A Sunday evening quiz

Q: What happens when you set your internal alarm to 6pm (central time) thinking that this is when the Awards are aired and find yourself staring at Barbara Walters instead?
A: I turn beet red, turn off the TV and go back to blogging.

Q: What does it say about a 'scholar' who chooses to watch the Awards but neglects the political debate between democratic candidates earlier that day?
A: That she was busy earlier maybe doing her work so that she could take the time to do something frivolous in the evening?

Q: Is plunging live lobsters into a pot of boiling water a humane act ending lobster misery, or an act of sheer barbarian monstrosity?
A: Somewhere in between, but I hate doing it and offer prayers of remorse even though I am not exactly religious.

Q: Is it okay to watch something so inane as Barbara Walters interviewing DK of NY?
A: No, but I’m itching to do it, so the post ends here.

Is it me or you?

A wonderfully loyal reader and friend from Poland today admitted that sometimes my text runs completely into terrain that muddles and befuddles her. I just want to publicly reassure her that this isn’t at all due to her (or anyone’s) knowledge of English of Americanisms. It muddles and befuddles most readers I am sure. In fact, I just took an informal poll and the results are clear: I write spontaneously, oddly, inconsistently on topics that range from odd to odder (why DID I blog about my ancient truck, excuse me, van?). In my moment of complete humility and deep appreciation – thank you all for sticking by me in this project.

Sunday chat

I am recording the following conversation between a reader (r) and myself (n):

r: I have known you all these years and I never knew you owned a truck [referring to post from February 28]

n: Yes, you do know! Don’t you remember the time you needed a ride to Noah’s Ark where the water animals play?

r: You have never given me a ride in a truck. Well, once, you helped me move in a U-Haul truck, but that is it. And where do you keep the truck? Does it fit in your garage? Is it a pick-up? Like one of those Chevy pick-ups that they write songs about?

n: Of course not, it’s just a gray number, with a cracked headlight from the day you borrowed it and decided that you would fit it into a tight parking place at Border’s but couldn’t.

r: That is not a truck! It is nowhere near a truck! You are misleading your readership.

n: Listen, where I come from, a vehicle that is five times as big as you need or want it to be is a truck. A car is a little number that you zip through narrow passageways. This is a monster vehicle therefore, in my eyes, it is a truck. (sigh) People here can be so literal…

Taxes and legacy admissions

The NYT Magazine has an article today that tracks the debate about whether universities should abandon the “legacy advantage” in their admissions policies. The author notes that affirmative action has become the “political punching bag of the right” while legacy admissions – a significantly less important factor in admissions, but a factor nonetheless – has become the “political punching bag of the left.” The article concludes that neither affirmative action nor legacy status are going to go away anytime soon.

Oh, I know the time has come to cast away legacies – a relic of an aristocratic past, I know… For me, however, legacy status has a fundamental similarity to taxes. How so? Well, I am big on taxes. I only don’t like them in practice because they take a chunk out of the paycheck. But I believe in them, I don’t try to avoid paying them, and I think it is right that I should pay more if my income goes up (which it wont – see post on February 27). The devil within, however, gets happy when there is a rebate check in the mail. I do not send it back to the IRS with a note saying – here, the government needs this more than I do. I deposit it in the bank and think happy thoughts about next year’s vacation.

I feel the same way about legacy admissions: I agree that they are inherently unfair. Being in a household full of first generation college (to say nothing of post-college) grads, I certainly can say that I reaped no legacy benefit, and that offspring of this household reaped no benefit either, given their own educational choices. So of course, I am a wee bit wistful: when the first-time reapers, the yet-to-be-born grandchildren can finally lay claim to that privilege –pfffft! away it flies. I know, I know –and so it should. But darn it, can we wait just one more generation before we get rid of it? No no, I didn’t mean it. I like taxes, I don’t like legacies. Final answer.

