Reading in 2011

I can see that in retirement this blog is turning into a reading journal, which is fine. Reading has always been my main vocation. Now two of my favorite pastimes are reading and playing my guitars. However, of late, guitar playing seems to have plateaued. I probably need the stimulation of playing with friends to get me moving in a more ambitious direction. In relative isolation I think I've only learned two new pieces on my classical guitar this year, although I have several in various stages of "perfection," which for me means simply being able to play them all the way through without stumbling too much over the notes. I practice regularly, but not with sufficient dedication to see significant improvement. Perhaps in the new year I will do better.

But as for my reading program, there I have been able to gain some traction recently on books from the early 20th century. It has long been established that the first world war changed everything, especially for the European countries most engaged in the fighting. It took most of the rest of the century to come to terms with some of those changes. In England the generation that came of age just after the war was much affected by the trauma of the war. Martin Green, in Children of the Sun, suggests that the result for the educated classes was a flight from maturity into aestheticism and decadence. At the moment, that is where my reading is focused. I'm still working my way through Green's study, but also reading Huxley, and looking forward to Waugh, Orwell, and others, having just completed Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.

But in addition to this continuing fascination with 20th-century writing, I've also found time to read some more recent work: Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. And a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Curt Stager's Deep Future at the Alexandria library and enjoyed learning more about the long view of global warming. A little earlier in the year I got myself distracted by another library book, Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's Letters, a book I had been curious about after reading several reviews. Bellow got me interested in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, and earlier I had read Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness, books in my own collection I had been meaning to read but needed some impetus to push me in their direction.

The book that refocused my attention on the early 20th century was Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I had intended to read that one last year when I read McMurtry's memoirs, but for some reason got distracted by other things. McMurtry mentioned Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise and Graves's Good-Bye to All That, both books I'd long meant to read but hadn't yet got around to. In fact, I'd also been reminded of Cyril Connolly earlier in the year when I was reading William Boyd's Nat Tate and Any Human Heart. Boyd's Logan Mountstuart, had he actually existed, would surely have known Connolly and others in his circle, including Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming, who does make an appearance in Any Human Heart.

Two books I read this year have a rather peculiar relationship to my 20th-century project. One, Harold Nicolson's Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, was a sort of continuation of an earlier fascination with English gentlemen. A friend had lent me the book a couple of years ago, when I was reading Anthony Powell and Noel Annan's The Don's and David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.  I suppose those were the first signs of my lastest fixation on this period. Realizing I should return the book to its owner, I quickly finished reading it. Then later in the year I returned to Nicolson when I  decided to do some background reading on Harold and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, two prominent members of my group of authors; and so I read their son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage.

But while much of my reading has lately been focused on this single obsession with a rather small group of English authors of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, I began my year, following an earlier concentration on biographies and memoirs, with Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions, and Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life. After finishing the latter, I went back and re-read Salinger's Nine Stories, having realized their significant relationship to his war experiences as well as their importance for his apprenticeship as an author.

The only other book I recall reading this year, which would make nineteen if I counted correctly, doesn't seem to fit in any specific category. Just before I retired I picked up a reference somewhere to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and realizing that this was one of those major gaps in my life reading list, I decided to sit down and read it then and there. It turned out I really enjoyed the book, the plot was entertaining, if ridiculous, and the characters were engaging. I gained new respect for Goethe and determined that I should read more, only to discover that The Sorrows of Young Werther were not much to my liking.

And so Johann Wolfgang Goethe will have to remain on the shelf a little longer, while I continue to explore the writing of early 20th-century Britain. Next up is Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, a book I started earlier this week, to be followed by a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, both of which I last read when I was an undergraduate. I fear I was too young and inexperienced then to appreciate such brittle humor and satire, so I'm looking forward to reading them again in the context of Huxley, Connolly, Powell, and all the rest of that little group that left such a big imprint on British literary culture. I may even return to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, realizing now that the character of Fleming's hero very likely owes much to a group of rogues and dandies he knew in public school. Perhaps that is why I always thought Roger Moore, with his combination of wit, charm, and rakish humor, captured more of Bond than any of the other actors who attempted the role. But these are thoughts for another year and perhaps a different sort of reading obsession.

Boxing Days: Summing Up

This year Boxing Day was a genuine holiday in the U.S., but only because Christmas Day was on a Sunday, so Monday was officially a holiday for all federal workers and others who would normally have a Christmas holiday. Many others, I presume, were at work as usual, although I noticed while I was out walking last Monday that the crews working on our condo's massive water sealing project had the day off. Good for them.

Boxing Day is one of those British traditions that supposedly goes back to the time when folks with servants gave them a box of gifts on the day following Christmas. This grew to a tradition of giving to the needy that was eventually established as an official bank holiday. As soon as I discovered its existence, I declared it one of my own personal holidays as well. Back when I was employed, I was a great fan of holidays, and claimed all that I could. In time, as I built up my leave, I began a personal tradition of taking a long Christmas break, usually at least two weeks, extending from the week prior to Christmas through New Year's day and the day after, which is my birthday, a sort of personal boxing day.

As I think I have mentioned on other occasions, I have a number of personal traditions associated not only with the Christmas holiday season but with the coming of a new year and also my birthday, since that always follows the beginning of a new year. I usually mark the occasion of this new beginning by sitting down and filling in all the information in my new Letts Diary. It perhaps strikes some of those who know me and my penchant for electronic gadgets that this devotion to Letts Diaries is somewhat anachronistic. And, of course, it is. But having established the personal tradition of keeping all my important reference points and schedule in one of these little pocket diaries, I've become reliant on them as a resource and superstitious about abandoning the practice. Besides they are really neat, as well as handy, and filled with useful facts and points of reference, including this year a tiny atlas.

My other New Year/Birthday tradition is to buy myself a bottle of Single Malt scotch whisky. Over the years I've sampled quite a wide variety (yes, I'm old), but generally I prefer those distilled on Islay, for their peaty aroma and flavor. In fact, my everyday scotch is a single malt from Islay, McClellands, which I drink in honor of my birth name. I've finally found something the McClellands can be proud of. But while I like McClellands (the whisky), I recognize that it isn't a superior scotch, like Laphroaig or Ardbeg. This year I'm thinking of getting some Lagavulin, if I can find it (and afford it).

Next year will be the first full year of my retirement, and I have great plans, but then I had plans for this year as well, and it turned out to be mainly learning how to cope. Now, however, I think I'm getting the hang of it. My principle rule in retirement (as it has been in life) is to go with the flow. Make plans, but stay flexible. The Rolling Stones used to say "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." I've revised that just a bit. My personal motto is: "want what you get" and "reason not the need."

And so as 2011 fades to memory and 2012 looms before me, I'm set to embrace my future and make the most of it, whatever it is. Of course, wanting what you get may prove to be a hard principle to follow once the presidential elections are over, but that's a misery to face in 2013. And after all, I am retired now, and I understand a lot of expats enjoy life in Mexico, even with all the drug wars raging down there. Hey, I've lived more than 25 years in proximity to Washington, DC; how bad can it be?

