A close call in the post-modern world
March 6, 2009
Sometimes those who tell us the truth don’t do us any favors. For example, I’d rather Dan hadn’t told me what was wrong with my car. The battery was dead when I tried to start the Beetle on a recent morning, but Dan couldn’t find anything wrong with the battery, the alternator, or anything else in the car. The car ran for a week or so, but after it stood idle in the garage for a few days, the battery was dead again. After a closer and more invasive inspection, Dan told me that the battery went dead because of a bad door latch on the driver’s side. Dan says there’s an electronic component in the door latch that “tells” the car when the door is closed. But that component is defunct, so that the car “thinks” the door is open all the time – so Dan says. If the car thinks the door is open, it doesn’t shut down some systems and lights that are shut down when the door is both closed and locked – in other words, in “sleep mode.” As a result, Dan says, these systems are out there in the garage or the driveway humming away as though it were normal business hours. They’re “talking to each other” – those were Dan’s words – and heaven only knows what they’re saying, particularly what they’re saying about me. What if one of those systems had the personality of HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? It might have decided that a driver too negligent to have a working door latch – and lock the door, for Pete’s sake – was incompetent to drive the machine. The systems that have been out there whispering in the night might have wound up, as the Scripture says, taking me where I did not choose to go.
“How about that?”
March 2, 2009
HANK BAUER, TOM STURDIVANT, and MICKEY MANTLE
It wasn’t enough that this snow storm is disrupting my life; I had to wake up to the news that Tom Sturdivant had died. There may be more glamor attached to Yankee teams of other eras, but when names like Tom Sturdivant, Art Ditmar, Andy Carey, and Hank Bauer bob to the surface, I am again sitting on a summer evening on the step in front of our grocery store, tuning my GE transistor radio until I hear the voices of Mel Allen and Red Barber. I was in paradise, and I knew it: I’m glad of that, at least. During Sturdivant’s brief time as a top starter for the Yankees, I was in high school, I wasn’t serious about life, and others were looking after my welfare. I wasn’t concerned because Mickey Mantle was a drunk, Billy Martin was a brawler, and Enos Slaughter was a racist. These were my gods when they were on the field; I asked nothing more. I won’t look back at more recent Yankee teams with the same naive sentiment – and not because the teams and players have changed, except in the details of their fallibility. I already know – intellectually, at least – that I’ll never sit on that front step again and listen to those southern voices turn the progress of a game into poetry. On this cold day, I didn’t need to be reminded.
Netflix Update No. 1: “Starting Out in the Evening.”
March 2, 2009
At the suggestion of a friend who seems to have unerring taste, we watched “Starting Out in the Evening,” a 2007 film with Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, and Lili Taylor. This film, based on a book by Brian Norton, concerns Leonard Schiller, a retired professor whose run as a successful novelist is behind him. He keeps up a rigid routine as he works on his fifth novel, but it already has been ten years in the making. His books are out of print, and he is forgotten by everyone except the occasional literary wonk. One of the latter is Heather Wolfe (Ambrose), an Ivy League graduate student who wants to base her master’s thesis on Schiller’s work and who thinks she can simultaneously call him the reading public’s attention. Schiller at first rejects the idea of such a distraction, then cautiously agrees to cooperate with the student, and eventually becomes involved in a uniquely delicate personal relationship with the young woman. The secondary and related plot involves Schiller’s daughter, Ariel (Taylor), who is about to turn 40 and is anxious about her prospects for ever having children. Her decision to renew a relationship with a former boyfriend – for whom Leonard has no respect – is a source of tension between her and her father. Beneath both of these plots is a critical part of Leonard Schiller’s life – the turning point in his marriage – that he had hoped would remain buried in the past.
The complex story which explores issues of personal freedom is very nicely performanced by Langella, Ambrose, Taylor and Adrian Lester as Ariel’s rediscovered lover. Those who wish to can become engrossed in matters of literary criticism – the subject of a lot of the dialogue in this film – but the complex human stories these actors tell were enough to keep us from looking away.
Under the burning cross
February 28, 2009
I see by the papers that the Nebraska Supreme Court came down on the side of common sense this week by upholding the dismissal of a state police officer who joined a branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The subject of the ruling, Robert Henderson, joined the Knights Party in 2004 and resigned in 2006. He joined in the first place because his wife left him for a Latino man. Henderson, I gather, was not a student of logic. His defense contends that the court has brushed aside Henderson’s First Amendment rights – an interesting argument to make on behalf of a man whose own view of other folks’ rights is, to put it mildly, suspect. That, of course, wouldn’t justify mitigating his citizenship, but the state’s position isn’t that Henderson couldn’t belong to the Klan, but that he couldn’t belong to the Klan and be a sworn law-enforcement officer. Presumably, Nebraska also wouldn’t want a police officer to join a group that promotes pedophilia. The objection from his defense that Henderson strictly kept his racial views to himself while he was on duty somehow isn’t reassuring. One would rather that Henderson wore his hood on duty so that a black or Latino motorist stopped on a dark stretch of highway would know what and whom he was dealing with. This case isn’t done, and it might wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court where an argument either way from Justice Thomas could make for compelling reading.
“Never again”?
February 28, 2009
Living on the edge
February 26, 2009
I hate when this happens. I got in the Beetle Tuesday morning, and it wouldn’t start. It had the death rattle. Dan, the incomparable auto repair guy, said it sounded like a dead battery, so I had AAA lug it over there on a flatbed. The AAA driver jump started the bug before he took it away, so I had some assurance that it would live to fight another day. Dan had it overnight and came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with it. The battery is still good, even after a few “stress tests.” The alternator is functioning properly. The wheels turn in circles as Nature intended. Aside from the faded flower in the bud vase, there is nothing wrong. Good news, right? Except that the battery was dead on Tuesday morning for no apparent reason, so now I live in constant fear that it will be again be dead for no reason—and not in front of my house but, say, tonight, when I get done teaching my class in Passaic. Passaic, for the love of Pete!
