The Great Automatic Grammatizator

The Literary Strife

Novelist Jennifer Haigh is one of my best friends, but that’s not going to stop me from publicly kicking her ass in a game of literary trivia.

What is going to stop me is the fact that she knows a lot more about literature than I do.

Jennifer got me involved with the Boston Book Festival as Debbie Porter was launching it in 2009. It’s been a runaway success, growing in size, scope, and fabulousness every year. The 2012 BBF will take place on October 27 in Copley Square. If you’re any flavor of word or book geek, you really have to be there.

One of the lead-up events this year is a literary trivia contest, taking place in Cambridge at Think Tank (where the Kendall Square cool kids are hanging out these days) at 6 pm on Thursday, March 8. Debbie asked me to participate based on, I can only assume, the facts that I grew up with my nose in a book and have a demonstrated willingness to humiliate myself in front of strangers.

When I heard that Jennifer was also in, I couldn’t say no. She and I bonded over books many years ago. She gave me Light Years and The Young Lions; I reciprocated with Under the Skin and Cloud Atlas. She’s also given me her novels to read before they’re published, which gives me a preview of future literary awards and best-of lists. Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her next one, Baker Towers, won the Winship award for outstanding book by a New England writer, and her most recent, Faith, has been on so many ‘best books of 2011’ lists that I’ve lost count.

So am I outgunned and outclassed as one of her opponents on March 8? Oh my, yes. And in that situation there’s only one thing to do: talk as much trash in advance of the event as possible. I’m going to taunt and insult her, impugn her erudition and education, and do other similarly classy things. I’ll do it here and on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. I’ll do it with all the nastiness and ingenuity that I can muster.

And then I’m going to get schooled by her on March 8. Be there. And follow along and join in the fun between now and then…

The Mourners and Steve Jobs

Were any of us expecting the outpouring of sentiment after Steve Jobs died? He was a billionaire CEO (not a beloved class, generally), he engaged in little to no philanthropy, and he had a serious temper.

 And yet in the wake of his death people around the world spontaneously set up memorials, left notes at Apple stores, and mourned his loss with great sincerity. With the possible exception of Thomas Edison, we’ve never seen this before.

I wrote about this phenomenon and its roots in my work blog. Here I want to highlight an interesting coincidence: the best artistic representation of mourning I’ve ever seen is currently on display in San Francisco, the city nearest to Jobs’ legacy and company.

 The Mourners are a group of forty small statues carved to adorn the tomb of the Burgundian duke John the Fearless, who died in 1419 They represent the members of the procession that followed his coffin through the streets of Dijon. And they’re unlike anything else you’ll ever come across.

They include people from all walks of life – bishops, monks, merchants, and so on. They’re carved from alabaster in a simple, naturalistic style. And the artists, Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, absolutely nailed it.

The statues are similar in size and shape, but no two are anywhere near identical. The people have different postures, clothing, faces, and accessories, they lean at unique angles, and they’re captured in dissimilar moments. As a group, they’re endlessly interesting. I don’t know how they’re displayed in SF, but at the Met (where I saw them) they were arranged in two rows, led by a page.

I walked around the display many, many times, and always saw something new.  The Mourners didn’t make me sad; they made me deeply appreciative that an artist had been able to capture a moment of human community with so much clarity, insight, and emotional force.

I have no idea if John the Fearless actually was an enlightened and beloved leader. But he’ll be seen as one for all time, thanks to the sculptors of The Mourners, because they show how unhappy his people were at his passing. They hang their heads, pinch their noses, cover themselves, and stare upward. They’re not rending their garments or wailing —  they’re not incapacitated by grief – but they are sad, and showing it publicly.  In short, they’re mourning.

Jobs was often described as an artist, and he was adamant that a grounding in the humanities and arts is important, if not essential, for the development of great technological products. I don’t know if he saw The Mourners before he died, but I’m confident he would have loved them.

If you’re mourning him, go be among The Mourners. They’re at the Legion of Honour in San Francisco through the end of 2011. And leave a comment to let us know what you thought of them. 