Calm of Mind, All Fashion Spent

I've never been accused of following fashion, especially in the way I dress. My approach has always been to blend in as much as possible while remaining comfortable. This probably began when I was a child. My mother used to make most of my shirts. She would have made the pants too, but they were a little beyond her skill level. It wasn't that she couldn't sew well. She actually did a pretty good job, but my Mom was thrifty. She liked to economize both on fabric and patterns. She got the most out of every piece of material, and she used one pattern for all three of her sons, who ranged in age and size considerably. She bought one pattern and then scaled it up, not always successfully. The result was that my shirts received many comments from the other kids, things like, "Where'd you get that shirt?" and "Wow, did your mother make that?" It wasn't that the shirts were strange, although the fabrics and colorful prints could be rather more exotic than store-bought merchandise. Her triumphs were the "cowboy" shirts, with fancy yokes and pearlescent snaps in place of buttons.

By the time I went to high school, however, Mom was scaling back as a seamstress. By then she had returned to the world of work, and with more money and less time she let us buy more of our school clothes at Sears and Penney's. As soon as I began selecting my own wardrobe, I put my personal theory of fashion to work and began choosing the most ordinary and conservative patterns. My plan was to blend in to such an extent that I would become invisible so far as fashion statements were concerned. I'm not sure I ever achieved this goal, but the number of comments on my clothing went way down, and by the time I went off to college I had reduced my personal wardrobe to Levi's (denim and corduroy), t-shirts, cotton dress shirts in pale colors, and a few sport coats. I think I also had a couple of very conservative suits which I seldom found occasion to wear.

By then we were in the sixties. The counter-cultural fashion revolution was getting into full swing. Young people, even the men, were making fashion statements by growing their hair long and wearing what often seemed to be costumes in outrageous colors and patterns. For me the long hair presented no problem; I hated getting hair cuts then as now. But my nod to hippie fashion went no further than tie-dyed t'shirts, denim cut-offs, and buffalo hide sandals. For formal wear I chose denim work shirts and a corduroy sport coat. I also began a personal custom, which continued for years, of having one special party shirt, usually somewhat bolder in color and style, but never really outrageous, nothing you couldn't wear to class or work without comment. Only my wife knew that this was a special shirt, because I always wore it when we went out to parties and concerts. I kept each shirt for years, eventually replacing it (only when it became threadbare) with a newer one of slightly different color and pattern. My favorite was a very nice Yves Saint Laurent long-sleeve dress shirt that was dark blue and light purple checks so tiny that from a distant it appeared to be a solid color.

When I got my first teaching job, teaching high school Latin, I had to come up with appropriate clothing. I settled on chinos, long-sleeve cotton dress shirts, mostly button-down white and beige and blue, some stripes, and a few sport coats (tweed and corduroy). And when I returned to graduate school and college teaching, I adopted the common uniform: Levi's, work shirts, knit ties, and a corduroy sport coat. This wardrobe served me well until I got my first job as a college professor, and even then my personal fashion altered very little and only gradually. But one of my colleagues, who became a sort of mentor and father figure for me, began to influence my sense of fashion as a function of personality. He was a flashy dresser, much more so than any of the other professors, and he definitely dressed to impress.

He loved it when someone commented on his clothes, and he enjoyed discussing his fashion choices with the others in the department. Soon he had convinced his younger colleagues that we should accompany him on his buying expeditions to the local men's store during their semi-annual sales. Watching him examine and select his purchases was a revelation to me. He looked for bargains, which I understood, but also for flash, which I could never do. But the most important lesson he taught me was to look for quality of materials and construction. Up to then I had always bought the cheapest clothing I could find, with the single exception of Levi's, which I have worn faithfully to this day (but more of that later). But now I began to see the wisdom of purchasing quality, which would wear well for many years. And so I began to branch out from chinos to wool trousers, gaberdines and twills. I began to purchase quality dress shirts, and silk ties. I even added some items in leather and linen and silk. But above all I discovered Johnston & Murphy shoes.

I have narrow feet, and cheap shoes never come in narrow sizes, so to get something that fits I had always bought my shoes too short. This resulted in some deformity to my toes and shoes that tended to wear out rather quickly. Now I found that higher quality shoes, although initially more expensive, were made of better materials, wore better, were more comfortable, and lasted much longer. In fact, I still have several pairs of Johnston & Murphy shoes in excellent condition that I bought more than twenty years ago, although I rarely wear them any more, having discovered Clarks and Rockports and the superior comfort of Merrell walking shoes. But for a time Johnston & Murphy was all I desired.

When I left teaching for government work, I came equipped with a decent academic wardrobe, which was suitable for the agency I worked in, populated as it was primarily with former academics. But I arrived in Washington near the end of the "dress for success" fad, and within a few months I sought out the local men's stores and began purchasing more typical bureaucratic clothing. The first couple of years I bought several nice designer suits -- nothing flashy, all various shades of gray, tasteful and stylish without being too conspicuous. For summer I acquired more silks and linens (influenced, I suspect, by my wife's fascination with Sonny Crockett and Miami Vice.) I also acquired a really good light-weight wool navy blue blazer. As my shirts required replacement, I relied on Joseph A. Banks and Brooks Brothers, still choosing mostly cotton button-downs, either white or conservative stripes and plaids in assorted shades of blue, with a selection of silk ties to add a touch of personality. I also invested a small fortune in a genuine Aquascutum trench coat, to set myself apart from all those wearing Burberrys. Within a little more than two years I achieved the pinacle of my success. I was an Assistant Director, and I dressed the part. I looked just like all the other federal bureaucrats riding into DC on the Metro.

Then came Newt's infamous contract on American government workers, followed by my agency's downsizing and all the attendant misery. It was soon apparent to me that no amount of dressing up was going to bring any further success, and I reverted to my former self. My new government uniform became khaki cotton Dockers and Brooks Brothers shirts (still liked those). My footwear, as I mentioned above, became Clarks or Rockport walking shoes. I got rid of my suits and brought a single sport coat and a few ties to keep in the office for those occasions where something more formal was expected -- meetings with the chairman or members of the public who expected to see bureaucrats in coats and ties. Before long I found that my new fashion statement was becoming infectious, or was I once again just following the latest trend in government attire? Ties were disappearing; Columbia and North Face and REI were replacing Brooks Brothers and Burberry. By the time I retired it seemed that casual Friday had invaded every other day of the week.

Well, now in retirement, I no longer dress for success or anything else. I dress for comfort. And I've settled on a uniform that resembles what I wore as a student. I find that I seldom go anywhere that requires me to wear anything other than my standard garb of Levi's (I prefer the original 501's), a black pocket t-shirt (short-sleeve in summer, long-sleeve in winter), a plaid cotton shirt (short-sleeve in summer, long-sleeve in winter), and Merrell walking shoes. In cold weather I wear my North Face or Columbia parka with appropriate fleece liner, depending on the temperature. At the fitness center I'm the man in black: black shorts, black jammers, black t-shirts, black sweats. I find that I still blend in pretty well with all the other retired geezers. And it sure cuts down on buying new clothes. Of course, I still have a closet full of clothes I no longer wear: wool trousers, cotton Dockers, Brooks Brothers dress shirts, tweed sport coats and a nice navy blue blazer, not to mention that classic Aquascutum trench coat. I'm saving them in case I need them later. With changes in fashion, you just never know.

