In this manner, III
We were just sitting there, waiting. Four of us boys sitting out in a couple of aisles waiting for the people and the preaching, for the singing and the praying and the coming down movement of the spirit.
The hall was rented for the revival, empty, with the chairs set in lines and one aisle leading forward. The room was waiting, waiting for a revival, for revivals can start anywhere, in the place you’d least expect, the spirit blowing where it will in tongues like fire. Like the revival in Wales, where the whole town stopped working and sleeping and everything to let holiness come in crashing in the sounds you’d least expect. Like Azusu Street. Like the Great Awakening. Like where Jonathan Edwards would only preach in a monotone so nobody’d be swayed by mere human theatrics, by just words, where he preached about that spider dangling spindly from the web of his own making over a lake of fire.
The microphones were wired up, waiting the words of God. We were just sitting there, antsy. We looked at each other and at the beige chairs in empty rows back to the double doors, and then again at each other. The shushed flapping of the ceiling fans set a slight stir in the air.
They’d been talking about tonight for a month. Now was the time. God was ready to move, to blow breath down, just waiting for us and for this room. They’d talked about battling flesh and battling spirits, about the wars of the realms and the feeling of God’s anticipation. The time was ready, waiting for tonight.
Someone’d gone to the airport to pick up the revivalist. We’d been talking about him a lot and what God had been speaking back in Arkansas about how he said to be open, waiting upon the spirit’s movings and sayings and the sounds that you couldn’t expect.
One mic up front, for the revivalist who was coming in. One in the aisle, for testimonies. Two on the side, for the music. The room vibrated with the silence of expectation.
Then the one boy stood up, letting his hand come up to rub his chin and he stood there sort of staring at the stage. We looked at him. He stepped out into the aisle and he went up to the revivalist’s mic and leaned in, stooping, cupping his hand around his mouth and the mic.
eeeeeeEEERRRG CHboukh BOUKH, he said and the mic played loud in the empty room and it sounded exactly like a bomb shell whining in over rows of trenches to explode in dirt and blood and noise. We jumped, each getting a microphone and leaning in, stooping down to cup our hands and send out arching whines and exploding noises. It was an all out sound effects war. The little kid did a machine gun ut ut ut ut ut ut ut ut ut and the shelling noises all came back verberating off the white walls, in chaos down around our heads.
That’s when the revivalist walked in, when the parents walked in and started shouting to stop, shouted our first and middle names. We stopped, and stood there. A stern silence settled down.
They stared at us, faces stuck in states of shock. We stared at the carpet with that sinking feeling of having fouled the whole thing.
(See part 1 and part 2.)
Jul 16, 2005
The history of philosophy by influence
The BBC has up a list of the 10 most influential philosophers – one of those exercises that is half fantasy baseball for nerds and half intellectual mapping – and some of the neocalvinists have followed suit.
I don’t think Popper ought to be on the list. I’m thinking “influential” means “changed the face of philosophy, or even the way we think,” and I don’t think Popper will survive the next 200 years except, perhaps, as a contemporary and rival of Wittgenstein’s. I think the BBC ranks Marx too highly, for Marx’s influence was mostly on world politics and not, actually to the way we think. To the extent he shaped our thinking he was, I think, reading Hegel. I could be wrong about that.
Gideon Strauss's list I think cants too much towards the political, which is a general disagreement I have with Gideon's philosophy. His understand of Modernism, e.g., is primarily political while I think the politics follows from the epistemology, like Locke’s political philosophy follows from his idea of the tabula rasa. So I would not include Machiavelli or Hobbes, and I don’t think Locke was the most influential philosopher of his school or generation.
My list:
1. Socrates/Plato – Necessarily combined, these two inaugurate philosophy with the ideal of abstraction and the metaphysicalist project. They radically moved past the religio-ethical thinking you'd find with the Stoics or the Hebrews, created "philosophy" and changedwhat it means to think.
2. Descartes – On my map, Descartes stands at the absolute center, where everything can be measured by its distance from him. He is, I think, the most brilliant thinker among a slew of brilliant thinkers. He suffers for this. In thinking the most clearly about the epistemological turn, he fails to really obscure the foundational problems with foundationalism.
3. Heidegger – If philosophy is metaphysics, Heidegger is the end of philosophy. His work on Being is the most sophisticated and thorough, his “turn” to language is shattering, and his later philosophy has yet to even be really explored. He’s the point where phenomenology and existentialism come together and remakes both of those schools. While not the most influential, he is arguably the greatest philosopher.
4. Wittgenstein – Brilliant and concise, LW is claimed and debated everywhere and he most effectively and influentially shows the linguistic turn of both analytic and continental philosophy. He’s also captured the imagination of more thinkers than any other philosopher.
