T. Scott

Touching the words

Their birth dates are all in the early 1990s.  They're undergrads in the Honors class that Liz & Sylvia are teaching, and I went in yesterday to talk about issues involving copyright and plagiarism and retractions in the context of the role of librarians in preserving and transmitting culture.  I wanted to frame it, as I often do when talking about this stuff, by comparing the world that we now live in with the beginnings of print culture in the late 15th century.  I'll usually talk about what a long time it took from those beginnings for a truly mature print culture to emerge.  I've often used the phrase "the mature print culture that we all grew up in" because my audiences have always been people for whom that's true.   But I realized as I was speaking yesterday that I'd have to say, "The mature print culture that I grew up in..."  as contrasted to the nascent digital culture that they've grown up in.  Digital natives.

I wrote a letter to Josie yesterday morning, as I do every few months.  I imagine these letters to be read by a Josie who is 12 or 14 or so, a young woman who'll get a kick out of reading about what she was like in her own pre-literate era.  But she is emerging from that now.  Her reading is clearer every time I see her, and her writing is getting stronger.  We spent nearly twenty minutes after dinner the other night as she wrote out for me a Valentine's Day poem that she'd learned at school.  When we were at  John & Evelyn's some weeks ago, we'd get up in the morning together and she'd write in her diary sitting next to me while I wrote in mine.

Soon I'll have to quit writing letters to her older self -- I'll need to be writing them to the girl she is now. And then, I think, will she want to write back to me? She's fascinated right now with her ability to form words.  But for how long will the notion of putting pen to paper, rather than fingers to keyboards, retain any appeal?

Twenty years ago, for reasons that I won't go into here, I switched my daily journal writing from the notebooks that I'd been using to the computer.  For about five years, I did all of my journal writing that way.   But the letters that I wrote to Lynn were done with pen on fine stationery (the way I write letters to Josie now).   After I moved to Birmingham and the flow of letters to Lynn gradually slowed (although it never has entirely stopped, and it never will), I found myself moving back to the pen and paper journal.  It seemed to give me something I was missing.

There is an intimacy to writing with a pen on paper that cannot be replicated electronically.  The screen is forever between you and the words.  There is an esthetic quality to the pen and ink and paper that is inherent in their physicality.  It is rare, very rare, that I will spend half an hour in a bar or restaurant writing in one of my leather bound Italian journals and somebody won't make some comment about how beautiful the journal itself is.  The envy in their voices, and the sense of desire to handle such beautiful objects is palpable.   We are physical creatures, not digital constructs, and we respond to physical things.  Sometimes I need to write something down for the content and any medium will do.  Sometimes I ache for the physical act of writing and nothing can substitute.

I've pointed out many times that if I'm writing an essay, I want to do it at the keyboard.  That's the best tool.  But if I'm writing a love letter to Lynn, a fountain pen and fine paper are the only sensible  tools to use.  Neither is better than the other in any absolute sense -- they have different qualities which make them appropriate for different purposes.   I don't think my chef's knife is better than my paring knife -- I need them both when I'm working in the kitchen.

I expect to be writing letters to Josie for the rest of my life.  I'll certainly communicate with her electronically as well, but the letters are a kind of communication that can't be replicated in any other medium.  As my little digital native grows older, I hope that she never loses touch with the magic of making little marks by hand on pieces of paper -- little marks that change lives.

 

Apparently, It Starts Early

Josie got her first phone call from a friend yesterday.    Ashleigh called and left a message on Marian's cell.  Josie called her right back and they talked for ten minutes.  This is by far the longest phone conversation she's ever had.  If she spends 2 minutes on the nightly phone call with her dad or her mom (depending on whose house she's at), that constitutes a very long conversation.  She'll call me or Nonni on occasion when she's got big news to share, but she'll tell the news and then quickly get to her standard signoff, "Love you, bye!"

At Mikey's, we're sitting at the table finishing dinner and Ashleigh calls again.  Marian sees who it is and hands the phone over.  Josie says, "Hi Ashleigh!"  She says, "Oh, thank you."  She says, "Let me go to the bathroom so we can talk about this," and bounces out of her chair and heads down the hall without so much as a glance at her Mom or a word to the rest of us.  We look at each other with amused and shocked faces.  Me, the clueless guy at the table, says, "I thought they learned to do that in high school!  I didn't realize it started when they were five."

Josie's in the bathroom a long time.  Marian asks Tanya, the waitress, to poke her head in when she's back there.  Tanya comes back and reports that she can hear Josie chattering away in the stall.  Finally, Josie comes back, hands the phone to her Mom, and takes her seat.  She's wearing a very self-satisfied smile. 

