Common Things at Last

A New Project? Let's See How Long it Lasts

2010-03-03T23:45:00.011-06:00

Been a while since I posted. My apologies, faithful readers.

Rilke says somewhere in his letters to a young poet that a true writer writes because that’s what he is, and that if the young poet isn’t writing, then he isn’t a poet. I’m not sure what I am (at 35? - O my!), but I find that while I can get away with not writing, I am unable to be happy about it. Sooner or later, I have to start setting things down, even though that is sometimes more stressful than the thoughts that beg to be set down.

Often, though, the things don’t beg. I have no end of unfinished poems, ... well, scratch that, I have an end to them, but not an end I’ve approached. And I often have ideas, but I am not chomping at the bit with them, certainly not with plots. My ideas seem more meet for the lyrical essay or verse, and they don’t come too often. One idea that has persisted is that is this: I have wished to reread the novels of Charles Williams and write about them. I have no fully formed thesis; I simply have upsurgings of thought that arise when I read them. All these upsurgings are quite possibly both coherent and synthesizable. So finally, after reading all of them last Spring – I had previously read three or four of them, at widely spaced intervals over the last ten years – I am feeling ready to start. So I went to the shelf and pulled out Williams’ novel War in Heaven.

Naturally enough, I also pulled out a completely unrelated book of poems, Patrick Kavanagh’s (“kav'-an-ah,” I was admonished by a blonde in Dublin, not “kav'-a-naw'”) Collected Poems, and decided to read that instead before I started writing. This book is special to me, for I plucked it at random out of a bookshelf in a covered red brick market somewhere south of the Liffey and near St. Stephen’s Green, if I remember correctly, read a poem or two, decided it was good enough, and later found Kavanagh to be one of my favorite poets, even if I do regard him as a minor. I feel close to the guy as a part-time poet, as an underachiever, and as a dreamer. Besides that, and more importantly (there are many dilettantes I could love), he says things both beautiful and true.

So here’s another project: every few days, or more often, I will pick out a poem by Kavanagh and write about it. I’ll start with the first, my favorite, one of the few sonnets I can come close to quoting from memory: “Inniskeen Road: July Evening.”

The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries,
The wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight, and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown,
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates, in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

When I teach sonnets, I don’t bother with the whole “Shakespearean, Spenserian, Miltonic” thing. I see it as beside the point and too terminological for high school. I teach the basic structure: most every sonnet will be a 12-2 or 8-6, that is, a trio of quatrains, followed by a couplet, or a pair of quatrains (an octet), followed by a sestet. And the reason this structure is important, I tell them, is that it gives us a clue to the true structure, the thematic structure, of the poem. A sonnet is almost invariably composed of two parts: the situation and the resolution (there are plenty of exceptions, of course). A 12-2, or three quatrains and a couplet poem, is more likely to have its situation explained over the course of twelve lines, and resolved (or even solved) in the last two. An 8-6, or an octet-sestet poem, will lay out the situation in only eight lines, and resolve it over six.

There are, however, any number of poems that do not hold to these generalizations, and “Iniskeen Road: July Evening,” is one of them. It seems obvious that there is a break after line eight, symbolized by the line break, but that the sestet is not a wholly unified statement either. The octet evokes the intimacy of a country dance in a local barn, in which the participants are so close they converse non-verbally, through a “half-talk code of mysteries,” and through the universal “wink-and-elbow language of delight” (3-4). At “half-past eight” (5), however, the speaker is alone on the road, no “man or woman” with him (7). The last line of the octet tells us that there is not “a footfall tapping secrecies of stone,” an evocative line from a poet who throughout his poetry seeks searchingly – but perhaps more futilely than even the Romantics did – for the sources of the magic of Creation.

The sestet represents a clean break, and contains what may be Kavanagh’s most perfect two lines, in their hopeless truth:

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

Those are lines I remember, in spite of my faulty synapses. Those are lines that the Goblin Bee of truth states quite loudly in its sting for a lonely, unproductive expatriate. When I read it, I was plumb sick of being king of my little rented room off North Strand Road, just past the tenements with the mismatched doors. I was king indeed of my little world, had the run of a miniature Georgian house, and simply wanted to go back home. I wrote more than I’ve ever written since, and it wasn’t much. I had what every poet hates, I didn’t do much with it, and I don’t much wish for it back, though in my weaker moments I blame my empty blog and journal on its lack.

Kavanagh’s poem is ultimately an 8-6, but his final two lines are a couplet – they are not integrated into the sestet – because they solidify and cry out his frustration over this loneliness and his resulting petty power: “A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.” Lonely is the head that wears the crown.

Not-so-N.I.C.E.

2009-09-08T17:52:00.013-05:00

The lazy blogger's last resort is publishing (slightly emended - especially if there were any egregious spelling errors) letters to the editor. So, here I go:

Dear Mr. Taranto,

Don't know what you think of C. S. Lewis, but today you mentioned Britain's "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence," or, "N.I.C.E." There is already a precedent for a sinister organization called N. I. C. E., dating from around the same time Orwell was writing, and that is C. S. Lewis's "National Institute for Coordinated Experiments," a sort of genetic engineering center cum Frankenstein's lab cum Faustian summoning chamber that houses the bad guys of That Hideous Strength, the final installation of Lewis's space trilogy. The three novels have much more religious than governmental overtones. Out of the Silent Planet portrays a trip to Mars, a sort of mature Eden, where the inhabitants have gone on to procreate but still live in harmony with God, each other, and nature; Perelandra tells of a trip to Venus, where the inhabitants are only two - a Venusian Adam and a Venusian Eve, both subject to temptation from a visiting demon; That Hideous Strength is one I've not read as recently as the other two, but I know it is set on earth - the "silent planet," due to its sinful state - and has, if I remember, its conflict as the efforts of the hero from the first two books, Professor Ransom, to prevent the members of N.I.C.E. from bringing to life a corpse that most of them think they are reanimating through scientific means, but which they are actually making ready for demonic possession.

If, again, I remember correctly, Lewis's essential criticism is similar to what he writes of in The Abolition of Man, which is that there is a certain breed of utopian in this world that thinks he could solve all our problems if only he could extirpate just this or just that imperfection, whether by means of eugenics, biological engineering, different governance, or different education. Being a Christian who took seriously the existence of the devil, Lewis believed this tendency a mistake and associated it with a demonic desire to remake mankind, thus perverting (though in his - the devil's - mind, perfecting) God's creation. By opening mankind to reanimation through ungodly means, one was not rescuing from death the soul of the man so affected, but opening his body up to be enslaved by evil. Hence Lewis's "men without chests" in The Abolition of Man, and hence his Professor Weston in Perelandra, essentially a automaton acting not out of his own free will, but because he (it) is enslaved, or possessed. Anyway, this is becoming a bit of a digression, but Lewis distrusted big, unaccountable, elite-staffed bureaucracies trying to remake the world by removing what they see as the sources of human evil. It's kind of shocking - or perhaps it's not - that the British bureaucrats and scientists are so ignorant of the writings of one of their most famous 20th century authors that they would use an ironic and previously used name for their big, unaccountable, etc.

Sincerely,

Jay Hawking

P. S. Hope you don't mind, but I'll probably post the text of this letter in my infrequently-updated and less-frequently-read blog. When I actually get around to writing something, I might as well publish it.

Another point to make, that I won't get into now: Lewis uses Perelandra to posit a solution to the free will vs. predestination debate, suggesting that they are somehow one in the same. In Perelandra, Professor Ransom goes to bed one night conflicted about how to act, and wakes in the morning knowing precisely what he will decide to do. Lewis's narrator (can't remember if it's Ransom himself) suggests that perhaps there is no true difference between these. Lewis was of course trained in the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox, so perhaps he's being more credulous than he should be, but I'm also not phrasing my point quite as eloquently and subtly as he did (sorry that I don't have the time or text handy to quote him on this). Also, not meaning to demean "the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox," as I myself am one of its pupils, but phrasing something as a paradox doesn't, of course, make it true.

This Is All Very Disturbing

2009-04-22T21:44:00.002-05:00

Before the election I wrote that Obama was prepared to re-make America in a socialist, collectivist bent. Larry Kudlow has similar fears:

An old friend e-mailed me this week about how to characterize Obama’s economic interventions into the banking and auto sectors (with health care next on the list). He says it’s not really socialism. Nor is it fascism. He suggests it’s state capitalism. But I think of it more as corporate capitalism. Or even crony capitalism, as Cato’s Dan Mitchell puts it.

It’s not socialism because the government won’t actually own the means of production. It’s not fascism because America is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and Obama’s program doesn’t reach way down through all the sectors, but merely seeks to control certain troubled areas. And in the Obama model, it would appear there’s virtually no room for business failure. So the state props up distressed segments of the economy in some sort of 21st-century copy-cat version of Western Europe’s old social-market economy.

So call it corporate capitalism or state capitalism or government-directed capitalism. But it still represents a huge change from the American economic tradition. It’s a far cry from the free-market principles that governed the three-decade-long Reagan expansion, which now seems in jeopardy. And with cap-and-trade looming, this corporate capitalism will only grow more intense.

This is all very disturbing.

Indeed.

The End of Breeding

2009-04-21T14:47:00.014-05:00

I am not an Ezra Pound expert by any means – he is too allusive and classical for my learning, and my ears have never attuned themselves to his music. Despite that, I am teaching a few of his poems, rather poorly, as part of a unit on Modernism, which I am also teaching rather poorly.

The poem we covered today is “The Garden,” which goes as follows:

En robe de parade.
– Albert Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

It is not a bad poem, and has some resonance for the modern world. The most important line in the poem, I think, is: “In her is the end of breeding.” It seems clear to me that “end” has both a teleological and a prosaic meaning here: First, like a work of art, she is the perfection of breeding. The simile of a “skein of silk” implies her quality of rare and fine beauty; she is an object of wealth and labor. Her contrast with the surrounding “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” who do not speak to her is obvious. Whether Pound was a eugenicist, I do not know, but I believe he was an anti-Semite and I know that he broadcast on Italian radio during the Second World War. These lines bespeak a kind of tragic eugenic sensibility, the belief that there is a perfected race, but that it is going to be surpassed, that it will not “inherit the earth.”

This of course brings us to the prosaic meaning of “end”: she is the end because she is the last. We know that does not have any children because she is bored and because she “would like someone to speak to her” – in other words, she has nothing to do (no children to care for), and no one who loves her. That “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” emphasizes her infertility. The mention of an “indiscretion” implies the scandal of the presumably male speaker approaching her; she seems to have been without man.

Her boredom is “exquisite.” Perhaps the emptiness of wealth has something to do with the resentment of quality that Spengler mentions in the article I linked to below. Perhaps we have so long been wealthy in the West, have so long avoided great suffering, that we have nothing to fight for anymore. We have been denuded of our religion, and with it the spiritual battles that give concern and color to our lives, and our bodies have been secured by the comfort granted us by prosperity and guaranteed us by the state, and the safety guarded by our technologically powerful military. The success of capitalism and the long slow decay of socialism have together done us in, and we Westerners, who see ourselves as perfected in the cultural sense (even those who believe the West irredeemably flawed believe themselves to have come out of it with true wisdom), have become bored, have failed to see the point in it all, have wandered through the gardens of these wealthy states surrounded by the children of the poor. We blame ourselves for their state, we shake our heads sadly at their savagery, we distrust our ourselves, and unstiffened by any iron in our blood, we allow ourselves to die. We are not so unlike that lady in Kensington Gardens.

The Fall of the West

2009-04-21T09:35:00.000-05:00

I passed this deconstruction of the fame of Susan Boyle on to my students. Thought I’d scare a bit of ambition into ’em. Hat tip to John Derbyshire.

A Letter to our Adoption Lawyer

2009-04-19T14:55:00.004-05:00

After last summer’s ordeal, we have not progressed in fertility efforts, so we have decided to begin the adoption process. What follows is a letter to a lawyer with whom we met in January:

Dear Ms. ...:

This letter is a much-belated follow-up to our meeting in January. Kay and I meant to write you shortly thereafter, but the school year took over and we got busied in those concerns. Now that we have some time off around Easter, we wanted to sum up the things we discussed with you and ask you a few questions for clarification. I would appreciate if you are able to answer the questions and correct any misapprehensions I might have.

As a first step, you suggested we get licensed with DCFS, not necessarily as a way of taking in foster children, but because many of the agencies require that prospective parents be vetted with them. I have looked over their website, and from what I can see, it seems I have to call them to begin this process. There doesn't seem to be a way to do it online. I plan to call them on Monday.

Second, you said the next step is to figure out our path. As I remember you suggested four choices, with the following commentary:

DCFS: this would be true foster-parenting, with the problem that the children we take in would not necessarily be up for adoption, and even those who were could at some point be removed from our care. I believe you said also that there is a wide range of ages and conditions of the children that one cares for as a foster parent.

Charitable Sectarian Organizations: You mentioned that Catholic Charities, Lutheran Family Services, and the Jewish Children’s Bureau all offer adoption services on a non-sectarian basis. I do believe you mentioned that the children available from these groups are more likely to have health problems, though I don’t remember for certain.

Adoption Agencies: The Cradle, and others, offer adoption services. Some of these specialize in the U.S., others in foreign adoptions, and others offer both. The quality of these is varying. You suggested that we interview a number of them to figure out which fits our needs the most.

Private Ads: You suggested we could also place advertisements in newspapers looking for a private adoption. You said that you would be willing to serve as a go-between, setting up meetings between us and the prospective parents, using your experience to vet them.

I assume that pursuing more than one of these avenues is fine, with cost being the limit, correct?

Third, you have said that we need to figure out our own requirements. As I remember, there are at least three questions:

Age: we said we would like to adopt an infant.

Sex: we are open to either; I would guess, especially with foreign adoptions, that girls are more likely.

Open or Closed: probably the biggest question. Your opinion on which we should choose was that it simply depended on our own preferences. We expressed an bias towards closed adoptions, but are definitely willing to consider open adoptions, especially because, as you noted, being open to either kind obviously increases our options.

Fourth, you said we would want to put together an album showcasing ourselves as adoptive parents.

A few questions that we have are these:

•Do you have a list of agencies that you would recommend we start with? Part of what we are looking for is advice in this area. Rather than searching and interviewing at random, we hope your experience can give us a few starting points, so that our interviews can then be a more subjective exercise of deciding whether we are personally comfortable with the agency in question.

•Are there any books, websites, or support groups you suggest we read or join as a way of understanding this process better?

•Where might we get some guidance for putting together an adoption album or an newspaper advertisement? Would you also be able to recommend publications or websites on which to post these ads?

Thank you so much for any advice you can give. The meeting we had with you was very helpful in orienting us. We will be pursuing this process more consistently from now on, especially as the school year comes to a close, and I will make sure to keep you up to date as we make progress.

Sincerely, ...

