The Weekly Essay

June 8, 2012

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction."-Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury made me want to be a writer. It was, more than anything, his gorgeous, sensual phrases, wonderfully evocative little details giving magic to seemingly mundane things that made me want to write. I loved those details even more than the oh-so-ironic endings to so many of his stories. I wanted to capture the world in that same way. Here are some examples:

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light. (from There Will Come Soft Rains)

The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. (from The Veldt)

He felt his brain fill with boiling mercury. (from Fever Dream)

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. (from The Fog Horn)

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. (from A Sound Of Thunder)

And the sand in the dying light was the color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any time might read and savor down the years. (from In A Season Of Calm Weather)

I recognize that some of these are, at best, examples of overwriting. Bradbury sometimes tends to pile up metaphors and similes like a train wreck. There may have been a certain pragmatism in that; a lot of Bradbury’s early writing was done for pulps that paid by the word. I revered him so much when I was young. But then I developed high-minded (or so I thought) literary aspirations, and looked condescendingly down on "popular" writers. I played the part of the literary snob, but, when I was truly honest with myself, I felt a sense of loss. Ray Bradbury used to represent all I wanted to be, and no other writer ever came close to filling the void I created when I pushed him aside.

Even when I called myself a fan, though, there were some major Bradbury works I couldn’t get through, specifically the novels. I didn’t get much farther than the first couple of chapters of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and not much farther than the first couple of pages of Dandelion Wine. It was the short stories I really loved. In high school sometimes I’d say I needed to do research for a term paper as an excuse to go to the library and read a thick blue hardback volume of Bradbury’s complete (up to that point) short stories. But as a thirteen-year old devoted Bradbury-phile I couldn’t avoid Fahrenheit 451. In fact I looked forward to it, certain it would be a great book, that it would have everything I loved about Bradbury. When I found a copy I bought it with my own money, which was important to me. Knowing what it was about I wanted to feel I fully owned the book, and besides I couldn’t wait for my birthday or Christmas. And yet as I read it I became more and more disappointed. This was supposed to be Bradbury’s masterpiece. As young and naive as I was I felt there was something smug and self-satisfied about his vision of a future divided into the saintly dreamers and preservers of books, who purposely separate themselves from society, and the evil, self-destructive non-readers. The message seemed to be that reading books was more important than understanding them.

As an antidote to Fahrenheit 451 I preferred the black humor of a short story, Usher II, in which a devotee of Edgar Allan Poe invites people who’ve officially censored Poe’s works to a party where he systematically murders them and replaces them with robotic replicas. I never thought murder was an effective way to counter censorship, but I don’t think Bradbury did either. Usher II was deliberate parody–Bradbury’s modest proposal to deal with book banning, or maybe just a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that when we ban books, when we try to suppress rather than face what makes us uncomfortable, we risk becoming robots. There was also The Town Where No One Got Off, in which a man has to do some quick thinking, and some quick talking, to save his own life. I didn’t realize it the first time I read it, but later on I’d see it as a very apt metaphor for what writers do.

Like O’Henry Bradbury is associated with the surprise ending, but his stories could have surprisingly ambiguous endings. Maybe it was because of the open-ended nature of some of them, inviting readers to carry on where he’d left off, that made me want to be a writer. Even now when I reread the story The Veldt I wonder the same thing that I did when I first read the story: the kids are alone with the lions they created. How long before the lions turn on them? The written story ended, but prompted me to imagine more.

Bradbury has written about the writing of The Veldt. It came out of a time when he’d set himself the task of writing a short story a week. He’d write a first draft on Monday, do complete rewrites on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then Friday mail it out to magazines to be published. Bradbury made writing sound like extremely hard work, but that was what made it appealing to me. I knew adults who called writers lazy, who said writing books wasn’t "a real job". Bradbury was the first to make me think that writing was a job, an extremely difficult one that took a lot of dedication. If writing a story a week was what it took to be a writer, I thought, that’s what I’ll do. For three months I tried to write a short story a week. Most of them never got past the first draft stage, and none ever got published. Finally I gave up, although I did keep a couple of the stories, and kept revising and revising them for years afterward. Bradbury made writing sound like hard work, but it turned out to be even harder than I thought it would be. Still, reading Bradbury, among other things, I kept at it, still wanting to be a writer.

I also had an English teacher who, when he caught me reading some cheap paperback (not by Bradbury), couldn’t resist making a disparaging remark about science fiction. I said, "What about Bradbury?" And he said, "Oh, Bradbury’s good!" And then he quietly added, "Hey, could I borrow that book when you’re done with it?" In fact I had several teachers whose attitudes ranged from a resigned "If you’re going to read science fiction at least read Bradbury" to emphatic recommendations of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Even now, having fallen out of love with Bradbury, I can honestly say that The Illustrated Man is one of my favorite books.

That same teacher who said "Bradbury’s good!" had the class read the story There Will Come Soft Rains. When we were done he asked, "What is the theme of this story?" Up to that point I’d been taught that the theme of any literary work was like the moral that was always written in italics at the end of one of Aesop’s fables: an easily digestible capsule that told us what the story or novel was supposed to teach. And there was only one right answer. The teacher explained that the house in There Will Come Soft Rains is like the human race: capable of extraordinary things, but, in the end, unable to save itself. Then he added, "That’s one way of looking at it." It began to dawn on me that literature, great literature, wasn’t about telling us what to think, but rather was supposed to make us think.

In the Eighties when I was reading Bradbury the Cold War seemed to be escalating. Both Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles climax with the outbreak of global nuclear war. Although Bradbury wasn’t the only writer to predict it he was the only writer I was reading who was predicting a future that seemed like it could happen at any time. And yet in Bradbury I also found hope. At the end of The Illustrated Man the unnamed narrator sees his own murder foretold in the illustrated man’s tattoos. The fact that he escapes, the fact that he lives to tell his story, leaves open the possibility that what he’s seen is only one possible future and that, having seen it, he has the power to change it. The power lies in knowing that the future is not fixed.