5. Hegel – His dialect cracked philosophy’s addiction to dualisms, opening new possibilities and saved philosophy from strangling itself into Logical Positivism.
6. Aquinas – The greatest Christian philosopher, though in close competition with Augustine, whose “Aristotle and Jesus” project formed the face of Christianity and the west and to this day is the default Christian system of thinking.
7. Nietzsche – I know more people who have had their lives dramatically affected by reading Nietzsche than by reading anything or anyone else. I am leery of his work, and haven’t undertaken it like I will have to, but I do not believe one can understand and experience the condition of our world without feeling his sense of tragedy.
8. Saussure – He was in linguistics, not philosophy, yet his argument that meaning happens not by the reference of sign to object but by the relationships between signs was dramatically influential.
9. Augustine – He would top my list of theologians, his words having given shape to all the traditions of Western Christianity. As a philosopher, his critique of skepticism is the best, his Aquinas-like project of unifying neoplatonism and Christianity and his eventual lack of confidence in their compatibility, his doctrine of a Just War, and his doctrine of man are vital to the course of thinking in the west.
10. Hume – He’s normally known for skepticism, but I find him of more influence in his idea of the possibility of the end of philosophy, of a final resolving.
Considered but not included: Kant, because I’m uncomfortable with him and his project and can’t trace his line of influence; Derrida, because even though I think he’s incredible and give him a lot of my time, I don’t know completely unique influence he will have specifically on philosophy; Anselm, because he’s know too narrowly for his ontological argument to be top-10 significant.
I’d be interested in reading a list by Garver, who I know has a better and broader understanding of the history of philosophy than I do, Sam would be able to tell me about Frege, Quine, and the analytics, GC, who I’ve just started reading, Berek, and Talcott.
The BBC has up a list of the 10 most influential philosophers – one of those exercises that is half fantasy baseball for nerds and half intellectual mapping – and some of the neocalvinists have followed suit.
I don’t think Popper ought to be on the list. I’m thinking “influential” means “changed the face of philosophy, or even the way we think,” and I don’t think Popper will survive the next 200 years except, perhaps, as a contemporary and rival of Wittgenstein’s. I think the BBC ranks Marx too highly, for Marx’s influence was mostly on world politics and not, actually to the way we think. To the extent he shaped our thinking he was, I think, reading Hegel. I could be wrong about that.
Gideon Strauss's list I think cants too much towards the political, which is a general disagreement I have with Gideon's philosophy. His understand of Modernism, e.g., is primarily political while I think the politics follows from the epistemology, like Locke’s political philosophy follows from his idea of the tabula rasa. So I would not include Machiavelli or Hobbes, and I don’t think Locke was the most influential philosopher of his school or generation.
My list:
1. Socrates/Plato – Necessarily combined, these two inaugurate philosophy with the ideal of abstraction and the metaphysicalist project. They radically moved past the religio-ethical thinking you'd find with the Stoics or the Hebrews, created "philosophy" and changedwhat it means to think.
2. Descartes – On my map, Descartes stands at the absolute center, where everything can be measured by its distance from him. He is, I think, the most brilliant thinker among a slew of brilliant thinkers. He suffers for this. In thinking the most clearly about the epistemological turn, he fails to really obscure the foundational problems with foundationalism.
3. Heidegger – If philosophy is metaphysics, Heidegger is the end of philosophy. His work on Being is the most sophisticated and thorough, his “turn” to language is shattering, and his later philosophy has yet to even be really explored. He’s the point where phenomenology and existentialism come together and remakes both of those schools. While not the most influential, he is arguably the greatest philosopher.
4. Wittgenstein – Brilliant and concise, LW is claimed and debated everywhere and he most effectively and influentially shows the linguistic turn of both analytic and continental philosophy. He’s also captured the imagination of more thinkers than any other philosopher.
5. Hegel – His dialect cracked philosophy’s addiction to dualisms, opening new possibilities and saved philosophy from strangling itself into Logical Positivism.
6. Aquinas – The greatest Christian philosopher, though in close competition with Augustine, whose “Aristotle and Jesus” project formed the face of Christianity and the west and to this day is the default Christian system of thinking.
7. Nietzsche – I know more people who have had their lives dramatically affected by reading Nietzsche than by reading anything or anyone else. I am leery of his work, and haven’t undertaken it like I will have to, but I do not believe one can understand and experience the condition of our world without feeling his sense of tragedy.
8. Saussure – He was in linguistics, not philosophy, yet his argument that meaning happens not by the reference of sign to object but by the relationships between signs was dramatically influential.
9. Augustine – He would top my list of theologians, his words having given shape to all the traditions of Western Christianity. As a philosopher, his critique of skepticism is the best, his Aquinas-like project of unifying neoplatonism and Christianity and his eventual lack of confidence in their compatibility, his doctrine of a Just War, and his doctrine of man are vital to the course of thinking in the west.