The Empire Morality

2009-04-18T21:41:00.006-05:00

A few thoughts on sexuality, inspired by Bill Maher and Oprah Winfrey. (No, that’s not the image I am trying to convey.) Last night, in a hotel, Kay and I sat watching cable. We don’t have cable, so we watch it when it’s available. Perhaps because I had been overly aggressive in a political discussion with her, had apparently gloated when I made a point she could not at the moment refute (I had not been consciously trying to gloat), had made her upset, Kay settled, with the clicker (what more civilized people call the remote) in her hand, on Bill Maher’s show, whatever it’s currently called. Maher had a panel that one could hardly call fair and balanced. He had an Independent senator from Vermont, which is to say, a Democrat, or a “Progressive”; he had a black woman whose name I cannot recall (Kerry Washington sounds about right), who calls herself an actress and an activist, which is to say, a Democrat, or a “Progressive”; and he had a New York Times columnist, which is to say … well, you get the idea. I will, however, give the columnist, whose name escapes me, but who was young, sharply dressed, dark-haired, the benefit of noting he was at pains here and there to be fair, though he smirked a fair amount at Maher’s immature gags, and was often overridden by the the Senator.

Maher was crude, which, though I’ve not watched much of him, is I think to be expected. He made many jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter and granddaughter. He did this on the way to making a point about George Bush’s failed eight years of abstinence teaching in America. Or was it the other way around? – he seemed to take too much pleasure in making fun of Tripp, Bristol, and their matriarch for it to seem incidental. Nonetheless, he made the point that in the past year, I think it was, America has acquired the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. This is presumably a bad thing. Indeed, all other things being equal, I think it is. But he did not make it clear what the circumstances of all these teen pregnancies are. There must be at least two factors to be considered: actual age, as 13 does not equal 18, and marital status. If most of those teen pregnancies belong to married 18-year-olds, I am less worried.

Probably they do not. Probably there are very few 18-year-old brides in America, and probably many of those brides will end up divorced, things being as they are. Maher noted that among the other hundred-and-fifty or so countries who have a lower teen pregnancy rate than we do is India. Now, since all countries apparently have a lower teen pregnancy rate than we do, I’m not sure what makes India so remarkable for having a lower rate than ours. Are they particularly known for their teen pregnancy rate? More so than say, Russia? or Nairobi? or Peru? (Not that I have any idea – all of these countries were chosen without any other thought than multicultural representation.)

That seemingly random mention of India, however, made me think. I thought of saris, and single-sex Bollywood theatres, and arranged marriages, and I thought, well of course we have a higher teen-pregnancy rate than does India! Indians keep an eye on their young. They watch their girls especially, and there is little likelihood that there is time for the pretty young things to get it on. I would guess that very few women work outside the home, and that there are few latch-key kids coming home to houses denuded of parents and grandparents. Call it the Locked Door Theory. The criminal can rightly say to the householder: “Go ahead, lock your door. I’ll get in anyway. I’ll use brute strength, crowbars, sledgehammers. I’ll get in, and I’ll take your stuff, and you can’t stop me.” Really, what does your chain lock add to your deadbolt? And in the end, your deadbolt is only as strong as its weaker doorframe. But in the end, the locked door does keep you reasonably safe, because the criminal who has to deal with the locked door has to deal with the noise and the hassle and the neighbors. He’d rather get into the unlocked car than the locked one. Just so the oversexed teen. He may desperately want to do what all undersexed teens desperately want to do (especially the boys), but he’s not going to give all he has to get that. Very few of them will lay with a man’s daughter while that daughter’s father or mother is at home. Could they? In some circumstances, probably, yes, but only some boys will have the cojones to take advantage of those situations. Even fewer girls would let them do so (or cajole them into doing so).

India has a lower rate because they have a different system. You bet they teach abstinence. They also live it, far more regularly than we do. They have systems in place, and non-governmental coercions, such as shame and who knows what else – transgressors of both sexes most likely are beaten or killed or exiled. This is not to say that all such actions are consistent with a civilized society – they are not – but it is to say that a society that laughs at the two Gossip Girls slurping down a phallic double-scoop ice cream cone together (as Maher, to his credit, briefly introduced as evidence that perhaps we’re oversexed), is hardly equipped to help the 12,000 boys and girls who reneged on their promise of pre-marital abstinence. On one level, I suppose I agree with Maher: teaching abstinence is a fool’s game. But who would expect the children of smokers to follow, in high percentages, their parents’ non-smoking precepts? Teaching abstinence isn’t working right terribly well right now, but teaching the opposite isn’t going to have much better of an effect (more on that in the next post). Teaching abstinence will not become effective until we see it becoming effective in the wider culture, until the casual couplings of shows like Gossip Girl and Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives face a greater censure than they have up to this point (which is to say, any). Teaching abstinence will not become effective until sexual hypocrisy becomes, once again, the tributary coinage paid to the empire morality (or at least, respectability), at which point, the monetary supply will be greatly lessened, I believe.

First Things, Part the Second

2009-04-16T15:31:00.004-05:00

Joseph Bottum, the new Editor of First Things, writes, as the first essay of what was once Richard John Neuhaus’s The Public Square, a fine and subtle introduction to the magazine under its new headship. Mentioning Connecticut’s brief attempt to undress the public square by restructuring the leadership of the Catholic Church in that state, as well as the resurgence of 70’s style economic theory, he writes, “A great deal of the seriousness in American public discourse has fled.” This is his transition to a discussion of the path the magazine he now heads is going to take as it regroups after the death of its founder and guiding light of almost twenty years. Of that seriousness, he writes, “The task of First Things is to call it back.”

The paragraph that follows is a listing of things that Christians hold, and that, ultimately, all humans hold, in common because these common things are the first things of concern: the respect for life, the defense of responsible liberty, the brotherhood of those who seek God, the care of the weak, and the defense of the whole truth. That paragraph reads:

Certain matters remain at the heart of what the magazine exists to do. The struggle to halt the slaughter of the unborn and the ill, for instance – the need to defend the weakest among us, constantly threatened by a culture that accepts abortion and euthanasia as easy devices with which to solve personal and social difficulties. We believe the United States to be a grand historical experiment, worth defending in its own right and inherently interesting to study. We work for the advancement of Jewish-Christian relations. We feel the divisions of Christianity – Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic – as a scandal that shames all believers, even while we know that true ecumenism must begin with each tradition’s theological integrity. We demand a society that feeds the hungry and cares for the poor. We know that the political effort to strip religion from the public square is an attempt to undermine the American experiment, and it will bring only disaster in its wake. On all this, we will not be silent, and we will be heard.

This is a fine brief for a magazine to cover, a truly conservative and Christian one, I believe (note that the passage on feeding the hungry and caring for the poor is not paired with a dogmatic assertion that government action is the most, or the only, efficacious means to that end). It is consistent with the mission as Neuhaus shaped it, and it seems that Joseph Bottum will do a fine job of carrying on in Neuhaus’s footsteps.

A Fragment

2009-04-10T12:44:00.002-05:00

This little selection did not make it into the previous essay; its original version started going off the rails here. The observation is slight, but I think true, and where else can one publish such slight observations than on a blog?

The old double standard, expressed by Ophelia in her song of madness, perhaps a clue to Hamlet’s behavior, perhaps just a generalized lament about men:

By Gis and by Saint Charity,

Alack, and fie for shame!

Young men will do't, if they come to't;

By cock, they are to blame.

Quoth she, before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed.

So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,

An thou hadst not come to my bed.

has always been unfair, but it has these truths in it: that one must respect another in order to love her, and it’s always been easier to excuse one’s own failings than another’s.

Consolations

2009-04-10T11:49:00.005-05:00

Good Friday is the day of the greatest tragedy, when the Utterly Innocent was murdered. Though I am not particularly familiar with these writings, it is my understanding that theological history records a longstanding debate whether, ultimately, the Fall was a Good Thing because it allowed the Resurrection, or whether the world would have been better off without it. I am not attempting to answer that question in the following essay, rewritten somewhat from an unpublished entry of January 6, this year, but it addresses the question, I think. For those of you who think the topic ill-suited for today, I apologize; I think I am approaching it in an acceptable manner. For those of you who detect a dwarfish, misshapen quality to the essay, I think you are probably right. It was going off the rails a bit when I stopped it originally. I’ve tried, with a half-hour of effort, to slap it into some sort of readable shape; I hope I’ve succeeded:

It’s the confounded and confounding everlasting refrain of my life: “what if I had just ….” Over and over again I stare wisdom in the face and tell her to sod off. I seek for her and her sister beauty in a desultory way for awhile, then lay off and take what joys I can find in pleasure or in idleness or monotonous busyness. The one wisdom I refuse is the wisdom of routine, of duty, of doing what I ought to do when I ought to do it.

What if I had graded five tests last night? What if I had graded five tests each of the last five nights? What if I had refused to entertain myself with political and football blogs while at school, and done only work instead? Politics and football I ingest like pornography, shoveling them down my maw or rejecting them as their tastes seem congenial enough or too complex. No investment of love and time and routine and boredom and duty and thought and sacrifice in them – all the things that are necessary for love – nothing but the slightest approaches to a deeper connection with the subjects, the slightest entanglements with profundity, nothing more than the slightest gasp that the naked woman degrading herself is truly beautiful, before boredom sets in, the mouse button is clicked, and I’ve moved on.

Not that I can invest myself in these subjects, at least not all of them. I can invest myself in political discourse, though more on the policy or philosophical level; I grow bored with the tactics of politics fairly quickly. But I usually read that with which I agree – I get too annoyed reading the opposition, so I often decline in favor of more flattering material. Football is truly more difficult for me to enter. I am not an athlete, and so I cannot play the game at any level, plus I am thirty-four, and so past any possible prime. Nor can I see football – by “see,” I mean, understand what all twenty-two parts of a football scene (the eleven offensive and the eleven defensive players) are doing simultaneously, and thereby figure out why a particular play did or did not work at a moment, and whether it will continue to do so. I instead respond to the beauty of the athletic moment: the artistry of a reception, the irresistible, thuggish power of a back bulling his way through a tackle, the mayhem caused by an offensive line making six simultaneous blocks with absolute precision, the violence of the perfect tackle stopping motion cold, the inexplicable passion of the students rushing the field. Except for the last, however, I cannot participate.

The primary problem with pornography, of course, is that one cannot – indeed, must not – participate. I do not mean, here, to say that it would be better, acceptable, were one allowed to participate; I am not trying to say that the orgy is moral while the photo is not. I mean instead that what one sees, the naked body, is meant to be the reward for (and a cause of) love, but that true love is precluded. Love is more than feelings, more than actions; it is a combination of these, and one cannot fully love the girls in the photos and films because one can never be with them, and because what they are doing in order to gain their watcher’s attention is bound to destroy whatever connection might arise were they together.

Of course, here I run into the objection that certainly there are men who have loved women who have degraded themselves. And certainly there have been Bud Whites, and Lynn Brackens, people who have overcome the degradation they’ve endured. But Bud White’s knowledge that his “knowing” of Lynn Bracken is not exclusive, even worse, that it was in fact widely shared and purchased, must harm him somehow; the special quality of their union must feel somehow stunted or amputated; they are not each other’s as completely as they could be. Perhaps Jacqueline Kennedy still loved Jack, and truly mourned when he died, but was her love as deep after his betrayals? was she unwounded? It is the miracle of this world that in spite of all the corruptions, we still find and make beauty, but that is a consolation, not a perfection.

My frustration, my sin, is that I never enter truly and deeply into anything, it seems: my teaching, my reading, my writing, my thinking, are all shallow and dilettantish, marked with moments of happy success, but marred by lack of genius and lack of determination. If I have a vocation truly followed, a task where I have given my all, exposed my full self and invested my full self, worked full days and gone to bed exhausted but happy with my effort, an artwork to whose detail I have given full and thoughtful attention, a competition where I have risked injury and loss and come out on the winning side, it has been in my marriage. There is my greatest happiness, the joy from which my soul does not hide, the risk I have dared most willingly. There, I hope, I will win salvation – if win it we can, and if I am not told, like the hypocrites will be, “Truly, I say to you, [you] have received [your] reward.”

Another Complaint about Blogger

2009-04-07T23:49:00.005-05:00

How’s this for an original post: a complaint about spacing. Look at the post from October 30th, and look at the most recent post before this. Notice the difference in the spacing of the indented passages. Why are they different? For anyone with a perfectionist attitude when it comes to formatting, this is highly annoying (why I found myself with a perfectionist attitude in this part of my life, and not another, more lucrative or honored, I’ll go to my grave wondering). I suppose it could be fixed, but there are so many other things to do (as, for instance, delete six or seven different tags that come with writing in Word but are incompatible with Blogger ... sigh).

Weaving Sand

2009-04-07T23:12:00.005-05:00

For the first posting of slightly emendated un-posted material from this winter, a mildly overwrought bit of prose from February of this year, inspired by Pace Bus’s Transit TV (perhaps the only thing Transit TV has ever inspired, besides annoyance):

“Genius has no taste for weaving sand.” So stated Ralph Waldo Emerson, or so he did if Transit TV, whose slogan is “Moving Entertainment,” is to be believed. I have no reason to disbelieve Transit TV, the collators of whose quotation quiz show are apparently enamored of Emerson, for according to my desultory observations of their product, he supplies what must be a good fifty percent of their quotations. Perhaps they’re just going through that section of Bartlett’s.

The image grabbed my mind: weaving sand. I thought briefly of Borges’s book of sand, but that mythical book is an embodiment of history and all we cannot know. Emerson seems, absent context, to be imagining the mind that has no effect on the world. Grasp the strands of the world and braid them or weave them, warp them and woof them into one another, and if their fibers simply dissolve one into the other, if no texture or structure is formed beyond a temporary and miniature dune about your feet, you are weaving sand. Think of all the helpless endeavors of man: think of a boy who cannot shoot a basket or defend against a layup running for all he is worth from key to key on a basketball court only to do nothing when he arrives; think of the grains of digital sand, all the pretty pixels of Facebook and Civilization IV, unread blogs and Super Mario Bros., Ms. Pacman and the seventh and last episode of some forgotten sitcom; think of the dissolved wealth of a generation, the first of five digital numbers simply dark, winked out with the wealth it represented, on the giant and tiny screens we use to follow our finances; think of seven Troys buried, of Ozymandias ground to sand, of the ashes of the library of Alexandria, of the Celtic culture and the Gothic languages; think of six million Jews and a mixed six million more, of tens of millions of Russian and Chinese peasants and their forgotten tribes; think of all the Reichs, of the British Empire, and of twin towers that, lasting only forty years, seem now to have been built only to be a monumental pyre of concrete, jet fuel, and copier paper on which three thousand would be immolated.

“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” We have been reminded many times of the words of Ecclesiastes. Pace Emerson, genius indeed has no taste for weaving sand, but contra Emerson, it is what genius must endure, whether he live to understand it or no.

