Blogging in Verse

Whose blog this is I think I know.
His laptop's in the study though;
He will not see me reading here
Watching this space fill up with words.

I've been asked to blog in verse, but such is not my bent. I'm not even good with doggerel and am terrible with rhymes. On the other hand, I did blog once about the poetry missing in our lives. Interestingly, I have no idea how to find that blog since poetry is not one of my designated categories and I don't remember what I was referring to.

It was not too long ago that I asked one of our project managers, Beth, if she was familiar with the Stevie Smith poem, "Not waving but drowning," and she was! This delighted me. My colleagues Dom and Frank are both knowledgeable about poetry and have had occasion to discuss poetry with Katharine when we were all meeting in Chicago. There's something in me that finds this kind of abstract knowledge deeply satisfying, even though I possess so little of it myself. It's a knowledge for knowledge's sake, and yet I've only known thoughtful people who care about it and I like thoughtful people.

Please forgive the awful opening of this blog. I suppose I could do better with some effort, but like drawing for me, it's an effort that is more painful than pleasant. I don't mind writing, I do mind writing verse. When I was studying architecture, I actually enjoyed drafting, but I didn't like drawing. When I was studying music, I liked playing, but I didn't like composing. And when I was studying theater, I liked everything: tech and acting, though perhaps not directing. The only thing I was any good at was drafting, and that wasn't anything to be particularly proud of.

I will have to find the poetry in my life from other things besides writing verse. Perhaps my friends, like Nick, will do me the honor.

Taking it Personally

I couldn't sleep last night, which for me is quite unusual. I dozed, I saw the hours pass on the clock, I thought about the work I need to get done, and something else kept running through my sheep counting. I couldn't help thinking about last night's presidential debate and it made me feel angry. It was keeping me awake!

Once again, a distinguished, articulate, thoughtful, well-informed democrat was meeting a self-satisfied, inarticulate, rude, and ill-informed republican. Once again, pundits called it a draw. I knew they would, but it outrages me every time, a trait I've inherited from my Mother. First of all, why are the pundits such cowards? The only news broadcast claiming to be "fair and balanced" is Fox, and they wasted no time declaring a victory for McCain. All the other networks seem to bend over backward to be "balanced" to the point of political correctness.

But what really agitated me was the missed opportunities for Obama to skewer McCain, who repeatedly insulted his soft-spoken opponent by calling him "naive." What if on the third or fourth repetition Obama had retorted that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?" Or perhaps something more along the lines of: their was no act more naive than voting to approve the Bush war in Iraq.

It's hard not to get defensive when your opponent makes up facts, distorts the truth, and shows a lack of respect and knowledge. But how much better to turn the tables on name calling? How much better to respond to a rambling, repetitive answer on Afghanistan (but not about Afghanistan) by saying "so you have no plans for Afghanistan?" Let's put the little pugilist on the defensive, instead.

In fact, I think the next New Yorker cover (I thought of this while laying awake last night, as well) should feature a boxing ring with a map of the world on the floor and centered on Iraq. Jim Lehrer is the ref. On the left side, with his feet in Israel is the short, sweaty, McCain swinging wildly at the air. On the right side, with his feet in Pakistan, is the cool, tall Obama, holding off his opponent with one boxing glove to the forehead. I think Barry Blitt would do a fine job with this image.

I'm feeling better this morning. Many of those calling round 1 a draw are also saying that the tie goes to Obama. That McCain needed a victory on foreign policy, but Obama held his own and looked more presidential (a vague notion if there ever was one). In fact, McCain looked as if he'd rather be almost anywhere but Oxford, Mississippi.

My father, ever the physician, noted that McCain looked like he might have Horner's Syndrome
(droopy eyelid), a sign of various neurological problems, including Alzheimer's. Fortunately, there's nothing to worry about. Palin will make a great president.

Lying is Good For You!