"Publishing" in the Electronic Digital Void

As an online author, I have been guided, for better or worse, by two somewhat contradictory notions of publication. One is derived from a French critic I used to read and admire quite a lot, Roland Barthes, who once suggested that we write for the pleasure of reading ourselves. And I would have to agree that one of my early pleasures as a young writer was seeing something I'd written published. In print it gathered more ontological and existential weight than in mere typescript. But while this satisfaction was genuine, it was always rather short-lived. Despite the appearance of permanence, it became increasingly obvious to me that nothing I had published was destined to last, except in the accidental ways that old literary journals continue to exist in the moldering stacks of various library collections. The other notion of publication I've lately been drawn to comes from one of my all time favorite authors: J.D. Salinger. At some point publication became so fraught and painful to him that he simply ceased publishing his work. And yet we are told he continued to write, one must presume primarily for his own pleasure in continuing to read what he had written.

Now I have discovered a sort of magical electronic compromise for myself. Thanks to Google's Blogger I am able to write (and publish) just as my own personal whims and passing fascinations might dictate, without having to concern myself with the desires and directives of publishers or even of other readers. And while it is true that sometimes someone may happen to stumble onto something I've posted here, that is not really the point. The point for me is simply the pleasure of the text, the momentary and ephemeral delight derived from writing and reading what one has written. Is this really any different from the rather less than satisfactory print publication of my previous efforts? I would have to say that for me it is. Here my imagination can range over whatever topics interest me. I put them up for myself to satisfy that fleeting interest. I can return to them whenever I please, knowing they will be around, at least for a while, so long as Google keeps faith with all of us bloggers. But if they should disappear, as I suspect eventually they must, little will actually be lost. I've had my fun (and so have you). The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence, or in our case the vast and looming digital void.

Of course, there's also the possibility that this stuff could linger for years, even after I'm gone, another ghost blog for web surfers to stumble on and wonder at, like so many others whose creators have forgotten to delete them or make provisions for the disposal of their digital property. And that too has its appeal. In the end it's no different from any other form of publication. Only the accidents of time will determine what lasts and for how long. And, after all, nothing is forever, not even diamonds (unless you want to count American presidential elections, which don't last forever either but only seem to because as soon as one ends another one begins). So with that I say, "go little blog," and if you run into Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde out there, say hello.

The Great War and English Literary Culture

It's probably the approaching centennial, but something seems once again to be focusing cultural attention on World War I. My own recent interest, I suspect, has something to do with looking backward, which I seem to be doing more of these days. As I have already mentioned in previous comments about my current reading program, I have developed a rather serious fascination with the first half of the 20th century. The more I consider it, the more I think of it as an important formative era for those of us born in the 1940s. After World War II the world changed, perhaps unalterably, and we with it. As we have moved steadily away from that earlier era, we have lost touch with what it must have been like to live in that time. Lately, I have been trying to recover for myself some sense of British and American life as it was experienced in the years just prior to and after World War I, and then continuing through what was in many ways a long sequel leading to the conclusion that was World War II.

I started this most recent reading program with Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Connolly was part of a generation that came of age after the first world war, but in Enemies of Promise he sums up much of the literary culture prior to the war and just after. He was writing just prior to the beginning of the second world war, publishing his book in 1938, but with a keen critical eye on the impact of the Great War on his own generation of authors and critics. There is a certain amount of gloom and cynicism that hangs over Connolly's assessment of literary culture in England, and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent in America. Connolly mentions Hemingway's influence, as well as the importance of Edmund Wilson's critical judgments, especially in Axel's Castle. But although he acknowledges a larger context, Connolly's perspective is British, not American or continental. But in some ways what is most important about Enemies of Promise is Connolly's account of the impact of an English public school education on himself and his contemporaries, in his own case his years at Eton.

Next I read one of the most important books that came out of World War I, mentioned by Connolly (and others): Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That. Graves published his memoir in 1929, just prior to leaving England and his family to live abroad in Majorca with Laura Riding. The book is one of the best accounts of life in the trenches, but it is much more than that, covering Graves's youth, education (another public school, Charterhouse), and later efforts to establish himself as a poet and author. Graves knew many of the key literary figures in England and was early identified with the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. And when he went to Oxford after the war he became close friends with T.E. Lawrence and rented a cottage from John Masefield. But despite a wide circle of literary friends and acquaintances, Graves remained pretty much a party of one. Even his association with the other war poets was fleeting. For that reason he offers a useful perspective on literary life during that period; he offers a fresh perspective on English literary culture in the twenties, and does a good job of showing the influence of the war on English letters.

For still another view of this same period I turned to Nigel Nicolson's reflections on his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, in Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson gives a very different version of the same period, just prior to and after World War I. The book offers alternating chapters of Vita's autobiography and a son's additions, clarifications, and further reflections on his parents' rather unusual union. While Harold Nicolson was never involved in the fighting, he was instrumental in diplomacy both during and (especially) after the war. Vita, on the other hand, was almost completely oblivious, not only to the fighting, but to her husband's role as diplomat and negotiator, seeing both the war and his service primarily as an inconvenience to her travel preferences, especially on the continent. While the book concentrates most of our attention on Vita's love affairs with Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Trefusis and her later infatuation with Virginia Woolf. Nigel Nicolson nevertheless succeeds in pointing out that while he was contending, sometimes daily, with his wife's indulgences and indiscretions, Harold Nicolson was also seriously engaged in diplomatic missions and negotiations related to the armistice and founding of the League of Nations following the war. (Harold Nicolson's pubic school was Wellington; he sent his sons to Eton.)

After completing these more or less first person accounts of my subject, I've taken a bit of a detour to read Martin Green's Children of the Sun. Green is interested in the same period that interests me, roughly from the 1890s through the mid 1950s, but with a concentrated focus on the generations that came of age between the two world wars. His own take on the literary and artistic culture of that time is somewhat narrowly focused on the impact of the dandies and aesthetes, especially on the two figures of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and their influence on English culture and society. Along the way he discusses a diverse selection of writers, artists, and socially prominent figures of that era, including many American and continental personalities. Thus he sketches the influence of Henry James and Diaghilev, as well as the fascination in all of the arts during this period with comedia dell'arte. Most importantly, from my point of view, Green demonstrates the effects of the Great War and of the importance of the English public schools for the writers and artists of that era.

However, while I enjoy reading critical interpretations, I'm more concerned to look at the works themselves. So I've decided to look next at some of the autobiographical works of George Orwell, a writer that Green was also much interested in before he turned his attention to the aesthetes and dandies.

More to follow.

Sense of an Ending

As I have remarked previously, I seldom read current or contemporary fiction. I'm not sure why this is, except that I have only a limited amount of time and attention, and such as I have I seem to have given over to a fairly serious study of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. But from time to time something will catch my attention, e.g., William Boyd's Any Human Heart and Nat Tate, and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Recently, my attention was grabbed by reviews of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. I remembered really enjoying Flaubert's Parrot, which was the first of his novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, but that was some time ago, and I haven't been very faithful since. Still, the reviews made me want to try this one, and at just a little over 160 pages, I figured I could get it in without really interrupting my regular reading program.