Return

2009-04-07T22:57:00.004-05:00

Something about the school year just takes it out of me. Whatever sort of blockage or death-wish or simple laziness is in me prevents me from posting for much of the year. I’ve actually written a few short pieces, but I’ve never gotten around to putting them up. Some of them are done, some not. Few of them are all that high-quality, but that’s not what blogs are about, now, is it? As Easter Break is beginning soon for me, I will post some of these out-of-date musings. (Some are not so out-of-date; to quote one of my favorite lines from C. S. Lewis, provenance forgotten, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date”; some of these are, if not eternal, at least applicable to any particular time). I’ll also, I hope, write a few originals. One thing to think about over the break includes the adoption process, which really we should have begun already. We’ve seen the lawyer, but done little else. Also, I’ve been watching the film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the newer one with Peter O’Toole, which is really quite the odd long film (halfway through it, it’s a whole new movie), and I’ve been reading Waugh, specifically The Sword of Honor, a book that meanders along in a quiet, occasionally funny, occasionally mystifying way, and then comes together all in a satisfying rush in the final book (there’s some oddity of revision and re-revision alluded to but imperfectly explained in the intro that might be worth investigating). That’s launched me on a re-reading of Brideshead, a rapturously written book, one that the gay man who gave it to me said had such a sad ending, but which I found ended rather beautifully and happily, if with a touch of the true melancholy with which the world is, I think, suffused. I’ll have to decide if that opinion from my first and only reading of the novel (I was 22, or so, working my first job), is accurate. I’ve also been reading, a bit, from The Mary Book, an anthology by F. J. Sheed last published in the 1950’s, that offers some food for thought. I had to do a little grammatical sleuth-work myself in the past few weeks, having tried to teach phrasal verbs and having the “textbook” I am using (actually, a PowerPoint projection prepared by a professor-friend of a professor-friend) blow up in my face. The stuff’s of interest to me, so perhaps I’ll bore my legions of happy readers with some of my own formulations. Much to look forward to, you have.

Obama Remaking America?

2008-10-30T13:08:00.012-05:00

From another note I sent to Kay (we do talk, by the way - it’s just that I get the need to rant when I’m reading the internet; I’ve been fairly restrained in sending stuff to her for most of our marriage, but this election is worrying me). Again, not tons of time to research, but this is up for a sample of my thoughts:

Remember the claim I made that Obama would try to change America fundamentally? This quotation, though edited for length by someone else (and I’ve not checked the original source yet) seems to support what I’m saying. The poll numbers have been narrowing again (though possibly not enough), because Americans don’t like explicit re-distribution [and Obama has been more open about his tendencies in that direction]. What Obama sees as a “fundamental flaw” most of us see as its glory - we don’t have others who think they know better than us telling us what to do with the fruits of our labor. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they don’t back it up with an army and force it upon us, but the government does. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they don’t get more votes from those they’ve benefitted with someone else’s confiscated monies, but the politicians do. (That’s the benefit of the Church being a dictatorship of sorts.) The debate between socialists like Obama and the rest of us is not to do with greed vs. generosity, but liberty vs. freedom. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they mean that I have to, [but] morally. When the government says, “give to the poor,” they mean that I have to, or else, and that, in addition, they’ll decide who the poor are and how, whether, and how much they deserve the largesse from my pocket. What else is a confiscation of my monies for another but a chance for the powerful to buy popularity at little cost to themselves?

Here’s the quote, indirect source below:

“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. … And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was — because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. … The Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day. … The Framers had that same blind spot … the fundamental flaw of this country.”

http://www.creators.com/opinion/tony-blankley.html

I wasn’t going to originally post that, but it seemed to connect to a really effective post by John Hood, over at The Corner. I want to just post the whole thing, but I’ll simply summarize and post part of it. Then go and read it. Hood riffs on Obama’s line that McCain would call him a Communist if he were to share his toys in kindergarten, explaining that Obama’s gag shows he doesn’t even understand what Communism is. Hood’s points have been stated many times, but Hood states them clearly and with elegance, using Obama’s inadvertently-provided analogy to great effect. Here is Hood’s explanation of collectivism:

Collectivism in all its forms is about taking away your choice. Whether you wish to or not, the government compels you to surrender the toy, which it then redistributes to someone that government officials deem to be a more worthy owner. It won’t even be someone you could ever know, in most cases. That’s what makes the political philosophy unjust (by stripping you of control over yourself and the fruits of your labor) as well as counterproductive (by failing to give the recipient sufficient incentive to learn and work hard so he can earn his own toys in the future).
Government is not charity. It is not persuasion, or cooperation, or sharing. Government is a fist, a shove, a gun. Obama either doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t want voters to understand it.

Nicely said. Looks like my poor wife is going to get another e-mail.

Thoughts on Marlowe's Edward II

2008-10-28T22:27:00.006-05:00

My goodness am I exhausted. Up till one last night, slept till four, got grades in only twenty-five minutes late. Slept only about an hour the night before. The wife wants to know how it is I’m still standing. So, naturally, what do we do? We go to see a play. Marlowe’s Edward II was playing tonight at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, put on by the Hypocrites, a local group that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

The play itself is good, but it seems to me like I’ve seen it before. Richard II Redux, it seemed to be, to me. Could have called it Run, Richard, Run too. An effeminate young king enriches his favorites, ignores his wife, is deposed, and dies, horribly. The main difference is that Edward is far less sympathetic. He is grotesquely, and grossly, obsessed with his lover. The Hypocrites, to my distaste, played up the visuals of this relationship, and the whimpering effeteness of Edward’s character, but, unless they were putting words on Marlowe’s page, there is plenty of textual evidence to support the sexual nature of the relationship. Edward’s behavior to his wife is unkind and cruel: he evinces kindness only when she helps him restore his lover to him, and thus exchanges her literal for a resurrected metaphorical exile. And his attitude toward the kingship is childish and selfish. While the throne is a source of gifts for his toy, he revels in it, but when his funds are depleted and his toy taken – in part because Edward has deprived himself of the funds with which to pay to protect the pretty noble – he has no interest in the position, except as a tool with which to have his way again in the future.

The other main difference is the language. I can’t do a textual analysis here for you, and I’ve never read in-depth on the possibility of Marlowe being Shakespeare, but I know now that Marlowe didn’t write Shakespeare. He couldn’t have. The language of the play I heard tonight is not the language of many plays I have seen and read by Shakespeare. I’m too tired to be precise, but the lines just didn’t seem to have the … length of the lines of Shakespeare. To be undoubtedly more clichéd, they didn’t have the same majesty. I didn’t feel sorry for Edward, but I did for Richard II. That’s ’cause Richard could talk.

The play was put on in the same space as was the CST’s Rose Rage of a few years ago, and its … ugh. I can’t do any more. I’m too tired. Let me just list a few points, mostly made by the beautiful Kay:

This bloody and inventive staging of Edward II was
effective but owed much to Rose Rage, it seemed, at
least in its charnel-house motifs – perhaps they both
owe a lot to horror films, though that’s speculation of
the moment.

Like in their staging of The Three Penny Opera a few
weeks ago, the Hypocrites played this show as well at
an extremely high pitch that allowed for little in the
way of modulation. My point: The quiet moments
near the end were not nearly as successful as the
quiet moments of Richard II are – this seemed to be
due at least in part to the choices made by the
company.
Kay mentioned she was surprised that the Defiant
Theatre, a now defunct but once long-running
local group, never got their hands on Edward II, a
play of excesses.

The choice of the actor who played the king’s lover
to play the king’s executioner was more than apt; if
you don’t know why, research how Edward is
rumored to have died, and you’ll see.

My point: The extreme gayness of the main
character was distracting and came off as childish.
Edward spoke in that hyperbolically whiny vibrato
typical of television clothing designers, and
flounced or pouted at every available moment. We
wouldn’t put up with that behavior from
kindergartners, and it was effective in denuding this
king of even the faint hints of glory that might have
made us pity him.

Ok, I’m done. Pardon the mistakes. By the way, don’t pity me too much on the hours. They’re self-inflicted. Teaching is a lot of work, but I’m not getting things done all day long then having to work all night. When I slip on the ice, ’tis by my own weight that I fall.

From a Letter to Kay

2008-10-20T22:32:00.005-05:00

This letter originally began with a list of taxation stats, reportedly from the IRS website (no, I haven’t checked – just vet my numbers yourselves – I’ve spent too much time writing this when grades are due next week). But I got them from a newsletter my dad forwards to me, and I’m not supposed to forward it to anyone else, so I’ll just leave the one number in that’s in the body of the paragraph, except to say that the bottom 50% pay around 3% of our taxes. Comparatively overtaxed they are not.

Anyway, here begins the letter, without indentation, both because Blogger’s indentation is ridiculously edit-intensive if one wants it to look other than plain stupid, and because the letter constitutes is the rest of the post. The letter, except for the now-missing list, was never sent to my wife (listening to U2 tunes on the computer two rooms over – probably watching the videos on YouTube, if I know her, and I do); I figured she can just read it here, if she wants to:

The demonization the rich have undergone in this country is mind-boggling. All you have to make, to be part of the so-called “super-rich,” the fabled 1%, is under $370,000 a year. Now granted, that’s awfully nice, but it’s not Gossip Girl country. When I grew up, my dad made in the $100k to $150k range, probably not that far different from the one-percenters at the bottom of that bracket today. Our life was very nice, but it wasn’t blowing people out of the water. We had three bedrooms in a safe, attractive suburb with good schools; we had one TV; we had one car; we did our own yard work; our most expensive pieces of art were chalk portraits of the kids and a few ivory pieces bought by my dad while on business in Singapore; we drove a series of station wagons (we did have a 1929 Model A parked in the garage, doing nothing; it sold for $10,000 in the mid- to late-nineties); we traveled by car and second-class plane, and our hotels ranged from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.

The family business almost failed a few times in turbulent market conditions, and might have done so had it not been for the money my dad’s brother had made in the markets and plowed back into the company. Had his brother been soaked by the government because he owed it to the nation, because it was “patriotic” to give (cf. Joe Biden – who’s never shown any evidence of checking the voluntary giving box that appears on all our tax returns), he would not have been able to risk his savings on the business, the business might not have survived, and 10, 20, 50 people (not sure how many were employed at the time) would have lost their jobs, and a family-owned and -operated company that employed over 200 by the mid-2000’s would have ceased to exist. We maybe weren’t in the top 1%, but we were probably in the top 5%, or at the very least the top 10%, and my grandfather, father, and uncle were living productive lives, giving employment to people who needed and benefitted from the jobs run by honest, responsible men, and giving a service to investors and farmers who benefitted from working with honest, responsible men.

It has historically been, for fifty years, the contention of your [Kay’s] party [the Democrats], and increasingly seems to be the contention of mine, that the rich are to blame for the ills of this country, when in fact it is in the greatest proportions the rich, and the just-barely-rich, who grow up and raise their own children responsibly, who make the investments, who take the financial risks, who do hard work, and who pay the vast majority of this country’s way in the world, providing for infrastructure and defense and nation-building and the UN and vast quantities of charity at tsunami time. It’s nice that Obama wants to give money to the bottom 95%, but should the top 5% really be paying more than 60% of this nation’s vast yearly expenditure? Should the bottom 50% be given more money – in cash payments from the government – than they contribute in total? Isn’t it obvious how this is electoral pandering, a statement to the effect of, “I, the President of this United States and Commander in Chief of this nation’s Armed Forces, will use the police power of this state to transfer the money earned by a portion of the nation that does not have large numbers of voters to a portion of the nation that did not earn the money, but who will be so grateful for it that they will use their large number of voters to vote for me”? It’s bribery, pure and simple, and it’s not sustainable. Because when the government demands and demands and demands, the citizen does three things: he ceases working, he starts lying, and he moves away. At a certain point, those who get nothing in return for their work cease working, those who are not dealt with honestly will not be honest in return, and those who are not appreciated where they are go somewhere else.

The point is not that Joe the Plumber does not now make $250,000 (“The liar!” they gasp.); the point is that Joe is motivated to run a business making $250,000 – else why risk his savings and put in all that work? – but finds it not worth his trouble when the majority of that bounty goes to someone else who deems himself a better judge of where that money should go. Who knows whether Joe wants to build a beautiful church or gamble it all away? Does Joe even know yet? Does it matter politically? Is Obama’s opinion that the poor of Chicago need better public housing, for instance, inherently right? Does he know what those poor have been up to? Did they do their homework? Did they show up for the school play? Did they make it to every practice? Did they listen to their parents? Did they avoid drugs and alcohol and crime? Did they apply to college? Did they go to class in college? Did they show up for their first jobs on time and do good work? How can Obama, or any other of them, discern from their raptor’s perches in Washington how Joe’s money should be spent better than he can, other than on indisputable necessities like the national defense?

Since Marx, success has been deemed a mark of perfidy. And when Obama is called a socialist or worse, it’s because he exhibits that mindset. He bears the mark of socialism, of the idea that the center can better decide what to do with the output of my labor and your labor and our neighbor’s labor than you and I and our neighbor can.

Outside

2008-10-13T08:33:00.001-05:00

Outside, all is grey. It is a strange fall day, too warm to be Autumn, but too grey for Summer. Green leaves are still on the trees. The wind is nonexistent. Our half-dead hanging plant sways, its pink flowers translucent in the morning light amidst the brown branches of its less hearty cousin in the same pot, but the trees are almost motionless. No squirrels or cats creep about; no birds cluck or chatter or sing. The neighbors are all abed or at work. Even the roar of the nearby trains seems to be silenced, and when it does come is muted, remote. Only just now is a pipe at work, somewhere in our building, briefly. The outside might as well be in. Walls seem built around the world, the doors locked, the owners away. Dust cloths cover the houses and the sunlight shines dull and grey through the dirty windows.

Thoughts on Chekov’s “The Fiancée”

2008-10-12T23:52:00.023-05:00

I’m supposed to be grading wretched summer papers right now (yes, summer papers), but tomorrow I have off, and I will undoubtedly get scads, just scads, of work done then, so for now I play. I also have a short Tolkien essay I’m working on, but again, for now I put it off, primarily because I think it might end up being somewhat publishable, and would like to actually do a good job on it. So instead I will write on an author I hardly know, having read few of his stories, and none in their original language.