Blog posts well taken

I want to mention two blog posts that were as interesting as anything I might cite to in the press:
The first is Tonya’s (here), where she states her belief that film stars rarely transit successfully into the music world. I balked when I read that. [Though I do think that her other comments about the incongruity of upper-east-side NY women rapping are well-taken; I’m not sure that I agree in principle, but I do see that it is an awkward genre to push yourself into if you haven’t any identification with the life milieu that gave birth to this type of music.] Surely that can’t be right? Oh yes it is: there ARE more singers that move successfully into acting than there are actresses/actors who then pick up a singing career. I can think of a million that have gone the route of singing-to-acting and I cannot think of any moving in the other direction with great success. A friend pointed me to Lena Horn, since she really became initially famous for her movies and only later did her singing career take off. Oh, and I suppose one could mention Jim Nabors – how about that, I now have all of TWO! But why is it almost impossible to go further with this list?

The other post that made me dig into my limited storage chest of counter examples was Ann’s (here) where she reflected that most politicians tout the careers of their fathers and rarely showcase the humble work of their mothers. Of course, there is a small group out there (Clinton comes to mind) without identifiable fathers, and in those cases humble moms make the cut. But the point can be taken out of the political context as well. I have a number of colleagues who paint a picture of their upward mobility by referencing their dad’s work, by-passing their equally blue-collar employed moms. Here, the reasons aren’t so mysterious, but the general phenomenon is fascinating nonetheless, in that, absent some element of fame associated with our mothers, we almost always rush to describe the work of our fathers, and sometimes by-pass entirely the achievements or under-achievements of our mothers. If you don’t buy this, try in your imagination to start the description in the other direction – “my mother was…. “ and then after a pause “… oh, and my father was…” Awkward, and rarely done.

Slow food

Good title because: it has been a slow blogger day, and I haven’t had enough food to keep me happy (an evening event that was never touted as being food-centered turned out to be even less food based than one would have expected, leaving me basically hungry).

Slow Food is, of course, a movement, born in Italy, but spread to many parts of the world (see their web site here). It is an idea that I deeply believe in but can only adhere to in an abstract sort of way, because in reality it appears to run counter to everything else that we do to speed through life. We do not slow down to cook, to eat, to savor (the company or the food), we don’t slow down for much of anything. Though, I have to admit to being a card-carrying member of the snail – the symbol of Slow Food. And I’m proud of it.

UN on the march

In her blog (here), Ann linked to a songbook, dated 1944, that is a compilation of lyrics for songs of the Women’s Army Corps. I had seen her copy of this, and the link now gave me a chance to read over some of the songs. I was especially intrigued with the section that has the so-called songs of the United Nations, and disappointed that the idea here was only to give a chance to mispronounce some words from far away places in the spirit of global unity.

In a different forum, one can pick up still other songs that are identified with the UN. At the UN school, even in 2nd grade (which is when I joined the school, in 1960) we would start off each weekly assembly with the following:

The sun and the stars are ringing
With song rising strong from the earth
The hope of humanity singing
A hymn to a new world in birth

Chorus: United Nations on the march
With flags unfurled
Together fight for victory
A free new world

Take heart all new nations swept under
By powers of darkness that rise
The wrath of the people shall thunder
Relentless as time and the tide
(chorus)

As soon as the sun meets the morning
And rivers go down to the sea
A new world for mankind is dawning
Our children shall live proud and free.
(chorus)

It was, in retrospect, rather funny to have the younger and older students sing these lyrics over and over again. For my rather confused, 7-year-old mind, learning English was tough enough. I’m sure I missed the subtleties of “take heart all you nations swept under by powers of darkness that rise.” But oh, how I would love to belt out that part about the marching United Nations, all fighting (fighting whom?) together for a free new world. I was such a fan of this idea. I loved my school (even though the city of New York generously let us use only a “condemned” former public school building; weekly fire drills thus had to be enforced with an iron hand, because the threat was very real), I loved the UN itself – the great meeting halls inside thrilled me to pieces. They still sort of do.