I'm glad I did. It's a very entertaining little book. There's much more to it than one might expect from such a relatively short work. Barnes is a masterful writer. By that I mean he knows how to make all the elements of the book work well together so that the reader is both entertained and engaged. This is one that deserves a prize, and also deserves to be studied by younger would-be authors who want to discover some of the secrets of good fiction writing. The book is divided into two unequal parts. The first part, which is only about 60 pages, could stand alone as a complete work of short fiction. But in this case it also serves as the set up for the second part of the story, which complicates and deepens our understanding of the book's small but very well-drawn cast of characters.

In the first part, apparently a rather typical coming of age story narrated by Tony Webster, we learn about a group of male friends of varying degrees of sensitivity as they move from school to young adulthood. One friend, the newcomer Adrian Finn, is a focal point for the group, and especially for Tony. Adrian is popular with his friends as well as his teachers, in spite of or because of his brilliance and sensitivity and penetrating wit. But later, when Tony discovers that Adrian has been seeing his former girl friend, a girl Tony has already chosen to break with, he feels a sense of betrayal and lashes out at both. More complications follow, but as this first section of the book comes to an end, we learn that Tony has now married, had a daughter, divorced, retired to a settled existence, and become one of the many who live into their mature years, "neither victorious nor defeated," as he puts it.

Or so he thinks, until he gets a mysterious letter from a solicitor with an unexpected bequest that turns his world completely upside down and gives Barnes the opportunity to show what marvelous things can be accomplished by means of the well-known trick of the unreliable narrator. The final two thirds of this little book are masterfully written. I could not put the book down until I had finished, and even then I wanted to go back over what I had read to test my own understanding of what has transpired. What I found particularly engaging was the way that Barnes drew me into Tony's view of the world. He truly is a modern everyman, who exhibits such a clear view of his own life and his place in the current world order that I found myself again and again agreeing with his judgments.

I can't imagine how someone younger might respond to this little book. But I was thoroughly absorbed and taken in by it. It's one of those stories that will stay with you, and I bet it would be a great one for a book club, especially of sixty somethings who want to take on a story about how it feels to be one of us just now. By the end of the second part Tony Webster, who was so self-satisfied at the conclusion of part one, is now observing: "There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest." It's a good book.

Science and Religion, or Why I Still Like Christmas

I'm a great follower of science programs on television: programs like Nova, especially those about the cosmos and the universe, and life on earth. I'm no longer much of a church goer, and I give little thought to religion in any but the most general sense, but I'm still interested in those big questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What's the meaning of life? I haven't a clue so far as answering any of those, but I'm entertained by television programs that purport to bring me up to date on the latest theories. In some respects, for me science has picked up just about where religion left off.

Of course, if someone were to ask me what I believe, I would have to admit I don't really know. It seems to me unlikely that human beings will ever really figure anything out. Just about the time we think we have an answer, someone comes along with another theory, all involving invisible particles and vast unknowable forces and dimensions. On the other hand, it's a good bet we will never give up trying. That's why we like to refer to ourselves as homo sapiens, wise or knowing man. The evidence is we aren't really all that wise, and most of us don't know squat, but that has never stopped us from making claims to knowledge, and being willing to back up our beliefs with lethal force, ever since we started lording it over the poor old Neanderthals and all the rest of creation.

When you think about it, science is really just an extension of religion, especially when it comes to these big questions. Each cult of believers always seems confident in its own explanation of the origins and meaning of life. That's what has made me a skeptic, I guess. Each group is always absolutely confident that they've finally got a line on the truth, but no explanation seems to endure. Now instead of high priests and theologians giving us insight, we have physicists and astronomers. I'm just not persuaded that string theory, dark matter, and black holes are any more reassuring or convincing than that bunch of libidinous Olympians Homer imagined pulling strings and stirring up trouble for his Greeks and Trojans.

But, I'm told, the truth is out there. (Or was that just Fox Mulder whistling in the dark?) And it's our job as humans to go looking for it. I'm not so sure. The older I get the more I find I'm content to be ignorant, muddled, and mystified -- or should that be bewitched, bothered and bewildered? Anyway, I can still remember my first existential disillusionment. Maybe this is true for everyone my age or thereabouts. (Spoiler alert!) It was when I tumbled to the fact that Santa just might not be all he was cracked up to be. I mean, seriously, that was a big blow. What was my incentive to be good, when all I had to contend with was my own parents? I had already learned how to get around them.

I think that's why so many of my favorite movies are about the magic of Christmas. Once a year I sit down and watch It's a Wonderful Life, The Bishop's Wife, Miracle on 34th Street, and others too numerable to mention here,  although I think I've covered most of them in previous posts. (If you're curious you can check them out here, here, and here.) With me it's almost a sacred ritual, like turkey and football at Thanksgiving. After more than sixty-five years, I'm still not sure what the meaning of life is, but I think there may be something close in some of those old movies. Maybe it's the magic of Christmas, or just the magic of childhood; or perhaps it's just nostalgia for a simpler time, but there's a world view there I can still relate to even in these cynical days of rage and world-wide despair.

Deep Future: Further Thoughts

The scale of time that Curt Stager considers in Deep Future, while it remains essentially human, in that he focuses primarily on the time that human-like primates have inhabited the earth, is nevertheless vast in comparison to any individual life. Even allowing that a normal life span is now approaching 100 years, that is nevertheless a relatively brief moment in the history of the planet, or even in the history of human existence. And yet it is all a matter of perspective. Any one of us fortunate enough to survive into our seventh or eighth decade will have experienced a considerable amount of personal history and witnessed a good deal of change. And that is now true even for those inhabiting the less technically advanced parts of the earth. There is no place to hide from change, whether it's climate or cultural.

I have often thought of some of the changes I've witnessed. Every generation has this experience, but it seems to be accelerating with each new cohort. This is interesting, because each new generation also seems to feel that it is the crown of creation, the destiny of progress.We all have a tendency to think that what is now is what must, or at least should, continue to be. As Curt Stager points out, in a similar context, it's like the old parable of the blind men describing an elephant, each imagining a creature based on the particular part he happens to be touching. We each experience our moment of existence as somehow significant and indicative of some profound reality. How can it be otherwise? And yet what could be more delusional?

The most fascinating part of Stager's Deep Future was the way he forced me to think about a longer view of human history, not just a generation or two, or even a few hundred years, but thousands and tens of thousands of years. In that time humans have vastly altered the earth, whether for good or ill is practically irrelevant. Think only of North America. The Indians, Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples, whatever we wish to call them, had already begun to change the continent before the arrival of Europeans, but the alterations brought by the European conquest accelerated the pace of change, bringing industry and machinery followed by urbanization. The burning of fossil fuels was also a big part of that change, exploiting the continent's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas to make the energy needed to drive progress. Meanwhile similar changes were sweeping across Europe and now Asia. Stager demonstrates through chemistry and mathematical analysis the scale of human intervention in the composition of the earth's atmosphere, but he also shows how the atmosphere has been altered in earlier eras by the activity of bacteria, and plants, and geological events. Earth's climate history is long, much longer than human history.