10. Hume – He’s normally known for skepticism, but I find him of more influence in his idea of the possibility of the end of philosophy, of a final resolving.
Considered but not included: Kant, because I’m uncomfortable with him and his project and can’t trace his line of influence; Derrida, because even though I think he’s incredible and give him a lot of my time, I don’t know completely unique influence he will have specifically on philosophy; Anselm, because he’s know too narrowly for his ontological argument to be top-10 significant.
I’d be interested in reading a list by Garver, who I know has a better and broader understanding of the history of philosophy than I do, Sam would be able to tell me about Frege, Quine, and the analytics, GC, who I’ve just started reading, Berek, and Talcott.
Jul 15, 2005
Jul 11, 2005
Animal tales 1 & 2
1. Protestantism started with Martin Luther preaching about a worm. Evangelicalism started, you could say if you wanted, with Jon Edwards preaching about a spider. If you were going to add a third animal to this history of Protestantism, what would you add?
2. There’s a story going around our house about a cat. Actually it was something factual about some old friends who’re now in Michigan breeding pure Persians, but then I stole the male cat minor character. He’s got one eye. I named him Jack. We’re still deciding what Jack’s story is about.
1. Protestantism started with Martin Luther preaching about a worm. Evangelicalism started, you could say if you wanted, with Jon Edwards preaching about a spider. If you were going to add a third animal to this history of Protestantism, what would you add?
2. There’s a story going around our house about a cat. Actually it was something factual about some old friends who’re now in Michigan breeding pure Persians, but then I stole the male cat minor character. He’s got one eye. I named him Jack. We’re still deciding what Jack’s story is about.
Best you can get
I can’t find the picture we took, before we left. Marvin and me and David standing outside in the Texas spring, Marvin with his hand behind his back, maybe to hide the cigarette or maybe to hide his hand.
I’ll see you, he'd say, unless I’m dead.
He’d lost his thumb and two fingers in a tractor accident. He’d tell you that matter of fact, letting all the horror of it stand there bare. His wife had left him because she couldn’t see herself married to a cripple, and something happened where the Southern Baptist church said it’d be too awkward and would he mind leaving.
Marvin was matter of fact about dark things: dieing, betrayal, and human rottenness. For Marvin, the horrific was normal and he treated it as normal and a little sad, but not surprising. He showed up on the doorstep of our black January, when we were friendless and in shock and teetering on despair. He showed up with a catch of fresh fish, empathetic and offering to help and understanding the horror of it all without needing to know anything more. He didn’t want the fish, he said, he didn’t eat fish, didn’t eat nothing that swims or flies.
Marvin was one of the old guys I knew through woodcarving. He didn’t do much woodcarving, actually, sort of starting projects and leaving them around waiting for an inspiration of attention. He liked knives though, and taught my brother and me about blades, the temper of metals and the angles of edges. When we scrounged pawn shops for pocket knives we looked for what he was talking about, and then brought them to his sprawling ranch house cluttered with antiques and half-finished projects, bringing them to Marvin for official approval. He’d thumb the edge, contemplating, and take the edge to the stone bringing the angle out to a feather and then turning to the leather, the strop.
If you see straight razors, he'd say, buy them. Best metal you can get.
He died maybe a year after we left. When I think about it, his being dead doesn’t make any sense.
I can’t find the picture we took, before we left. Marvin and me and David standing outside in the Texas spring, Marvin with his hand behind his back, maybe to hide the cigarette or maybe to hide his hand.
I’ll see you, he'd say, unless I’m dead.
He’d lost his thumb and two fingers in a tractor accident. He’d tell you that matter of fact, letting all the horror of it stand there bare. His wife had left him because she couldn’t see herself married to a cripple, and something happened where the Southern Baptist church said it’d be too awkward and would he mind leaving.
Marvin was matter of fact about dark things: dieing, betrayal, and human rottenness. For Marvin, the horrific was normal and he treated it as normal and a little sad, but not surprising. He showed up on the doorstep of our black January, when we were friendless and in shock and teetering on despair. He showed up with a catch of fresh fish, empathetic and offering to help and understanding the horror of it all without needing to know anything more. He didn’t want the fish, he said, he didn’t eat fish, didn’t eat nothing that swims or flies.
Marvin was one of the old guys I knew through woodcarving. He didn’t do much woodcarving, actually, sort of starting projects and leaving them around waiting for an inspiration of attention. He liked knives though, and taught my brother and me about blades, the temper of metals and the angles of edges. When we scrounged pawn shops for pocket knives we looked for what he was talking about, and then brought them to his sprawling ranch house cluttered with antiques and half-finished projects, bringing them to Marvin for official approval. He’d thumb the edge, contemplating, and take the edge to the stone bringing the angle out to a feather and then turning to the leather, the strop.