The Boys of Late Summer

I love my adopted home of Boston with all my heart, but the winters here profoundly suck. Yes, the first snowfall is gorgeous, but then they get old pretty quickly. And the skies are gray, the driving treacherous and parking impossible, and on its worst midwinter days the city looks like something out of The Road. 

Herman Melville, another transplant to New England, wrote bout “growing grim about the mouth” in November. I know the feeling, and there’s a whole lot of winter left after that.

I think this aversion to the season helps explain why I start to lose interest in baseball about this time of year, just as it’s heating up for many people. And it’s not just that the Red Sox seem to be executing a truly special meltdown this September. I’d feel the same if they had a lock on the playoffs. Because while the playoffs are great fun they’re just forestalling the inevitable, which is the end of baseball and the start of winter.

So the countdown to the playoffs feels like the countdown to the end to me. To nights without Don and Jerry coming into my living room from Fenway. To months without the possibility of a triple play or a triple by a catcher. No more cutters or 12-6 curveballs. No more “Sweet Caroline” and “Shipping up to Boston.”

I watch waaaaaaayyyyy too many of the 162 regular season games, usually with undivided attention. Doing so brings me peace, especially when the Sox have a lead and I have a beer. I watch in the hopes of seeing something extraordinary, whether it’s a 13-pitch at bat, an outfield assist, an inside-the-park homerun, or a knuckeball that travels over 60 feet without completing one full rotation. I also watch to try to understand the sport better, because there’s a lot to learn, no matter how much you already know.

The poet Mary Oliver is one of my sages, and I know she’s right when she writes this about not mourning the coming of fall:

I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Red Sox baseball is one of the sweets of every year for me. So as the team plays its last regular season home game tonight I’m going to watch, and be content, and try to follow Oliver’s advice.

It’s been a great season.

On Becoming a Regular

If you’re raised by industrious Midwestern near-teetotalers as I was, you don’t aspire to become a regular at a bar. And reading a lot of Bukowski later in life solidified my notion that people who get to know bartenders’ names are on their way to Skid Row. 

But a few years ago Tony Maws opened up Craigie on Main, right on my walk home from MIT. I’d eaten at the Craigie St. Bistro, his former restaurant, a few times and liked what he could do with steak and marrow, so I stopped in with a friend. We had a great meal, and I walked out happy that there was another good restaurant in my neighborhood (When I was a student at MIT in the latter half of the 1980s I was broke and Central Square was a wasteland; both situations are better now).

On a later visit I ordered a cocktail that turned out to be delicious and found myself in a conversation with the bartender about whether a man who was not James Bond could drink a drink that was not a martini from a martini glass. I maintained not. He maintained, politely enough, that I was an idiot. There are many ways for friendships to start.

His name, I eventually learned, was Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, and like Maws he was extraordinarily good at what he did. And the core of his talent, I’ve come to believe, is taking care of people, making them feel like they’re being well looked after for the time that they’re in his place.

Hospitality is hard work. The hours are brutal, the demands constant, and the customers too often unappreciative or even nasty. There are lots of reasons not to do it. But as I watched Tony, Tom, and the people they hired and worked with I was reminded of some great lines from that old drunk Bukowski himself, who started his poem “so you want to be a writer?” with the lines

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

in spite of everything

don’t do it

Hospitality has come bursting out of the staff at Craigie. The place is far from cheap and too many other people know about it, but I don’t care. I’ll keep going there, because it’s a pleasure to see real professionalism and experience true hospitality. And the cheeseburger is as good as you’ve heard.

Tom has moved on from Craigie; he’s now managing the wonderful Island Creek Oyster Bar near Fenway Park with the help of Ashley Paige White-Stern. Other alums are keeping people happy throughout the Boston area. Paul Manzelli is at Bergamot, Carrie Cole has moved on to Eastern Standard, and John Mayer is in Southie at Local 149. I can’t be a regular at all these places, sadly, but I can recommend them without hesitation.