Hail and farewell, Mr. Bradbury.

June 1, 2012

In the late spring when lightning bugs start to come out I always think about the British folklore of the will o’ the wisp, the mysterious lights that would lead travelers to their deaths on the moors. Except will o’ the wisps are really swamp gas, since they don’t have lightning bugs in Britain. They do have glowworms, although these are apparently so rare you usually only find them inside giant peaches, but that’s another story.

Why people were out wandering around the moors is beyond me. Probably they were lost and I understand will o’ the wisps were often mistaken for the lanterns of other travelers, so people would follow them blindly. Well, not entirely blindly. And I would think that if the will o’ the wisp was well-known enough to make it into folklore people would learn not to follow strange lights without first yelling out something like, "Hey Phil, is that you?" And if there was no answer they’d go some other direction. Unless they were lost and panicking, which I understand can make people do crazy things.

Many years ago I took a hunters’ education course, on the off-chance that I would one day want to go out and shoot wild animals for food instead of chasing them down and tearing them apart with my bare teeth or, well, going to a grocery store. And we watched several educational hunting films that taught me, among other things, that sitting in a pile of brush wearing camouflage while blowing a turkey call and occasionally wiping your mouth with a red handkerchief is an incredibly boneheaded thing to do, which would seem to be common sense, but you’d be surprised at the number of guys who’ve been shot doing that. Each year. The scientific term for that is "thinning the herd". Anyway one of the genuinely surprising things I learned is that there’s something called brush panic that people who are lost in the woods sometimes experience. According to the film there was a guy who wandered away from his group while hiking in the woods. Having lost both his group and the trail he gradually became more and more upset, steadily reaching a state of panic bordering on psychosis. He was finally found by rescuers with his arms wrapped tightly around the trunk of a tree. He’d lost all sense of external reality and could only be moved once the rescuers had used crowbars to pry his arms loose. And because these educational films always liked to have Twilight Zone-esque endings we were told that the tree where he was found was just twenty feet away from his cabin. I’m still not sure what, exactly, this story was supposed to teach us, other than "Don’t get lost in the woods". Even at the time, and even though the film’s narrator had a very authoritative voice, I suspected brush panic was a made-up phenomenon.

And I still doubted its existence even when I once got lost in the woods and came very close to having a mental breakdown myself. Technically, though, it wasn’t the woods in the sense of a large forested area. It was a wooded area behind my uncle’s house in Connecticut. We were visiting, and I was wandering around the backyard and found a path leading off into the woods. And I thought, hey, there’s a dark, spooky-looking path going an unknown distance into woods I’m completely unfamiliar with. What could possibly go wrong? So I started walking down the path, among birch trees and ferns. I came to a fork and decided to go left, because, hey, totally different direction taking me even deeper into woods I was completely unfamiliar with, so what could possibly go wrong? Besides, I thought, I could just retrace my steps. And my uncle lived in a suburban area. How big could these woods be? When I came to another fork and decided to go right I started to get an idea that these woods were a lot bigger than I realized. I’d later learn that my uncle’s house was at the edge of a state forest. I started to panic, especially when retracing my steps didn’t get me back as quickly as I thought, and I kept finding more forks in the path and wasn’t sure which way to go. The birches and ferns all looked alike. Then, luckily, I came out into a clearing with a house nearby. Not my uncle’s house, but I thought, hey, strange house near the woods, nobody around, "Dueling Banjos" being played in the distance. What could possibly go wrong? I knocked on the door and told the nice woman who answered who I was and asked if she knew the way to my uncle’s house. And she pointed out that if I looked really hard I could just see his house through the trees. Maybe I’d panicked. Maybe there really is such a thing as brush panic, even though, through the whole ordeal I retained enough presence of mind that, had I seen a little light up ahead, I would have yelled out, "Hey Phil, is that you?"

May 25, 2012

The other day I was about to step off the patio in my bare feet to take something to the garbage can. My wife said, "Don’t walk in the backyard in your bare feet. You don’t know what’s out there." I realized we have very different definitions of "the backyard". My definition of "backyard" begins about fifty feet from the edge of the patio, where you find the first tree. It’s the every edge of the dense jungle that our backyard becomes where giant honeysuckle bushes have formed bowers and pangolins roam. It’s where I chase rabbits into the neighboring yards so our dogs don’t kill them. The neighbors’ dogs are too small and slow to catch rabbits, and too dense to notice that rabbits even exist, but that’s another story.

My wife’s definition of "backyard" begins at the edge of the patio. It’s more accurate, but it’s also less romantic. Besides since I frequently take the dogs out I have a pretty good idea what’s in the backyard, and where the dogs have left things that I don’t want to step in. Part of the reason I didn’t want to put my shoes on just to walk ten feet to put a rabbit carcass that I’d almost stepped in in the garbage can is because, well, I’m lazy like that. But I also like going barefoot, especially when the weather is warm. At the end of a long day at work when I take my shoes off it’s a feeling of such immense relief that I can almost hear my feet screaming, "I’m free! Free, I tell you! I’m breathing deep of the fresh air of liberty!" Sometimes at work when I’m at my desk I’ll even take my shoes off, although I try not to because as soon as I do someone will come to my office with a question and they’ll stop and look around, trying to figure out where that tiny voice is coming from. Seriously, though, I think we all know that feet, when released from their patent leather prison, tend to not smell very good, no matter how often you change your odor eaters. And I mostly wear sneakers, because they’re the shoes I’m most comfortable in, but they also infuse feet with a slow-release stench. This problem could be avoided if I could go barefoot all the time, which I would do if I could, except on special occasions, or when driving.

