at the dentist to avoid looking like a fool; the book is W. Bruce Cameron's A Dog's Purpose, which my son Ian chose for our family-book-club, and he finished it weeks ago . . . on the beach . . . this is the only book my son has ever read while at the beach, my wife said it was bizarre-- he actually couldn't put it down (my wife loved it as well) but when I started reading, it seemed to me like a creative writing assignment gone bad: it's the story of a unique canine consciousness searching for its purpose-- but the dog lives through multiple lives, reincarnating after each death . . . the synopsis is utterly ridiculous and childish and silly, and the book feels that way for the first five pages but then -- especially if you're a dog owner-- the story becomes riveting and also makes you contemplate the philosophy of the whole animal consciousness thing (which apparently is far more sophisticated than people once believed, read this book for the latest research) and then there's the crying . . . I cried multiple times while powering through the book yesterday, our new dog Lola napping at my feet, the ghost of my old dog Sirius roaming through my house and my memory and I only had twenty pages left when I took my son to the dentist today, and so I brought the book-- but I also brought a back-up book, something dry (Mark Kurlanky's Salt: A World History . . . pun intended) in case I started blubbering in the waiting room . . . and when I started reading, I could feel the tears coming (my son Ian, a tough kid, said, "If you don't cry at the end of this book, you have no soul") and so I switched over to Kurlansky's take on the divinity and wonder and significance of sodium chloride, and avoided clouding up my own eyes with brine and finished the book in the privacy of my home, my trusty dog nearby.
The Test 114: You Need This For That
This week on our podcast The Test, Cunningham forces Stacey and me to ponder how this leads to that . . . or how some things (or people) are instrumental to other things . . . like eggs are instrumental to baking a cake (or maybe not) and as a bonus, Stacey makes a pun.
Land Ho! Two Five Star Recommendations!
Summer is waning fast, but if you still have time left to binge some quality stuff, I have two superlative recommendations for you; both are concerned with man's relationship to the land, but one is British and the other as American-as-fuck-all so they have very, very different takes . . . one piece is an incredible piece of deep dive journalism that-- if you're a liberal-- will make you scared and angry and freaked out and contemplative, and if you're a moderate conservative, will make you wonder where the hell the fringe of your party wants to go (and if Donald Trump actually wants to lead them there) and if you are willing to follow; and if you're a right-wing-gun-nut-ultra-patriotic-endangered-species-hating-militia-member-antifederalist then you'll be pleased that your story is getting some press (even if there's a liberal media bias to the reporting)
and the other piece is a droll, charming comedy that will make you forget all the troubles I formerly mentioned . . . without further ado:
1) Bundyville . . . a journalistic tour-de-force consists of seven podcasts and four articles on Longreads that details how Cliven Bundy and his family and allies have fought the federal government about grazing rights on federal land, starting with the Bundy Ranch Standoff in 2014, which attracted anti-federalist right wing militants from around the country, and leading to the forty day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon . . . along the way, Leah Sottile touches on religious fundamentalism--God speaks to Bundy-- and the environmental movement (which the Bundy's believe should be labeled as a cult-like religion), radical interpretations of the constitution, the rights of states versus the rights of the federal government, David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh, race (if people of color tried to do the stuff the these white nationalists do, they'd be shot and killed) and government overreach, and-- in the end-- what it means to be an American and the relationship Americans should have with our land and our government . . . compelling and essential, so good I'm going to teach it this year;
2) Detectorists . . . a fantastically weird show about friendship . . . and metal detectors; Mackenzie Crook (best known for playing Gareth in The Office) and Toby Jones roam the British countryside looking for bits of ancient history (in a nation where you have the right to roam on private land . . . while you may have to ask permission to look for treasure, if you are British, there is a much more communal feeling about "private" property, and you're not going to get to keep the Saxon hoard you turned up anyway, you have to report it to the "coroner" and it is regarded as national treasure) but meanwhile, in the present, the two buddies aren't exactly killing it . . . so is the metal-detecting a healthy escape from the mundane or a barmy obsession that's going to destroy their relationships and life-goals; I thought this would be it, but the show introduces some rival detectorists (that look like Simon and Garfunkel) and an attractive female and you've got way more plot then I anticipated, plus extremely well-written dialogue, understated and pitch-perfect acting, and lots and lots of laughs . . . I convinced my wife and kids to watch and despite the utterly weird and slow start-- two dudes roaming a field with contraptions-- they fell in love with the show and we're racing through (I know some of you only take my reviews seriously if my wife is onboard) and I will also admit that as we slog through these final hot, humid, mosquito-and-tick-ridden days of central Jersey summer, I am longing for a cool place where you can hike wherever you wish, without the fear of getting gunned down by a semi-automatic-weapon-wielding-anti-federalist landowner.