Some of the old guard remains at Craigie. Meredith Devinney manages the place, and I’m pretty sure she’s the reincarnation of legendary Tour d’Argent host Claude Terrail; she can put anyone at ease, make them feel welcome, and improve their disposition. Ted Gallagher runs the bar and runs his mouth, both to great effect. Anna Ellingboe maintains the distaff tradition behind the bar, and of course chef Tony is always there. He sometimes even has a minute to come over and talk about the Sox, especially at the end of the night.

When he does, I try not to get star-struck. This May, Maws was given the James Beard award as the best chef in the Northeast. He’s not the only one bringing home hardware. Tom and a team from Eastern Standard won the Tales of the Cocktail Bar Room Brawl competition in New Orleans earlier this month. I’m thrilled to see their crazy talent and worth ethic recognized.

The poet and critic Randall Jerrell wrote about reaching the point when you wake up wishing not for things to be different, but instead wishing “May this day / Be the same day, the day of my life.” The essayist Adam Gopnik picked up that idea and wrote that in the evening of the day of his life he dined at the Parisian Brasserie Le Balzar. In the evening of the day of my life I have dinner at Craigie on Main, or one of the places where its alums have landed. 

In Memoriam: Cy Twombly

A few years ago I went to MoMA and headed, as I always do, for the design galleries on the 3rd floor. As I passed through the atrium, though, I got stopped in my tracks by a painting. It was Cy Twombly’s “Summer,” part of his Four Seasons series (which is owned by MoMA):

I have no formal art education, so didn’t know that I was looking at a work by one of America’s most prominent post-war artists. All I knew was that I had been reached. I absorbed “Summer” and the rest of the seasons for a good long time, and walked away determined to find more of his work, and find out more about him.

I learned that he was then still alive, living and working in Italy. He moved there in the 1950s, just as the center of gravity for modern art was shifting away from Europe and toward America.

And he was not just in where he painted, but also what. He reached back into myth and poetry for inspiration, rather than looking at the soup cans and cartoons of contemporary culture. He was moved by the story of Leda and the Swan and the words of Catullus, Hildegard von Bingen, Rilke, and others.

This was pretty unfashionable at the time, but he didn’t seem to care. He also didn’t seem to care much about being witty with his art, or engaging in biting social commentary, or exposing hypocrisies and injustices. Instead, I get the impression that he wanted to do something almost unthinkable for a modern artist: he wanted to convey strong positive emotions: awe, rapture, love, joy.

He felt these emotions while working. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said in a rare public comment, and after finishing one “I usually have to go to bed for a couple days.”

Viewers of his work can usually recover more quickly, but are rarely unaffected. I’ve included screen grabs of a few of his paintings here, but they are utterly inadequate. Many of his works take up an entire wall, and are not eye candy —  they’re eyeball heroin.

Luckily, seeking out your next Twombly fix won’t get you arrested or take you to the scuzzier parts of town. It’ll just send you museum hopping. The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London is showing his work now (along with Nicolas Poussin’s), and there are large permanent displays at the Menil Foundation in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich. 

I’ll vouch for the Brandhorst. The entire top floor of the museum is devoted to Twombly. If you spend time there and are unmoved, I’m pretty sure you are a zombie. 

I tried to come up with good words for how his work affects me, but all I mustered were ones usually associated with religious ecstasy: to give oneself over, to be in the presence of something larger, to abandon oneself, to be transported, etc.

So I’m going fall back on the poet Richard Tillinghast’s description, from his poem “Rain,” of how he felt on a wondrous rainy evening:

I wanted it never to end

I wanted to deconstitute and emanate out

…

And let [it] possess me entirely - let it soak right down

Into the pores of my happiness.

Cy Twombly is no longer with us —  he died on July 5 - but his paintings are. Please make it a point to go see them, and leave a comment here once you do.

Happiness Doesn’t Hit

I don’t mean to pick a fight with Florence + The Machine and I love the song, but I don’t agree that happiness hits you like a train on the track. It’s way sneakier than that. It doesn’t have a timetable or announce its approach, and it doesn’t follow set pathways. We go looking for it on vacations and at celebrations and sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t (at least not in any way commensurate with the hassle and expense involved in setting them up).