That reminds me: have you ever gone past another car on the road and noticed another person’s bare feet either up on the dashboard or up against the window? Not that I’m complaining, but it’s more than a little disconcerting when it’s the driver. And I probably wouldn’t go barefoot at the gym either. I’ve had a couple of cases of athlete’s foot, which doesn’t seem fair because I’m not even close to being an athlete. At least I think it was athlete’s foot. All I know is my feet suffered The Itch From Hell. Commercials for athlete’s foot treatments always show feet bursting into flames, which would explain why athletes go through so many shoes. If they wanted to be accurate, though, they’d show a guy rubbing 40-grit sandpaper between his toes. And I wouldn’t want to go barefoot anywhere that I might step on anything sharp or painful. I envy hobbits who, even though they’re fictional, are still admirable for being able to go everywhere without shoes. When Frodo was climbing Mount Doom I never thought, will he destroy the ring? No, I was too busy thinking, man, I wish my feet were that tough. And then there are parasites, although those can have their advantages. Some time ago I heard a news story about a guy with severe allergies who decided to treat them by purposely infecting himself with hookworms. The theory is that allergies are caused by a crazy immune system, and hookworms suppress the immune system. The only downside is that side effects of hookworm infection include skin lesions, anemia, and impaired mental function, which makes them slightly better than over-the-counter allergy medicines. Since I don’t have allergies I think I’ll try to avoid hookworms, though. And there’s also tetanus. The only thing I know about tetanus is that you can get it from stepping on rusty nails, and it’s commonly called lockjaw.

But I’ll still go barefoot when I can. It takes me back to my childhood when I went barefoot everywhere all summer long. Well, not everywhere. Sometimes my mother would have to take me to the store or some other place where I had to wear shoes. Because it was such a pain to have to put on socks and shoes I’d ask if I could go without socks, except my way of asking this as a child was, "Can I go barefoot in my shoes?" My mother thought this was very cute and clever, so of course I repeated it a lot. My parents often comment on how talkative I was as a child, and how that frequently resulted in me saying inappropriate things. Now that I think about it my parents encouraged me to go barefoot as often as possible. And always seemed to be leaving rusty nails lying around. Maybe they wanted me to get lockjaw to give them a little peace and quiet.

May 18, 2012

It’s been said, and it’s probably true, that, statistically, flying is a safer way of traveling than driving, although I wonder if anyone has ever studied the likelihood of surviving a car crash versus surviving a plane crash. And while driving you don’t have to worry about things like the car suddenly dropping out of the sky, or having to swerve around mountains, or a fellow passenger’s underwear exploding, or, most dangerous of all, airline food. Flying may be the fastest way to get from one place to another, but driving has its advantages. If you fly into a place you have no real sense of what it’s like because you’ve approached it from above. Driving you come into it gradually and can get a sense of how it’s grown. You can also stop a car and stretch your legs whenever you want. Or whenever the person driving wants. You can watch the countryside go by, while in a plane for most of the flight all you can see is sky and clouds, although I understand there are long stretches of interstate 80 through Iowa where all you can see is sky and corn, but at least you could stop the car and pick some corn. Try that in an airplane.

And I also admit that driving from Tennessee to eastern Oklahoma the countryside doesn’t really change that much, although there are things that make it interesting. For one thing no matter where you drive on any long road trip you’ll pass at least half a dozen places that claim to be world famous. They’ll claim to have world famous pickles, world famous tattoos, world famous tattoos of pickles, world famous cabinets, or world famous barbecue. All these places have one thing in common: you’ve never heard of any of them. Their claim to being world famous is that a dozen years ago somebody from Belgium who was visiting the United States decided to stretch their legs and sample the local pickles or maybe get a tattoo. The barbecue places all have one other thing in common: they always have pictures of smiling, happy pigs on their signs, which always makes me wonder if the pigs really would be happy if they knew they were about to be knocked on the head with a hammer, have their throats cut, their bellies split, and, eventually, their ribs thrown on a metal grate over a fire. I was kind of disappointed that eastern Oklahoma looks a lot like Tennessee and Arkansas. I was honestly expecting to see arid plains, tumbleweeds, and saloons once we crossed the border. I was expecting Woody Guthrie and all I got were toll booth attendants, even though I admit they were some of the nicest toll booth attendants I’ve ever spent six seconds talking to.

The main difference is that while Tennessee and Arkansas have towns with names like Franklin, Springfield, Knoxville, and Bug Tussle in Oklahoma the towns have names like Muskogee, Anadarko, and Okmulgee. It’s a good thing I don’t live in Okmulgee because if I did I’d constantly tell people where I lived, especially if I were visiting another place. Someone might ask me, "What time is it?" and I’d say "It’s a quarter after three in Okmulgee". And they’d say, "But we’re in Quito." And then I’d zone out for a couple of hours trying to decide whether Okmulgee was a cooler name for a city than Quito. (Answer: Okmulgee. Three syllables beats two.) I have to add that I regret never being able to find a postcard for Okmulgee. Or even Muskogee, which really is world famous because of the Merle Haggard song. I collect postcards. It’s a habit I started several years ago when I was on a long trip and my camera wouldn’t work, which didn’t bother me much because I felt walking around taking pictures made me look too much like a tourist anyway. But I wanted to have some memento of places I’d been, so I started buying postcards, because no tourist would ever walk into a hotel gift shop and buy twenty-seven postcards. I also have postcards of places I’ve never been but would like to visit, which is pretty much everywhere except Brussels, and postcards of works of art I like, and unusual postcards I just happened to like. People even sometimes send me interesting postcards, like the time a friend sent me a postcard with the Earth on it and on the back he wrote, "Wish you were here", which is a Steven Wright joke, but I’m flattered that it also applies to me. I even have complete strangers’ old postcards that have fallen out of used books I’ve bought, so I can say, "Hey, that’s great that Myra made it to Wales even after the amputation." I like postcards because I’ve discovered that most people are better at taking pictures than I am, especially since, when I got home from that original trip, I discovered the reason the camera wouldn’t work was because I’d put the batteries in the wrong way, but that’s another story. Something else you’ll notice about traveling west is that somewhere in Oklahoma they have very few road signs and they decided to not put numbers on the interstate exit signs. This might not be a problem, but Oklahoma’s roads actually warp the fabric of space time, so that it’s easy to drive from Muskogee to Tulsa but if you try to go back the way you came you’ll end up in Wyoming. This reminds me of a time when I was on a high school trip and I was riding with one of my classmates who’d just gotten her license. At one point we passed a sign that said "Welcome to Kentucky". I pointed this out to her and she said, "Oh, yeah, it’s part of Kentucky that juts down into Tennessee". Since we were supposed to be going southeast I wondered how far exactly this part of Kentucky jutted down.