and the other piece is a droll, charming comedy that will make you forget all the troubles I formerly mentioned . . . without further ado:
1) Bundyville . . . a journalistic tour-de-force consists of seven podcasts and four articles on Longreads that details how Cliven Bundy and his family and allies have fought the federal government about grazing rights on federal land, starting with the Bundy Ranch Standoff in 2014, which attracted anti-federalist right wing militants from around the country, and leading to the forty day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon . . . along the way, Leah Sottile touches on religious fundamentalism--God speaks to Bundy-- and the environmental movement (which the Bundy's believe should be labeled as a cult-like religion), radical interpretations of the constitution, the rights of states versus the rights of the federal government, David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh, race (if people of color tried to do the stuff the these white nationalists do, they'd be shot and killed) and government overreach, and-- in the end-- what it means to be an American and the relationship Americans should have with our land and our government . . . compelling and essential, so good I'm going to teach it this year;
2) Detectorists . . . a fantastically weird show about friendship . . . and metal detectors; Mackenzie Crook (best known for playing Gareth in The Office) and Toby Jones roam the British countryside looking for bits of ancient history (in a nation where you have the right to roam on private land . . . while you may have to ask permission to look for treasure, if you are British, there is a much more communal feeling about "private" property, and you're not going to get to keep the Saxon hoard you turned up anyway, you have to report it to the "coroner" and it is regarded as national treasure) but meanwhile, in the present, the two buddies aren't exactly killing it . . . so is the metal-detecting a healthy escape from the mundane or a barmy obsession that's going to destroy their relationships and life-goals; I thought this would be it, but the show introduces some rival detectorists (that look like Simon and Garfunkel) and an attractive female and you've got way more plot then I anticipated, plus extremely well-written dialogue, understated and pitch-perfect acting, and lots and lots of laughs . . . I convinced my wife and kids to watch and despite the utterly weird and slow start-- two dudes roaming a field with contraptions-- they fell in love with the show and we're racing through (I know some of you only take my reviews seriously if my wife is onboard) and I will also admit that as we slog through these final hot, humid, mosquito-and-tick-ridden days of central Jersey summer, I am longing for a cool place where you can hike wherever you wish, without the fear of getting gunned down by a semi-automatic-weapon-wielding-anti-federalist landowner.
The Red Bulls Game Was the LEAST Exciting Part of the Night (or Hostage Situation at the Carpark)
Last night, Catherine, Alex, Ian and I went to Red Bull Arena to watch Wayne Rooney and DC United take on the Red Bulls; Rooney put in an understated performance, playing a number of great one touch passes (and demonstrating that his vision and decision-making is miles ahead of the MLS players) but he never took on the defense in full Shrek-rugby-fashion (and he had a perfect opportunity at the six and cranked it over the crossbar) and the Red Bulls combined well, generally controlled the ball, moved forward with purpose, should have scored three or four goals, and made do with a one-zero victory . . . we thoroughly enjoyed the game, but the problem with watching the Red Bulls is the transportation situation: you can't park in Harrison, where the stadium is, because it's a traffic nightmare, so you can either take the train to Newark and then the PATH, or drive to Newark, park in a lot, and then do a rather treacherous walk along the (very polluted) Passaic River, then cross into Harrison over the Frank E Rodgers bridge . . . we elected to do the latter, because if you hustle out of the stadium and walk fast, you can beat all the traffic; we took off right as the injury time ended, and I warned the kids to take it easy and be careful because it was dark and this was not a well-marked or evenly paved stroll; despite my warning, Ian bit it hard when he tried to jog up to Catherine to ask her something-- he caught his toe on the stand of a portable traffic sign that happened to be on the sidewalk, he fell hard (and nearly into traffic on Raymond Blvd) and scraped up his knees, hands and elbows . . . he was bleeding and crying and had some glass bits in his rapidly swelling elbow, but he got up and we hobbled on towards the Edison ParkFast on Market Street . . . when we arrived, there was only one person working and a number of people waiting for their cars, and you had to pay at a machine and then give the guy the ticket, then he would get your key and