And I wasn’t the only one who felt allegiance to the ideas espoused in the song and the school in general. Of course, you had to be pretty forward thinking to begin with to send your child there, what with all those little communist kiddies running around the already dirty halls. But it is worth noting that from my small class of about 20, my best buddy Radhika Coomaraswamy (for whom I dedicated a song on WABC Radio – “the 19th nervous breakdown” – because I was leaving the States 'for good', and I knew she liked it; sadly, the announcer butchered her name, though she wasn’t listening at the right moment anyway) became the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, sweet little Ashok Alexander is now the Director of the India AIDS Foundation, funky John Zorn with his shirt tails always dangling, turned out to be quite a remarkable musician-saxophonist (it started with the UN song!!), recognized now for championing the music of the obscure, forgotten artists – most others I’ve lost contact with, but I am imagining that they are pushing other important boundaries, commensurate with the spirit of our school. So was it simply a blind repetition of lyrics? Maybe not.

Retreat into politics

I’ve noticed in myself a reluctance to blog in a political vein lately. There are many reasons for it (among other things, what I think about politics is oft times predictable and even oftener --not with a great deal of entertainment value; to agree with a position is not, for me, blogworthy unless that agreement comes with a singularly interesting perspective), but I will step away from this pattern for a minute and point to the Washington Post editorial today. It states a very simple truth: GWB is starting with the Republican fear campaign, imbedding in everyone the idea that “a Democrat in the White House will only raise taxes.”

The Post correctly states (isn’t it nice that little me can vouch for the veracity of the leading DC journal) that neither Kerry nor Edwards want to repeal the tax cuts for the vast majority of income earners, keeping in place the child tax credit, marriage penalty relief, the new 10% tax bracket, etc. What they both do want to repeal is the tax break for the 2% of Americans that have an income over $200,000.

Though we are all aware of the fact that the beneficiaries of GWB’s largess were the wealthy, I hadn’t quite studied the numbers and so it did surprise me to read that, in the words of the Post, “this group amounts to the wealthiest 2 percent, but it stands to reap 28 percent of the benefit of the tax cut this year.”
It’s a good editorial to read at a time when the Bush reelection team is starting to sound its principal economic theme. You want to keep everyone focused on keeping the simple math straight. News stories and editorials are crucial to that effort – the clarifications shouldn’t be left to the opposing Democrats, this is a matter of correcting misinformation that is coming from the White House. There are numerous opportunities on the horizon for newspapers that take on the mission of setting records straight.

Reality check

Again I am asked if my “readers” are mere figments of an overindulged imagination and again I am going on record as stating that they are not. Once you blog with your real name, the obligation to blog with real events and real people is very real. Comments aren’t a frequent thing, but when they come and they are of general interest I do address them here.

I have given up on addressing them only on a Sunday, however, mostly because I am impatient, forgetful, and slightly worried that if I make a point of doing that, it will be like a bad version of NPR’s Thursday’s emails without the emails.

One more real note on real issues: last Thursday I took my dog Ollie to the vet for his annual check up. Ollie has joined the ranks of Americans struggling for a sane level of body mass. The dog has gained weight and is now about 15% over his optimal poundage (46 instead of the desirable 40 lbs). That is indeed a reality check: I am going on record with a resolution to walk the beast regularly instead of just letting him run around once in a circle in the back yard whereby on my command “hurry up, Ollie” he does his thing. The command was a clever trick, taught with great patience and perseverance on my part, for days when I would want to retire from dog-walking, but the time has come to reassess my values. From today onwards (I pick my starting date with great care, paying careful attention to the weather), we are back on the dog track. Look for us all over town – the chocolate colored American water spaniel and the reluctant owner of mixed origins.

Indispensable?

Teaching at UW may offer compensation far beyond that which appears in your bank account on a monthly basis. It is also true that the dollar compensation that has been trickling in has not been subject to much of an increase in recent years. Market forces aren’t necessarily determinative in setting pay scales in an academic setting. Nonetheless, occasionally, the devil in me wonders if I’d fare well were I to make a case to the administration for an adjustment to the salary I have been receiving, given that I, like everyone else I suppose, would love to believe that it is not commensurate with that which I bring to the university. Today being “pay day” made me all the more happy that there is indeed a tool out there – a “meter” in Fortune Magazine that allows me to predict the probability of success were I to go begging for a raise (look for it here).