If you see straight razors, he'd say, buy them. Best metal you can get.
He died maybe a year after we left. When I think about it, his being dead doesn’t make any sense.
Jul 6, 2005
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Jul 4, 2005
The last book I bought and other questions
How many books do I own?
I counted once, but that was number of years ago and I don't recall what the number was anyway. I started buying books when I was 14, in the couple of used book stores in Porterville California, my highschool education consisting mostly of hauting those bookstores, the chain book store and the library and reading everything. I have a lot of the old books, esp. the history and political ones I'm not really reading right now but will get back to, stashed here in Washington. And then in Hillsdale I have probably a few dozen books from last semester stacked in the house, waiting for me to move in. In Philly, where I have to go get them and move them to Hillsdale, I have three book shelves of literature, philosophy, theology, and poetry.
Books were really my first vice.
What’s the last book I bought?
I went to Powells yesterday, for the 4th, and bought I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, by Emmanuel Carrere, Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard, A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus, by William Hamilton, Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, by K.T. Fann, Towards a New Christianity, by Thomas Altizer, Unframed Originals, by W.S. Merwin, The Rediscovery of Mind by John Searle and The Magic Journey, by John Nichols. Which is a fairly accuarte list, I think, of the projects I'm working on.
What’s the last book I read?
I'm in the middle of four books right now. I like to keep it to two, one light and one heavy, but I haven't lately. I'm reading Martin Buber's Eclipse of God, Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music, the Dick book, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 100 years of Solitude. The last book I finished - #20 for this year which puts me 4 books behind my one-a-week last year - was Girl Meets God, on the recommendation of Jeremy Huggins.
What are the five books that mean the most to me?
If my library were destroyed, the first five replacements I would buy are Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Graham Greene's The Burnt Out Case, Heidegger's Being and Time, Derrida's Circumfesions, and Beowulf.
I was tagged by Gideon Strauss for this. In turn, I tag Peter Krupa, and Luke Heyman.
How many books do I own?
I counted once, but that was number of years ago and I don't recall what the number was anyway. I started buying books when I was 14, in the couple of used book stores in Porterville California, my highschool education consisting mostly of hauting those bookstores, the chain book store and the library and reading everything. I have a lot of the old books, esp. the history and political ones I'm not really reading right now but will get back to, stashed here in Washington. And then in Hillsdale I have probably a few dozen books from last semester stacked in the house, waiting for me to move in. In Philly, where I have to go get them and move them to Hillsdale, I have three book shelves of literature, philosophy, theology, and poetry.
Books were really my first vice.
What’s the last book I bought?
I went to Powells yesterday, for the 4th, and bought I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, by Emmanuel Carrere, Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard, A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus, by William Hamilton, Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, by K.T. Fann, Towards a New Christianity, by Thomas Altizer, Unframed Originals, by W.S. Merwin, The Rediscovery of Mind by John Searle and The Magic Journey, by John Nichols. Which is a fairly accuarte list, I think, of the projects I'm working on.
What’s the last book I read?
I'm in the middle of four books right now. I like to keep it to two, one light and one heavy, but I haven't lately. I'm reading Martin Buber's Eclipse of God, Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music, the Dick book, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 100 years of Solitude. The last book I finished - #20 for this year which puts me 4 books behind my one-a-week last year - was Girl Meets God, on the recommendation of Jeremy Huggins.
What are the five books that mean the most to me?
If my library were destroyed, the first five replacements I would buy are Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Graham Greene's The Burnt Out Case, Heidegger's Being and Time, Derrida's Circumfesions, and Beowulf.
I was tagged by Gideon Strauss for this. In turn, I tag Peter Krupa, and Luke Heyman.
Jun 29, 2005
POW and BAM
He stood on his side of the street, pretending not to look at me looking at him. I stood on my side of the street watching him focusing his full attention on looking idle and uninterested, kicking at the gravel rocks.
Hey, I said. How old are you?
Karl was 8. I was 7. His dad drove a jacked-up Toyota and drank O’Dools. Karl was a small kid from somewhere tougher than here and his hair was all buzzed down to a rat tail that hung down his neck.
He was 8 and I was 7, so we were friends by default of age and he’d come across the street and Steve and Mark next door would come over the split-rail fence and my brother and I would come out and we’d play gang-of-boys games. King of the hill. Guns. War. Water guns. Hide and go seek.. Baseball. Horse. Football. Lots and lots of hand ball. One time we even tried golf but it was pretty boring, and then I broke a window.
Karl was fast. He was the fastest kid we knew. My brother decided he needed to grow a rat tail so he could be that fast, but my parents wouldn’t let him.