Nadya is the protagonist, and Anton Chekov’s “The Fiancée” begins with her engaged to be married. She is possessed of an ennui or misery that seems so typically literary to one of our day, but which was probably so shocking in Chekov’s, and the boil of her misery is prodded by her friend and distant cousin Sasha (short, in some mysteriously Russian way, for Alexander Timofeyevich). The story takes on Communism and the idle rich, spiritualism and the Orthodox Church, tubercular Romantics, self-satisfied young bourgeois, crotchety old women, and old romantic novels. None of these targets seem to escape unscathed, as is seen in this quotation, by the tubercular Sasha:

The only interesting people are the educated and
idealistic, they’re the ones we need. The more there are of
these people, the quicker God’s kingdom will come on
earth – agreed? Very gradually, not one stone of your
town will be left on another, everything will be turned
upside down, everything will change as if by magic. And
then there will be magnificent, huge houses, wonderful
gardens, splendid fountains, remarkable people. But
that’s not the most important part of it. The main thing
is, the mob, as we know it, as it exists now – that evil
will be no more, since every man will have something to
believe in, everyone will know what the purpose of his
life is and no one will seek support from the masses.
My dear, darling girl, get away from here! Show
everyone that you’re sick of this vegetating, dull,
shameless existence! At least show yourself! (23)

The fascinating thing about this passage is that it’s not spoken by a Marxist; it seems almost to be spoken by an evangelical, though one that places his faith in learning that is not exclusively religious. Sasha believes at the least that some approximation of heaven can be built upon earth, but disavows any worship of the mob as it is. Only when the mob is educated can this heaven be built. The line about living off the masses seems to have a doubled edge, aimed at both Nadya’s fiancé Andrey – a churchman’s son – and a demanding, grasping proletariat. The latter are dismissed in the line itself: the “evil” that is the mob will be no more, as all will have “something to believe in,” a “purpose,” and will cease to try to live off “the masses.” The former eagerly, almost comically, cops to Sasha’s criticism of his laziness, saying, “he’s absolutely right! I never do a thing, I just can’t!” (26).

What is unclear to me is what the story advocates. Is it worship of the self, or of the artist? Is it intellectualism? Sasha, we are told, was, at one point previous to the beginning of the story, a student at the Komissarov School, later went to the Fine Arts Institute, and stayed there for fifteen years, “just managing in the end to qualify in architecture” (18). Afterwards he works “for a firm of lithographers in Moscow” (18). Is he an artist or no? Architects straddle the line between useful and decorative, and lithographers … well, I’m not sure I remember what lithographers are (I’ve not fired up the Internet yet, as the wireless is finicky and the Internet distracting), but I’ve got an image of Sasha working for a company churning out magazine illustrations and Currier and Ives greeting cards. There’s nothing wrong with either, but neither really says artiste.

In the end, it seems that Sasha, at least, advocates solid middle-class usefulness, what with his inveighing against both the mob and the idle. But there are a few inconvenient details: his dilatory course of schooling was paid for by Nadya’s grandmother, a woman he criticizes for the conditions in which her servants live: “early this morning I popped into the kitchen and four of the servants were asleep on the bare floor. They don’t have beds; instead of bedding all they have is rags, stench, bugs, cockroaches” (18). He is apparently free to spend months on end away from his job, saying in June, while visiting Nadya’s home, “‘I may well stay until September’” (18). What’s more, Sasha’s lifestyle is positively bohemian. He wears “a buttoned-up frock coat and shabby canvas trousers that were ragged at the bottoms. His shirt had not been ironed and on the whole he looked somewhat grubby” (18). His living quarters in Moscow are worse. His room is described as:

full of the smell of stale tobacco, and with saliva stains.
On the table, next to a cold samovar, lay a broken plate
and a piece of dark paper. Both table and floor were
covered with dead flies. Everything showed what a
slipshod existence Sasha led – he was living any old
how, with a profound contempt for creature comforts (31).

Finally, he dies in the end of tuberculosis, the classic disease of the impractical Romantic – surely by 1903 this was settled symbolism? Sasha seems not to epitomize middle class respectability, bohemian revolution, nihilism, monasticism, or even, we shall see, intellectualism.

Nadya, only one of Sasha’s protégés, it seems, goes away to study. It never becomes clear what she studies, so it is hard to say whether one should regard her as an artist or something else. Her studies seem only to ironically confirm Sasha’s prediction: “Drastically alter your way of life and then everything else will change too. The most important thing is to make a completely fresh start, the rest doesn’t matter” (29-30). The primary change seems to be that Sasha is diminished in her eyes. As the tuberculosis weakens him, her experience in St. Petersburg diminishes him. “She wept,” we are told, “because Sasha did not seem as abreast of things, as intellectual, as interesting as last year” (32). This assessment of Sasha is unsurprising, given how emptily optimistic his advice to Nadya was.

Beyond this, Nadya seems as empty as Sasha. She comes back to a quiet home. No one has died, but the family, since Nadya’s repulse of Andrey, has lost their “position in society, reputation, the right to entertain guests” (33). The town is as meaningless to her as it had become before she left. “She saw,” we are told, “how her whole past had been torn away, had vanished as if burnt and the ashes scattered in the wind” (35). So she looks to the future, in words that, fifteen years after the story was published, would begin to take on an eerie, inexact prescience:

Oh, if only that bright new life would come quickly, then
one could face one’s destiny boldly, cheerful and free in
the knowledge that one was right! That life would come,
sooner or later. Surely the time would come when not a
trace would remain of Grandmother’s house, where four
servants were forced to live in one filthy basement room
– it would be forgotten, erased from the memory” (34).

Boy would it ever be. Is it possible that Nadya will, fifteen years after the story ends, find herself a professorial den mother to a pack of murdering Bolsheviks, that Sasha will turn out to have been some John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness of Moscow the advent of a salvific bureaucracy of intellectuals?

The back of the Penguin edition I own speaks of the story’s “high note of optimism.” I have no doubt that the back cover blurb writer either knows what he’s talking about or is getting directions from one who does, but even if we reject the notion that Chekov was some sort of ironical prophet in that passage, there is still the last paragraph of the story: “She went upstairs to pack and next morning said goodbye to her family. In a lively, cheerful mood she left that town – for ever, so she thought” (35).

“So she thought.” There seems to be some menace there. There is at the very least the possibility that she is wrong, that her “vague and mysterious” future will not turn out so “new, full and rich” in the end (35).

Works Cited

Chekov, Anton. “The Fiancée.” “The Fiance” and Other Stories. Trans.
Ronald Wilks. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

Apology

2008-09-09T00:16:00.002-05:00

Yes, I know, if I’m going to post at all, I oughtta post something important, something relating to the somewhat impressive difficulties my small family endured this summer. Unfortunately, return from Omaha was an escape of sorts, and so I didn’t blog; school has since intervened, as have the election (loved the end of McCain’s speech, though were my policy differences with him great enough, it would not have persuaded me to vote for him), and the looking-like-it-might-be-abysmal Notre Dame football season.

Suffice it to say, for now, that Kay is doing well, mostly. A few small issues from the operation remain – a healing thrombosis, scars, a not-quite-normal-feeling abdomen (muscularly and otherwise vaguely, though seemingly improving); and then there is the sadness of it all, and her continual frustration with my position, which never boils over and only occasionally seems to surface.

I will be back. I will provide the answers to the five questions. I will, when I know, answer the question of, will we try again? I will discuss some of the adoption advice I’ve heard (four routes, one bad, one probably best, that one sort of like what happens in Juno, so they say). And you’ll hear a small yippee from me when we (they, I suppose) beat Michigan next week, most probably by something like a point.

GradeQuickSlow - A Sample of True In-School Correspondence, Offered without Commentary or Footnotes for non-Pedagogues

2008-09-09T00:05:00.004-05:00

Dear Principal,

I know you always like to hear commentary, so here’s mine while I’m entering grades: GradeQuick seems to me to be Stone Age tech. I know we’ve got lots of technological (and other) needs, and I may be the only one who feels this way, but whenever I use it I feel stymied by a myriad of niggling inconveniences over and over again. If the question of “should we renew?” or “what do people think?” comes up, my answers are “no,” and “arrrgh.”

One quick illustration: even with GradeBook to GradeBook Copy (which is strangely inactive this year - finally sent our tech guy an inquiry today), there is no way to make commonsense changes (such adding tests, grade markings, or grade footnotes) just once. Always you have to make it to one of the four gradebooks, and then copy it.

I was driven off the deep end tonight by the effort to delete the Mean from my reports. I found an old e-mail that answered that question, but other programs (not grading programs – I have, alas, no alternate experience other than my wonderful old Excel spreadsheets: beautifully flexible, endlessly adventurous (i.e., always open to catastropic, unnoticed changes)), seem so much more intuitive and easy to grasp, unlike this sentence. Perhaps I just have more regular and long-lasting experience with them, but after two years and a bit, I still don’t like GradeQuick.

Thanks for listening to the vent,

J.

Turbine Sprawl

2008-09-08T23:48:00.005-05:00

A small calculation riffing off a piece by Planet Gore's Drew Thornley:

According to numbers reported and calculations made by Mr. Thornley, wind turbines able to power one fifth of Texas would take up 2005 square miles. If Wikipedia is correct that Texas takes up 268,820 square miles, that means that these turbines would take up approximately 0.75% of Texas's land. Is there another industry in the nation that takes up almost 1% of the country's landmass? or even 0.5% of it? Does even suburbia take up that much land? (Probably.) Can you say Turbine Sprawl?

Peggy Noonan, at Zenith of Profession

2008-08-09T09:29:00.006-05:00

I love Peggy Noonan. Not because she’s still beautiful at 58 (though she is), but because she’s the best I’ve ever read at tiptoeing along the line of sentimentality without tipping over into the slop. I’ve never read a columnist who can sympathize with the strategies and opinions of her intellectual opponents without in any way giving into them. I’ve not been a big fan of some of the big government triangulations of Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism.” What I like best about it is what comes out in virtually every column Noonan has ever written: an honest attachment to her own values and an appreciation for tough politics that does not preclude her from seeing the best in the ideas and strategies of her opponents. A longish excerpt from her latest on Obama will show what I am getting at:

What Mr. Obama has been doing, and this started before
the European trip and continued throughout, is making
people see him as president. He's doing this when he
ambles back to the back of the plane and leans over the
reporters, in his shirtsleeves, speaking affably into their
held-up mics and recorders, at the end of the victorious
tour. That's what presidents do. He speaks to rapturous
crowds in foreign capitals. That's what presidents do.

He isn't doing this to show he's inevitable and invincible.
He's doing it to give voters the impression that they've
already seen President Obama. That he's kind of already
been president, he's done and can do all the things
presidents do, to the point that by the middle of October
a certain portion of the country is going to think he
already is president.

And he needs to give them this impression because he's
a young black man from nowhere who's been well-known
for less than a year. And he knows one of his biggest
problems with older white voters is they just can't
imagine a young black man from nowhere as president.
He's helping them imagine.

It's not vanity, it's strategy.

I read that and thought, she’s probably right. I don’t know how she does it: is a section such as this the result of good reporting – i.e., she’s talked to those who know, and those who know have told her, “this is our strategy”? Or does she have the moral imagination of the great novelist, that enables her to get inside others, to divine the motives, to sympathize, to empathize, to understand that most people do what they do because they believe – they’ve somehow convinced themselves – that what they’re doing is right? Perhaps this is what allowed her to be such a good speech writer for Reagan (I say this taking their reputation on faith, because I am sadly unfamiliar with the speeches beyond the famous soundbites, not being into politics then). Either way, we’re lucky to have her watching us and writing about us, and though I have no use for those who whinge about negative politics, we’d probably be better off if more had her ability to understand the good motives of others. (And here’s my partisan sign-off: I think Krauthammer’s Law, enunciated in 2002, still is dead on the mark: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”)

Anniversaries, Juxtaposed and Commemorated

2008-08-05T17:45:00.002-05:00

I’m disinclined right now to do much with this information, but there have been a number of articles posted in the last month on contraception, IVF, and abortion. I’m going to link them for now, and perhaps someday I’ll have the time, inclination, and courage to go back to them and comment.

Kathryn Jean Lopez posted an article on the 30th anniversary of IVF’s first use, here, and it is one of the few out there that, however briefly, gives attention to the notion of “giving yourself totally to your spouse — not putting up barriers and introducing artificial methods and procedures into your reproductive lives.” As to what the barriers introduced by IVF are, she does not say, and I’m not sure I see IVF as creating barriers, exactly. (Already I’m getting nervous about even posting these, since I feel like I ought to have a treatise-level opinion on each one.) A mostly coherent response came through and is posted here, testifying to, though not proving scientifically or theologically, the wisdom of waiting for God’s hand to work. (It also makes a distinction between giving physically and giving more deeply that I’m not sure I can countenance, since it seems to set adoption up as a higher good than giving life.)

Earlier, observing the fortieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Lopez published “Holy Sex@40,” an affirmation of the encyclical’s teachings, turning the words of feminist Jessica Valenti against her, somewhat effectively, I think, to remind her readers of the racist usages to which the pill has sometimes been put, and to remind her of the hardly-lessened burden for the responsibilities of pregnancy that women still face. K-Lo is apparently hitting this issue hard this year, as she has another article out that I’ve not even read, here. If the title and abstract are any indication, it’s a jujitsuistic attack on the pill for what it’s doing to the environment, not so much a first principle attack as a piling-on of all available forces (not that I mind – this is a time-honored political and military tactic, and is consistent with honesty so far as the things said are true).

Also, from July 5, at 1:18AM, see this article for link between contraception and abortion. It’s a bit surprising for me to see it in there, given America’s reputation for opposition to the more conservative sorts of Catholicism, but I’m not an expert on the subject of America and its leanings, so perhaps my expectations are malformed. And there is a First Things article in the current edition, called, rather resoundingly, “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae,” now posted here. I’ve not read it yet, having too many magazines laying about, delivered, bought, and largely unread.

Results

2008-08-05T16:48:00.001-05:00

Kay’s follow-up surgery is over, and went reasonably well, though not as well as it might have, in a best case scenario. Kay knew that, if she woke up in the recovery room after the surgery without me already attendant upon her, she would be staying in the hospital. Although it was not the predicted outcome, it did happen. She immediately searched for confirmation of her worst non-death fear – a colostomy – and found that she had not received one. Indeed, no indication had been given that such a measure was even a possibility, much less a likelihood, but it is one of her least dispellable fears. She did find, however, that she had been fitted with another JP drain, and if she looked at the clock, if there was even one available, she found that she had been in the operating room for two hours total, one more than had been planned.

The reason for the extended surgery time was simply the difficulty of the surgery. The abscess wreaked considerable havoc in Kay’s gut, essentially undoing all that had previously been done to un-stick the organs from each other. All was tender, inflamed adhesion, as far as the scope could see, which was not far, as of the reproductive organs only the end of one fallopian tube – whether left or right could not be discerned – was visible. (This tube, for what it’s worth, did have intact fimbria.) Drs. Hilgers and Fitzgibbons also found some remnant of the abscess, though only a teaspoon-sized portion, which they removed, and they “irrigated” – medical-speak for “rinsed” – the area with an antibiotic wash. The JP drain was fitted to allow anything remaining of the abscess to be pulled out, along with blood, irrigating fluids, and whatever other incidental liquids had collected as a result of the surgery.