I once had a Rambler that would just stop running, perhaps when I was in the middle lane doing 55. I’d coast over to the side of the road, get a ride home, and send Wayne the Mechanic out to get it. Wayne would get in and turn the key, and the car would start. “Mr. Paolino, I can’t fix it if it isn’t broken.” Yeah, I studied logic in college, too. But I drove that Rambler with my heart in my throat, because I never knew when it would stop running.
Maybe I’m missing the thrill inherent in such experiences. After all, if it weren’t for that battery, tonight would be just another night in class. Instead, I’ll be in a state of anxiety all night and, if I go out into that dark parking lot—in Passaic, for Pete’s sake—and the car does start, that’ll be more enlivening than the usual trip home. Maybe that’s what Winston Churchill was talking about when he said, “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”
“… and unto dust …”
February 25, 2009
I always feel a little guilty right about now in the rolling year. No, not because we’re supposed to feel guilty during Lent. Not exactly, anyway. I get a little self conscious about all those Lents in my childhood, the Lents everyone in my house and people of our acquaintance couldn’t wait for. In those days, the emphasis in Lent was on the “giving up,” at least in popular culture. For me, that meant a hiatus in the constant gorging on candy and ice cream and Yoo Hoo as I worked, if you can call it that, in my family’s grocery store. Naturally, I looked forward to resuming that self-destructive behavior, but I wouldn’t have traded all the candy and Yoo Hoo in the world for what was unleashed in my grandmother’s kitchen when this day came.
Like many women of her generation and background, Grandma had a repertoire of Italian meals that she cooked only during Lent. Besides being restricted to the season, they were parsed out on certain days during the five weeks of “penance.” My favorite was the hand-made pizza with wild mushrooms Grandpa had picked up in Ramapo. I even loved the spaghetti with anchovy sauce, though I don’t think I could stomach it now. Of course, whenever she was cooking – and when wasn’t she cooking? – Grandma would call me into her kitchen and slip me whatever preliminary scraps were available – a clear violation of the fast. While some people, including me, still practice some material sacrifices during Lent, the season has a much more positive spin now than it did in the 1940s and ’50s. Presumably, those who endured the trials of those days piled up treasures in heaven, as we used to say. I piled up IOUs.
Here, kitty
February 22, 2009
We spent a couple of hours yesterday watching, of all things, Felix the Cat. I think the earliest cartoon was from 1924, which was about two years after the character first emerged from Pat Sullivan’s studios. Felix was enormously popular, and that isn’t surprising. Using simple two-dimensional black-and-white images, the artist created an impressive variety of situations for this proto-Garfield. These cartoons, incidentally, like many cartoons of that era, are laced with stereotypes of blacks, native Americans, Mexicans, and Asians. Most of the Felix cartoons shown in movie theaters were silent like their contemporaries Koko the Clown and Farmer Alfalfa, and when the studio belatedly tried to add sound, Felix’s career died by the end of the decade. The later TV, movie and comic strip version by Joe Oriolo and his son and namesake is a different product altogether that doesn’t have some of the grim undertones of the original. The Felix of the Pat Sullivan studio was often portrayed as friendless and hungry and, accordingly, as scheming and amoral, if not immoral. In one sequence, for instance, the cat plucks the white hair and whiskers from the head of an old southern black man to add to a bale of cotton he hopes to trade for a meal. That was considered hilarious in the 1920s, though probably not to the folks in the rear balcony.
The final frontier
February 20, 2009
Those of us who are trying to keep track of how the federal government is spending money might want to jot down the $591 million NASA is launching into space early next month in a search for planets that are like our own. “Like our own,” in this case, means planets that orbit a sun at a distance that would allow life-sustaining conditions. The space craft, with its powerful telescope and cameras, won’t be looking for life in space, but only for planets that might sustain life if there were any, given factors like density and gravity. This project is going to take 3 1/2 years. Presumably, NASA will find the money to actually look for life sometime after that – unless, of course, the mission doesn’t find any “planets like our own.” NASA, one presumes, regards as a temporary setback the fact that we’re having trouble sustaining life on this planet
Those of us who were living when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite might appreciate the fact that there is no conversation about this latest mission, which is to get off the ground, as it were, on March 5. Back then, we were so embarrassed by the Soviet achievement that any progress in the American space program was news. When the first manned moon mission was launched it got more attention than the final episode of “Dallas.” Now we don’t care, which in the present economic climate is probably good for NASA.
“Dallas”? It was a TV series.
Never mind.
“… three, four, open the door”
February 19, 2009
For reasons I’d rather not go into, I have been studying math. As in algebra and geometry. I know, I know. There was a time and place for this process, but my mind was otherwise occupied – or altogether unoccupied – back then. Besides specific things such as figuring ratios and solving for x, I have learned two things. I have learned that math isn’t difficult. I’m not sure that the prospect of its difficulty was what kept me from learning it when I should have, but if I had been asked back then, I would have made that my excuse. This wouldn’t have carried too much weight with my Dad, who could calculate in his head faster than I could figure on a mechanical calculator. (Hey, I was born in 1942!) But then, he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t remember that James A. Garfield was the 20th president. Anyway, I have learned in this, my new incarnation, that I can learn pretty much any math function if I simply concentrate. Who knew?
I have also learned that those who talk about the beauty to be found in math ain’t just whistlin’ “Dixie.” I’m having this whole epiphany in which I’m synthesizing the verities of mathematics with the “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas – but maybe I shouldn’t bring that up in mixed company. For now, it’s enough to know that it all adds up.
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