One time we were playing touch football in the yard, with the fence and the driveway as end zones and two saplings as obstacles. There was a kid from down the street who’d come by on his bike and decided to play. We were running our non-plays and screaming and trying to team catch Karl when he’d double fake around the trees. Then suddenly Karl’s yelling that we cheated and there’s a turmoil of rules and details debated and we’re all standing there on the edge of the driveway trying to come to something that’ll make the game fun again.
No way, Karl said. you didn’t touch me. I went like this and you were like, here, and then I made it in. We reenacted it two or three times and decided what must’ave happened was that Karl just didn’t feel it and that a two-hand touch still counts even if you don’t feel it. Karl started yelling - cheaters, liars - and quit. Faggot, said the kid from down the street, which was the first time I’d ever heard the word.
Now we didn’t know what to do, so we’re standing there feeling like shit and then Karl comes out his house followed by his mother screaming at him. He must not be a son of hers. Is he a coward? How come he doesn’t just go over and kick our asses? No son of hers was a quitter, would walk away. Her son would be a man and would be over there across the street punching our stupid faces. And so on like this. Karl pretended we weren’t all staring at his mother, this crazy screaming women who wanted us to brawl over touch football.
I think that was the beginning of the feud. Officially it was later, when Karl spent the day killing slugs with slug poison and then he and Mark and Steve told my brother they were going to get him with it and my brother hit Mark in the head with a hammer. Mark was the logical choice. He was closer to my brother in age and so the betrayal was more nasty. And he was the pretty kid, the angelic blond boy doing modeling for kid’s clothing. So my brother chunked the hammer at his forehead and left a big and beautifully ugly purple bruise on his face. They were forbidden to play with us. We were forbidden to play with them. Our own personal Cold War set in.
The three of them threw rocks at our house for months. They began a doorbell ditching campaign and mastered an array of dirty looks. We played in the back yard. They ran up big support-our-troops-and-get-that-dirty-Saddam American flags and talked about bombs. Dad was a Democrat and a pacifist who told us the war was about oil and that bombs were killing Iraqi kids.. Rumors went around among the kids at the park and people stopped playing with us. Someone told me that Karl’s friends were coming and when they got here they were gonna beat me up.
And then, one day, it looked like they’d come. We were in the park and saw Karl and 15 or so boys with bikes in synchronized karate practice out by the monkey bars, shouting Bruce Lee grunts in unison. The kid from down the street was there and started talking tough and desperate, started talking like this was Armageddon or the Alamo. His dad was a cop, he knew about these things. He found three rusty little razor blades on the bike path and showed them to me. When they come, he said. He looked at me and waited. My sister looked at me and my brother looked at me and it was me they were coming for so it was my job to get us out.
Put them back where you found them, I said, thinking I didn’t want to cut myself with a stupid and dull little blade covered in corroded-colored rust and die of lockjaw. Besides, they knew karate.
When they came, they swarmed over the hillock peddling like hell and it looked like there were more’n 15. Twenty, at least. We heard them behind us, turned, and were surrounded. They straddled their bikes, sneered, and talked to each other about how shit out of luck we were.
’K Karl, said the oldest one with the really cool black BMX bike. The mob shut up so he could talk. You said you were gonna beat him up. Go ‘head.
I looked at Karl. I had expected something more like a comic book swirl of dust and limbs, with explosions of BAM and POW while I had my head stomped into the ground. But it was just Karl, here to show me, and the big kid with the bike going let’s you and him fight. The mob looked at Karl, waiting, wondering what was taking him so long. He looked at the ground, pretending he didn’t know we were all looking at him.
I turned my back, and walked away. C’mon, I said to my sister and brother and the kid from down the street. We walked out of the circle, the bikes parting, wobbly turning aside to let us pass.
You’re just gonna let him walk away? I heard the big one say. You a pussy? Someone went ba-ba-bawk-baawwwk and the crowd started up again, hissing sisss-sy and pus-sy. I didn’t turn to look, but I imagined them closing in on him.
I’d been in fights before. I lost one when I was 4 to a kid who was 8. One time after church the parents had had to pull me off the pastor’s kid who had laughed when he tripped me. I wasn’t walking away because I didn’t want to fight, or for any of the pacifist reasons my dad preached. I didn’t walk away so I could be one of Jesus’ blessed peacemakers. I walked away because it would be a devastating victory, because I was kicking the shit out of his ego, going BAM and POW to the face of his reputation.
He stood on his side of the street, pretending not to look at me looking at him. I stood on my side of the street watching him focusing his full attention on looking idle and uninterested, kicking at the gravel rocks.
Hey, I said. How old are you?
Karl was 8. I was 7. His dad drove a jacked-up Toyota and drank O’Dools. Karl was a small kid from somewhere tougher than here and his hair was all buzzed down to a rat tail that hung down his neck.