And you can’t rely on a GPS device in Oklahoma. If you try using one all it says is, "Recalculating…recalculating…recalculating…I give up." I really wouldn’t complain about this if they’d just number the exit signs, mainly because I have a mild obsession with counting exit sign numbers. I think this started when I was a kid and my family would drive to Florida every summer, and at a certain point in Georgia my mother told me I could count down the exit sign numbers. Once we passed exit number one that meant we’d soon cross over the border into Florida. On another long road trip my father gave me a simple speed and distance math problem, and even though I hate math I worked it out and realized that when you’re traveling sixty miles an hour you’re going a mile a minute. And I would see signs that said 198 miles to the next town, and I’d calculate in my head at sixty miles an hour the next town was three hours and eighteen minutes away. Except I’m never sure how they calculate that distance. Is that the distance to the town center, or just to the edge of town where there’s a place that has world famous tablecloths? Anyway, that discovery, unfortunately, became another minor obsession and led to me calculating that thirty miles an hour is a mile every two minutes and fifteen miles an hour is a mile every four minutes, so if you’re traveling at seventy-five miles an hour you’re going 1.25 miles every minute, and at that point my ability to do math in my head completely breaks down until you get to a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and then you’re either flying or traveling through Wyoming. In conclusion I think it can safely be said that flying and driving each have their advantages, especially since while driving you are at a risk of exploding underwear if you’ve stopped to eat at that place that has world famous enchiladas.

April 27, 2012

April is the cruelest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot. He was a poet, and April is National Poetry Month, so it now really is the cruelest month if you’re a poet because it’s just a reminder of how few people read poetry anymore. Just a few years ago, when bookstores that you could actually walk into and browse were still legal, the poetry section was almost always the second smallest section, tucked away in a back corner next to the drama section, which is actually the smallest, but that’s because most people don’t read plays because even if they’re into that sort of thing they go see plays. And poetry books, for their size, were always some of the most expensive books in the bookstore. You could pick up a six-hundred page Stephen King paperback for less than five bucks, but a thin paperback of Brenda Hillman’s poems would cost about twenty.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, poets are seriously underpaid. Some people ask, if there’s a National Poetry Month, why isn’t there a National Painting Month, or a National Sculpture Month? There isn’t one because a lot of painters, sculptors, and, for that matter, novelists, playwrights, and composers make enough money that they can support their habit. Or habits. Some teach, but if you ask someone what they do for a living and they say, "I’m a painter" or "I write music" chances are your next question is going to be about their work. If someone tells you "I’m a poet" chances are your next question is going to be, "So, do you teach?" or "What do you do for money?" or "That’s a job?" Not even Poet Laureate is a full-time job. In the United States the job of Poet Laureate was originally Poetry Consultant To The Library Of Congress. You can be a consultant to a banking firm and make enough money to have a summer home in the Hamptons. Being the U.S. Poet Laureate will barely buy you a shack in rural Vermont.

Even in Britain, where the tradition of appointing a Poet Laureate started, the job doesn’t pay much, although some laureates did make more than others. Tennyson, for instance, was paid £99 per year which, in those days, was enough to buy a Lamborghini. A lot of other British poets laureate, though, waived the money and instead were paid in wine. Typically they received a 140 gallon cask of wine which, for most poets, is pretty paltry payment. Dylan Thomas could drink that much in a single reading. But it wasn’t always this way. Robert Burns wrote a small volume of poetry in the hopes of earning enough money to leave Scotland. He then made so much money he said, "Eh, I think I’ll stick around", even though his PR people would like you to think he said, "Hoots nae, I ne’er kenned I’d be rollin’ in sich dough!" Sylvia Plath’s first book was launched with the kind of party that these days is reserved for memoirs of sitcom actors. And t-shirts with bats with baby faces and rats’ alley coffee mugs are still highly prized collectibles from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland World Tour. There are even still a few aging roadies who talk about Robert Frost trashing hotel rooms, Anne Sexton freaking out groupies, and Emily Dickinson demanding whole bowls of only green M&M’s.

Poets used to be respected, and even feared. Plato wanted poets kept out of his ideal society, which caused Homer to yell, "D’oh! Why you little…" When Dante said to you, "I’ll see you in Hell!" it was no empty threat. And I remember hearing in the 1970’s that rock stars were corrupting the youth. But in the 1870’s the original prince of the punks Arthur Rimbaud, before he was even eighteen, was corrupting adults. It’s no wonder Sylvester Stallone played him in all those movies. And in some places poets still command some respect. In some places "poet" is even still a profession. Poetry, most people seem to think, is about freedom; metaphors, the thinking goes, liberate the mind to connect things in ways that lead to deeper understanding. If I were a poet, though, I’d be all for living in a totalitarian regime, because those seem to be the places where poets are still respected and maybe even still feared. Joseph Brodsky committed the crime of making money as a poet in the Soviet Union. A judge asked him, "Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?" Brodsky replied, "Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?" That line earned him a stint in Siberia and eventual exile. When Ceaucescu’s regime collapsed an actor on his way to the national television station asked the poet Marin Sorescu to make the announcement. Romanians wouldn’t trust an actor, but they’d respect the word of a poet.