A series of basic questions leads to an assessment of how indispensable I really am. The result is not really surprising. The title of the questionnaire says it all—you need only ask yourself “are you indispensable” without even plodding through the questions. This will save you some anxious moments where you check off boxes page after page knowing that each answer is placing you even closer to the category of “you will never get a raise at all because you are just so damn dispensable,” a place where none of us want to reside.

One might well ask how many faculty at the Law School are truly irreplaceable? My “score” indicated that I have an indispensability rating of “Medium to Low.” I could, I suppose, tweak the answers to reflect some more intangible indirect contribution that my enormous talents are supporting (I may be replaceable, but is the replacement going to love her students as much?), but at the most basic level, responding in terms of the unique value of my field of expertise (there is great value, but I have doubts as to the uniqueness of it), the questionnaire couldn’t be more blunt in telling me that I best forgo the plug for more dollars.

I did for a moment consider reading the link at the end entitled “How to Get a Raise When the Well has Run Dry,” but gave up after I fully grasped the meaning of my mediocre indispensability rating.

The anticipation builds

A reader wrote that my post on the Oscars inspired her to have an Oscar party this year. One has to let go of one’s individual sensitivities here and not mind that an invitation was not forthcoming. Keeping a blog reader happy is far more important that attending to one’s own social needs. Let me show my generous spirit and pass on a few tips to make her evening a complete success:

1. don’t hand out ballots and ask people to vote. The winner will make a complete idiot of her/himself. They will regret their behavior the next day and you will regret having had them over: a lose-lose situation;
2. don’t serve dinner beforehand. Many people like the preshow more than they like the Awards. You’ll be serving goat cheese soufflé as an appetizer and half your guests will already be glued to the TV;
3. don’t invite people who really are into the ceremonies: they’ll keep telling everyone to be quiet and a quiet party is no one's idea of a success;
4. don’t withdraw into yourself and read legal briefs so that everyone can see how cool and, ergo, bored you are with the ceremonies; that kind of boredom is contagious and you’ll soon have yourself a slumber party.

Oh, I could go on. Fact is, these parties are far less fun than seeing people in a non-TV context. But, if you must spice up your own viewing pleasure, go for it. And don’t invite me. I’m already committed. I’m baking up a soufflé, I have a stack of briefs to read – the whole bit.

Spring fever

As my afternoon went to coaching a group of law students in their moot court competition prep, I missed the chance to grab something for lunch. These events lead me to conclude the following:

1. I am really seriously nuts about my students (not all of them). When I listen to them speak, I see a future that is filled with their talent and humanity. I can’t wait ‘til my generation (and those before) steps aside from the legal profession, to be replaced by these guys.

2. I am really seriously nuts, period. Because I was running so late with everything, I decided to treat myself to a cup of coffee at Ancora. This is an indulgence because I cannot otherwise justify spending $3 for a latte that I can easily make in my office (and I have the fridge, the burner, and the stove-top little moka to do it, too). Since it was such a gorgeously spring-smelling day, I was rather upbeat and chipper in my slow meander toward Ancora (via parking lot, grocery store, post office etc.). At the entry to the coffee shop, a guy was sort of loitering, chatting up various customers as they were coming and going, in the most friendly of ways. Eventually he left, and I remarked to the sellers rather slyly “my, he was excessive!” And they smiled and nodded (sales people will agree with anything you tell them) and I left. And of course it struck me that I should not speak of “excessive” since I had just minutes ago spent a great deal of time explaining to a store clerk the virtues of buying fresh basil in February (he seemed genuinely interested), and telling the postal clerk that the stamps in Poland almost always have great artistry to them and this, in turn, opened the door for a number of other reflections on differences between the two cultures (the Hilldale postal clerks are extraordinarily patient with stories of this nature perhaps due to the fact that the average age of their customer tends to be 94 –prime time for story telling). Okay, it had not gotten to the point where I was accosting virtual strangers with conversational anecdotes, but still, I decided I should be more careful or else my mother’s predictions about the decline in the mental health of all our family members (she exempts herself I believe, which is good: we need to have someone keep the records of our demise) will have turned out to be true.