But this got me thinking again about my own history and some of the changes I've seen. I recall that as recently as my own childhood we relied on an ice box that depended on regular deliveries of large blocks of ice from the iceman to keep our food fresh. The advent of a refrigerator that not only kept the food cold and the milk fresh but also made its own ice was a revelation. The milk also came not only to our door, but to our kitchen, delivered by our regular milkman, just as the ice had been delivered by the iceman. Our first telephone was on a party line, which meant we shared it with several other families who used the same line and could, if they were nosey, listen in on our calls. At first our home entertainment was only from the radio, an enormous piece of furniture that was eventually replaced by our first television, also enormous, but with a rather tiny viewing screen, although eventually twenty-one inches became the standard of excellence.

Soon I learned to expect change, even though I sometimes tended to resist it. Even as a child I worried what would become of the iceman once we got a refrigerator? And I insisted that my mother continue deliveries from our milkman, until I went away to college and she quietly gave him his notice. By that time radio, once the source of drama, comedy, and mystery programs, broadcast only music; for the rest we relied on television. The phone soon gave us a direct private line, and eventually morphed into smaller and smaller devices, eventually to be almost replaced, at first by wireless sets and then by much smaller personal cell phones that have now begun to grow into somewhat larger multi-purpose devices that also serve as networked computers, phonographs, video displays, and cameras that take still and motion pictures. And our cameras have gone from the early Kodak that relied on photographic film, which itself had replaced earlier more cumbersome technologies, to the magical Polaroid that made instant photos, to early digital cameras that gave instant gratification, but lacked clarity, to multi-megapixel cameras that have rendered film nearly obsolete even for those who make movies.

And what are we to think of music. We listened to it on radios, then on phonographs that played wax, then vinyl disks, tape recorders, first reel to reel, then cassette, followed briefly by compact discs, all eventually to be displaced by digital recordings that can be stored (and played) on devices sometimes no larger than a wafer. Entire industries have been altered; some are on the verge of vanishing. And so also with books. Of course, we still write, and print, and buy millions and millions of books. But the change is already underway, along with the digitization of the way we work, and the way we teach and learn. Much of this has come along with the spread of computers which, when I was young and still in school, were enormous machines kept in spotlessly clean and air-conditioned rooms. At first humans interacted with them only by means of paper punched with coded holes, as they had done with automated mechanical devices, but soon we had terminals and cathode ray screens similar to televisions. But even this was only a brief stage on the journey as we replaced our CRTs, both for computers and televisions, with flat screen LCDs, also a step along the way to more advanced video displays. And now even our smart phones are 3D. Advanced and visionary types see a day, soon perhaps, when we will carry only a single device no larger than our smart phones (although these, as I said, seem to be growing again), no longer needing desktop computers, telephones, cameras, record players, books, or even credit cards or other means of identification. But why should we even require devices?

Also in a not too distant time we will find ourselves coping with a different climate and environment, as well as a different diet, modified by the latest beliefs about health and the rather limited availability of much of the food we used to eat. I suspect we will also have learned to live in a more social environment where privacy as I experienced it will have become unknown, not because of the expansion of Big Brother police states, although that is also likely, but because privacy will have become obsolete in a more social and collective environment. Some will perhaps resent this and will profess to miss the good old days, some always do. Even today you can hear folks lamenting the passing of what they recollect as the good old days. But the fact is change is inevitable; most of it has already happened; we're just trying to catch up to it and learn to live with it. And so is it any wonder that we like to think or hope that it will stop with us, that each generation believes it will be the crown of creation, the ultimate stop for the history of progress and human destiny? As Stager points out, the world will be a very different place in 2050 or 2100, but it will be home to those who live there, and for them it will be not the future but the new normal, the latest in a long history of good old days. And our own advanced times? Well, we'll be as quaint as those people in the old black and white photographs, the ones we used to capture with cameras that used photographic film--whatever that was.

Enemies of Promise: Then and Now

Although in Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly never puts it exactly in these words, the greatest enemy of promise is death, and after death, probably birth. At birth we all (or most of us) have promise, great expectations, optimism backed by nothing more than a blank slate and a fresh start. With a little luck we soon begin to show those early signs of talent that Connolly refers to, but much is determined by circumstances far beyond our control, the accidents of birth that place us on a certain trajectory. Of course, in America, or so we are told, we make our own luck and determine our own future, with hard work and our native spirit. So one might well wonder just what a book like Enemies of Promise would have to say to an American audience in the twenty-first century.

It's true that the Georgian boyhood spent in priviate schools (or public as the English call them) that Connolly describes with loving detail in the autobiographical third section of his book would seem to hold little relevance for anyone attempting to navigate childhood and adolescence in the contemporary world, even in England. And yet boys will be boys, and Connolly's often desperate efforts to be liked and to fit in by refusing to fit in and styling himself a rebel and an aesthete will certainly ring true for many of us. Human nature remains remarkably consistent. Connolly's self-deprecating celebration of his own wit and achievements in school will seem charming even to those who find them mildly repulsive. That was his great talent, both as a boy and a writer.

But even more intriguing is his analysis of British literary culture in the years between the world wars. In the book's first section he examines much popular writing, breaking it into categories based on style and content, in an effort to determine what gives good books and authors their staying power, so that they might endure for at least ten years after publication. His judgments are interesting, and of course personal, but his lists and references are educational both for who surfaces or rises to prominence as well as for who settles to oblivion, not only from Connolly's perspective, but for us all these years later. It isn't at all surprising to see Virginia Woolf or T.S. Eliot or James Joyce, or even Aldous Huxley or Somerset Maugham, given so much attention, but who would now expect Ronald Firbank or Norman Douglas to be given such prominence?

This, of course, is precisely Connolly's point. Literary reputations, like all others, rise and fall with changing tastes and times. Just ask Ernest Hemingway, or is he now due for a revival? And who reads Ezra Pound who doesn't have to? In any case, Connolly is correct in observing that it gets harder and harder for a writer to make an enduring mark, perhaps harder now than it was then. He spotted his school friend George Orwell for a winner, but what would he have thought, what did he think, of another boy's, Anthony Powell's, remarkable rise to literary fame? Well, all of that was well and good, but he was most interested in the case of one Cyril Connolly, a boy who had shown so well at school, but now seemed doomed to failure and oblivion.

So what are these enemies of promise that Connolly enumerates? Well, there are matters of style and content, but also of the question of money: whether writing for money, mere journalism, will ruin one's chances, or whether too much income will then dull one's artistic drive. Then there are the distractions of sex, love, and romance, and family -- the pram in the hallway -- as well as those of booze and drugs and other vices. Of course, too much success can be a serious impediment, almost as bad as not enough. But soon one discovers that just about anything one does can become an enemy of promise, since promise is always so much more attractive than fulfillment, like the anticipation of a pleasure that can never quite be realized in its experience.