"So what did you talk with Ashleigh about?" asks her Mom.  Josie raises her eyebrows slightly and makes the zipper motion across her lips.   Apparently, it's private.

Josiebug, I remember when I first held you, barely ninety minutes old, not even sure how to open your eyes.  You amazed me then.  You astonish me every day since.

Simplicity

Lynn decided to take Marian out for some therapeutic Christmas shopping so she called me to see if I could pick Josie up from school.  It's the kind of call I love to get.  I rearranged a couple of things so that I could leave the library by 2:15.

Josie's school has a pretty slick arrangement for pickup.  The cars snake in a long line around the parking lot, each car with a paper plate hanging from the rearview mirror with the child's pickup number on it.  The kids are all gathered under the portico in front of the school.  As we turn the corner, an aide stands with a wireless microphone and reads the numbers.  This is relayed to the aide standing with the kids who shouts the numbers out and the kids run up to find their car.

Josie sees mine and bursts into a big silly grin.  She gets in and says, "I didn't know you were coming to pick me up, Nonai!" 

"Your Mom and Nonni went Christmas shopping so they asked me to get you.  Here," I hand her my phone.  "Do you want to give your Mom a call so she knows I've got you?"  They chat for a minute or two.

"So," I say.  "What did you think when you saw my car in the pickup line?"

"Awwesommme...." she drawls in her distinctly southern accent, grinning back at me.

My heart is lighter than it has been all day.

 

Finding Moonlight

I wasn't older than 14 when it became clear there were never going to be enough hours in the day for everything I wanted to do.   I was dealing with blisters on my fingers from this new guitar that I talked my sister's boyfriend into giving me $20 to buy; even then there were stacks of books rising around my bed; it was becoming clear that girls were going to require a lot of time; and I was becoming obsessed with the fascination of scratching sentences into cheap notebooks everyday.  Oh, and there was school.

Not much has changed -- the blisters are thick callouses, but I'm not close to making that guitar do whatever I want it to do; the stacks of books & magazines get ever higher; the girls are fewer, but they take up even more time; and it feels like there's more sentences knocking around my brain everyday than I'll ever in my life get a chance to get out.  Oh, and there's libraryland.

This is my only excuse for taking until last night to get to Moonlight on the Mountain.   We managed to get to its previous incarnation, the Moonlight Music Cafe, several times during the few years before it closed in '06.  Always a fabulous experience.  And every time we went we told ourselves we were going to get there more often and then it was closed.

So when the new room opened last spring, we were determined to be better.  Still, it wasn't until last night that we made it.  We were wonderfully rewarded.  First set by Jason Harrod, short break and then a set by the Twangtown Paramours -- all original music, some sweet, some funny, some delicate, some rowdy.  CDs for sale.  Plenty of time to mingle and chat with the performers. 

Go to their websites.  Listen to their samples.  Buy their music.

The new Moonlight is stripped down.  Cash at the door, no food & drink.  A few chairs & tables.  A small stage and what must be one of the finest sound systems in the city.  It's all about the music.  I made some Parisian style ham & camembert baguettes to bring along with a bottle of wine.  The candles on the table made it feel like a chic underground cafe.   How could there be a better way to end a busy week?

So when will we get back?  No promises.  We're coming up against a hectic travel schedule.  We've got all that other stuff to juggle.  But surely, surely, we can be smart enough to find a few hours here and there to bask in the music and Moonlight?

 

Sidewalk Films: Tell Me What's Real

For two people whose first marriages imploded rather messily, hitting the fifteen year mark felt like a real milestone.  It made us happy.

We generally celebrate our anniversary at least twice -- once at the Welcome Reception of the annual MCMLA conference, whenever that happens to be, and once on the actual date.  (In the fifteen years since we got married at that reception, I don't recall that the two dates have ever exactly coincided.)  Given our typical fall travel schedule, as often as not we'll be out of town on the calendar date.  But Lynn always has our wedding champagne flutes in their travel case and we always have a fine time.

This year, the calendar angels were working in our favor.    We were in town, and the annual Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival was scheduled for the same weekend.  One other year we managed to get down for a day of the festival, but this was the first time we'd be able to go to the whole thing.  So I booked us into the Tutwiler Hotel and we made a celebration of it.

The venues for the films are all within easy walking distance of each other, so with a little ingenuity and careful scheduling, you can get to quite a few.  And we did.  We only saw one that we thought was pretty awful -- I won't mention it by name (bless it's heart).   We saw a couple that were stunning -- Marwencol was clearly a highpoint for me.  Lynn saw Mars without me and told me that I'd love it.  We were both touched and delighted by The Happy Poet.  There were others that were quite fine.