When I was a teenager I started writing poetry even though the closest thing to a totalitarian regime I knew was school, mainly one of my English classes where we read the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow, that goes, "so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens." And the teacher told us we were all too young and ignorant to be able to understand the depths and meanings of that poem. She made it sound like a puzzle, like a riddle wrapped in two mockeries of a travesty of an enigma. She said that if we went to college and studied hard and read a lot of really difficult books we might eventually someday be able to grasp how profound that poem is. I went to college and studied hard and read difficult books and learned that Williams’s poem is about a wet red wheelbarrow next to some white chickens. I took her sneering as a challenge, but I was the exception. The first time I read The Red Wheelbarrow I loved it. The second time, after listening to my teacher, I hated it. It took a lot of work to get back to loving it, and even though the work was rewarding in its own way, I never should have hated it.

Even in the United States, even though most people don’t read poetry, I think there’s still some respect for poetry. The movements of a beautiful person or animal or even a machine may be called "poetry in motion". We sometimes express deep sentiments with cards that are written in verse. Something that affects us deeply, no matter what it is, may be called pure poetry. Beautiful language, even if it’s prose, is often described as poetry. And poetry is still being written, and not just by academics. When Adrienne Rich edited a volume of The Best American Poetry she didn’t limit herself to big-name periodicals devoted to poetry or those which, like The New Yorker, still publish big-name poets out of habit, but went to small independent presses, journals published on photocopiers, even poetry written by prisoners. I used to hang out at coffee shops that had regular poetry readings, and heard some pretty damn good poetry from a wide spectrum of people, poetry that, even if it’s published, will never get the same level of readership as a lot of novels. Oprah Winfrey never picked a book of poems for her book club. There may be a lot of reasons most people don’t read poetry anymore, but people like my English teacher sure aren’t helping. So, inspired by William Carlos Williams, I wrote her a poem:

This is just to say

I have studied poetry
and read
the difficult books
that you didn’t,

since you
were too busy
drinking gin
in the lounge.

Forgive me.
I thought
you wanted us
to be educated.

April 20, 2012

Scientists have conducted a study and concluded that beer makes you smarter. At least that’s the way it was reported in the news when I first heard about it. The truth is a little more complicated, which, I think, is why people hate science. It’s not the fault of scientists because they come up with conclusions that get mangled and misreported, and when it’s something like "beer makes you smarter", that, even though it sounds counterintuitive, also sounds awesome and a great excuse to pop open a cold one right in the middle of a meeting at work, it turns out to be more complicated. You have to wade through the data, although I think data is a much better reason to hate science. I don’t mean information itself. I mean, specifically, the word "data" because it’s confusing. It’s a plural noun, but no one other than scientists and grammar Nazis seem to realize it’s a plural noun so they always cringe whenever they hear someone talk about "this data" or "that data" and then use "impact" as a verb because they can’t differentiate between "affect" and "effect" well enough to use them correctly.

So anyway as I was saying I always cringe when I hear someone talk about "this data" because I know they’d never talk about "this children" or "that Ukrainians". And I do have to admit I understand why the fact that data is a plural noun is confusing. For one thing there was only one Data, even though Brent Spiner played at least five different characters on Star Trek, but that’s another story. For another the singular of data is datum, but I don’t think anyone really knows what a datum is. What would a scientist say if you asked for a datum? "Well, here’s one. It’s the number 7."

To get back to beer making you smarter, though, the real result of the study was that a certain amount of alcohol in your system makes you smarter in some ways, but dumber in others. Specifically scientists found that a blood alcohol content of 0.07 made people better at creative problem solving because it encourages non-linear thinking, although it also made them worse at other things. Driving, for instance. Depending on where you live a blood alcohol content of 0.07 may be just under the legal limit, but it’s still 0.07 more than you should have in your system while driving and guaranteed to make you a pretty stupid driver because even with a very small amount of alcohol your chances of answering a question like "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" by saying "Practice" go up, and the chances of you trying to get to Carnegie Hall by driving through a crowded train station go up the more you drink.

Oddly enough a few days after I heard about the study I found evidence of obvious beer-induced stupidity, or maybe it was just beer-exacerbated stupidity, while I was walking home from work. Someone had thrown a Guinness bottle cap out of their car onto the side of the road. So not only were the littering, they were also drinking and driving. There are all kinds of ad campaigns, and messages within ads for alcoholic beverages, telling people not to drink then drive, but I realized there are very few that tell people not to drink while driving, probably because that’s something so patently obvious that you should be able to figure it out even without a blood alcohol level of 0.07. Admittedly most people do drink and drive, but specifically most drink water or sodas or, well, nothing alcoholic, and most people who do that use a straw. Somehow I doubt the guy who tossed out that bottle cap was drinking his Guinness with a straw. And I am more than a little bit surprised that he was drinking Guinness, because if there’s one beer that should make you smarter it should be Guinness, since it’s made with fish eyes. And it annoyed me because I felt like this guy was making responsible Guinness drinkers like myself look bad. I imagine he was driving along in his 1976 green Pontiac, getting about four miles to the gallon, using his teeth as a bottle opener, sucking down the six-pack of Guinness that his step-brother had given him as a birthday gift because he couldn’t bear to not have a buzz on for the fifteen minutes it took him to drive to the corner market to pick up a $5.69 case of Milwaukee Lite. Maybe I’m wrong to assume that he was an idiot, though. Hopefully he wouldn’t harm anyone else, but if he were to crash his car badly enough to effectively take himself out of the gene pool that would be a creative way of solving a problem.