Okay, I confess, I found this book appealing, and I suspect I am not alone in this, because I identified with Connolly's point of view. I was a boy of promise; I had many of those early signs as well as a certain number of prizes. And, like Connolly, I enjoyed making it all seem to come easily, without any obvious effort on my part. Moreover, I was also rather lazy, and yet at the same time disciplined when it was required. I enjoyed popularity, but didn't seek it out. I wonder now how I would have responded had I not been popular? At the time I said, and believed, that it did not matter to me, but I was never really tested. I just expected things to come to me more or less as my due, pretty much as Connolly seems to have done, although he also seems to have done a great deal more conniving. 

And then what? I suppose that's what the book Enemies of Promise is all about. One day Connolly wakes up to discover that, by his lights at least, he has not fulfilled that early promise, and he now attempts to account for his own failure and disappointment. He asks himself how one should go about writing a book that will matter and endure for at least ten years, and the evidence is he found the formula. Buried in the details of this entertaining little book is the one obvious answer, the only answer there ever has been. You have to work very hard and seriously at what you wish to accomplish, and then also get lucky. Now why didn't I think of that?

Deep Future

Curt Stager's Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth is one of those good news/bad news sort of books. Taking the long view he observes that the good news is human generated global warming has most likely already prevented the next ice age, which would not be due for another 50,000 years or so anyway. The bad news is that if we don't do something to bring a halt to the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere, we'll bring about some fairly unpleasant climate results over the next couple of centuries.

That's sort of the take away from the book, but by no means the really interesting part. The interesting part of the book has more to do with all of the data that climate scientists and paleoecologists such as Stager have accumulated from a close study of ancient climate patterns and changes in earth ecology over the last several hundred thousand years. If you accept Stager's account, which I do, then you have to accept that most of the effects of global warming are already inevitable. The damage, if that's what it is, has been done, and the consequences will play out for centuries whether or not we do anything now or in the near future to reduce greenhouse emissions.

So what are some of these inevitable consequences? Well, sea levels will rise, although most likely only very gradually over the next few centuries. Perhaps more alarming, the seas will acidify, which could very well be devastating for shellfish, coral, and all of those creatures whose habitats will be destroyed by that change in ocean chemistry. Much, but probably not all, of the earth's ice will melt, and the arctic will be open ocean much of the year. Stager is optimistic, however, that humans will cope with these changes, as they have done with previous climate changes. It will not be easy, and it will be expensive. But earth will adjust. We'll abandon low-lying areas, or more likely try to protect them before abandoning them. In fact, this is already happening in some parts of the world: the Netherlands, New Orleans, Bangkok.

Stager's greatest concern is that without any effort to slow the carbon emissions from our use of fossil fuels we may face what he describes as a worse case scenario in which much greater warming will bring about far more serious climatic changes, more devastating to the earth's ecology, and more enduring. But some readers worry that Stager takes such a long view he seems to minimize the seriousness of the choices that must be made relatively soon. And by emphasizing that much of the damage has already been done, and will not be undone for centuries, he contributes to a fatalistic attitude. I don't think that's fair. His analysis is sober and he does make it clear that while the consequences are certain, there is a difference between the moderate warming we are already experiencing and the much more catastrophic warming that will come from continued use of fossil fuels. Finally, the questions he raises are moral and ethical: Do we really care what happens to humankind after we're gone?

Random Thoughts on My Reading Program

I've begun a more or less disciplined program of reading books I've long known about but never actually read. I was prompted to do this while reading Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a very thoughtful essay on reading and writing (and book collecting). McMurtry mentions a number of books that I have always intended to read, and I decided I should go about this in a more organized way.

Something all of these books have in common is a focus on literary culture in England (and to a lesser extent America) between the twentieth-century world wars. I've started with Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly. Next up, in no particular order are Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves' autobiography first published in 1929, Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell's 1933 fictionalized autobiography of his early experiences, and Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson's influential 1931 study of the modernists.

I actually did read Axel's Castle in graduate school, but that was a long time ago, and now I want to look at it again in context. Wilson is one of my favorites; I've read much of his criticism, but also his fiction (Memoirs of  Hecate County) and notebooks and diaries. One of the things I most admire about Wilson was his ability to lead the life of a literary intellectual outside the confines of academe. That made him much more like the English authors I'm reading than other Americans, who tended to be drawn into various academic orbits.

Next up I may include Wilson's To Finland Station and Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, which will take me somewhat beyond the literary culture, but will introduce some of the social and political concerns of the 1930s and 1940s that were current during the years leading up to the Second World War. This may also bring me back to my earlier interest in Arthur Koestler, but I will let that trajectory develop as it may.

My main object is to do some concentrated thinking about the way those most affected were reacting to the onset of another world catastrophe so soon after experiencing and before completely recovering from a previous one. I'm already getting a strong sense of the frustrations the young writers were feeling from reading Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. His premise was that writing a book that would be likely to last even ten years had become an almost insurmountable challenge. But while the circumstances he describes and analyzes are rooted firmly in his own moment, they continue to resonate even now. Ironically, and perhaps sadly, his own somewhat autobiographical account of the barriers to successful writing has become a classic of sorts.

I'm not entirely sure what has drawn me to this period. Of course, I have always been attracted to the moderns. Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and Woolf, as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, were among the first serious authors I read. And in my youth they were nearer to being contemporaries than might now appear the case. But as they have receded into the past, I've grown even more interested in them, and in their time. I've also grown more interested in the larger cultural and social context that surrounded them and gave them sustenance.

I suspect this all began about two years ago when I decided finally to sit down and read all of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Since then much of my reading has been about that era and its passing. As I finished Powell's last novels, I found I was seeing them as a chronicle of a dying culture. It's not so much that I would want to return to that world, but that I find myself continuing to be fascinated by it. It was a world I glimpsed when I was a student, and even then I suppose I knew it was dying. Now as an old man I understand what it must have been like for those like Powell (and Connolly) who were already aware of the forces arrayed against us.

Reading: My Life-Long Vocation

This is really the second part of my previous post about staying in school too long. When I first went off to college, I didn't really go very far. My initial plan was to become an architect, something I'd been encouraged to do while still in what we used to call junior high school. I enrolled in the local community college, what we then referred to as a junior college, and began taking the first required courses in drafting and drawing. My intention was to complete the first two years of architecture courses on the cheap, then transfer to a regular university to complete the degree. But while I was still in high school I had discovered another interest: literature. And the pull of reading and writing was stronger than any lingering interest in drawing and design.

I have no actual regrets about my decision, although I am sometimes curious to know how things might have turned out differently if I had stuck with architecture. I came from a working class family and had no direct experience of any profession, but I guess teaching was more familiar than architecture. I knew only two architects, one very successful (a relative of one of my high school friends) and one not (the father of one of my friends from church). But then I only knew one college teacher of literature, who was also my former Sunday school teacher and a very educated and proper woman. But while I was taking my first college courses in literature and history I was bitten by the same bug that bit Larry McMurtry and the ill-fated hero of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (which should have been a warning to me).