He was 8 and I was 7, so we were friends by default of age and he’d come across the street and Steve and Mark next door would come over the split-rail fence and my brother and I would come out and we’d play gang-of-boys games. King of the hill. Guns. War. Water guns. Hide and go seek.. Baseball. Horse. Football. Lots and lots of hand ball. One time we even tried golf but it was pretty boring, and then I broke a window.
Karl was fast. He was the fastest kid we knew. My brother decided he needed to grow a rat tail so he could be that fast, but my parents wouldn’t let him.
One time we were playing touch football in the yard, with the fence and the driveway as end zones and two saplings as obstacles. There was a kid from down the street who’d come by on his bike and decided to play. We were running our non-plays and screaming and trying to team catch Karl when he’d double fake around the trees. Then suddenly Karl’s yelling that we cheated and there’s a turmoil of rules and details debated and we’re all standing there on the edge of the driveway trying to come to something that’ll make the game fun again.
No way, Karl said. you didn’t touch me. I went like this and you were like, here, and then I made it in. We reenacted it two or three times and decided what must’ave happened was that Karl just didn’t feel it and that a two-hand touch still counts even if you don’t feel it. Karl started yelling - cheaters, liars - and quit. Faggot, said the kid from down the street, which was the first time I’d ever heard the word.
Now we didn’t know what to do, so we’re standing there feeling like shit and then Karl comes out his house followed by his mother screaming at him. He must not be a son of hers. Is he a coward? How come he doesn’t just go over and kick our asses? No son of hers was a quitter, would walk away. Her son would be a man and would be over there across the street punching our stupid faces. And so on like this. Karl pretended we weren’t all staring at his mother, this crazy screaming women who wanted us to brawl over touch football.
I think that was the beginning of the feud. Officially it was later, when Karl spent the day killing slugs with slug poison and then he and Mark and Steve told my brother they were going to get him with it and my brother hit Mark in the head with a hammer. Mark was the logical choice. He was closer to my brother in age and so the betrayal was more nasty. And he was the pretty kid, the angelic blond boy doing modeling for kid’s clothing. So my brother chunked the hammer at his forehead and left a big and beautifully ugly purple bruise on his face. They were forbidden to play with us. We were forbidden to play with them. Our own personal Cold War set in.
The three of them threw rocks at our house for months. They began a doorbell ditching campaign and mastered an array of dirty looks. We played in the back yard. They ran up big support-our-troops-and-get-that-dirty-Saddam American flags and talked about bombs. Dad was a Democrat and a pacifist who told us the war was about oil and that bombs were killing Iraqi kids.. Rumors went around among the kids at the park and people stopped playing with us. Someone told me that Karl’s friends were coming and when they got here they were gonna beat me up.
And then, one day, it looked like they’d come. We were in the park and saw Karl and 15 or so boys with bikes in synchronized karate practice out by the monkey bars, shouting Bruce Lee grunts in unison. The kid from down the street was there and started talking tough and desperate, started talking like this was Armageddon or the Alamo. His dad was a cop, he knew about these things. He found three rusty little razor blades on the bike path and showed them to me. When they come, he said. He looked at me and waited. My sister looked at me and my brother looked at me and it was me they were coming for so it was my job to get us out.
Put them back where you found them, I said, thinking I didn’t want to cut myself with a stupid and dull little blade covered in corroded-colored rust and die of lockjaw. Besides, they knew karate.
When they came, they swarmed over the hillock peddling like hell and it looked like there were more’n 15. Twenty, at least. We heard them behind us, turned, and were surrounded. They straddled their bikes, sneered, and talked to each other about how shit out of luck we were.
’K Karl, said the oldest one with the really cool black BMX bike. The mob shut up so he could talk. You said you were gonna beat him up. Go ‘head.
I looked at Karl. I had expected something more like a comic book swirl of dust and limbs, with explosions of BAM and POW while I had my head stomped into the ground. But it was just Karl, here to show me, and the big kid with the bike going let’s you and him fight. The mob looked at Karl, waiting, wondering what was taking him so long. He looked at the ground, pretending he didn’t know we were all looking at him.
I turned my back, and walked away. C’mon, I said to my sister and brother and the kid from down the street. We walked out of the circle, the bikes parting, wobbly turning aside to let us pass.
You’re just gonna let him walk away? I heard the big one say. You a pussy? Someone went ba-ba-bawk-baawwwk and the crowd started up again, hissing sisss-sy and pus-sy. I didn’t turn to look, but I imagined them closing in on him.
I’d been in fights before. I lost one when I was 4 to a kid who was 8. One time after church the parents had had to pull me off the pastor’s kid who had laughed when he tripped me. I wasn’t walking away because I didn’t want to fight, or for any of the pacifist reasons my dad preached. I didn’t walk away so I could be one of Jesus’ blessed peacemakers. I walked away because it would be a devastating victory, because I was kicking the shit out of his ego, going BAM and POW to the face of his reputation.