drive your car around to the front of the building-- it was fairly disorganized and difficult to determine the line or what was going on, but Catherine fed our ticket into the machine, ran her credit card, was charged $20, and out popped TWO tickets . . . so she handed the guy both tickets-- and he immediately took one of the tickets and ran it over to a car that he had already pulled around and handed it to the driver and then he went back to getting cars so I told Catherine that we might have given him the wrong ticket and he wasn't getting our keys and when she explained this to him and how the machine gave us TWO tickets, he said that the machine couldn't take two tickets and that we had to pay and we explained that we HAD paid and that the machine DID spit out two tickets and he said this was not possible and then ran off to pull around another car and this is when I realized that we were going to have trouble resolving this issue-- it was an issue with the machine and the attendant had no clue how to solve it; Catherine tried to explain again-- she said that maybe we paid for the other person's ticket or something, or the tickets got jammed, but that we had paid but the attendant turned a deaf ear and continued serving people who had come after us because he didn't understand the situation-- and while all this waiting is going on, Ian is bleeding from his knees and elbows-- and the guy, who, judging by the accent, might have hailed from Trinidad, was not getting it and Catherine was getting pissed off that he kept ignoring her and he was getting pissed off that we were interrupting his work; things got more and more heated, and a random guy stepped in, took out a twenty, handed it to the attendant, and said, "Will this resolve the situation?" and the attendant said, "Yes" but Catherine was having none of that-- she took the money and handed it back to the guy and said, "We're not paying $40 for parking" and, while I admire her principles, I would have paid twenty bucks at that point to get the hell out of Newark, but Catherine tried another tactic-- she pulled up her Wells Fargo account and showed the guy that we had paid $20 at the Edison ParkFast at 9:27 PM but he wouldn't even look at the phone and ran off to pull more cars for people who had got there after us, and then Alex got vocal with him and he said, "I don't talk with children" and this pissed me off, so I told the guy the kids were people too and he was putting them out as well as Catherine and I and he said he would deal with this problem later because he was busy so Catherine laid it on the line and said, "Are you giving us our keys? Or do we have to call the police?" and the guy-- getting very defensive-- said, "Call the police" and so Catherine did-- and then another random guy made an excellent suggestion; he said, "Run the ticket again on your credit card and then call the credit card company tomorrow and say you were double charged," and that is exactly what we will do next time this happens (God forbid) but at this point Catherine was angry and determined and she saw a cop car across the lot and so she walked over to it, meanwhile, Alex got a complimentary bottle of water and we cleaned out Ian's wounds . . . right in front of the attendant's little booth, and perhaps this moved him, or the fact that the police were coming, but he gave me the ticket and said, "Write an explanation of what happened on it and your phone number" and I did so-- then Catherine got back and told me to put a fake phone number on it and the police were on their way-- but at this point, the guy had caved, he realized that we weren't going away and that he was holding a bleeding child hostage in his lot, and so he took the ticket-- with my hastily scrawled explanation on it-- and pulled out car around; that was when an officer showed up, and we told him that we had finally resolved the situation and thanked him for coming to lend a hand . . . all told we were at the lot trying to get our car for over an hour, but there is a happy ending to the story; we crated Lola before we left, she still isn't great about being left alone, and we were worried that with the delay, she might have peed in her crate, but she was fine and dry and happy to see us.
Mission Accomplished?
In the spirit of George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" proclamation, I'm claiming victory in my goal to improve my under-the-porch bike shed . . . it's not perfect and will probably require some tweaking, but I'm tired and I did some stuff: I laid down plenty of tar paper-- which should keep the cave crickets out-- and I built new slots on plywood for each of the bikes; it was much easier to build the slots on pieces of plywood outside the bike shed, and then insert the floor into the shed with the slots already built, a lesson that makes me recall George H.W. Bush and the first Iraq War: if I would have done things right the first time, I would have never needed to go back in and do all this labor a second time.