The last time happiness flooded over me I was at home on a Saturday morning, hooking up a new receiver for my AV gear. There was nothing at all remarkable about the day or the task, but my life circumstance and neurochemistry nonetheless got on the same page and decided to throw me a little party (unaided by pharmacology, I want to stress). A strange euphoria came over me and stayed for a while. I don’t have any other label for the feeling except happiness. I didn’t ask for it and surely wasn’t expecting it, but was appreciative as Hell.

The poet Jane Kenyon knew something about happiness, in large part because of its absence. She had a brutal lifelong fight with depression, which she chronicled in “Having it Out With Melancholy.” It’s one of the most devastating things I’ve ever read, conveying just how horrible and hopeless chronic depression is.

So when I came across a poem by her titled simply “Happiness,” I was thrilled. Both that she herself found some, and that she’d be able to put the emotion into words to the benefit of the rest of us. 

Which she does. The poem is about how happiness comes unexpectedly, and also about how it comes to everyone. To drive this latter point home, she ends with a litany:

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea, 
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine. 

I read poetry in the hope of coming across lines that powerful, and of gaining some insight into how the world works as we’re working our way through it. I’m grateful to Kenyon for teaching me something about both the highs and lows of our emotional lives, and wish she were still with us (she died of cancer in 1995). 

When did happiness last come to you? Was it at a time and place you expected, or more like stacking cans of carrots in the night, or hooking up a stereo on a Saturday morning?

I really know? What I’m talking about?

Am I the only one left? Who gets annoyed any more? When presenters engage in uptalk?

When they end sentences? And sometimes even just a few words? With the rising intonation at the end that used to signal a question in Standard American English?

Wow. I find it grating to even read sentences punctuated that way.

Mark Liberman’s excellent Language Log blog educated me that uptalk is not, as I thought, used at present mainly by insecure, young, and/or low status people (see this post, and this one). Instead, it’s “mainly used by “powerful” speakers, those “institutionally responsible for the conduct of the talk” — teachers, doctors, talk-show hosts and so on.”

I find this research both convincing and irrelevant. It’s convincing because it’s well-done work. It’s irrelevant because uptalk is not only spoken, it’s also heard. And the impressions it leaves on its hearers matter a great deal.

We judge the people who are talking to us in large part by how they’re talking to us.  This is not wise or fair, but it is universal. A lot of Americans will give you a huge amount of intellectual credit if you sound like 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy, and penalize you if you sound like Kenneth the page.

I bet that a lot of people raised on Standard American English unconsciously assign an IQ and/or expertise penalty to presenters who go heavy on the uptalk. I know I do.

I’ve attended a few talks recently by smart young people who had interesting things to say and were clearly on top of their material, but were (in my view) shooting themselves in the foot? With their incessant uptalk?

Yes, I’m old, and crusty, and need to embrace shifts in dialect as they occur. But I’m  pretty sure I’m the rule, not the exception, among decision makers in the business world today. Millennials are not yet calling the shots; Gen Xers and Baby Boomers still are. And as (unelected) spokesperson for my generation and the ones behind me, I’m stating for the record that uptalkers sound shaky and needy to us.

The first rule of presenting is to know your audience. So if you’re going to be in front of a group with Standard notions of how to intone a declarative sentence, you should take those notions into account.

Jestem Polakiem

Poland now has the 6th largest economy in Europe, and was the only country on the continent to escape recession in recent years. As The Countess and I walked around Warsaw and Krakow over the past few days we passed by sushi bars, pet groomers, coffee and wine bars, Indian restaurants, dance schools, and huge H&M billboards.

The most concrete evidence that we were in Eastern Europe came to our ears, not our eyes; Slavic consonants filled the air like bumblebees. But without the soundtrack, Poland appeared very much like a western European country, one that had not spent the sixty years from 1939-89 at the mercy of first Nazism and then Soviet Communism.