The primary object of the operation was, I may remind you, the extraction of three pieces of GoreTex bandage. Those bandages had been placed over Kay’s ovaries and uterus to reduce the normal adhesions due to any surgery as much as possible, but had been overwhelmed by the toxicity and ubiquity of the abscess, which left scarring everywhere else. In their efforts to remove these pieces, they had to remove some of the new abscesses, but were hindered in their efforts by the effective blockade created by the jumbled and cohered organs. They hesitated to do much in the way of what they had done last time – separating the organs by removing the scarring – because the inflammation has not yet settled down, and the organs are thus weaker than they would be normally. Of particular concern was the possibility of penetrating the wall of the bowel. Both because this surgery was planned to be less severe, and thus a full bowel prep was not ordered, and because of the weakened nature of the bowel due to the inflammation, which could result in a torn bowel, the surgeons in the end chose to curtail their chase for the third and final piece of GoreTex membrane, leaving it behind.

Kay stayed in the maternity ward, where all of Dr. Hilgers’s patients stay when hospital time is required afterwards (this is either ironic or appropriate, depending on the eventual outcomes of their cases – though the Pope Paul VI Institute and the nurses there were good enough to inquire of us whether we thought the maternity ward was a bad choice for their patients; we told them we were happy to see the babies, if for no other reason than that they were a welcome diversion from the task of healing). The maternity nurses, though a bit shocked to see us – they had hoped Kay would have to endure no more hospital time – were as kind and attentive as ever, apparently giving Dr. Hilgers the news that they felt Kay deserved a gold medal for her behavior, news he promptly passed on to us. Kay was a bit befuddled by this compliment, asking me, “What have I done to deserve a medal? How terrible must the other women be who come through here that I deserve a medal?” I told her it was due to her almost utter lack of complaining, to her patience and mildness when she called the nurses in for help, to her continual sense of humor, to her persistent efforts to comply with their healing instructions (particularly the need to take multiple walks a day). I doubt the other women, mostly delivered mothers recuperating for a day or two, were great termagants, but the nurses’ sense of pity for her rarely precedented stay in their ward, and her perfect behavior throughout, likely elicited the compliment.

On Monday, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Kay and I had our regularly scheduled post-op with Dr. Hilgers, though he had been quite attentive that week already – as is customary he came in to see us every day, skipping only Sunday this time as Kay was clearly in no danger (though he did send his resident in to see her). He had little to say that he had not already said, and his usual joviality was rather suppressed by his discouragement over the results of the June procedure. We had plenty of questions for him, of course, mostly about the future. As the blog format and its readers, however, are polonian in their prejudices, I will attain brevity by saving those – including the questions addressing the mystery of the missing third bit of GoreTex and what happens next – for the next posting.

Update

2008-07-30T23:10:00.001-05:00

We’re in Omaha, and arrived here without incident. Our dinner, at a local Mexican restaurant was just ok – I thought it was pretty good, actually, with a mediocre margarita, but Kay didn’t like it much, and didn’t eat it. Strangely, she doesn’t eat if she doesn’t like the food, even if she’s hungry. I always try to get her to eat more. Tomorrow we go to a few appointments, and the next day is Kay’s surgery.

Attention Microsoft Programmers, or Influential Competitors

2008-07-30T23:09:00.000-05:00

I would like to create a document, stored on my hard drive, containing links to other documents stored on my hard drive. I don’t want to upload those other linked documents to an internet document file, because I don’t always want to have to hook up online to get access to those documents. I simply want to be able to turn on my computer, open one file, see an internal hyperlink (perhaps colored green instead of blue), click on the link, and have the second document open after having been accessed from its location on my hard drive. Is that possible to do now? If not, is it possible to make it happen? It would make my life as a teacher easier: I could create a syllabus with links to all the relevant documents, or perhaps with links to the relevant folders containing the relevant documents. For instance, if I have “Syllabus” saved on the desktop, I want to open it and click on the internal hyperlink “Elizabethan Literature,” which would then open my Elizabethan lit. file. Or, if I have “Hamlet reading schedule” listed, I would like to click on it and suddenly have the Word file “Hamlet reading schedule” pop up. It would be even better, of course, if, once the original document was published online, it could automatically make the linked docs accessible online, via actual hyperlinks, whenever one’s computer was online, but perhaps that would be too great a hassle – certainly the accessibility of such docs would be highly variable.

So, please, People Who Know More About Computers Than I, if such a capability already exists, please let me know. Consider this a bleg. And please, Microsoft Programmers Or Their Influential Competitors, if such a thing does not exist, please make it do so, quickly, so everyone else has to make it do so too, and then I’ll get it in my next computer when I buy it in a few years – but remember, you’ll have to let me know that it’s been put in, so don’t forget. Thank’ee much.

Sincerely,

J.

A Wide Gulf

2008-07-25T00:15:00.000-05:00

Went tonight to see WALL-E with a couple that are friends of ours. The boyfriend and I get along, but at a bit of a distance (my wife and the girlfriend are the original couple). We don’t seem to understand each other when we discuss serious issues. When I asked him about Neil Gaiman, the review of whose American Gods I still have not finished, he was unfamiliar with the guy, which was unremarkable, though his long-time girlfriend, a fan of graphic novels, knew all about Sandman. We discussed the book only briefly, since he hadn’t heard of it, but I said the odd thing about it is that it has some huge holes, including the Greek gods, but even more startlingly, including Jesus. I remarked in passing that perhaps it was better that way, that I would probably have been offended by an inferior or wrong-headed depiction of Christ. The boyfriend, who has an infectious laugh, thought that was great. He was positively merry about it, about getting offended over someone’s portrayal of Jesus. It’s strange. I don’t ask that he be a Christian, or even have any sympathy for Christianity, but for him to be so humorously struck by the quaint notion … I’m not even sure he would describe it as quaint, for that would imply it has ever existed, that it at one time seemed reasonable to someone, if only of a benighted age. He seemed incredulous at the very concept, not just its wizened obsolescence. For him to be so struck merely underlined just how deeply different he and I are. To think! Being offended on behalf of Jesus!

A Strange Season

2008-07-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

This has been an odd summer. As Kay and I walked in the cool of the summer night around ten o’clock, the breeze just ruffling the leaves so that their silver undersides glimmered dimly in the street lights, we marveled at just how little heat there has been this summer. We’ve been blessed, though, for the heat would have added to the discomfort she has felt recovering from her surgery. In the cool, she is progressing apace, and looks to be healing fully. The hole from the JP drain is closed and is almost healed, and her scar looks great. There are still a few issues that seem to be left over, however, from the stress her body has been through. She’s still complaining of an odd taste in the mouth, but I think that will go away once the effect of the antibiotics wears off and her system is allowed to return to normal. Because of her temperature being lower than normal for the past few days, we are not really worried about a resurgent infection, but the doctors have suggested that she may have a bit of anemia, so they have scheduled a blood test for tomorrow. And she has had some problems with digestion. We have introduced new foods to her system gradually, a few fruits here, a couple of seeds or nuts there, but after a particularly rich delayed anniversary dinner (we hit five years in early July), including escargots, Alaskan king crab, and rice pudding accompanied by the ever-perilous raspberry, she awoke at 2:00 AM with stomach pains. Sitting up helped to ease them and allowed her to sleep eventually, and nothing more occurred. Tonight she is a bit uncomfortable, too. I hope that some Tums antacid will help her to sleep.

Meanwhile, I have become beleaguered as well. Yesterday, lying on the bed in the hotel room we ended up scoring for free on the night of our anniversary celebration, I felt the room begin to spin. Only once or twice did it go round, and then it was over, but it was alarming. Rising, I realized that I didn’t feel quite right in the head, and I haven’t since. My head spins seem to be related to the motion of getting up or lying down, and it’s more common when I am lying down. Luckily, my mother is office manager for a neurologist. When I called him after hours yesterday, having mentioned these odd symptoms to my mother late in the day and getting her imprimatur to call her boss, he dashed away my apologies, saying something like, “No, you are not allowed to apologize – you are a member of an honorable family that are good friends of mine. You are welcome to call.” When I explained my symptoms and answered his diagnostic questions, he said I was likely suffering from something in my inner ear, not my brain, but that I should get an MRI anyway, just to be safe. So off I go tomorrow, to relieve my wife’s (and my own) lingering fears that I might have a brain tumor or a stroke, that she will not be left alone at the end of this strange cool summer that we have spent fearing for her, not for me.

The String Has Been Cut

2008-07-21T18:50:00.003-05:00

For some reason, I have found myself unable to finish off a review of Neil Gaimon’s American Gods and so have done nothing else in the way of publishing in my concentration on, or wholesale ignoring of, that so far abortive project. I’ve not talked about Lovecraft, whom I’ve also been reading (he’s kind of silly, overall), and I’ve not updated Kay’s condition, despite knowing that there may be some who are interested in the latest. Those who are interested, by the by, are welcome to prod for more information, either through the comments (all three of which I checked before allowing two of them to be published, the first being abusive), or through personal e-mails to jrrhawking@gmail.com.

Kay’s condition is pretty good. A few days ago her spirits received an uplift when we were called by Dr. Hilgers’ office to let us know that the second bacteria in her abscess had been identified, and that the Flagyl she was already taking orally would kill it. Up to this point, knowing only that the E. Coli was being taken care of, we were uncertain that the second, as-yet-unidentified, bacteria was going to be destroyed. They had told us that the Flagyl was likely to do it, but not knowing the identity of the bacteria, they couldn’t be sure until they received a positive identification. As the days stretched on, we were both worried and mollified, worried, because we weren’t sure whether the delay was caused by the slow growth of the bacteria (which we assumed could only be good) or their inability to find something that would kill it (which we assumed could only be bad); mollified, because the output of the drain both lessened and became less yellowish-brown, more clear, with a pink substance we were told was new tissue, white blood cells, and other signs of a return to normality. Clearly we are not really sure how bacteria cultures are accomplished. But however it’s done, it’s been done, and the infection is at bay, if not positively defeated.

So effective has Drs. Hilgers and Fitzgibbons’ effort been, in fact, that the drain’s outflow has dropped beneath the magical number of ten cc’s per day (cc’s are apparently equivalent to milliliters). Once beneath that number, said Dr. Fitzgibbons, the drain could come out. It attained that level on Thursday, at which point Kay called him, and he contacted a local surgeon to remove it. That local surgeon was leaving for vacation, but asked a colleague to do it. This colleague, whose odd name I will not repeat, because I am about to make fun of it, but the oddity of which can be hyperbolically approximated by the pseudonym “Dr. String Barracuda,” was available today, Monday, and, after having been needlessly warned by Kay, as she had been told to warn the person taking it out, to “cut the string,” thus releasing the coil that held it in place, removed the thing out without incident. The extra time with it in did cost Kay another few days of mild discomfort, and some lost sleep as she does not sleep naturally on her back, but it also afforded us the added satisfaction of knowing that the level of drainage did not go up. It has, in fact, not gone above around seven per diem since then, implying that the infection is properly finished. She will, however, watch the leftover wound – small enough to be only bandaged – closely, to make sure there is no excessive drainage, and plans to continue taking her temperature well after this entire project is over, as fever seems to be a good indication that the body is up to something that is causing it exertion, whether or not it is obvious on the outside.

Dr. Barracuda and Kay chatted about how she had gotten to this point, and he did worry her some by his surprise that Dr. Hilgers was using GoreTex to reduce scarring. Just now, in fact, I went into our bedroom, where I found her sitting in front of the TV with worry stitched into her face. I reminded her, as I reminded her earlier, that Barracuda is not a fertility doctor and has no previous experience doing or exact knowledge of what Hilgers has been doing, with some success, for many years. Presumably, had GoreTex not, in the past, precluded adhesions from forming post-surgically, Hilgers would not be wasting his time with the stuff. I also reminded her that Dr. Fitzgibbons, the chief of surgery at Creighton, is aware of and accepting of what Hilgers does, and has said that he uses internal GoreTex bandages all the time. Back when we were in Omaha, Dr. Fitzgibbons said, specifically, that he would have no trouble removing the bandages when we came back. These reassurances had their good effect, but more will undoubtedly be needed, for worry with Kay is like a persistent army that lays siege to her piece of mind, fortified howsoever it may be, and will not be dislodged without a determined assault on his supply train, or an end, altogether, to the war.

We are due to arrive again in Omaha on the 30th of July, with the 31st reserved, we assume, for a pre-op visit, and the surgery scheduled for the 1st of August. Assuming all goes well, and assuming the surgery is able to be conducted laparoscopically (there is some potential that it will become a laparotomy, mini- or otherwise), we will head for home on the 3rd or so, with just under two weeks to prepare for the beginning of the school year. Whether Kay will start on time or not, or as a full-time teacher or not (we are lucky in that, childless and with some help from our families, we can afford to do either), depends on the outcome of the surgery (which will be reported here), as well as on a conversation she will have with her school principal, a woman sympathetic to her because of similar fertility ordeals she underwent herself, some years ago. One way or another, we hope for things to continue looking up, so please place or keep us in your prayers.

We're Home

2008-07-13T15:50:00.003-05:00

Kay and I are at home now, having gotten back to our apartment around 7:00 last night. Her parents came over last night with dinner, and my mother will be bringing dinner over tonight. My dear sisters brought over flowers and basic groceries for us, leaving them with a sign that said, “Welcome Home!” By the time we got home, the cold I'd been nursing along the last few days was in full force, so I've been feeling poorly to the point that I could barely rouse myself at 10:00 this morning. I only got out of bed because the nurse was coming over to administer Kay's IV. Having the family care has therefore been a great boon.

The nurse, who came from Coram Specialty Infusion Services, was very friendly and professional. She was entirely unfazed by the abscess – beyond feeling bad for Kay that it had happened – saying that these things happen and are easy to solve. When we said we didn’t know what the second bacteria causing the abscess was (the first is e. coli – very common and nothing to worry about once identified, she said), she speculated that it might be a type of staph infection from the skin. No matter how much they do to clean the surface of the cutting area, she told us, sometimes things survive. Kay lamented that she forgot to wash with Dial antibacterial soap before the surgery, but I figure that if the iodine and things they use in the OR didn’t do it, store-bought bar soap is unlikely to. Still, would have been better to be safe than sorry, I suppose.

We are likely to return to Omaha in about three weeks, when Dr. Hilgers and Dr. Fitzgibbons (the chief of surgery at Creighton) will remove the Gore-Tex bandages. By that point, the course of anti-biotics will be over (the one being given via IV will end on Tuesday), and, we hope, the drain will have been removed. Kay is doing pretty well overall, though she is suffering some minor discomfort from the drain – when the nurses ask her to list her pain on a scale from one to ten, she usually says one or two. Her taste buds are also a bit discombobulated, we think as a result of the antibiotics. All told, we will be glad when the bandages are out and this part of the process is over. We can only hope that the inflammation from the abscess has not undone the progress of the surgery, but we won’t know until we go back in August.