Vacation is Over (Cue the Cave Crickets)
No time for abstractions and bombast today, I'm back from vacation and battling a horde of cave crickets inside my beautifully designed but ill maintained bike shed . . . I've been flushing them out with our leaf blower and I now I've got a fan running int here so they won't return; I just got back from Home Depot with a big sheet of plywood for a new floor, tar paper to seal things up, pressure treated four by fours so there's no need for kickstands, and a waning supply of determination.
New York was an Oyster Town (and may be again)
Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell is the perfect beach read if you are at the Jersey Shore (which I am) and you don't want to escape and instead want to ponder just what has happened to our water-- especially the water and estuaries around New York City and New Jersey-- and the creatures that inhabit this water; Kurlansky writes a chronological and comprehensive history of New York City through the lens of the oyster, starting with the Dutch and the Lenape's interaction in New Amsterdam in the 1600's; then detailing Revolutionary Era Manhattan-- "a city of pirates, entrepreneurs, and the struggling poor,"; then Kurlansky focuses on New York in the 19th century, which was the golden age of oyster eating, oyster harvesting, oyster shipping and oyster bars; and finally, he ends with the inevitable: rapacious overharvesting, pollution, sewage, the end of edible oysters around the city and recognition that something needs to be done . . . it gets weird to read the word "oyster" so many times, but New York really was an oyster town-- the shellfish was abundant, delicious, cheap, and cooked in a variety of ways; the rich and the poor both ate oysters in vast quantities, and Kurlansky provides the recipes to prove this; the beds were everywhere: the East River, Jamaica Bay, the Gowanus, the Battery, City Island, Rockaway, way up the Hudson and the Long Island Sound and in Jersey as well, the Raritan Bay, Keyport, Newark Bay, etc . . . the processing plants and markets and barges and boats and harbors and seeding and tonging operations were all big business, fueling "oystermania" in the 1800's; it's hard to imagine, but the waters around New York City were incredibly rich in sea life: blue claw crabs and menhaden and shrimp and anchovies, mackerel, bluefish, enormous sea drum, stripers, sharks and sturgeon . . . and up the Hudson there were also freshwater species such as carp, pike, perch, bass and pickerel . . . and then it all came crashing down; first, it was the sewage and typhoid-- and by 1927 the oyster beds around New York were all considered inoperable, incredibly polluted, dangerous, and disgusting . . . and then things got even worse-- for the next fifty years or so, factories poured industrial waste-- heavy metals, dioxins, DDT, etc-- on top of the sewage sludge and silt that had already decimated the bays, rivers, and estuaries . . . and while the Clean Air and Water Act helped to change things, it will be a long long time before we can eat the oysters from around NYC again; environmental programs have started growing oysters in various locations (though not the Gowanus, it still doesn't have enough oxygen) and hopefully, despite the Trump EPA's plan to roll back standards, there is enough momentum to get oyster populations on the rise-- because even if you can't eat them, they filter the water-- and there has been a return of many fish species (but not the drum, because they eat oysters, or the sharks-- which live out past Sandy Hook and can still smell something wrong with the bay) and after doing all this reading about the state of oysters, I had to eat some, so last night at Mike's Dock, I ordered a dozen Cape May Salts, which I ate on the half-shell-- which means they were still living when I bit into them-- and they were absolutely delicious and typhoid free . . . anyway, there probably won't be edible oysters out of the East River in our lifetime, but if they do get established, they may filter the water enough to change things for our children . . . and the descriptions in the book of the golden age of oysters, when rich and poor, pirates and prostitutes, all congregated in basements to drink beer and consume massive quantities of oysters, is worth the price of admission, whether you're a fan of the bivalve or not.
They Accepted the Challenge!
Last night, the LED placard on the side of the Springfield Inn advertised three special events:
1) $3 COORS LIGHT 4 PM to Close
2) $3 TWISTED TEA 4 PM to Close
3) TODAY ON THE DECK . . . CHALLENGE ACCEPTED;
and I imagine the band meeting where the guys (had to be guys, right?) decided on that moniker went something like this:
Dude #1: Dude, we should name ourselves the stupidest thing possible and see if we can still get gigs!
Dude# 2: Challenge Accepted!
Trump: What, Me Worry?