These are two of most evil systems people have managed to come up with, and the leaders of both made sincere attempts to wipe Poland off the maps and history books. Yet the wounds they inflicted were not mortal, and in fact were fading rapidly after only a bit more than twenty years of Poland as a free and independent country.

I got the consistent impression that Poles have made the choice to improve their future rather than dwell on the past, and that their minds and society were not animated by a sense of grievance or victimhood, or a desire to avenge wrongs either personal or historical. Instead, their goals looked familiar to this American: let’s figure out how to make our government more responsive and our companies more competitive. Let’s educate our kids. Let’s have dinner. Let’s go shopping.

This banal list becomes amazing when I look around the world and see the radically different choices made by other countries and people that have been through horrible times. But when I looked around Warsaw, a city that was destroyed and depopulated by the Nazis, I saw a huge building with the Mercedes logo on top, and a branch of the Austrian Raiffeisen cooperative bank right behind the spot where the last fighters of the Ghetto Uprising emerged from the sewers. I listened to tour guides describe what happened at Auschwitz with great skill and an absence of hatred. And I talked to Poles of all ages who espoused optimism and good cheer.

I don’t mean to romanticize the country; I’m sure that there are plenty of Polish revanchists. I just want, on Memorial Day, to record a few impressions that Poland left on me: that it’s possible to commemorate and mourn losses without being consumed by a lust to avenge them. That blood enemies can become allies, if that’s what people and their leaders want. And that the Americans and Poles who died fighting Nazis and Soviets didn’t leave this world for no good reason. I look at Poland in 2011 and see some pretty good reasons.

Learning To Take It Back

No, not my anti-Scrabble rant on CBC last Friday (starts at 23:40), which was based on this post. I recently learned the virtues of taking something else back.

I started doing crossword puzzles in high school when my mom got me a subscription to Games magazine, which was then edited by word-nerd legend Will Shortz. She thought that I might be just such a nerd, and she was right. I’ve done crossword puzzles regularly ever since.

From the start, I did them in ink. It started out as teenage showoff-iness (“I dont make mistakes when I solve.”), grew in to adult showoff-iness (“I don’t second-guess myself”) and settled into habit.

As I got better and better at them, I never timed myself or entered contests. The only yardstick I cared about was completing the puzzle. And I dabbled with others over the years, but always stuck with the New York Times crossword, which Shortz started editing in 1993. I eventually stopped doing any except the Friday and Saturday puzzles. My weekend now starts, no matter how hungover I might be, with NYT Saturday puzzle, which is nasty. 

I usually get it done (with no Internet assistance, thankyouverymuch), but it ain’t pretty. At least one quadrant is usually totally illegible because of all the crossing out and over-writing I’ve had to do. I considered this a bit of a badge of honor, and never really thought that it might actually get in the way of my ability to solve.

And then I read a story about Dan Feyer, who sat down with the NYT Saturday puzzle and solved it in under six minutes. Granted, he’s the best in the world now, but that’s still way impressive. What stuck with me most from the article was this description of his solving technique:

He erased, and rapidly filled in more boxes. Then he paused, erased again, and resumed skittering. Nearly five minutes had passed and he still seemed to be working the top left corner of the puzzle, the very beginning. He mumbled once and erased three more times. Was he in trouble? He wrote something, looked up, put his pencil down.

Done. Five minutes, 29 seconds.

Could his success, my voiceover went, be somehow related to his ability to erase? Could it give him ideas, spark pattern matching, allow more experimentation, make it less likely that he’ll get locked in to unproductive approaches?

To answer these questions, and to shut up that annoying monologue, I sat down this past Saturday morning with the usual puzzle and shot of espresso, but an unusual writing implement — a pencil.

And I crushed it, comparatively speaking. Just had a much easier time when the grid was not full of ink blots, and when I could quickly and completely get rid of guesses that weren’t working out.

So I’m not doing hard puzzles in pen any more. And am advocating, with a convert’s zeal, letting go of counterproductive displays of ability, and acquiring some helpful humility. In crosswords, and probably in other areas as well.