Some Reading

2008-07-10T01:13:00.002-05:00

Finished Volume I of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War the other day, then blasted through Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Great novel, though perhaps a bit unpolished – part of its conceit, but causes it to end abruptly and perhaps never commit to a mode: is it supposed to be a tale of Scottish adventure and family drama, like Kidnapped and David Balfour, or an exploration of evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or a dark journey through unavoidable passions in stormy landscapes, ala Wuthering Heights? Still quite entertaining. Will try to write more on it later. Just picked up John Gardner’s bio of Chaucer, but being more in the mood for fiction just now put it down almost immediately for American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Enjoyable and vulgar. Can see it as a comic book – Shadow’s early internal monologues and the wry humor more generally seem typical of the genre. Couldn’t help but compare the love-goddess-as-anthropophagous-whore scene early on to Lewis’s Aphrodite in Till We Have Faces. The former is horror-film gross, the latter deeply frightening in its darkness. Only about thirty pages in, though, so these are first impressions.

Some Minor Relief

2008-07-10T01:02:00.001-05:00

Something I forgot to mention in the last post. Before she went to bed (a good couple hours before I posted “The Waiting Game”), Kay asked me a question: “What if they can’t kill it?” Not quite understanding, I asked for clarification. She then gave me to realize that her conception of the bacteria-identification process was this: the doctors take the culture and then try to kill it with various antibiotics. When they succeed, they know what bacteria they are fighting, and they know how to kill it. Kay’s culture was taken on Sunday evening, and still has not been identified. The longer the wait, the more worried she was getting: they still haven’t been able to kill it!

I responded to this novel concept by reassuring her: no, they identify the bacteria by letting it grow until it identifies itself. But there was a small stab of horror within me as I said this, because I frankly didn’t really know how they do it. I know there’s a disk of sheep’s blood and that the stuff grows on the blood, and that’s about all I knew. I wondered, could Kay be right that this is how they do it? After all, shouldn’t a microscope do the trick? – what needs all these days of growing? Finally, when the nurses came in to hook Kay’s PICC line up to the antibiotic bag, I decided we had to ask. Turns out, I was right. The stress melted out of Kay when we heard this, and I pray that she will sleep better tonight as a result.

The Waiting Game

2008-07-10T00:53:00.004-05:00

We know now what we knew the last time I reported anything: Kay has a pelvic abscess. It seems to be under control. She has a little plastic drain coming out of her right abdomen, just a tube and a bubble pump that, when squeezed, wants to expand to its natural rotundity and so suctions out what is inside – a translucent brown liquid that is, if I’ve been listening closely enough, a combination of mucus, germs, and a foreign saline pumped in to liquefy the others. The hand grenade, which is what we call the pump for its resemblance to that weapon, hangs pinned to her clothing, transparent to allow for an easy measuring of the poisons extracted. The plan is that the amount will decrease regularly, implying a decrease in the amount available to be pumped, and that the lab will then figure out what the bugs in the brown fluid are and what antibiotics will destroy them.

Our doctors have been very good to us. Dr. Hilgers comes by every day to keep us up to date, even though there has not been much to tell in the past few days. He is always upbeat and always willing to answer the questions he can. There is none of the condescension in him that one sees so often with doctors, though he is always confident, in an understated way. Kay likes him quite a bit, as do I, and all the nurses speak quite highly of him. (This abscess, incidentally, is apparently the third time he’s seen one in twenty-five years of doing this surgery.) The GI surgeon with whom he has been consulting, and who has been very reassuring that they will fix what ails Kay, comes by every two to three days, and a Hungarian doctor from the radiology department (they put in the pump) has come by on a number of occasions to make sure the hand grenade is working well.

The wait comes from Dr. Hilgers and the GI surgeon needing more information to decide whether they want to take the internal bandages out sooner or later. On their own, Gore-Tex bandages are not a problem – they are used because they are non-allergenic, and their use is fairly common, from what we’ve heard. But as an artificial mesh, they are attractive to germs, and once the germs are in the same region, there is a chance they can colonize the Gore-Tex. Once they do that, they will be protected from antibiotics, which can only reach the abscess through the blood stream. The removal of the Gore-Tex is thus desirable, but the surgery to take them out could stir up the infection dangerously. Therefore we play the waiting game: suction and then reduce or destroy the infection with antibiotics, then go in safely to remove the Gore-Tex at a later date. What that later date will be depends, probably, on what the culture turns up and how long the appropriate antibiotics take to destroy it. It will not be more than three to four weeks, we’ve been told.

The problem now is to wait without getting too down. Kay is has been down for the better part of two days, and doesn’t know whether she wants to leave more or be well more – well, she knows she wants to be well. But she doesn’t want to be here for another week or two while it happens. We are able to go outside, but Kay is confined by doctor’s orders to the hospital grounds. There is some talk of her going home with the grenade – either to the hotel or really back home – then coming back for the Gore-Tex-removal surgery, but until they know what kind of bug or bugs she is fighting, they don’t want to let her go. Ultimately, we just want her to get better, and we’ll do whatever they want us to do to make sure that happens.

An Annoyance

2008-07-07T00:50:00.008-05:00

Why is Blogger's block quote function so useless? The much-maligned Microsoft Word somehow manages to figure out that a block quote means a new left margin now exists, with words on the right wrapping into place along the new margin and not carrying with them their enter commands on the right-hand side. In visual terms, what this means is that I have to manually re-configure each block paragraph I create, so that instead of this:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
bbbbbbb
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
bbbbbbb
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
bbbbbbb

I get this:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
bbbbbbbaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaabbbbbbbaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabbbbb
bb

Which obviously makes more sense.

If Blogger has in fact fixed this problem with some work-around, I make no mea-culpas for not doing my research, as their block quote button has not incorporated it, and a block quote button that doesn’t block quote seems fairly useless to me.

If the fault lies with html code, and not Blogger, then I guess I’m sorry. But if somebody’s invented the i-Phone, not to mention this tablet I’m using, couldn’t someone figure this out, considering just how many are blogging today?

Update: This is not to mention that in the “Compose” window of the Create Post function, a space between the main text and the first line of a block quote is meaningless until it is actually placed manually in the “Edit Html” window. Why? And the same space below the block quote is always smaller than the space above it. Why? None of this seems rational, though no doubt code writers – and I am ignorant of their craft – know the reasons.

Update: Of course, now that I’ve pasted this into Blogger (which can’t do curly quotes or apostrophes, so I compose in Word), I’ve got to reformat the block quotes again. Sigh. I know, it’s the least of my worries, and the system’s free. Shut up and blog.

Faith and Its Fluctuations

2008-07-07T00:09:00.020-05:00

From the beginning of this whole process, Kay and I have been ready to rejoice, only to find our hopes disappointed. The first month we tried to get pregnant, Kay was late with her period. She was never late, she’s rarely been late since, but she was not pregnant. For well over a year we tried, but nothing happened. Finally, they went in to take out her ovarian cysts, not having anything else to try (various fertility drugs, such as Clomid, had failed) only to find that she had endometriosis. At first, that seemed like a good thing: we knew what was wrong and had heard it could be cured with hormone treatment (I think I’m remembering this correctly), not to mention the scraping they had done already. It turned out that it would not be so easy – endometriosis is infinitely more complicated, and as we found out later, the scraping did possibly more bad than good, as it left behind adhesions as effective as endometrial tissue at physically isolating and damaging, through inflammation, the reproductive organs.

We finally began the process with Dr. Hilgers and the Pope Paul VI Institute, well over a year ago (perhaps a year-and-a-half ago), and things seemed to go well in the operation, though we knew it would be a difficult one, and by no means guaranteed success. But these last two weeks have been full of nothing but setbacks, it has seemed: a good first day followed by the somnolence of atalectesis; her revival and subsequent eating followed by vomiting and diarrhea; a bowel revived from ileus followed by fever and renewed coughing; plaintive hopes for pneumonia followed by revelation of the pelvic abscess. Now the less harsh procedure of the catheter and a dose of antibiotics is our hope, against which is juxtaposed the six-month colostomy. (This is not to mention the damage this kind of inflammation can do to ovaries, tubes, and uterus, which, along with the coughing, is for now a secondary worry.) I hope our beleaguered troops hold the line here.

The military metaphor arises because I have been reading the first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. I am not alone in having Lincoln as my favorite president because of his thoughts, expressed in his profound and serious words. I was too poor a philosophy student to say whether Lincoln’s thoughts were particularly original, but the humility and cadence of their expression is moving in the extreme. There are two writings that Foote quotes, in each of which Lincoln addresses situations of much greater extremity than that in which Kay and I are embroiled. In speaking to a Quaker woman who called on Lincoln to show her support for his having issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he said,

We are indeed going through a great trial – a fiery trial. In
the very responsible position in which I happen to be
placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our
Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out
his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and
acts may be according to his will; and that it might be so,
I have sought his aid. But if, after endeavoring to do my
best in the light which he affords me, I find my efforts
fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to
me, he wills it otherwise. If I had had my way, this war
would never have been commenced. If I had been
allowed my way, this war would have been ended before
this. But we find it still continues, and we must believe
that he permits it for some wise purpose of his own,
mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our
limited understandings we may not be able to
comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe that he who
made the world still governs it.

Kay and I are not so much instruments here, not so much operating as being operated upon (quite literally, in her case), but still her subjection to treatment and my support for her can be said to be our “efforts,” and certainly our “war” would have ended before this had we been allowed our way. And our little case is as worrying to us in its threat to the world for which we are responsible – our parents, our marriage, each other – as the horrendous losses of Antietam were in their threat to the vast arena for which Lincoln was so tragically and movingly responsible.

Lincoln also wrote a private piece, left on his desk but apparently not intended for publication. It was rescued by his secretary John Hay, being published later. In it, Lincoln attempts in effect to reconcile the existence of men such as Bishop-General Pope, and his prayers, with the equally fervent Northern clergymen, and their many prayers:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party
claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may
be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and
against the same thing at the same time. In the present
civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is
something different from the purpose of either party;
and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as
they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose.
I am almost ready to say this is probably true; that God
wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By
his mere quiet power on the minds of the now
contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed
the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest
began. And having begun he could give the final victory
to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

This passage is perhaps less applicable to Kay’s and my situation: there is no one, after all, praying against us. But the enemy that (or who) has entered the field has not been prevented from bringing his soldiers against us. The contest proceeds. We can merely fight by our best lights and pray that, supposing it is His will on earth and in heaven, we receive our daily bread, and that our trespasses will be forgiven us. Father, if Thou wilt, remove this chalice from us: but yet not our will, but Thine be done.
___________________________________________________________________
Thanks, by the way, to The Abraham Lincoln Association, as well as to that perfidious academic institution holding the electronic version of their The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. As their version contained some confusing punctuation – perhaps in the manuscript sources? – I have made some changes to match Foote’s version, on pp. 709-10 of Volume I of his work.

Worst Day 1.2

2008-07-06T18:17:00.003-05:00

Well, now we know. The fever and the white blood cell count are due to a pelvic abscess. Who knows whence the cough, though that is not our worry now. What is an abscess? It’s not like an ulcer, apparently. I always figured it was a spot in the surface of the organ (skin or internal) where the germs were multiplying and eating away at the flesh. Instead, an abscess, or at least a pelvic abscess, seems to be a collection of germs surrounded by a membrane created by the body in an attempt to ward it off from the rest of the body – it sounds as if its appearance is not dissimilar to a bubble, though this one apparently multiplies and spreads itself wherever it can, without concern for a globular appearance. Worst case scenario, and fairly likely it sounds like, is a temporary colostomy, which would apparently give the body and doctors a chance to fight off the infection in Kay’s interior. The less-bad case, and the one they will try first, is a temporary catheter inserted through her side. This will drain and collapse the abscess, allowing antibiotics to more easily reach the whole of the infected area, which is cut off currently from blood supply. If this is successful, it may preclude the need for a colostomy, which would save Kay six months of that indignity and inconvenience. But better six months of indignity and inconvenience than various worse alternatives.

Worst Day 1.1

2008-07-06T17:25:00.003-05:00

Update on yesterday: The problems of this first of the worst days have not gone away. I forgot all about the white cell blood count. White blood cells, of course, attack infections in the body. When they increase, that is a sign that there is an infection. Kay’s white blood count had gone up following the surgery, so in addition to being told to walk and use the incentive spirometer, she was also given antibiotics. Her CT scan showed, in the end, no leakage or abscesses anywhere in her gut, so they supposed the white blood count and the clearing of the throat she had been doing might indicate the onset of pneumonia or atalectesis (the “external compression of her lungs by fluids used during the operation” that I referenced in the last post). A night of the diuretic, with the dissipation of the fever the next day indicated it had been the atalectesis after all.

This issue has come back up, however, and the diagnosis seems to have been wrong, or at least incomplete. Kay’s throat clearing has continued, turning into a cough, deep and regular, but productive of no phlegm. Her temperature, having fluctuated all week, has gone up to 101.6, which is quite high, and her white blood cell count is high again, I believe for the third time since the surgery. There are two possibilities, one being that she has come down with pneumonia, which at this point would be a good thing. The worse alternative is that she has some kind of abdominal abscess or infection or inflammation (not sure how mutually in- or exclusive these things are), for which reason the follow-up procedure is going to go on as planned, if not sooner. They’ve ordered another chest x-ray and a CT scan to explore both possibilities, and if something abdominal is indicated, they’ll go in today, instead of tomorrow as planned. (In this case, the coughing proceeds from something else entirely, and is a secondary worry.)

The Two Worst Days, Part I

2008-07-05T23:36:00.005-05:00

The bad days these past two weeks have been many, but there are two that stand out. The first worst day was Friday, the 27th of June, the third day following surgery, when Kay spent a second day in a stupor more pervasive than the preceding one, in and out of a fever, unable to get past 1500 on her incentive spirometer. She was awake, but not endowed with anything resembling her true personality, just grimly trudging through life and sleeping a sleep that may have been a “prisoners release” but was not “the certaine knot of peace, / The baiting-place of wit, the balme of woe,” for when she awoke she only trudged the more. In the late afternoon and the late evening, she was given a diuretic, the diagnosis being that her somnolence and fever were due to the external compression of her lungs by fluids used during the operation. This diuretic had no impact until late, perhaps twelve midnight, at which point she got up to go to the bathroom. This continued all the night, every half hour exactly, until it tapered off near morning. As she was still somewhat disabled from bending and yanking, I was point man for unplugging the IV – conveniently between her bed and my couch – and we both spent a vergessenworthy but unforgettable night. Miraculously, the next morning, she was better. The fever was down, the lethargy gone despite the long night, and she was allowed to take her first liquid tray since she had gone under, her first food, in fact, since noon of the day before the surgery. All seemed well.