Movies for the week-end

If you're one of those who has requested email updates of NYT film reviews, you will have gotten the following capsules of what this week-end offers:

Passion of the Christ: After a horror-movie beginning, complete with demons, menacing music and creepy camera moves, Mr. Gibson settles into a long, relentless contemplation of torture, maiming and execution. His stated goal was realism, but the emphatic musical, visual and aural effects — the first nail is driven into Jesus' palms with a sickening thwack that must have required hours of digital tweaking — make the film a melodramatic exercise in high-minded sadomasochism. In spite of concerns about the anti-Semitism of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of the Pharisees, the movie is more grueling and unnerving than outrageous or offensive. For a movie made out of such evident religious conviction, it seems utterly lacking in grace.

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights: This reimagining of the recklessly melodramatic 1987 original is packed with flashy, taffeta silliness, and a desperation for a sweaty PG-13 sexiness so laughable that the cast members deserve Oscar nominations for getting through the picture without cracking up.

Twisted: The greatest mystery in this laborious, nonsensical thriller is why the director Philip Kaufman bothered to lend his talents to such mediocre studio hackwork.

I suppose it is not inconceivable that the producers will try to salvage some good words from those reviews, if only for the future DVD rental market, which is often driven by reviews on boxes. For example, you could truthfully quote (without even changing the meaning much):

Passion of the Christ: “Mr Gibson settles into a long…contemplation. [E]mphatic musical, visual and aural effects.. a melodramatic exercise.. a movie made out of …evident religious conviction.”

Dirty Dancing: HN: “Packed with flashy…sexiness… The cast members deserve Oscar nominations...”

Twisted: “The greatest mystery…thriller… The director Philip Kaufman lend(s) his talents...”

Not exactly catchy slogans, but if you’re a dazed customer who has just spent 3.5 hours staring at countless DVD boxes trying to decide what to rent, it all kind of blurs together anyway.

The senior citizen in the parking lot

How old is my truck?
It is so old that I need a key to open the door (though I never lock it--what for?), but I don’t need a key to start the ignition (I don’t know how this happened but it seems these days I can just turn it on, much like a light switch).
It is so old that I bought one of the first models at the inception of this particular line of trucks, and I am still driving it even though after a long and happy history, the line has been discontinued.
It is so old that no one asks me to pick up prominent visitors at the airport anymore for fear that I will be driving them in THAT TRUCK.
It is so old that I’ve stopped ever going to a drive-through car wash. I’m afraid that the brushes will cause the sides to collapse on me much like a deck of cards and I’ll be devoured by the steely swirling monster bristles.
It is so old that… okay, enough. It is old. But I have no reason to discard it. It starts, it moves, it doesn’t guzzle gas. Can one demand more of a vehicle?

There is the image issue. I remember many years back when I drove some law students to the court house, one said “uh, we always sort of pictured you driving a SAAB.” I felt that to be a complement and it was disturbing to know that I had shattered a classy myth. From there, it is but a small drop to appearing for class in clothes that belong to the last decades, having vinyl furniture in your office, and generally exhibiting a loss of pride in the aesthetic presentation of oneself and one’s surroundings. I’m keeping up with the other stuff so far, but I’m on alert for signs of decline.

I never would have guessed...

The reason we love the Oscars (just bare with me, I realize not everyone loves the Oscars) is that in the end, they are unpredictable. Imagine if they were like political elections: polls indicate that X is the clear frontrunner; exit interviews indicate that Y is leading, the NYT endorses Z. That would be far less interesting.

But the fact is, we really don’t know who the winners will be.

We can weigh the merits of a performance (though even here we typically do not have a consensus), we can factor in such things as “the Academy owes her one” or “he wont get it – he never shows up anyway.” But these factors are rather random. Depending on whom you talk to, you may get bizarrely skewed answers. For example, here’s a little conversation that I bet no one is paying attention to (appearing in some side story in the Times):

"A week ago I would've said it was Sean Penn," said Tony Angellotti, an Oscar campaign expert working for Universal this season. "But at my table at the S.A.G. Awards," he said, referring to the guild ceremony, "we all looked at each other and realized we'd voted for Johnny" for the Oscar. "I'm not sure Johnny Depp is going to win, but he's getting a lot more votes than I suspected," he added.