You have probably been told that you can get away with crying wolf once, but come the third time, your lies will catch up with you and the wolf will have you for supper. I say it's broccoli, and I say to hell with it. This fable has more to do with foolishness than with lying, which I maintain is a sign of sophistication. After all, it is only the youngest children who tell no lies and by a very young age we have taught our children how to prevaricate.

I am not making a value judgment. In fact, I am removing any sense or good or bad from the act of telling lies. When the president tells you that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he's decided to misrepresent the truth for the greater good. He did a really good job getting lots of important people to believe him, but his little story got a lot of people killed. History is full of such lies that shouldn't have been told. What looks good to some can look bad to others, even when the lie is revealed as unpurified snake oil.

On the other hand, let's say someone asked me if I was looking for a job and I said I'm always looking for a job. And let's say the person asking was my boss who was expecting a lie along the lines of I'm happy, contented, and despite the vast array of job-seeking tools, listings, and information at my fingertips, haven't sent out a resumé since the day I was hired. The only surprising thing is that I didn't tell a lie when I should have.

Yes, your royal highness, that suit of invisible clothing is very becoming to your paunch. A child would never know to say the expected if it weren't true. The emperor has no clothes! Kids do say the darndest things, but we all grow up and learn to say the expected. We learn the art of smalltalk, the subtleties of the compliment, the politically correct (even when it's factually incorrect). Why do we do this?

We lie because we must. We even lie to ourselves. We are our own worst flatterers, unless we have a poor self-image, in which case we are our own worst enemies. The necessity for lying is two-fold. One is that not everything is black and white, on or off, meat or fish. There are algae and germs and all sorts of gray areas open to interpretation, which leads to dogma, differences of opinion, and divergent views of reality. Which is why one man's god is another's devil, why all capitalists are lying pigs, and all who disagree are enemies. It's the stuff of Orwellian worlds.

The other necessity is forced on us by human nature; we lie to gain some sort of advantage or avoid embarrassment. (I think these two amount to the same thing.) "I finished my homework, can I go out and play?" What do homework and play have to do with each other? Pretty much nothing, so this lie works, as long as it's not scrutinized too closely. We invite lying and then reinforce it every time we try to lay down the law in a controlling, yet arbitrary way. (I'm not going to get into a discussion of child-rearing tactics, here.)

It's not so surprising that children lie to their parents, but I'm amazed how often parents feel they must lie to their children. "You mean Santa Claus isn't real!" But the most amazing is how much grown-ups lie to each other, especially at work. There are any of terms for this - manipulation, hidden agenda, managing to an outcome - but it's all the same and it's all untruths.

My problem is one of naiveté. I believe in mutual respect, which greatly obviates the need for untruths. It works across age groups and office hierarchies, but it only works when it really is mutual. Otherwise you end up like Atahualpa, whose Incan empire was defeated by a puny force of Spaniards led by Pisaro, who was so cunning that Atahualpa couldn't believe he'd been defeated.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

It is the day after Thanksgiving. A day known in retail circles as "Black Friday," but a day otherwise without significance. It is a good day for the official launch of The Bloggregator! I have invited Callie, Chris, Jamie, Nick, and Lisa to join in a group blog for no other reason than to exercise our thoughts and further attempt to make sense of them in written form. Who else would like to join this endeavor in writing to friends and strangers? 

The Bloggregator is my name for the tool we are using to collect and publish our writings. Right now, we are simply a group of WordPress members contributing to a single blog, which I have given the name Manifold Predictions. This refers to a story that occurred to Chris when I first attempted to explain my idea for a Bloggregator to him. It is the story of the blind men and the elephant: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Men_and_an_Elephant 

In one version of the story, there are many ways to state the same truth, and it is this open-minded view that is known as the theory of Manifold Predictions. So chew on this and digest in good health and harmony. On to further feasts!

-originally published 11/23/07 on Manifold Predictions

A Cold Winter's Blogging

It is cold. The windchill was -9.5° this morning with more of the same for tomorrow. But we took a walk up to the Clamshell Pinnacle in Steep Rock with no ill effects and tonight's chicken was grilled outside. I'm wearing my long-sleeved, zip-neck Patagonia long underwear and my flannel-lined blue jeans from L. L. Bean, but the weather doesn't really affect us, much.