April 13, 2012

Advertising has become unbelievably invasive so slowly and gradually that I think most people are unaware of it, but I wonder if there will be a tipping point. Even as advertising becomes more invasive advertisers remain admirable. Sometimes they’re even the heroes of TV shows, living glamorous lives. And, hey, they are people who do creative stuff and get paid huge amounts of money for it. So what if they’re rotting our brains and taking human artistic expression, one of the most beautiful things there is, and ruining it by using it to make us buy junk we don’t need or want? And supposedly advertising has become more sophisticated in modern times, although, really, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much more sophisticated than it was in the days when merchants would throw things at random people and yell "Eat it!"

Advertisers have been selling us the same tired, stupid ideas for decades now: all women care about is being thin and fashionable, men are dumb slobs who will eat and drink ourselves into coronaries, our pets are smarter than we are, go ahead and wreck your car because your insurance company will buy you a new one, and we all need energy drinks to get going in the morning, get through the day, and stay up late until we take a pill to help us sleep. The difference is now this advertising is everywhere. I don’t want to blame my generation for everything but I think it started when we started paying ridiculous amounts of money, or, technically, asking our parents to pay ridiculous amounts of money, for Jordache jeans and Guess t-shirts. And we all knew that cheaper jeans and t-shirts would be just fine. We even all admitted we were really paying mostly for the label, which was idiotic because we were paying companies for the right to use our bodies for free advertising. I don’t know of any other place where this works. Billboard companies, for instance, don’t pay for the ads they display. It’s the other way around. And obviously just using our bodies as walking billboards wasn’t good enough. There are advertisements for candy bars on gas pumps, because nothing gives me a craving for caramel and peanuts like the smell of gasoline, and the airport security bins you put your shoes in have ads for shoe companies, because nothing washes away the annoyance of walking through an airport in your socks than the suggestion that you could use some new shoes.

And for years now we’ve been putting up with annoying little advertisements that pop up in the corner of the screen in the middle of shows we’re watching. The other night I was watching a movie about people trapped in a cave and at one point I noticed a couple of tiny people I hadn’t seen previously in the corner of the screen waving flashlights around. Who are they? I thought. And then I realized they weren’t part of the movie. They were an advertisement for a TV show about detectives that was coming on after the movie. Because, you know, I couldn’t be trusted to do something like look in the TV guide or wait until the movie’s credits were rolling, when they’d inevitably cram in "Coming up next." over the closing theme music. And apparently the ads in the corner aren’t working well enough, which would be a good thing, but instead it’s only encouraged advertisers to up the game. The other night I was watching a television show and right in the middle of it half the screen was covered with an ad for the show that was coming up next. Or was on another night. Or was on another channel. I don’t really know because I changed the channel, but I doubt that will work.

In fact I’m not sure how much advertising really does work. I used to think I still get spam emails because somewhere some bonehead actually decided to buy a free subscription to Fishin’ Weekly after getting an offer in his inbox, but I think it might be simpler than that. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result. By that standard advertisers all belong in the loony bin. I came to this conclusion when I heard about an unbelievably invasive advertising campaign. A well-known brand of toilet paper hired "ambassadors" to stand in bathrooms and talk to people about how much toilet paper they used, or-and I swear I’m not making this up-"What was the most enjoyable part of your bathroom experience?" If a stranger asked me that because they were just curious or doing anthropological research or something I’d probably be happy to answer, but I draw the line at being ambushed by an advertising campaign. And I say this as someone who’s had some pretty strange experiences in public bathrooms. Once as I was coming out of the men’s bathroom in the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville four women came up to me and asked if they could come in. If you’re thinking that stories like this usually start with "Dear Penthouse" let me explain that this particular men’s bathroom is famous for its elegant art deco décor. In fact it’s so famous that I think they should stop making women sneak in to get a look at it and just offer guided tours, but only after I’m done washing my hands. And once while I was washing my hands in a bathroom in a New York airport a very elderly man asked me, "What kind gets rid of them?" Starting with the fact that I didn’t know what "them" were there were more things wrong with this question than I could count, but I just said, "Green" and left with wet hands. As disconcerting as this experience was I’d still prefer it to someone in the bathroom advertising toilet paper.

Besides if the advertising agency that came up with the ambassadors program really wanted an effective selling campaign they’d take the toilet paper out of the stalls and replace the ambassadors with someone selling toilet paper by the foot. And that idea is so insane that I’m sure some advertising company is considering it right now. And if you’re wondering what toilet paper company it is that came up with the ambassador program I’m not going to tell you. I’m not advertising for them unless they pay me. For a little more, though, I’ll even wear one of their t-shirts.

April 6, 2012

We’ve known about postpartum depression for years, but recently another, even more insidious problem associated with child bearing has arisen. It’s called "baby name regret". Parents give their kids an interesting or unusual name, hoping their child will grow up to be interesting or unusual. I think this is an inevitable result of my generation’s obsession with trying to be unique and different. Not that a name necessarily defines your destiny. William Shakespeare asked, "What’s in a name?" Of course he had it easy, having a name like William Shakespeare. And admittedly he also said, "he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him,/And makes me poor indeed".

And it can be hard being saddled with a name with an unfortunate history. I used to know a man named Adolf. Not the famous Adolf, the one who ruined that name for everybody, but the Adolf I knew was born before World War II. And he was a nice, unassuming guy, as was his next door neighbor, Benito. There are also studies that suggest that kids with unusual names are more likely to become criminals as adults, probably because if you’ve got a name like Lionel you’re either going to hear a lot of model train jokes or spend most of your days at school being beaten up. And I understand parents who named their children Andrew or Katrina the years those hurricanes hit being upset, but, hey, these things happen. It’s not a problem I’ll ever have to worry about myself, but for parents who are worried, though, I’m pretty sure your daughter Zoetrope or your son Quigley will grow up to be just fine.