Diversions

2008-07-05T22:31:00.005-05:00

How, then, is Kay fighting off the boredom? For entertainment we have watched a few movies and some television, played some Scrabble, perused the Internet, and read part of Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, one of Kay’s favorite authors. Yankee Doodle Dandy and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were our two movie choices. The first was our apt selection for the Fourth, and thoroughly entertaining, though it lacks much in the way of dramatic arc to carry it through its length. This is understandable, though. Made in the early days of World War II, and screened for its subject George M. Cohan in the weeks before his death, it plays more like a revue, or perhaps like a feature-length tribute for a life-time achievement Oscar, or, I suppose, Tony. It is certainly a piece of propaganda, though I don’t mean that slightingly, because the things it elides – Cohan’s first marriage and divorce, the deaths of his mother and sister, his objections to a Broadway labor agreement – do not counter its essential argument that America is a great place and worthy of praise even by those who struggle to rise to the top. The last elision probably does counter that argument, in the eyes of some, and probably makes him a villain, and perhaps it objectively does so – I’ve not investigated the details – but as an actor and a producer, Cohan knew both sides of the argument and seems to have lost a lot for his stand, including much of his acting career. In any event, whether my ambivalence about unions is correct in this case, the movie contains some great dance numbers, some stirring patriotic songs, and Cagney’s charisma. It’s worth seeing.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was exactly what we needed the day we watched it, I believe Wednesday. We needed silly escapism, and that’s what we got, though daft and mercenary never reach so near the sublime as they do in Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. The IMDB quote list for the movie doesn’t seem to have the ones I laughed at the most, though of course now I’d have to re-watch the movie to remember them. These, though, will do:

Daft (said of a diamond tiara):
“You DO wear it on your head. I just LOVE finding new places to wear diamonds.”

Mercenary (in conversation with the father of her fiancé):
Esmond Sr.: Have you got the nerve to tell me you don't want to marry my son for his money?
Lorelei Lee: It's true.
Esmond Sr.: Then what do you want to marry him for?
Lorelei Lee: I want to marry him for YOUR money.

What I also found interesting about the film was the dirty sensibilities that were there for those who wanted to find them, censors be damned, such as the sly one-liner uttered by an Olympic athlete when asked which girl – Monroe or Jane Russell – he’d save from a sinking ship: “those girls couldn’t drown,” reminding me of my father’s advice to lay hold of Dolly Parton should I ever find myself on a leaky vessel with her. These sneaky one-liners seem to have been all over certain films of that time, along with an absolute fascination with adultery: cf. The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Apartment (1960), and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). While adultery is almost always rejected in these films, they seem like a foreboding, a straining against the reins, that makes the advent of the Seventies and Eighties unsurprising. The one-liners I enjoy – I was raised on dirty jokes and can find nothing wrong with them, within some limits; the clear interest in adultery I regard with less comfort and no sympathy.

The only other observation I have on the film is this: Marilyn Monroe is a clearly superior screen bimbo to poor Jayne Mansfield, depressingly similar as were the eventual denouements of their lives.

Our Current State – Pretty Good, Overall

2008-07-05T16:43:00.001-05:00

The last week-and-a-half has been eventful. Kay has suffered a horde of complications, some of them scary, some of them undignified, some of them simply annoying, none of them, in the end, terribly dangerous. We never did find out what a temporary colostomy would do to revive the small bowel, mostly because we’d lost interest in the question by the time we had the chance to ask it. Kay tried the liquid tray (I called it the “wet tray” earlier) yesterday morning and kept it down, meaning that whatever organs had been asleep or blocked, they’d now awakened or opened up. She’s since then had four liquid trays and one full liquid tray – the appended adjective meaning that the liquids now include milk: milk instead of juice, cream soup instead of broth. The cream soup may even have had potatoes in it!

Thus we are healing and improving. Kay’s enemies now are a relatively slow and sometimes painful digestion process, despair, and boredom. None of the doctors seem worried by the first, and it is my opinion that her digestion will improve as her GI tract realizes it’s back on the clock. The second is mild, as despair goes, and is due to missing home, wondering when she’ll ever feel normal, and fear that the follow-up procedure will restart the ileus. There’s no real way for me to alleviate this, other than to stay positive, iterate her successes so far, and remind her of the doctor’s assurance that laparoscopic surgeries never result in ilei. I thought that Kay might also benefit from getting out of the hospital, and so suggested a jaunt through the city for half an hour in our car, but our nurse said it wouldn’t be allowed, and one of the doctors disclaimed responsibility, saying only the doctor who had admitted her could ok that. That would be Dr. Hilgers, but we usually only see him in the morning, and it doesn’t seem right to ask our nurse – who said the doctor would not say yes – to ask him for us. We’ll wait until tomorrow, when we’re still likely to be here.

Pseudonymicon

2008-07-03T23:03:00.002-05:00

Been thinking that speaking of “my wife” constantly sounds rather impersonal. I could do what someone like John Derbyshire does, and speak of her as “Mrs. Common Things at Last,” but since I actually have a pseudonym, rather than a nickname, if that’s what you call “The Straggler,” it makes sense to give her a pseudonym too. Clearly she is Mrs. Hawking, but her first name must needs be provided. I have other reasons for the name I have selected, Kay, but I also like the WASP-ish quality; it goes well with Hawking, I think. There are no doubt Hawkings in various leafy Connecticut suburbs. Perhaps one contemplates adultery in a Cheever story, though that is emphatically not my implication. Nor is Kay is what one would call WASPy, but what good a pseudonym that doesn’t deceive?

A Quick Note on Dr. Hilgers

2008-07-03T12:12:00.003-05:00

My wife has been advised to be as active as possible, sitting up rather than lying down, walking rather than sitting, so we are currently outside on the rather nice patio of Creighton University Medical Center (unfortunately overlooking the highway), where we are engaging in one of our favorite, but recently neglected, joint pastimes – Scrabble. So I don’t have time for a full update, but I wanted to mention something we appreciate about Dr. Hilgers, now more than ever: his kindness and patience. He has enlisted the advice of a gastro-intestinal surgeon and a general practitioner, both to give him advice on my wife’s probable ileus and to prescribe various fluids for her IV. A young and rather jaunty doctor, who seems to be working under the GP, blew into our room yesterday when we were feeling pretty optimistic and announced to my wife, “Well, you look great, but your x-ray doesn’t!” He made a jokey comment about how he was happy to see her distended small intestine, because surgeons love when things are difficult, rather than easy. After reassuring us by saying that he treats the patient, not the x-ray – in other words, that in the absence of corroborating symptoms such as nausea and vomiting there is not enough reason to assume a blockage of the bowel and therefore no reason to operate – he blew out of the room again, residents and fellow doctors following in his wake, leaving us mouth agape and my wife jittery and nerve-wracked.

Dr. Hilgers, who has been in every morning, came in today when I was not here, having left very early to pick up my dad at his hotel for Mass and then a trip to the airport. Dr. Hilgers and my wife had a good conversation. She mentioned this doctor and his extremely poor bedside manner and how it had jarred her, how she’s now imagining all her worst fears. He asked her to tell him what she was afraid of. Other than death, she’s afraid of a permanent nutritional IV – never being able to eat again. I think doctors have to strike a balance between needlessly informing patients of worst-case scenarios, thus stimulating their fears, and limiting their fears by setting the boundaries with a worst-case scenario. In this case, Hilgers rightly chose the latter, telling my wife the worst-case scenario would be a temporary colostomy – six months is the figure he put on it – because the small intestine always wakes up. It just does. He also let her know what the next step will be: tomorrow, if the passage of gas continues and the vomiting doesn’t come back, we’ll try the wet tray again. If she keeps it down, we’ll go to the dry tray. His attention to us, his apparent knowledge, his willingness to explain and answer questions, are all qualities we value highly in him. They’ve made an unexpectedly-difficult recovery that much more endurable for us.

Update: My wife and I have been reading this over before I post it (we’re no longer on the patio playing Scrabble – I’m winning by the way – as these postings always take longer than I think they will to write), and we’ve just realized that we’re not quite sure, now that we think about it, how a colostomy would allow her to go on while waiting for the small intestine to wake up. A colostomy replaces the large intestine, if we understand this correctly, because the large is concerned almost exclusively with disposal, which a colostomy bag can do, while the small is concerned with distribution of nutrients to the body, which a colostomy bag can’t do. Clearly we’ve missed out on some details somewhere along the line, but Dr. Hilgers will no doubt answer them for us when we see him tomorrow.

Surgery Update

2008-07-02T17:52:00.003-05:00

I should have posted something by now, but it's been a long, rather eventful week. My wife came out of the surgery ok, but there have been bunches of minor complications keeping her in the hospital, the most significant of which has been something called “ileus,” which has been described to us as a “sleepy bowel.” None of this seems to be life-threatening, and Hilgers has been very attentive to us with daily visits and sometimes multi-daily visits, but it’s been frustrating for my wife and me, and sometimes exhausting, as various issues, such as a diuretic and a nutriment-filled IV have kept her (and therefore me) up half the night with regular urination – as often as every half hour. Anyway, my dad has come into town to spend some time with me, so my wife has released me to go to a steak house for a martini and a t-bone in an hour or so, and I need to take a shower. I will update the blog tomorrow with much more in the way of detail, as my wife and I have recorded many of the events.

A Wretchard Choice

2008-06-25T23:31:00.022-05:00

Richard Fernandez, né Wretchard, the writer of The Belmont Club, doesn’t need my help publicizing his blog; I’m putting this comment of his up in my own blog more as a reminder to myself of how well he’s put this point. I argued the same in a letter to a friend of my father that I wrote about three years ago, but never sent (he didn’t want his angry friend to turn his guns on me, and I think he thought one of my generation responding to one of his, outside of family, unseemly). I doubt, however, that I put it as well. The crux of the argument, that I was making specifically in regard to the Iraq war, and which Wretchard Fernandez is making more generally, is: “We don’t want to go there,” “going there” being defined as “being forced to destroy with nuclear weapons vast segments of Islamic society.” Here are his words, as they appear in the third comment of this post, Thinking the Unthinkable: (should the link fail to work, he may have moved his archives over to his new home at Pajamas Media, here):

The argument has already been made and widely
accepted that Western society is guilty and deserves
collective punishment. Much of the Left believes this, an[d]
certainly Osama Bin Laden does. Terrorism is all about
collective punishment. That's why terrorists don't meet
armies or enemy forces directly. They strike at civilian
and other targets reasoning that one is as “guilty” as the
other.

The idea of collective retaliation is an old one. What was
the bombing of Dresden about? The Japanese, who
butchered civilians in Nanking and Manila knew all about
collective punishment. And so did the Brits, who used
poison gas and strafing runs against Iraqis in the pre-
World War 2 years. There is no way to prettify collective
punishment. It is so unavoidable that deterrence -- the
thing that kept the world in one piece from 1949 to
1989 -- was based on it.

Consider, that if in 1963 it was US policy to incinerate
every Russian man, woman and child in the event they
had to “duck and cover” -- American schoolkids were
taught to try to survive a nuclear blast -- then why is it
less moral to apply the same morality to terrorist
supporters and places of prestige?

In truth, they are equally immoral. And for myself, I think
it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.
About all you can say is that it may be necessary.
Necessary to make these threats to keep the peace. So
maybe you can argue that we can threaten the immoral to
achieve the moral -- which is the prevention of war -- aka
deterrence.

This used to be called, back in grad school, the art of
“thinking the unthinkable.” At this point some people
mentally short circuit, raise themselves erect, throw back
their heads and announce “I shall not contemplate this.”
But after a while, they sit down and realize that heroic
poses aside, he's still stuck in the same bottle along with
all the rest of the trapped scorpions. Then they go back to
doodling.

For my part, I think the only unambiguously moral action
to take is work toward avoiding this fix to start with. That
means nipping WMD terror threats in the bud. Hitting the
enemy conventionally and precisely now. I don't hold
with the idea, so dear to many pacifists, that we should
just let things slide, because “nothing can be worse than
war” -- meaning limited war, against terrorists. Or holding
back from criticizing noxious ideologies. There is
something far, far worse than this.

And the Hoover piece gives us a glimpse into what that
worse thing is. We don't want to go there. Though we
seem to be doing our damndest to go there anyway.

“‘I shall not contemplate this.’” Turning the other cheek calls for this stance. I wrote a few days ago that it is ok to turn one’s own – ok to let one’s own self be destroyed by a terrorist bomb – but not ok to tell others to turn theirs. I.e., it is ok to fight to prevent injustice being done to others. That said, however, I believe in the professional pacifist. Jesus was not a Zealot, even if they were fighting for freedom from the Romans. Clergy generally refrain from taking up arms. Maxmillian Kolbe did so, but left no doubt as to his bravery. I am not a pacifist, and I’m not even against collective punishment (I am a teacher, after all), but when it comes to nuclear weapons … well, I have thought and written and sometimes spoken in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if I had the key to the suitcase, if I were in charge of pushing the little red button, I don’t know if I could do it. Perhaps that makes me a coward, but perhaps deep down I hold to that law of morality, that one not do evil, even with the intention that good may come of it. Ech.

If there’s any certainty in all of this for me, I can say these three things: 1. better we colonize the whole of Islamia than nuke it all (note that I am not necessarily recommending this); 2. like one categorically opposed to the death penalty is an invalid juror, I would be an invalid President of the United States; 3. it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to be sinless while living in this world, which is why the monastery has such appeal at times. ~~As Wre-~~ As Fernandez might say of the world, “it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.”

The Lobo Moment

2008-06-25T20:55:00.001-05:00

My wife’s second and probably most beloved dog, a German Shepherd-Collie mix, was called Lobo. When we took him off to have him put down (at fifteen years old (!), his back legs were no longer working, due to tumors on the spine), two guys from the Animal Hospital took him gently out of the back of the car, placed him on a rolling trolley and wheeled him across the parking lot and inside. Normally, being half shepherd, Lobo would have torn to shreds, or at least threatened severely, any stranger who had reached into his car. But it was a quiet and peaceful dog that allowed himself to be lifted from the car and placed on the trolley. As he was being wheeled off, he threw his head back and looked back at us – especially at “Mommy,” my mother-in-law. I asked my wife what she thought he was saying. She says, “It wasn’t exactly concern, but he knew he was going to something serious, and he wanted to connect.”

She referenced this “Lobo Moment,” after she came out of surgery. As she had been wheeled off from the room, and I was told to go the other way down the hallway, she had looked back from her gurney and said, “I love you.” “That was my Lobo moment,” she said. She meant that that had been her moment to connect one last time before we were temporarily separated, not that she was being wheeled off to be euthanized, but I reacted as if stricken – after all, death was the fear, death was the unspoken reason for that connection. God thankfully forbade that anything like that would happen to her, but I had been so afraid that I would lose her that even after the surgery I just couldn’t think of that as her “Lobo Moment.”

Signs?

2008-06-25T18:31:00.011-05:00

For many months now I have prayed rosaries for my wife, though not nearly as often as I should, certainly not every day. When I have been strong enough to pray, however, I have most happily prayed the Joyful Mysteries: the Annunciation, the Visitation to Elizabeth, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the finding of the Christ Child in the Temple, for the obvious reason that they are about the miracle birth of Jesus, and we are in need of a bit of a miracle now. We prayed these mysteries in our Rosary on the drive out to Omaha, even though it was on a Sunday and it is suggested that one prays the Glorious Mysteries. When I told my wife we were praying the “wrong” Mysteries, she said, “Can you do that? Is it allowed?” I told her it would be fine.