Then I think about the house we live in. It is known as a center-chimney colonial and was built in 1796 around a massive brick chimney that occupies about a fourth of the square footage of this house and includes four fireplaces plus a beehive oven. There was certainly no insulation and there were no storm windows, and it was considerably colder 200-years ago. And they knew not of Patagonia or L. L. Bean. How did they keep warm?

This is also the time of year when sap in the maples starts to rise. It won't be rising much today or tomorrow, but Valentine's Day is in four days and it is the traditional beginning of maple syrup season. They were already boiling sap down the hill in Woodbury this past weekend. We'll be putting out a few buckets again this year, but we won't be boiling over an open wood fire in an outdoor sugar house. That's an activity that could keep one warm, but we've got a gas stove for the job.

I wonder if our lack of necessity and abundance of conveniences and comforts has put an end to a natural sense of poetry in our lives. There just isn't a need for Robert Frost in an age of polyester insulation and waterproof boots—no horses harnesses, no muddy tramps, no swingers of birches. We are warm, but with very little poetry in our lives. Is there a solution?

-originally published 2/12/08 on Manifold Predictions

Kindergarten Readiness

 

When Timothy was four, we were told that our eldest son was “not kindergarten ready,” but we didn’t believe it. In fact, we were incredulous for a number of reasons. Despite the fact that Timothy, with a mid-October birthday, was young for his class, he was tall and had an extensive vocabulary (according to his pediatrician). He seemed creative, responsive, and outgoing. Perhaps too outgoing for the perfect little Berkeley, California nursery school he attended. Outgoing enough to cross the line into what his teachers thought was more like the selfishly, anti-social behavior of a three-year-old; definitely not kindergarten ready.

We moved back east that year and trusting our own judgement over the dire warnings of the professional educators, enrolled Timothy in kindergarten, where he immediately learned to read, add, and function at an advanced level in the classroom. This past weekend he graduated from Yale University with distinction and received half-dozen prizes, including one of the five college-wide prizes awarded to undergraduates. 

Not Kindergarten ready? The phrase seems to have more to do with the readiness of teachers and administrators to accept the full range of challenges that a classroom full of children from diverse backgrounds presents. There are obviously children who thrive in school and others who fail. We praise the former and humiliate the latter, but it is difficult to categorize with any sort of consistency those who will advance to the highest levels of achievement and self-esteem or their opposites. Again, Timothy is a case in point.

In eighth grade, now at his second “Montessori School” (which I put in quotes because one Montessori School is as different from another as one student can be from another), Timothy again ran up against the anti-social behavior problem. His teachers found his actions so upsetting that, we were told, they would go home crying at the end of each day. So it was explained to us that for the sake of the teachers and the class, that Timothy would no longer be welcome in the classroom or even on school grounds.

Admittedly, our eighth grader was wonderfully adept at outsmarting his teachers and making them feel as though they had lost control of the entire class. He was not violent nor loud, simply peevish and disagreeable, what used to be called a “smart-aleck,” but in the extreme. By this time, Timothy’s gifts were abundantly clear as a musician, artist, original and analytical thinker, and writer. He was also arguably the worst athlete in his class, the most self-absorbed, the least concerned with conforming, and the most likely to lead his classmates into some new interest like birds, mushrooms, or fort building.

Being thrown out of a Montessori school eighth grade is not good for the self-esteem of the eighth grader. He felt like a failure, was cut off from his friends, and was even black-balled in his application to prep-school for 9th grade admissions. Was this Timothy’s failure or the school’s failure; a failure of teachers and administrators who we trust to recognize and reward talent while knowing how to deal with difficult developmental issues? 

Ah, you might say. He wasn’t kindergarten ready and it came back to bite him. Nonsense, he was bored with work he understood instantly and saw as demeaning. To have held him back a year would only have exacerbated the problem. Given the opportunity to advance rapidly, Timothy thrived. When treated with disrespect, Timothy bridled and rebelled, which to the teacher bent on conformist learning, looked like bad, willful behavior.