Coffee shop
This is a two coffee shop town, not counting the Starbucks counter in the grocery store. There actually might be a third one, but no one seems to know for sure and from the one thing I remember someone saying, it doubles as an old ladies stationary shop. So there are two, in this town. B. and H. We go to B.
I tell my sister I think there are two things that make this place better than H. 1) At H. the outdoor seating is out in passing-by public on the street corner, while at B. it’s in the back behind the taxi dispatch center and the bar. 2) B. doesn’t take itself too seriously.
My sister looks at me, amused but incredulous. “There are lots of reasons the B. is better,” she disagrees with me.
And then we’re going there the other night and our little brother mentions that H. now has ice cream. “I don’t care,” she says. “We go to the B.,” she says, like it’s a question of character.
This is a two coffee shop town, not counting the Starbucks counter in the grocery store. There actually might be a third one, but no one seems to know for sure and from the one thing I remember someone saying, it doubles as an old ladies stationary shop. So there are two, in this town. B. and H. We go to B.
I tell my sister I think there are two things that make this place better than H. 1) At H. the outdoor seating is out in passing-by public on the street corner, while at B. it’s in the back behind the taxi dispatch center and the bar. 2) B. doesn’t take itself too seriously.
My sister looks at me, amused but incredulous. “There are lots of reasons the B. is better,” she disagrees with me.
And then we’re going there the other night and our little brother mentions that H. now has ice cream. “I don’t care,” she says. “We go to the B.,” she says, like it’s a question of character.
Jun 28, 2005
Max
The barista’s name is Max, red hair in a pile on top of her head and bangles of straps on her shoulders. She moves with the body of a flapper, pushing eight buttons to fill four shot glasses to make two Americanos.
Still raining, she says. Good day to sit and read, I say and she smiles, showing braces.
The barista’s name is Max, red hair in a pile on top of her head and bangles of straps on her shoulders. She moves with the body of a flapper, pushing eight buttons to fill four shot glasses to make two Americanos.
Still raining, she says. Good day to sit and read, I say and she smiles, showing braces.
Jun 24, 2005
Jun 23, 2005
Cyril Nelson, collector and devotee of American folk art who donated museum collections of textiles, paintings, quilts, furniture, and sculptures, and who was a long-time editor at E. P. Dutton, publishing a classic work on painted furniture, died June 1 at the age of 78.
May he rest in peace.
May he rest in peace.
Jun 22, 2005
Once I had a physics teacher
They told me not to take his class. It’s hard, they said, take the other class. But I didn’t want to take the easy class that had every one in it, (that had all of them bored). If I was going to take any science class at all I wanted it to be interesting, with a professor getting excited in his chalk equations and with me walking out of class feeling the need to pigeonhole passing people, making them put down their back packs so I could tell them something that they had to hear and that I hadn’t known an hour ago.
No, no I said, I want to take Crawford’s class. Astronomy, though it was more like Astrophysics. It was the hardest class I’ve ever taken.
Prof. Ron Crawford had worked in NASA, doing the sort of things astrophysicists do at NASA, and had taken up teaching part time, decided he liked it, and stayed. He was, in style, droll. He assumed that other teachers did something mysterious that he without a Ph.D. had never figured out how to do. He wasn’t self-deprecating about it, just sort of curious, occasionally asking us questions about his colleagues.
The first day of class, he taught about light and explained how it’s a wave and how it’s also a particle and how you could explain light either way, or better, both ways. Then the next day he taught about wave lengths, radio waves, colors, and why the sky is blue. He made us memorize the speed of light. He taught us the equations of the processes of the births and deaths of stars, about giant stars and collapsed ones and black holes and Brownian motion. On one test we had to draw and explain all the possible orbits on one and two-star solar system. On the last day of class, after the final when there was this useless class that couldn’t count towards anything and most classes either canceled or turning to a get-to-know-you-now-that-it’s-over party, Crawford had class and talked about the possibility that space had a topography. Everyone was there.
He drew pictures and long numbers and Greek letters, starting on the left side of the wall to brick wall black board and writing and drawing in three arm-width wide columns a class. One day, half way through drawing some really long number that was equal to a Greek letter divided by some other Greek letter, he turned to us and said, Do you guys know Greek? Huh, you should really learn.
It was the hardest class I’ve ever taken. The next semester I wrote Prof. Crawford a note and told him that I didn’t have the talent to take physics much farther than reading history, but his class was fantastic. It was the only thank you note I’d ever written. Well, he said, it’s the only one I’ve ever gotten.
Crawford died last year. May he rest in peace.