How seriously are we to consider this? Are there other table-side conversations taking place? Do they offer another intervening force or factor? EVERYONE this year is predicting that Charlize Theron will win ‘Best Actress.’ But is this in itself reason enough to suspect that, therefore, maybe she wont win?

I have not missed an Oscar show since I moved permanently to the States in 1972. Most years I will not have even seen all the movies nominated for best picture. One fancy dress looks the same as the next (though I will try to pick out the DK gloves this year). My memory for names is laughable (and many do seize the opportunity to laugh), and if asked right now, I could not tell you off the top, which film won best picture three years ago. But I am fascinated by this fact of unpredictability. Post-Oscar analyses will offer the missing factors that we all will have neglected to consider. In the mean time, we can but guess and entertain each other with our own foolishness for never being 100% right. Enjoyable? Very much so.

Marrying Omar Sharif

The first time I was seriously considered for marriage was when I was 6 years old. My equally young Polish friend Janek announced, after a momentary critical evaluation: “when I grow up, I will marry Nina.”

You might say that this verged on being an arranged marriage, as his parents were cordially friendly with my parents. The only reason my path crossed Janek’s was because my parents made me spend time with him. Eventually I didn’t much mind, which is how arranged marriages have also been described to me – eventually you may even start liking your spouse.

But Janek and I were never meant to be. My travel to the States pretty much cut him out of my life.
Still, Janek kept in touch with my sister (who lives in Warsaw), and the last time I traveled to Poland, she asked me if I would agree to see him again, just to catch up. She would sit in on the meeting, as would Janek’s wife (idle curiosity, I’m sure).

Before agreeing, I asked my sister how I would find Janek. After all, it’s been 44 years since marriage was suggested, and I haven’t seen (nor thought much about) him since. She looked conspiratorially at me and said: “he looks terrific: 100% like Omar Sharif.”

I was reminded of this exchange today as I listened to NPR on the way home: there was a story on the return of Sharif to the movie scene. Of course, the real Omar Sharif is much older (72), while my “Omar” is my age (see earlier post for an analysis of how YOUNG that is).

Janek-Omar and I did meet over coffee. We eyed each other, his wife eyed me, my sister eyed the entire situation. It wasn’t awkward at all. But one has to wonder, what would have happened had I not left for New York? Would I now be helping him launch a mountain bed and breakfast in southern Poland? Would we eventually have even liked each other? Probably not. I can’t help but see Janek not as Omar but as the little boy in a cowboy suit, with a gleam that spelled trouble. But I did take a photo of us, just to show interested parties back home how close I came to marrying someone who looks now exactly like Omar Sharif.

The politics of age

If the NYTimes told you (through an editorial endorsement) to vote for Kerry but you had been leaning toward Edwards, would you switch? No, probably not. But if the Times told you to vote for Kerry acknowledging that Edwards is a wonderful candidate – perfect for 4 – 8 years from now, would you then switch? Still maybe not? And if the Times admitted that in the past, presidents have come to the White House with pretty empty political resumes, but that was before September 11, would you perhaps give Kerry another glance? Especially if in the same breath the Times portrayed Kerry as a mature, balanced candidate with experience in foreign affairs, while noting that Edwards lacked decisiveness and great depth?

Newspaper endorsements are an odd thing. Most of us would never admit to following a paper’s pointing finger except in instances where we don’t know a thing about the candidate, as for example, in races for county register of deeds. But an endorsement portends of things to come: in Wisconsin it preceded the rush toward Edwards. Or maybe it legitimized it. And that legitimacy influences one’s thought process, doesn’t it? “Well okay, if EVERYONE is going to be voting for him, I might as well too.”

It seems that the loaded term that emerges from the Times endorsement is “experience,” and that the paper has determined that this lies at the base of “electability.” Edwards is given little credit for positions he takes, except that the paper admits that he has populist appeal. It’s fascinating that in the end, age is seen as such a virtue: either political age (meaning number of years on the political scene) or real age. Come to think of it, I don’t remember when this country last elected a president who had not a whole lot of one or the other (though many have squeaked by with only “real age” in their favor). But hey, Edwards only LOOKS young. He’s MY age after all (less than two months younger). Not good enough?