So what about high school, how did Timothy survive, thrive, and regain his self-esteem? We couldn’t find a school that seemed to fit with who Timothy was for ninth grade, so we enrolled him in an alternative school for students in the performing arts. At the same time, he was accepted in Juilliard Pre-college as a composer, which allowed him, for the first time, to see that he was not so different from other children—he no longer felt like the weird odd-ball. This had nothing to do with his relative age, his emotional growth, or his innate intelligence. For the first time in school, he got to be who he was, and being true to himself, even before he had developed this advanced sense of self-awareness, was immeasurably more important to his education than the date of his birth.

I realize that my descriptions make Timothy, with all his gifts, eccentricities, and odd and difficult behaviors, sound like something of a freak. For instance, he never finished high school, opting instead for a year of directed study that included weekends at Juilliard, piano studies with a well-known pianist (the pianist arranged for a grant so that Timothy could study with him), literature and french tutorials, classes at the local art association. His year’s independent study culminated in a lecture performance on Ives’ Concord Sonata and American Transcendentalism that was presented at Juilliard.

To most of his former eighth grade colleagues, none of whom attended the performances, I suspect this would have seemed like mighty dull stuff—dry, academic, and certainly not as important as checking off all the items on the assignment rubric so the teacher can figure out how well you completed the work. And he didn’t win any varsity letters. But was happy as a non-conformist—happy to be who he was, happy to have peers and teachers who liked him the way he was and who respected him for what he was.  

Should children be kindergarten ready or should kindergartens be child ready? I think I’ve answered the question.

-CA

Disciplinary Inaction

Discipline is not my strong suit. I lack the discipline to eat with restraint, to exercise regularly without constant reminders, to get my homework done. It's not surprising that I'm unable to keep up a blog with any sort of regularity. For a while, when I started this blog, writing entries was a form of relaxation. This was while I was hating being tortured at work and writing provided a break, an opportunity to clear my mind of demons as a necessary exercise in mental health. And since I enjoy writing, I started this blog-as-therapy. Now what?

I used to be a writer or at least I write a dozen or so computer books, depending on how one counts them. I wrote hundreds of articles: reviews, features, profiles. Mostly I wrote about computers, but I wrote about local businesses and people as well as a number of music reviews. I tried writing fiction, some stories, an unfinished screenplay, and half of a novel. And I liked writing, which isn't to say that it was easy.

One of the things I liked best about writing was saying that I was a writer. It's embarrassing to admit this because it's so narcissistic, but it did my ego good to be a writer. I like saying that I'm an editor, which is what I am now, but it does sound as creative and it's pleasant to think that what I do is creative. Nonetheless, both writing and editing require a good deal of discipline, which is hard for me.

As an editor, I work with a lot of other people and so there are regular expectations, which keeps me honest. And there's a schedule. Work needs to get done in a timely way, which forces discipline. Professional writing has that nice scheduled quality and so I was able to act like a responsible citizen when I had deadlines to meet.

Perhaps I could pick up where I left off and start writing computer articles again. I might even get paid to do this. There's a lot of sense to this, but now that I spend a good deal of my time listening to pitches from others, I'm loathe to pitch my own ideas. Dare I say that pitching ideas stifles creativity? On the other hand, perhaps it's this ridiculous idea that I need to be "creative" that is stifling my ability to express some thought in writing. Oh, what irony!

The fact is, I'm spending too much time being an editor to find time to write. Writing is time-consuming and there are always more chapters to edit. This may be the real conflict, which is reasonable and justifiable. Hooray! No need for self-flagellation with guilt. But it is hard to write infrequently. So I will endeavor to write more frequently. I'm going to keep a list of ideas to write about. It's a list I started a while ago, but haven't even been able to keep current. But it's a new school year and so I shall try to be disciplined and keep something fresh in my blog, even if no one is reading it. But that's a subject for another blog.