I was prompted to mention this because, I discovered on the day of my wife’s surgery – yesterday, Tuesday the 24th of June – that three of that day’s scripture passages (the First Reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel) mention the role of God in forming us in the womb. Here are the relevant passages, with their locations:

The First Reading:
1 … The LORD called me from the womb, from the body
of my mother he named my name. 2 He made my mouth
like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me
away…. 5 And now the LORD says, who formed me from
the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him …
(Isaiah 49: 1-6)

The Psalm:
13 For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit
me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise thee, for
thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well; 15 my frame was not hidden
from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately
wrought in the depths of the earth (Psalms 139: 1-3, 13-15).

The Gospel:
57 Now the time came for
Elizabeth to be delivered, and she gave birth to a son. 58
And her neighbors and kinsfolk heard that the Lord had
shown great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. 59
And on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child;
and they would have named him Zechari’ah after his
father, 60 but his mother said, “Not so; he shall be called
John.” 61 And they said to her, “None of your kindred is
called by this name.” 62 And they made signs to his
father, inquiring what he would have him called. 63 And
he asked for a writing tablet, and wrote, “His name is
John.” And they all marveled. 64 And immediately his
mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he spoke,
blessing God. 65 And fear came on all their neighbors.
And all these things were talked about through all the hill
country of Judea; 66 and all who heard them laid them
up in their hearts, saying, “What then will this child be?”
For the hand of the Lord was with him. 80 And the child
grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the
wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel
(Luke 1: 57-66, 80).

That last reading is of course related to the Visitation – it is the birth of John, later the Baptist, the child who leaps in the womb of Elizabeth when the pregnant Mary visits her older cousin. I don’t believe in omens, and I doubt I am worthy of signs, but finding out that these were the readings for the day of my wife’s surgery, I hoped.

I had another moment, a possible communication through ordinary happenstance, of what might come of this surgery. Just before we pulled out of our parking spot at home to start off to Omaha, my wife asked me whether I had brought our “pod” – which is what we call our i-Audio mp3 player. When I said no, she said, “Go up and get it.” So I did, and as I came out to lock the door, I heard the new baby upstairs crying. It seems like nothing, but he’s been there for a month, and we’ve never heard him crying before. Again, I don’t believe in omens and I consider myself unworthy of signs (or perhaps I am simply weak in my faith), but some things make one wonder.

Literally ...

2008-06-24T20:27:00.003-05:00

As my wife dozes, I have been doing some reading online (updates on her after I go get some dinner). I get James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column in my e-mail, and have enjoyed it for a few years now. A lot of his ideas are politically creative, though sometimes he tries to be a bit too cute. Not today, however, when he went after one of my least favorite grammatical solecisms, in an item called “The Wet Look.” He comments on an article by Tom Gantert of the Ann Arbor News, in which the writer says, “Peirce literally gushes about a homeless man she got to know the last six months at the shelter named ‘Vittorio.’ ” Quips Taranto: “We hope the reporter was standing back.” The image is less than pleasant, but think of it as directed towards the reporter who came up with it in the first place, rather than the poor gal subjected to it.

Operation Day

2008-06-24T19:39:00.009-05:00

The psychological ordeal is over, for the time being, and now the physical ordeal has begun for my wife. It really began last night, when she first drank her bottle of magnesium citrate, but this morning she will be put under and have to go through surgery. I’ve thought to write about this, and I’ve thought about this over and over, but I’ve not written much down. I’ve been too stressed out by the thought of thinking this over. My most common thought has been fear, fear of losing my wife, fear for her parents’ loss and loneliness, and fear of being blamed, by myself, by my family, by her parents, perhaps by God. And though I don’t think I am, I’ve also been afraid of finding out I’ve been wrong.

We met with Dr. Thomas Hilgers again yesterday (we last saw him after her exploratory laproscopy last December). He’s a quietly intense man, a slightly disconcerting presence, a bit inscrutable, like most doctors, and with penetrating, appraising eyes. He’s jovial, though, bearded and rotund, a bit like a well-trimmed, tailored, gray-haired Santa Claus. He repeated a few times, “Well, we have our work cut out for us,” in relation to my wife’s severe endometriosis and adhesions. That unnerved her a bit, but she observed that he seems confident; he just seems to be communicating that what he’s doing is labor- and concentration-intensive.

There was a funny exchange between us regarding colleges. I had mentioned a mutual friend to Dr. Hilgers – a local doctor – noting that I knew the man because I had gone to college with his daughter and her husband. He asked, “Where’s college?” When I answered Notre Dame, he remarked, “Well, there you go!” – a remark that wasn’t clarified by the context. He followed that up by asking my wife where she went to school. She was surprised to know that he was familiar with St. Olaf – “oh,” he said, “in Northfield.” It turns out he is from Minnesota, went to St. John’s for college, and did some of his medical training at Mayo, to which my wife responded, “Well, there you go!” to general laughter. Hers seemed pretty clear – it seemed to say, “Wow.” His could have been “Wow,” or “Figures,” knowing how divergent opinions on ND can be.

When I first came into the waiting room, around 6:30 this morning, there were two TV’s on. I was the only one there, and they were both blaring, and so I turned one of them down entirely. I was too slow to turn the other one down, as a group came in while I snooped around the room looking for anyone who might reprimand me for turning off a waiting room television. They left eventually, so I girded my loins and charged over to turn it down. When they came back, they seemed unbothered by the change in sound level (they had previously been sitting right in front of it as it blared, and went back to the same place), so I had peace up until now, about 9:00, when the nice old lady in the waiting room came over to turn on the TV for a young boy who’s waiting on his own. The boy, a son of African immigrants, to judge by his beautifully deep black skin, is sitting without anything to do, other than look across the room at the TV (he seems not to be interested in the magazines), and so she came over to turn up the closer television for him, which is right next to me. I silently groaned, but after she fiddled with it for awhile, she asked the boy if he wanted to watch it. He said no, and she turned to me to find out whether the still low volume was too high. I said no, not wanting to lord it over the whole waiting room, but she then decided to turn it off, since no one would be watching it.

Later:
Just heard from the nurse liaison, a trial position here at Creighton Hospital. She makes a circuit of the operating rooms to find out how the patients are doing. She then comes to the waiting room and updates the family members who are waiting for news. About an hour or two into the surgery, my wife is doing fine. The anesthesiologist says she is stable, and the surgeons are inside, just beginning to take bits of endometriosis out – they are using lasers to cut away the adhesions. I then went out to make a call to update my wife’s parents, who are eager for news, as one might expect.

Later:
The nice old lady came over again. The boy is apparently Sudanese, and they apparently are quite friendly and have the nicest handwriting – or at least he does. She’s a garrulous old gal, but perfectly friendly. When I signed in to the waiting room, she asked who my surgeon was. When I answered Dr. Hilgers, she said, “I knew it. The nicest young couples always come in to him.” Now she wanted to tell me about the Sudanese boy. He’s apparently finished middle school and is on his way to a high school. She advised him not to stay out late, because our culture has changed and there are bad people about. He assured her that he’s always in early. She was quite happy to hear that I am a teacher – I get far more praise for that than I deserve – and commiserated with me like Socrates over the state of today’s youth. She seems to think the Sudanese boy is an exception, and I do too, from the little I saw. He was quite polite with her when she sat down to talk with him, taking her advice without resentment, and when I left to use the phone, I asked him to keep an eye on my laptop, which he did without incident.

Later:
The nice old lady is being nice again, now at 10:34, this time inquiring as to whether a few other people, who aren’t apparently interested enough in their own amusement to bring something to read, would like to watch TV. She asked the woman in question what she would like to watch, CNN? The woman responded, “CNN, Home and Garden, whatever.” “Whatever.” Doesn’t that say it all?

Later:
It is now 12:48. About an hour and a half ago I heard from the nurse liason that things were going well. My wife is still stable, and they have found the fallopian tubes. Way back in December, when they did a laproscopy to check out her interior, they couldn’t get very far. Most importantly, they couldn’t find her fallopian tubes, which might have been damaged or even obliterated by the scarring of the interior by the endometriosis. Dr. Hilgers has found them, however, and they are open and in good shape. I was told at the time that her surgery, instead of finishing between 11 and 12, would now finish closer to 1:00. So, as might be expected, I am starting to get a bit nervous.

Shortly after I received that phone call, I got my in-laws and my parents up-to-date; my father was jokingly unhappy to be called last – in fact, he called me, while I was talking to my mother – but I think he understands. My mother-in-law has been quite nervous, but I think is doing ok. She was moved to tears to hear that my wife and I said some prayers together before she was wheeled out. As a staunch Protestant, she may not have been as moved to tears if she knew the prayers were three Hail Mary’s, but she’s a good woman and easily moved, so she might well have. I also said a Rosary as I sat in the waiting room, a somewhat flawed rosary, however, as I was dozing off in the later decades, due to waking up at 4:30 or so. My final religious effort was a minor sacrifice: last night I ate what my wife ate – broth, jello, and popsicles – and this morning I decided not to eat until I knew she was in the Recovery room. At that point I’ll get up and go out of the hospital to eat something somewhere, but until then I’m devoting this very minor fast to her health and to the Doctor’s success.

Later:
Just heard that Doctor Hilgers might be out to see me in the next fifteen minutes. My wife is apparently doing well, and she will be in the recovery room in about an hour. Ran downstairs to give Sandy a quick call, and then shot right back upstairs.

A New-ish Cliché, Long Disproven

2008-06-19T01:26:00.008-05:00

I am a subscriber to and enjoy Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day. The word itself is fairly often one I don’t know, and is accompanied by one or two quotations showing the word in context, as well as another at the bottom of the missive, presumably meant to communicate what Mr. Garg believes are wise thoughts. Sometimes the wisdom is true, but other times it is not. Mr. Garg seems to have a streak of pretty typical Western liberalism in him, all the details of which I cannot remember without looking back through a list of his quotations, but one of which is a penchant for – perhaps a conviction regarding – pacifism. (Take a look at his list of organizations which he supports, at the bottom of this page here, and you’ll see I’m correct about the general drift of his thought.) Thus this bit, which I regard as rather clichéd, but which may not have been at the time, from Tolstoy:

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

I have to say, not being able to find the context using Google, I can’t quite make out what Tolstoy’s trying to say, or at least how he’s trying to say what it seems he is saying, that violence is equivalent to evil. The literal effort – using violence to prevent evil – implies a paradox between the means and the end, but the metaphorical effort – stopping a cloud to prevent the rain – does not contain that paradox, illustrating only the uselessness of the means because of the inevitability of the unwanted end. Perhaps he feels that stopping a cloud would cause rain, which would lead to the idea that violence causes evil, but of course stopping a cloud would not cause rain but would merely delay it, as it drifted its way through the cloud to an unblocked exit point. Perhaps, though I doubt it, he feels that evil is a natural, inevitable force that should be allowed to do its work unmolested. I have some sympathy with Tolstoy on the first point, believing in original sin as I do: evil will never be fully destroyed, while this world lasts. But evil is not a substance that is everywhere the same. The evil that leached out in 2001 is not the same evil that was prevented in the second half of 1945. More importantly, the people who avoided evil in 1945 are not the same who suffered it in 2001. Nor are the people who prevented it in 1945 the same as those who prevented it in 2002. It is a good to be saved from evil. It is good to save others from evil. Both actions change individuals in ways different from, and seemingly better than, succumbing to violence or watching others do so would.

I’ve not read Tolstoy, so I can’t say what value he gave to the defense of Russia by her soldiers against Napoleon, but from my historical perspective, he’s all wrong. Whenever I hear this violence-is-inherently-evil-and-useless meme, from Tolstoy, from Lennon, from Edwin Starr, from the Pet Shop Boys, this is what I think of:

What other response can there be? Nothing to kill or die for? Violence … breeds violence? Tell it to the men in this photo. This is what war is good for. It is one thing to turn the other cheek, but it is another to look on while the other fellow gets struck, and then, placidly or with an air of tragic regret, advise him to turn his.
___________________________________________________________________

Thanks, by the way, to the folks at A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust for posting the photo above on their site. The photo itself is by Hugh C. Daly, from his book, 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division: A Combat history of World War II. Photos from this book seem to show up here and there around the web, and the book seems to be out of print, so I thought it allowable to use one. If I am incorrect in that assumption, please contact me to let me know. Thank you.

I Need a Synchronizer

2008-06-18T19:09:00.001-05:00

The proliferation of information is a botheration to me. I have now four or five computers with multiple copies of the same information on them. I don’t want to lose any of the information, in case it is ever valuable again (much of it is – pictures, music files, tests and questions for my classes), so I copy it and copy it and copy it, over and over again. So now I have multiple copies of each document, sometimes multiple copies on one computer. And when I try to copy over the old stuff, I first am scared to because of what I might lose – I have not composed exclusively on only one or the other ever. And I am second scared because when I try to erase them I am sometimes told that I cannot erase this or that “system file,” that some system file called “thumbs,” an unprepossessing name if ever there was one, might bring down all of Windows. I need a synchronizer, a program that will tell me about these various files, destroying the older identical copies and telling me the amount of variation betweten the mostly identical copies, maybe combining them into one document with the newer text, wherever it is, tacked on or interpolated into the old, pictured in red, or underlined, or preserved in speechclouds that can be called up at the asterisks that identify them, the old text shaded or parentheseed or italicized. There’s gotta be some way of organizing reams of virtual text without being swallowed up in the cataclysm of copies I’ve created.

Crusaders are Bad; Jihadists are Good

2008-05-22T17:23:00.004-05:00

The good folks over at Phi Beta Cons, a sub-blog of National Review Online, yesterday published a comment on, with a link to the video of, a scuffle begun between two men working for a Muslim school named Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (often called TiZA charter school). This place has apparently been in the news quite a bit because their curriculum is suspected not to stay entirely on its side of the revered wall separating Church and State. They require ritual observations, such as the removal of shoes, various washings, and prayer times. They apparently also make it hard to leave until after Muslim instruction classes end, an hour after by school, by delaying busses until that time. This obviously leads to all sorts of questions regarding charter schools, school choice, and the rest, and not all of the answers are obvious. The main point I wish to bring up, however, is this: Tarek ibn Ziyad is a Muslim warrior who led the conquest of what Wikipedia calls Hispania – in other words, the Iberian peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal – in the days when it was apparently run by the Visigoths. I just know that I’ll catch hell (assuming anyone’s reading) when I suggest that there are no public or semi-public schools named after Crusaders (there is one named after a Viking – Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy on Chicago’s West Side, oddly enough), but I can’t imagine a modern charter school – one set up with government funds – being able to set itself up with the name of a great Crusader. Richard the Lionheart Academy? Don Juan of Austria High School? Pope Urban II Kindergarten? I’d be surprised.