And if you’re obsessed with them being unique, unusual, and interesting individuals I’ll let you in on a secret: they are unique, unusual, and interesting individuals. Just like everybody else. Being different isn’t for everyone, which may be why it’s so highly overrated. In recent history generations have generally rebelled against their parents to some degree or other, but I’m pretty sure Gen X was the first generation to not just rebel against our parents but against ourselves. Everybody wanted to look and act differently from everybody else–a famous advertising campaign even told us "Think different", and even though it was telling us to think differently it was also subtly telling us that proper grammar was for conformists. Except only a very small percentage of us knew that "Think differently" is grammatically correct, so, technically, we were the nonconformists.

As a result of our obsession with being different we all ended up looking like each other, while pretending to be so totally distanced and ironic about everything. And that’s the problem. When everybody wants to be a trendsetter nobody is. Not that I’m saying we should each stop marching to the beat of our own individual drummer, but if your individual drummer is telling you to play well with others that may not be such a bad thing. And if your drummer is telling you to change your name to Trout Fishing In America maybe you should ask your drummer what exactly he’s been smoking, but that’s another story. I can also think of a really good example of parents who wanted to give their child a name that was different and unusual and failed, but they were okay with it because they really weren’t concerned about being trendsetters or trying to be different from everybody else.

My mother picked the name Christopher for me partly because she didn’t know anyone named Christopher, so the name wouldn’t have any ugly associations, but mainly because she liked the book Winnie The Pooh. Later on she would wonder if maybe she should have gone with Piglet when I ate an entire jar of olives, or maybe Owl when I was around two and became an expert on every conceivable subject, whether I knew anything about it or not. Senility set in around four, but that’s another story. And there were times when she so frequently addressed me as What The Hell Were You Thinking that I started to wonder if that was my name. I’ve also had ups and downs with my name. Most people call me Chris. In one of my high school classes I sat behind a guy named Chris, and there was a girl named Kris on the other side of the room. One day Chris said to me, "Walking down the halls of this school and yelling ‘Hey Chris!’ is like going to a Cure concert and yelling, ‘Hey, you in the black!’" About the only time I get referred to as Christopher is when my parents are mad at me, although my full name is also included in my work email signature, so people I work with who don’t know me well are apt to call me Christopher. There used to be a guy at another company who would sometimes call me at work and he would always start our conversations by saying, "Christopher." He also sounded just like my father on the phone, so every time he called me my first thought was, "Oh shit, what did I do this time?" Not that I really have anything against being called Christopher. In third grade when I was first introduced to my teachers–for some reason I had three teachers in third grade–I told them I preferred to be called Christopher. I don’t know why I said this. It just sounded better than "May I mambo dogfaced to the banana patch?" And of course being three of the worst teachers I’d ever have they all insisted on calling me Chris. Except for the one who insisted on calling me Adolf.

March 29, 2012

The other day I was at the gym and running on a treadmill. There’s a side of me that always thinks there’s something goofy about running on a treadmill since, technically, I’m not a hamster living in a small enclosed space whose only means of real exercise is a big wheel. Although as a kid I did have a pet hamster and I always wished just once I could get in the wheel too and run alongside him, and maybe say something like, "Man, I’ve really got to cut down on the food pellets. Those things are just pure carbs." I could run or walk anywhere, and doing it outside does give me a feeling of accomplishment, of getting somewhere. And outside I have interesting experiences, like the time I was on a streetcorner and a guy came up next to me and asked, "Do you have any issues?" I said, "I have some old National Geographics, but mostly I recycle."

On the other hand most treadmills will keep an exact count of how much distance I’ve covered-although I wish instead of putting it in miles or kilometers they’d say things like "If you were outside you’d be home now!" And they keep a count of my heart rate and how many calories I’ve burned, and I’m grateful they don’t say things like "Cut down on the toaster waffles. Those things are pure carbs." And I’m not positive about this but I think running on a treadmill might be a little easier on my legs and knees than running on concrete or asphalt. At least I hope that’s the case. I’ve heard several different runners say that you know you’re a serious runner when you don’t have any cartilage left in your legs or you have to have a knee replaced, which seems like kind of a boneheaded attitude.

The reason I’m running is hopefully to keep my whole body in shape, not to destroy part of it, and if I really want painful and completely unnecessary surgery I’ll go to a plastic surgeon and say, "Make me look like Marty Feldman." Maybe I am doing damage to my knees and feet, though. And I wonder if even the earliest humans suffered from bad knees, since running, after all, is the second oldest form of exercise, although back in the very early days people didn’t just run for their health. They ran for their lives since they were usually being chased by lions or warthogs. The African veldt where modern humans first appeared was a pretty dangerous place which may be why homo sapiens collectively is sometimes referred to as the human race. Even from the very beginning we’ve been racing away from or toward something. What I’ve never been able to make sense of is why different groups of human beings with varying skin colors or with or without epicanthic folds are referred to as different races. In spite of mostly superficial environmental adaptations we’re all the same species. When was the last time you looked at, say, two different orchids that were the same species but different colors and said, "Hey, they’re different races"? But that’s another story.