They told me not to take his class. It’s hard, they said, take the other class. But I didn’t want to take the easy class that had every one in it, (that had all of them bored). If I was going to take any science class at all I wanted it to be interesting, with a professor getting excited in his chalk equations and with me walking out of class feeling the need to pigeonhole passing people, making them put down their back packs so I could tell them something that they had to hear and that I hadn’t known an hour ago.
No, no I said, I want to take Crawford’s class. Astronomy, though it was more like Astrophysics. It was the hardest class I’ve ever taken.
Prof. Ron Crawford had worked in NASA, doing the sort of things astrophysicists do at NASA, and had taken up teaching part time, decided he liked it, and stayed. He was, in style, droll. He assumed that other teachers did something mysterious that he without a Ph.D. had never figured out how to do. He wasn’t self-deprecating about it, just sort of curious, occasionally asking us questions about his colleagues.
The first day of class, he taught about light and explained how it’s a wave and how it’s also a particle and how you could explain light either way, or better, both ways. Then the next day he taught about wave lengths, radio waves, colors, and why the sky is blue. He made us memorize the speed of light. He taught us the equations of the processes of the births and deaths of stars, about giant stars and collapsed ones and black holes and Brownian motion. On one test we had to draw and explain all the possible orbits on one and two-star solar system. On the last day of class, after the final when there was this useless class that couldn’t count towards anything and most classes either canceled or turning to a get-to-know-you-now-that-it’s-over party, Crawford had class and talked about the possibility that space had a topography. Everyone was there.
He drew pictures and long numbers and Greek letters, starting on the left side of the wall to brick wall black board and writing and drawing in three arm-width wide columns a class. One day, half way through drawing some really long number that was equal to a Greek letter divided by some other Greek letter, he turned to us and said, Do you guys know Greek? Huh, you should really learn.
It was the hardest class I’ve ever taken. The next semester I wrote Prof. Crawford a note and told him that I didn’t have the talent to take physics much farther than reading history, but his class was fantastic. It was the only thank you note I’d ever written. Well, he said, it’s the only one I’ve ever gotten.
Crawford died last year. May he rest in peace.
Jun 20, 2005
Notes and links
"Things of the past are still with us. It's their world that is gone." - Richard Polt, on Typology, Phenomenology, and the typewriter.
Hillsdale College is moving forward with the proposed retirement community, to be called Independence Grove. The Grove will include putting greens, a club house, and lots of other old people stuff. Mostly, this is about selling the soul of an educational institution, and about how old conservatives are stupid, annoying, and rich.
The Disgruntled Son of the Moral Majority who's having the most fun, ex-pat Peter Krupa, has written an excellent E.B. White-citing article on the militarization of space.
For the depressing state of journalism, not that it was ever any different, see this blog rolling newspaper corrections.
When I was a kid in the mid-80s, kids at the school yard were doing Michael Jackson's moonwalk and speculating about the one white glove, and parents were wondering what the hell happened to his face. I thought he was creepy. Matt Taibbi went to the Jackson trial and saw the freaked out death of America.
Everyone seems to love Nolan's Batman, which makes me think maybe his post-Memento big budget Insomnia was better than I thought. All that love seems to have given some writers the excuse to talk about Batman, including this morning's Seattle Times, which gives the whole history of the thing, including the time when fan's voted to kill Robin.
Matt Labash on Mudcat, the man trying to bring rural southern voters back into the Democratic party, going to show that proletarian demagougery is still alive and fascinating, that class divides never die, that America is still divided into mutally un-unitable regions, and that religion's always an issue.
"Things of the past are still with us. It's their world that is gone." - Richard Polt, on Typology, Phenomenology, and the typewriter.
Hillsdale College is moving forward with the proposed retirement community, to be called Independence Grove. The Grove will include putting greens, a club house, and lots of other old people stuff. Mostly, this is about selling the soul of an educational institution, and about how old conservatives are stupid, annoying, and rich.
The Disgruntled Son of the Moral Majority who's having the most fun, ex-pat Peter Krupa, has written an excellent E.B. White-citing article on the militarization of space.
For the depressing state of journalism, not that it was ever any different, see this blog rolling newspaper corrections.
When I was a kid in the mid-80s, kids at the school yard were doing Michael Jackson's moonwalk and speculating about the one white glove, and parents were wondering what the hell happened to his face. I thought he was creepy. Matt Taibbi went to the Jackson trial and saw the freaked out death of America.
Everyone seems to love Nolan's Batman, which makes me think maybe his post-Memento big budget Insomnia was better than I thought. All that love seems to have given some writers the excuse to talk about Batman, including this morning's Seattle Times, which gives the whole history of the thing, including the time when fan's voted to kill Robin.
Matt Labash on Mudcat, the man trying to bring rural southern voters back into the Democratic party, going to show that proletarian demagougery is still alive and fascinating, that class divides never die, that America is still divided into mutally un-unitable regions, and that religion's always an issue.
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