But for pure fun and silliness, the favorite was Americatown.  It's fast, it's funny, it's shot on location all across the country, and it's got just enough of a touch of seriousness to leaven all of that silliness.   It was joy to watch.

As someone who actually knows very little about film, one of my favorite things about the festival is that there is almost always someone associated with the film attending, and they'll do a bit of Q&A with the audience after the screening.  I learned quite a bit from those.  My very favorite Q&A moment, though, came after Americatown.   Cory Howard, who plays Roosevelt Microsoft, took a question from a very young movie fan.  The exchange went like this:

 

Very young kid (6?7?):  All those places that you went – was that all real or was it fake?

CH: Yeah, it was all real, man.  Yeah, we went to all of those places…

VYK:  But that… when you fell through that trap door in the sand….?

CH: (looks stricken)  Oh, man!    You’re so young….  I hate to do this…  (covers eyes briefly with forearm)  But that…  Well – look – you’re going to see a lot of movies from here on out, and I’ve got to be honest…  It’s ALL fake.  But there’s lots of real stuff out there, too!  You gotta get into that – there’s the trees & hills…  and, um, there’s Santa Claus…  and there’s, oh yeah, there’s insects, man!  Get into insects, they are so amazing!

VYK: (inaudible)

CH:  What’s that?  (puts hand to ear)

VYK:  There’s SpongeBob!

CH:  Yeah!  There’s SpongeBob!  He’s real.  He’s hard to find, down there on the bottom of the ocean, though.  But yeah….

 

Reality is where you find it.  We found quite a bit of it in downtown Birmingham that weekend.

 

I Didn't Have Lemons

As I was getting my stuff out of the trunk I didn't have the grasp on my Publix grocery bag that I thought I did and it dropped to the driveway.  A pretty impressive "Crunch".  The eggs had been carefully packed at the bottom.  I'd been so pleased with the way the young woman at checkout had done that.

Sure enough.  Only one of the twelve was still whole.

No matter.  I hadn't decided what to have for lunch anyway.  I managed to get most of the remaining eleven eggs into a mixing bowl, with a minimum of bits of shell.  Lynn beat them lightly and took out the equivalent of two or three for her baking needs later this afternoon.  I went to my study to have a bloody mary and read the paper while the eggs came up to room temperature.

I suppose I ended up with the equivalent of six or seven eggs.  I fried three pieces of bacon, crisp.  There were three scallions in the bottom vegetable drawer, so I peeled off the decaying leaves and chopped the rest.  I'd picked up a basket of mixed hot peppers at the farmer's market, so I selected a long, pretty, thin red one and halved it lengthwise, scooped out about half the seeds and sliced it thin.

When the bacon was done, I put the slices on a paper towel and put the scallion & pepper into the bacon fat to cook for about a minute and a half -- just long enough for their scents to fill the kitchen and to hear them sizzle.  At least half the pleasure of cooking is the scents & sounds.

I poured a bit of milk into the eggs and then grated in maybe a quarter to a half cup of parmigiano-reggiano and beat that fairly well.  A bit of salt & pepper.  Then stirred in the crumbled bacon and the scallion/pepper mix.  I added a tablespoon or two of butter to the fat remaining in the skillet and put it on medium heat, and then poured the egg mixture in.  While it started to cook, I took one of the small tomatoes from the farmer's market and sliced that thin.  When the frittata was about half set, I placed the rounds of tomato on the top, pushing them in slightly so that the tops of the tomato slices were even with the top of the egg stuff.  A slight grate of pepper on top of each tomato slice and then one more light dusting of grated cheese.

(Should I mention at this point that I'm making it all up as I go along?  It's jazz.  You get the feel and you just kinda know what ought to work next.  Usually, it does).

Kept that cooking until there was just a little pool of uncooked eggs in the center (you test it by jiggling the pan every now and then and seeing what the egg does).  In the meantime, I had the oven broiler going.  I moved the pan into the oven, under the broiler, checking it every fifteen seconds or so until it was beautifully browned.  It just takes a minute or two.  Took it out and slid it onto one of those fine little platters that Lynn made forty years ago, that we still use regularly.

"Fresh herbs?" says Lynn. 

"Yeah, I was thinking about that, but if we're gonna do it, we need 'em quick." 

She went flying out the door, came back with a stalk of basil and a bunch of oregano.  "You do the basil, I'll chop the oregano."  We scattered the herbs half on half and let them sit for a minute or two so the heat from the frittata would wilt them, ever so slightly.