To get back to the treadmill, I’ve found that it also has other advantages. I’ve noticed that it’s really hard to go running outside and watch a soccer game at the same time, even with a handheld TV. And I can run five miles and I don’t have to worry about how the hell I’m going to get back to where I started from. I don’t have to worry about being hit by a car or chased by warthogs or getting so caught up in thinking about what it would be like to look like Marty Feldman that I run off a cliff. And the last time I was running on the treadmill I noticed something interesting: I could adjust the angle I was running at. Outside this is bound to happen, unless you’re running in, say, Kansas. You’re almost always going to be going either up a hill or down one, unless of course you’re my grandfather who used to regale us with stories about how he walked to school uphill both ways. I admit I’d seen the angle adjustment buttons on the treadmill before and thought maybe they just increased the resistance, the same way fancy electronic stationary bikes will make it harder to pedal when you’re climbing a "hill". This time, though, I was on the treadmill over by the wall, which, this being a gym, was covered with mirrors. I have no idea why gym walls are covered with mirrors because I’m pretty sure only about five percent of the people there are slim and attractive and narcissistic enough that they actually want to spend that much time looking at themselves. Maybe it’s supposed to be motivational. Maybe it’s supposed to make me think, "Keep running, or you’ll look like a fat gargoyle for the rest of your life!"

Really looking at myself I’m more inclined to think, forget this, I’ll just get liposuction and pec implants, so rather than focusing on my reflection I looked at the base of the treadmill and decided to adjust the angle to see if it really raised the treadmill. And it did. Levers on either side lifted up the front of the treadmill, so it wasn’t just a resistance thing. I was actually running uphill. And cranking the number up to five I was already at about a thirty degree angle. I didn’t put it up any higher than that, but it did go all the way up to fifteen. I think when you get to that level hand and foot holds pop out of the treadmill so you can climb straight up. For extra motivation a lion can also be provided.

March 23, 2012

Lately I’ve been noticing Mars rising in the east and moving steadily southward as it climbs in the sky. It’s probably always been associated with war because of its red color-although it can also be yellow or orange depending on what’s going on in Earth’s atmosphere-and also because it’s frequently visible, and, let’s face it, there’s always a war going on somewhere. I think there may be another reason Mars has a special fascination for most of us, though. At least since astronomers realized the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around it was easy to see Mars as the next big stepping stone in outward exploration. That’s why it’s interesting to me that, right now, if I look to the east I see Mars and, depending on the time, if I turn around and look to the west I’ll see both Venus and Jupiter very close together. Since Venus is really in a lot of ways Earth’s twin-it’s the closest planet to us, and the closest in size-and since it’s the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon you’d think Venus would be more interesting to us. And yet as far as I know only the Three Stooges went to Venus, while in most science fiction Mars is either the target of our explorations or the source of an invasion.

And that’s true of most real science too. Aside from a series of missions decades ago we haven’t really made much effort to explore Venus. Part of that is practicality: the spacecraft we sent to Venus were either crushed, since the air pressure on Venus is the equivalent of being more than a mile underwater on Earth, or melted. Or both. And then there’s the sulfuric acid snow. In the early days of the space age a lot of astronomers believed there must be oceans on Venus, that there might be plant life there, and that it might even be habitable. One of the few who reasoned that Venus must be a pretty brutal and barren place was a young guy named Carl Sagan. But I think even to the astronomers who misjudged it Venus wasn’t as interesting because it represents a step inward. And you’d also think Jupiter, which is the brightest object in the sky after Venus, would actually be an even more obvious choice than Mars for the next logical step out into space. And yet Jupiter doesn’t even have a surface we could stand on, and the difficulty of even exploring Jupiter, let alone colonizing it, make Venus look like the Mediterranean. Jupiter, unlike Mars, is a place we could never call home. And we could potentially make Mars home. If Venus is Earth’s twin then Mars could easily be Earth’s kid brother. If Mars had a moon like ours it might even look more like Earth. Our Moon, after all, helps stabilize Earth’s environment. If you’re thinking that Mars has two moons keep in mind that Phobos and Deimos combined would add up to an incredibly tiny fraction of the size of our Moon. I’ve seen science fiction films set on Mars with Phobos and Deimos portrayed as looking like a couple of Earth’s Moons hanging in the sky, when really they just look like a couple of bright stars. And yet their names mean "fear" and "dread", because, in spite of or maybe because of its fascination, it seems like we’ve always had a fear of Mars.

Maybe it’s because of that ancient association with war that "Martian" and "alien" have often been synonymous, even though Martians, by definition, come from Mars, while an alien-a stranger, an outsider, something or someone who may, through no fault of their own, inspire our most irrational fears–can come from almost anywhere. Even next door. H.G. Wells’s War Of The Worlds, and the paranoia that followed Orson Welles’s version, say more about us than we might care to admit. There are, of course, exceptions. Writers like Heinlein and Bradbury make the Martians themselves mostly peaceful, but the emphasis turns to human aggression. When Bradbury says we are the Martians it’s not exactly a compliment. Even the idea of terraforming Mars, thawing its carbon dioxide poles like a giant batch of dry ice to warm the atmosphere and tapping deep reserves of water seems less like a way to make it easier to settle and more of an act of aggression. Don’t get me wrong-I love the idea of Martian colonies, although, with the sandstorms and brutal winters, I think I’d still rather visit than live there. But even if it were technologically possible taking the mistakes we’ve made on this planet and purposely making them on another seems like a spectacularly boneheaded idea. In spite of all that, though, there is more to Mars than fear and dread. After the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli said he saw "canali" on Mars the word, which could mean "channels" or "gullies", his statement was translated into English as "canals", which inspired a lot of interest in Mars. The American Percival Lowell was convinced the Martians were a dying civilization that had built canals to collect their shrinking water supplies. He was inspired to build a first-rate telescope where, several years later, a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh would discover Pluto, which used to be a planet, but that’s another story. And while we’ve launched probes at Mars it’s also sent a few interesting items our way, including the meteor known as Big Al. Even though Big Al turned out not to harbor fossilized Martian bacteria it, like Schiaparelli’s canali, inspired a lot of interest not just in Mars but in science. And even though half the spacecraft we’ve sent to Mars either never made it or crashed and burned before even starting their missions we keep going back. So lately looking up at the sky even though I do find Venus and Jupiter pretty interesting I keep turning back to look for Mars, because it brings out the worst and the best in us.