In pursuit of trunks and memorable writing, part 3

For those who read the posts on trunks (yesterday), here is a reprint of the elusive New Yorker article, dated February 13, 1978. I had clipped it and tucked it into the envelope with the note from the author:

(Talk of the Town) Notes and Comment

A letter from a friend home in bed with a cold [nc: authorship stated below]:
This bed is a real mess—mountains of Kleenex, mountains of newspapers. You might say that on an extremely small scale I am fighting for survival, striving to keep from sneezing my precious life away, but between seizures I glance at the papers—especially at stories about Cosmos 954, the Soviet nuclear-reactor satellite that blew a gasket and finally came to rest in the icy reaches of the Canadian north, spreading radioactive contamination over miles and miles—and I wonder if it is worthwhile to shake this cold. I mean, I’ll get over the cold, with aspirins, fluids, bed rest, and the holding of many beautiful thoughts, but I am gripped by the fact that the Soviet Union has at least ten nuclear powered orbs dancing around our skies and that the United States has nine. The newspapers are rather cozy about the matter, some stories saying that it will take six hundred years for one of the orbs to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, and only adding sotto voce that even then the enriched uranium would be extremely radioactive. Another story says that there is nothing to worry about for four hundred years. And another joyously speaks of four thousand years of grace. But aren’t all these figures—six hundred, four hundred, four thousand—mere blinks in the long history of the human race? If so, I’m wondering who gave anybody permission, either orally or in writing, to tamper with the existence of Man, much less set a theoretical cutoff date for worldwide contamination. One of the few things that have sustained me, through happy years and through sad ones, has been the thought that somewhere, sometime, a vigorous, intelligent, progressive, decent, perhaps freckled great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild would put his or her shoulder to the wheel and roll the heavy stone one inch further up the hill. Have to stop now. Aspirin time.

The writer of this little piece (Philip Hamburger) went on (in the year 2000) to publish a book, about which the following is said:

Philip Hamburger joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1939 and hasn't stopped writing since. He has made something of a specialty of writing about presidential inaugurations, and in his new book, Matters of State: A Political Excursion, he collects ten of those pieces, covering the inaugural celebrations of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon (both elections), Carter, Reagan (both elections), Bush, and Clinton. Published just as the nation's capital geared up for the first inauguration of the 21st century, Matters of State provided the perfect opportunity to revisit a perceptive observer's half century of quadrennial dispatches from inside the Beltway.

In pursuit of a distant memory (trunks, part 2)

As a post scriptum to the post on trunks (below) let me say that I did proceed to dump the contents of my steamer on the basement floor. At the very bottom (really) I found this (dated March 30, 1978):

Dear Ms Lewandowske [okay, so he wasn’t the best at spelling Polish names],
Your very thoughtful letter to the New Yorker (with reference to the Notes and Comment on the wayward Soviet satellite) has just reached my desk, as I am the man who wrote the piece. Thank you for your kindness. It means a great deal to a writer to receive a letter such as yours. Sincerely yours, Philip Hamburger

So let me rephrase my concluding remark: do get a trunk, keep the contents organized, don’t confuse nuclear arms with nuclear reactor satellites, and let writers know that their work moved you.

If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll reprint the story later tonight. It’s short and quite touching.

The unbearable lightness of bears

A reader chastised me for not linking to the CNN story on green polar bears in the Singapore zoo (sorry – the story ran for 4 hours then was scratched, can’t imagine why…). Her comment is well taken for the following reasons: 1. I have a good friend who lives in Singapore and I NEVER have any occasion to say anything wise or intelligent about that small country, 2. the story is like no other these days: it presents an insignificant problem (green algae growing on the fur of polar bears), it is informative (it explains that polar bears typically have fur without pigment, hence the illusion of whiteness), and it has an easy, happy resolution (the bears are bathed in some Clorox-like liquid which does away with the algae). Oh and 4. it has (had) quite decent photos of a green polar bear.

How often can you read something these days that says so little about so little and still leaves you feeling perfectly content?