If you found some solace in the Manafort verdict and Cohen guilty plea, and you think now Trump and his followers are feeling the pressure, you're very wrong: Trump and his folks don't feel any pressure because they don't know, comprehend and/or acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary has even happened . . . Trump's carefully curated right-wing news feed is reflective of what a large part of the country sees and consumes as "news" and none of it has to do with the consequences and repercussions of yesterday's events . . . for Trump this is just another day of the left-wing rigged witch hunt that he fights "as a way of life!"
LeCompt Grants Us Two Wishes (But Not Without a Price)
Earlier in the summer, when I was on vacation with my family and my cousins, Catherine and I only made it through one set of LeCompt-- the band was great, of course-- but the song selection was kind of lame . . . they had already played a show in the afternoon and I think they were tired; this Sunday was a different story, however: it was the last show for long-time lead guitarist Jimmy Marchiano and the band wanted to send him off in style (Marchiano will now be devoting his time to Led Zeppelin cover band Get the Led Out) and this was a lucky coincidence, because we brought a couple of LeCompt newbies (Ann and Craig) and the band had a lot to live up to (according to us) and Ann is a big Prince fan (which is always the catalyst for an eternal debate because my feelings about Prince are: okay, he was very talented . . . but what was he doing for the thirty years after he released "Rasberry Beret"?) and so Connell and I buttonholed LeCompt before the show and I told him the deal and asked him if he could play a Prince song for Ann and he thought for a moment and then said, "Yeah . . . we can fake one, we can definitely fake one," and then-- as he was walking away and took a look at us and thought about our request-- he made an old-school comment about our sexuality that's not PC these days but was de riguer back in the 80's and we all laughed because it was the perfect comment for the situation . . . so then the band played two astounding sets (and thanks to Dom for taking notes on his phone so we have a complete list) and after set number two we found LeCompt at the outdoor bar and told him the band was killing it and then he told us he was going to do the Prince song and we said thanks and then Connell made another request-- we were pushing it-- and asked if he could do "Born to Run" and let me sing the 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 part after the bridge and LeCompt said sure and then we went back in and sat at the bar and as the band was plugging in-- and they play inside the oval bar-- so if you're at the bar, your a couple feet away from the band, LeCompt starting taunting Connell and I, getting meta about it, mouthing the words, "one two three four" but forgetting numbers or slowing down or questioning which number came next and then the band launched into "Born to Run" and, despite the taunting, I screamed "One Two Three Four" into the microphone at the appropriate moment in the appropriate Bruce voice and afterward LeCompt gave me a shout out and said I had been doing that bit for a long time and I looked back on the blog and I have been doing it for a long time, since 2010 . . . so that's pretty weird, and then they played "Little Red Corvette," thus granting all our requests-- but not without some appropriate taunting along the way; as a bonus, I crushed Ann's toenail with my Chaco sandal, those things are way too dense for small spaces-- I have to remember to wear sneakers to bar shows-- and we didn't get to sleep until 3 AM . . . yikes; here is the setlist:
Pinball Wizard
Pinball Wizard
Bargain
Hey Hey What Can I Do (Led Zeppelin)
Reason to Believe (Rod Stewart)
You're in My Heart
You are so Beautiful
Come Sail Away
Changes
Levon
Love Reign Over Me
Thunder Road
If I Fell (The Beatles)
You're So Vain
Forever Young
War Pigs
The Boys Are Back in Town (Thin Lizzy)
Band on the Run
Elton John New York City
Baba O'Riley
Born to Run
Little Red Corvette
Sweet Child O' Mine
Heroes
Maggie May
Go Your Own Way
Chain of Fools (Aretha Franklin)
Squeezebox
Can’t Buy Me Love
Hey Jude.
Living in the Aftermath . . . Fun To Read, Not So Much To Live
I often have a sinking sensation-- when I am stuck in traffic or taking a hot shower on a cold day or eating take-out food with disposable cutlery-- that this modern life of convenience and technological wonder is not sustainable . . . we just can't keep living this way, it's all going to come to an end and the people in the future will look back upon us with awe and envy; Jeff Vandermeer explores this premise with great relish in his new novel Borne, which is set in a dystopian future where biotech has gone wrong: biotech-- which was supposed to be the answer to food, disease, clean air and water, mental illness-- turns out to be catalyst for the collapse of civilization; Rachel and Wick scavenge among the ruins of a city devastated by the experiments of a biotech company (which still exists in some sort of skeletal form) and Rachel discovers and "raises" a piece of biotech which attempts to become a person but is actually something else entirely . . . the book centers on the complex relationship between Rachel, her lover Wick and the sentient biotech creature Borne, and all this takes place in a surreal and vividly rendered survivalist nightmare . . . a good pick if you're looking for some sci-fi written with literary flair.