And so I confronted my adviser in architecture and consulted with my mentor in English, and after much anguish changed my major. This meant quickly enrolling in a number of required academic courses I had neglected to take as an architecture student, including a foreign language. Like many of my peers in high school I had taken two years of Spanish (and even learned a little, but not a sufficient amount to place out of introductory college-level courses). Moreover, even as a young boy I had always had a love of classical literature, the epics of Homer and Virgil and wonderful myths told by Ovid. Thus I decided it was time to begin my long struggle to master Latin and perhaps even learn a little Greek.

My reward for this change in direction was that I would now be justified in spending much of my time reading literature -- something I had wanted to do anyway for as long as I could remember. It seemed to me then, as indeed it does now, that if you can contrive to get someone to pay you to read, you will have achieved something quite remarkable. And before very long I achieved just that. At first I was not paid very well; in fact, I often wondered if we would be able to survive, much less thrive, on such wages. But from that time on I was essentially paid to read (and to teach and write about) literature (as well as other humanities disciplines) for the rest of my working life. As I said, it's been a good gig.

Too Long in School

The title of this post alludes to something Larry McMurtry says in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. McMurtry remarks that he was "of the generation of American writers that stayed in school too long." His comment resonated with me not so much because I am a writer of any sort (although I have spent a good deal of my life scribbling in one way or another to earn a living), but because I suspect I had similar reasons for staying in school so long. McMurtry goes on to remark that by school he meant graduate school, and his reason for staying there was that there was "no more compelling place to be."

He was speaking of the late fifties and early sixties, but the same held true for me in the seventies. I stayed in school because I had no place more compelling to be, and I was good at school. When I finished up my undergraduate years at the University of Texas in Austin in 1968, after changing majors from English to history to classics, and ending up with sufficient credits to graduate in any one of the three, I took my barely serviceable knowledge of Latin off to the Texas panhandle (not far from McMurtry's home) to teach high school for a year in Pampa, a town known to me primarily as the boyhood home of Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory. 

I never imagined I was bound for anything other than an undistinguished year of teaching on my way to Vietnam, but when I failed to pass the draft physical (matter for a different story), I could think of nothing more original than to return to graduate school. And so I did, first in classics at the University of Texas for a couple of years, then in English at Johns Hopkins for another four. When I finally came to the end of my schooling, I had accumulated four degrees and credentials suitable for a career as a school teacher or (to be more precise) college teacher, which I tried my hand at for the next eight years.

Then something happened on my way to an undistinguished career in academe: I took a detour to Washington and ended up on the outside looking in for the next twenty-five years. That's not the whole story, of course, but it is interesting to me (if to no one else) that all of those years in school and teaching were perfect preparation for a comfortable life as a bureaucrat in a small government agency. When I was anxiously looking for work as a teacher, my dad used to tell me to get a good government job (which is what he had done), and I used to dismiss his advice as impractical given my long academic apprenticeship. Turns out he knew what he was talking about. Government work was a pretty good gig for about twenty-five years, although not what I had planned, not at all. But after staying in school so long, it may have been what I was best fitted for.

House of Leaves: Finally Finished

A few years ago I came across a reference to this strange book by Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves, about a photo journalist and his family who move into a mysterious house in Virginia that seems to have these nearly infinite spaces behind walls and closet doors. But the book is not just about the house; it's about a movie, The Navidson Record, that the photo journalist made about these mysterious dark spaces within the house. No, that's not quite right. It's really about an old blind man named Zampanò, who dies under mysterious circumstances and leaves behind a trunk filled with the remains of an enormous incomplete manuscript that purports to examine the Navidson film (which may or may not ever have existed), and an obsessive young man named Johnny Truant (certainly not his real name), who loses himself in the process of editing and publishing the old man's book.


Now this is not my kind of book. First, it's a sort of horror story, which is not a genre I favor, although I am a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley, and I enjoy classic horror films like The Uninvited and The Changeling and (of course) The Shining. Second, it's a mystery; again, not one of my favorite kinds of literature, although I have read a few by the usual stars, Hammett and Chandler and du Maurier, and I admire Hitchcock above nearly all other directors. But the thing about House of Leaves I most object to is that it's a puzzle book, and a sort of academic puzzle book at that, filled with footnotes and learned references to authorities (real and imaginary), as well as numerous allusions to other works and authors and filmmakers. Nor do the tricks end there: There are also diagrams, lists, bibliographies, appendices, exhibits, photographs, drawings, weird typography (pages printed upside down, sideways, and at odd angles), and multiple languages (mostly translated).


Still, despite my misgivings, I read every word this time. (I've started reading this book several times previously, but usually abandoned the effort after a quick foray that soon revealed what was going on.) And I have to say, it was much as I expected. Yes I got that Johnny Truant's life seemed to parallel both Zampanò's and Navidson's, that they were all haunted by the darkness and the nameless horror that was at the center of the house in Virginia and resonated with the personal horrors at the center of their own lives, which each experienced, but in a personal way. I read every complicated page and seemingly endless footnote -- well, maybe not every word of those endlist lists of books and films and photographers and architectural features. I double checked references to confirm what I suspected was imaginary or reassure myself about what I thought was real. And, of course, I read nearly every pornographic detail of Truant's descent into madness, although the details were obvious male fantasies, as all pornography tends to be.

Finally, yes, I was entertained, but I still came away thinking what an immense amount of effort I'd expended. And like every reader of this book, I suspect, I have compiled many theories on what it's really supposed to be about, if it's really about anything (another theory). Then one late night last week, getting ready for bed I checked the Turner Classic Movie channel and saw they were showing Fellini's La Strada; you know, the one where Anthony Quinn plays a strong man  who travels around exhibiting feats of strength, with Giulietta Masina as his waifish companion and Richard Basehart as a fool who stirs things up between them. Well, I couldn't resist watching a bit of an old classic I'd seen decades ago, so I settled back to enjoy the movie, and then suddenly I realized what Quinn's character was called. The  tortured strong man's name was Zampanò!

Suddenly, it all came clear. The book was like a journey, a road, La Strada. At the end of the Fellini movie, Quinn tries to bury himself in the sand; thus, he's blinding himself, but then he was blind all along, wasn't he? That is why he failed to appreciate Giulietta Masina until after he abandoned her to her fate (and ultimately death). Now he's haunted by her absence, just as all the characters are haunted by absence in The House of Leaves. The number 9, which figures prominently in the book, especially near the end, is obviously another such reference to Fellini: what comes after 8½? This is just the sort of wacky stuff you'll find throughout The House of Leaves. If you dig such nonsense, I recommend you try to read the book. Otherwise, well, life is brief and art is long.

Google Wallet Works

Here I go again. When my HTC Hero was starting to show its age, I decided it was time to look into replacing that first generation Android phone with something more up to date. I spent a few days looking at the various options, originally assuming I would upgrade to the HTC Evo, or perhaps switch to the Motorola Photon, but then Sprint offered me a deal I could hardly refuse on Google's Samsung Nexus S 4G. I like Samsung; I had a couple of Samsung phones prior to the Hero. So I started comparing the features and specs. I could see that the Nexus S was already less than cutting edge technology, probably the reason for the great deal, but I was impressed with the pure Android OS (no bloatware, not even from Sprint) and the promise of fast upgrades to the latest version, currently 2.3.7. And the processor and memory seemed more than adequate to my needs. So I ordered my new phone for $29.99, less a credit of $25 for my HTC Hero.