Yes, it was fabulous.  Yes, I know that the thing to do would've been to take a picture and post it here.  That's what people do nowadays, don't they?  I'm just not that into the picture taking thing.

Trust me.  It was gorgeous.

Andy & Marcel

By the time I met Andy Warhol the person had been so overshadowed by the persona that it was tough to remember what a shatteringly great artist he actually was.  This was 1984, and the Brillo Boxes, the Campbell's soup cans, the silk screened Jackie O's had long since become part of the backdrop of popular culture.  He was a cultural figure, but did anybody really think of him as an artist still capable of great work?  It seemed impossible to disentangle his influence from his celebrity.  (It occurs to me that this was also the time when Bob Dylan was considered a washed up hasbeen, respected for having done a few great albums twenty years earlier, but no longer capable of doing anything significant.)

The Warhol museum is a great corrective to this benighted view.  My visit there ten years ago was one of those world shifting art experiences that I've never quite gotten over (like the Whistler Retrospective at NGA in the mid-eighties, or seeing Ellis & Branford Marsalis together at Blues Alley in '96).   Going again was the one thing I was determined not to miss on last week's trip to Pittsburgh.

The current exhibit, "Twisted Pair", twines Warhol's work with that of Marcel Duchamp.  An inspired coupling, and the curators clearly had a lot of fun putting it together.  From the faces of some of the folks in the museum, they've clearly not lost their capacity to shock.  But mostly what's revealed from seeing so much of their work together -- some of it very familiar to me and some of it very new -- is how they shared a deep sense of joy in the world, wonder and respect for its mystery.  Neither would flinch from the harsh uglinesses of life, but they combat the darkness with a wicked, tender sense of humor. 

It appears that they may have met twice -- Duchamp, no longer active as an artist (practically no one knew that he was still working on the astonishing Etant donnes), but some sort of godlike figure to the younger generations; Andy coming into his own as the enfant terrible of pop art, but very much a fanboy when it came to the Frenchman.  Duchamp's few recorded remarks on Warhol's work are glowing and generous. 

Fittingly, the exhibition "catalog" is a tabloid newspaper.  They would have loved being in this show together.

On the way to the museum, I walked along the river, after crossing the Fort Duquesne bridge, then curved around PNC park, where people were just starting to get to the ticket windows for the Pirates' game that night against Houston (they lost that one, but won the next two).  City workers were starting to unload the barricades to block off sections of the street, and the beer trucks were unloading at Firewater's and Mullen's Bar & Grill where the faithful would be gathering after the game.  I walked another block past Finnigan's Wake, and one more to The Warhol.   I don't know the story of how the museum came to be in that location, but I'm sure Andy would've approved.

The Klosterman Question

Great.  Just what I need.  Another indispensable writer.

I've been vaguely aware of Chuck Klosterman for some time -- have read, I suppose, the occasional essay or article.  A couple of weeks ago I read a review of Eating the Dinosaur -- it's just come out in paperback.  I was intrigued, but I'm trying to avoid buying new books until the stack next to my chair is whittled down to something slightly shorter than JoBug.

But I underestimated what I needed to bring to read for the flight to Pittsburgh.    By the time I got to Atlanta I was almost through the David Sedaris book that was supposed to last me the entire flight.  So I ducked into a Buckhead Books and scanned the new arrivals rack and there was Eating the Dinosaur.  I guess it was meant to be.

He's funny, but he's not a humorist.  He just has a funny way of looking at the world.  But he looks very deeply and uses his writing to try to figure out what he's seeing.  Why do interviews work?  Why does the notion of time travel make him feel so uncomfortable?   What does the Kurt Cobain's response to his rock stardom tell us about rock stardom in general?  What does Cobain's sanity, or lack thereof, tell us about our own?

In the essay about time travel he says,

Here's a question I like to ask people when I'm 5/8 drunk:  Let's say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past.  You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen year old version of you.  However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking a lot about my mid-teen years lately. 

Implicit in the question is the notion that you'd use those 15 seconds to somehow correct something based on the knowledge you now have.  Klosterman says the results tend to split between gender lines -- women "advise themselves not to do something they now regret..., while men almost always instruct themselves to do something they failed to attempt..."

I can't think of a thing.

It's certainly not that I don't have regrets.  The piles grow daily, I'm afraid.  There's the big ones -- I deeply regret the pain that I caused my first wife when I decided to leave that marriage.  Despite knowing that it was the right thing to do, I'll never get over it.  