I Was Cold Today!
Best day of vacation ever: cold, windy and cloudy at the beach . . . I had to wear a sweatshirt for the first time in months.
Second Hand News to Me
Fleetwood Mac is good music to listen to while driving to the beach, so I played "Rumours" for my kids earlier in the summer and then I played some of the songs on my guitar and I'm loath to admit that I recently learned that the lyrics to "I Don't Want Know" are not "I don't want to know the reason why you love me" . . . they are the more inscrutable " I don't want to know the reasons why/ Love keeps right on walking on down the line" and now that I know, I can hear it but for the past thirty-five years, I've been singing it wrong (and I just asked my buddy Dom to sing the song and he got it wrong as well . . . so I told him the actual lyrics and we both decided that the internet is amazing).
The Test 113: Who Brings the Bacon?
This week on The Test, match wits and financial acumen with the ladies as I test them on the net worth of various wealthy (and not so wealthy) individuals; this is a good one, the sound quality is excellent, the format is compelling, and Cunningham explains just how much she should be compensated for her tug-of-war prowess.
Who is Culpable? The Fates? Or Dave?
Tuesday night just before soccer practice began, Carl-- our visitor from the Bronx (through the Fresh Air Fund)-- fell and skinned his knee, so my wife came and picked him up and brought him home and administered some first aid, and then thirty minutes later, Ian got stepped on, and-- unfortunately-- it was right on the toenail he had half-ripped earlier in the day when he stubbed his toe (because he was wearing slides on concrete) and so my wife had to come back to soccer practice and take him home, so when I was leaving practice at 8:30 PM, I was responsible for no children and decided to jump in a pick-up game with some former players and some other young men-- which I would never had done normally-- and a few minutes into the game, I caught a hard shot on the tip of my outstretched toe, but my ankle was loose and awkward and the ball turned my ankle a weird direction and now it's all swollen and sprained and this never would have happened if both the boys didn't get hurt . . . dammit.
Last Time I Listen to Him . . .
My son Alex told me a few weeks ago-- after a debacle with a used Chinese cell-phone-- that I should not offer him any options, I should just tell him the right thing to do and he promised he would listen to me; now I did warn him about buying a used cell-phone from China and I suggested he just purchase one from our provider (Cricket) but I didn't forbid him from buying a phone from China-- I thought it might be an interesting experiment and it was a good deal on a cool phone-- but the phone didn't work properly and though the seller issued a refund, it still cost us a bunch to ship the broken phone back to China (because of this crazy secretive system) but I told Alex that I couldn't just tell him the right thing to do because most of the time I had no clue what was right, so all I could do was offer suggestions . . . which drives him crazy; anyway, nearly a month ago we returned from our first summer trip to Sea Isle City and when we arrived back in Highland Park, Alex suggested that we just leave the car packed and drive it like that for a month so we wouldn't have to pack for our second trip down to the beach; while this wasn't feasible for the entire car, I did take his advice as far as the giant bag on top of the car was concerned: I left it up there, packed full of umbrellas and beach chairs and the beach cart and buckets and nets, but a few days ago I started wondering just what was happening inside that rubber sack-- especially since it rained pretty much every day since our last vacation, and when it wasn't raining, it was humid as all fuck . . . so today-- the first sunny day in weeks-- I got up there and unzipped the sack and I'm sorry to say that it was gross, lots of water, and the beach chairs were moldy and the beach cart smelled and the standing water was putrid and gross, so I took everything out and dried it in the sun so that it's ready for our ensuing beach vacation and that's the last time I'm going to take advice from someone who buys a used phone from China on Ebay.
Beauty Happens . . . It Really Does
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum is one of those books like Guns, Germs, and Steel . . . it's so well argued and supported and compelling and significant that it might change everyone's brain; I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so it was easy enough for me to buy Prum's theory-- but apparently there are some old school hold-outs that aren't done with their holding out (I guess if you die while still holding out, you never have to acknowledge you were wrong) but basically Prum argues that Darwin theorized about two kinds of selection and one of them has been tragically long neglected and ignored:
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
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