And there are thousands of little regrets.  In Toronto a couple of years ago, I ended up at The Rex one afternoon.  It was a benefit show for an Asperger's foundation, and a young man with Asperger's spoke briefly about how important the organization was to him.   He spoke movingly and as he walked past me I placed my hand on his shoulder in what I intended to be a gesture of support.  He didn't flinch, but it was an incredibly dumb thing of me to do and my face gets warm whenever that memory floats by -- which it does uncomfortably often.

And why didn't I help those two young women struggling to pull their cart full of office supplies up the curb as I was headed out to lunch this afternoon?

But what could I tell that fifteen year old self that would, ultimately, have improved my life or enabled me to cause less pain to those around me?  I can't think of a thing.

Klosterman pushes you like that.  And I know he's going to talk me into buying more records.

Pigs Fly

There's only scattered clouds as our plane soars over the Appalachians.    We can look down between the fluff to see the mountain contours.  Twenty-seven years ago I marveled at the same sight as I flew back to Wisconsin from my associates interview at NLM.  I can no longer count the number of times I've made this flight, but there's still magic to it.

I've got Tom Petty on the headphones, reminding me that there are so many songs the Bearded Pigs need to learn for next year!    The Nucleus did a fine job on Sunday night with American Girl, but I think it'd be better with the full band.    And I've been working up a solo version of Won't Back Down that'll sound great filled out....  

And we need to work up a Lady Gaga song or two, based on the twitter & blog chatter from late Sunday.  Tambourine Grrl is recommending Just Dance....   Maybe Beautiful, Dirty, Rich?  Requests, anyone?

And, of course, some Prince since we'll be in Minneapolis...  Let's Go Crazy seems like an obvious choice...  And I've always been partial to Little Red Corvette...

Too many songs...  not enough time...

We didn't come close to playing everything we wanted to on Sunday night.  How does three hours go by so fast?

But it was good.  I didn't feel like the band really caught fire until two or three songs into the second set.  First set was okay, but we weren't quite in the groove.  Not surprising, I suppose, since we hadn't all been on the same stage together in two years.  But it came together, as it always does, and the last 40 minutes was quite right where I wanted things to be.

And here comes my glass of wine...  Time to sit back, listen to the Heartbreakers...  I wonder what comes next?

It May As Well Be On the Front Page of the NYT

There was an article in the Times the other day on the number of clicks it would take to make all of one's personal information on Facebook private.  "To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options."   And I'm reading it thinking, But if you want all of that information to be that private, what in the world are you doing on Facebook in the first place?

Lynn, who is very strict about her privacy, has no trouble at all with the Facebook policies.  She doesn't have a Facebook account and, as far as I can tell, has no intentions of getting one.   Problem solved.

A few years ago, I was sitting next to someone at a conference dinner and we got to talking about my blog.  I'd never met her, but she'd been following the blog for some time and asked me, "How does it feel to be revealing all of that personal information for anybody to read?"  I said, "Oh, there is so much more in my life that never gets on the blog.  I'm not revealing very much at all."  My rule of thumb for two decades now has been that you never put anything out into the internet that you're not willing to see on the front page of the New York Times.

I've been trying to decide if I should get a smartphone.   I sort of feel a professional responsibility.  All of the trend pronouncements claim that mobile devices are where it's at and that's what we have to be paying attention to.  But I was in Chicago the other day, standing at a street corner during the evening rush hour.  A bus pulled up in front of me and when I looked in, every single person was looking down into their little screen, thumbs flailing away.  I was watching the rain mist off the tops of the skyscrapers as they pushed up into the low clouds.  I decided I just don't want to be that connected.

I do understand that people feel as if Facebook has pulled a bait and switch.  They believe that they were led to believe that they would have more control over who gets to see their information than they now do -- or at least than they now do unless they go through those 50 buttons and 170 options.  The level of outrage is high.  But seriously, I think it's misplaced.  The whole point of Facebook was to build an application that enabled personal information to be shared with people that you don't know!  So it makes sense to me that the default would be sharing and that you, as the user, would have to do something extra to prevent sharing.   Being outraged that Facebook is developing new ways to share information without asking you first seems to me to be the antithesis of what Facebook is designed to do.

Marian knows someone who was outraged when she discovered that people that she didn't know were reading her blog.  "That's just for my family and friends," she snapped.  I could only shake my head in wonderment.

There is no guarantee of privacy on the internet.  Never has been.   If Facebook is important to you (as it certainly is to many people) then you're faced with making a number of compromises.  Facebook provides tools that give you some control over those compromises.  That's the best you're going to get.