It turns out I love the new phone. It's not quite as oversized as the Evo or the Photon; the screen is 4" rather than 4.3", and it weighs only 4.6 oz., about the same as my Hero. It fits nicely in my pocket and feels comfortable in my hand. My only complaint is the location of the power switch, which I sometimes hit unintentionally. Of course, a Google phone comes with all the standard Google apps but little else pre-installed, so I downloaded some of my favorite apps from the Android market. The speed was amazing compared to my Hero, even on the regular 3G network, but especially on 4G or Wi-Fi, and the apps installed in seconds immediately after download. Browsing the web was also improved. The phone worked great. I've had it for nearly a month, and all of my initial concerns (based on early reviews) about 4G access and battery life have been put to rest.

Then last Saturday morning, when I turned on my phone, I noticed there was an Android upgrade waiting, so I went ahead and downloaded it, and then decided to check to see what the upgrade was all about. Turns out it was my Google Wallet. Now, I knew that one of the "cutting edge" features of the Nexus S was NFC (near field communication) capability. I was intrigued, but didn't think it was any big deal. Well, it probably isn't . . . yet. NFC allows the Nexus X to make use of Google Wallet, Google's entry in the emerging field of "tap and pay" applications for credit card purchases. You just touch your phone to the credit card terminal instead of swiping your card, and the purchase is completed electronically. Presently, the only credit cards that work with Google Wallet are the Citi MasterCard and the Google Prepaid Card, but others are lining up.

Well, the Google Prepaid Card is free. In fact, Google gave me $10 to sign up. So I did. I figure it might be interesting to try this out. You can load your Google Prepaid Card with additional funds from any of your existing credit cards; it's just like making a purchase. So it turns out you don't really need your regular credit card to work on the phone anyway. The only other hitch at the moment is that there are relatively few merchants that use Google Wallet's NFC technology, but apparently more and more are signing on. I checked and found that there were actually a few in my area that I use fairly regularly, among them CVS Pharmacy and Sunoco gas stations, with Subway and Macy's coming soon.

Today, while I was out shopping, I decided to stop in at CVS and try it out. Worked like a charm, but it kind of freaked out the cashier when I told her I was going to pay with my phone. Apparently, I was the first one to use Google Wallet at that store, at least so far as she knew. She did a double take when the sale went through and activated her register and printed out a sales receipt without any further action on her part. She looked at my receipt before handing it to me and said, "Oh, it's just MasterCard." I wondered if she thought I'd found some new source of money generated magically by an app on my phone. Now that would be an app worth developing!

Television: Then and Now

I still remember our first television. It must have been sometime early in the 1950s. San Antonio had two stations broadcasting by 1950, WOAI (primarily NBC) and KENS (primarily CBS). Later, around 1957, KONO (which became KSAT) signed on as an ABC affiliate. Although stations had network affiliations, they tended to broadcast a wide range of programs from other available networks and sources. But even so, programming was fairly limited early on. I can still remember watching the "test pattern," which was on for hours at a time before the first program of the day began. That might explain why my Mom remained loyal to daytime radio, which she could also listen to while doing her housework.

In fact, my Mom was never much of a TV fan. It was my Dad who wanted one, and who, we used to joke, once he had it sat down in front of the set and never got up except to go to the bathroom. Much to my Mom's chagrin, we often even ate our meals while watching television. We were early adopters of TV trays. Eventually, we added on a family room large enough to contain the dining table, so we could eat at the table and still see the TV which when Dad was home remained on at all times at the other end of the room. For special occasions my Mom would plead "can't we turn that damned TV off while we have the family over for Christmas dinner?"

At first, of course, TV was a great novelty, and just watching test patterns was a big kick. But very soon I lost interest in most of the early programming.  I did watch some of the kid shows on Saturday mornings, Andy's Gang and various cartoons, and in the afternoons, like most in my generation, I was a loyal follower of the Mickey Mouse Club, but never officially a member. Anyone who knows me will confirm that I've never been much of a joiner.  On nice afternoons, however, I sometimes stayed out and played football or baseball with the other kids in the neighborhood. TV was no substitute for play.

But for my Dad, as I said, it was television all the time. Initially, I think his favorite program was wrestling, which seemed to be broadcast about ten hours a day from the Wrestlethon in downtown San Antonio. It was our most popular local show and must have filled the void with a cheap alternative to more expensive network programs. The rest of us would watch from time to time. I don't know which was more exciting, the wrestlers on the tiny screen, or my Dad jumping around in his armchair. He must have worn out half a dozen chairs as he jumped from side to side and shifted this way and that following the various matches. My own personal favorites among the wrestlers were Gorgeous George and Duke Keomuka, who were big stars at the time. It was from Duke that we all learned about the karate chop, which in wrestling was of questionable legality. And Gorgeous George was the first male I ever saw who had really long hair.

Clearly, television was a tremendous influence in my life, whether I realized it or not. Even before I went to school I was learning things from TV. I used to get up late at night, after my Mom was in bed and while my Dad was sleeping in front of the set, supposedly watching the forerunner of the Tonight Show hosted by Morey Amsterdam and Jerry Lester. I would sneak into the living room and watch out of his sight from behind the sofa. I had to be careful not to laugh too loud or I would wake my Dad. I have no idea what I thought then about the supposedly adult humor I was seeing. I just knew that those guys were funny, and that Dagmar, perhaps TVs original dumb blond, was amazing. If I was able to stay up a little later, sometimes I could catch a late night movie. My favorites were the Marx Brothers or Abbott and Costello. Eventually my parents caught on to my tricks, but let me stay up anyway if I agreed to take a nap earlier in the afternoon.

This might account, in part at least, for my current attitudes toward television. I never turn it on during the day, even now that I'm retired. It's not just that daytime television is a vast wasteland. For me, it doesn't even exist. The only exception is sports. I will watch specific sporting events -- tennis, golf, football, basketball (but not wrestling) -- especially on weekends. Otherwise TV consists of the evening news and weather, followed by reruns of Seinfeld and something on PBS (especially the dramas and mysteries), or perhaps a current series like Eureka or Castle or Mad Men. Since Johnny went off the air I no longer watch the late night shows. I gave up on Letterman and Leno, and I have never been tempted by any of the other choices. But I have rediscovered some old favorites on the retro channels that broadcast reruns of Peter Gunn or Hitchcock or The Saint. I will watch Seinfeld reruns until they stop broadcasting them, and I will even watch reruns of Mad about You. But that's about it for broadcast television.

The rest of the time for television viewing I turn to other options. A few years ago I started buying DVDs of my all time favorites: the original Star Trek, Bob Newhart, the Rockford Files, the Avengers. But lately I've also started turning to my Apple TV, where I can stream a wide variety of old television programs as well as movies. And then there is always Netflix. Most nights, after Seinfeld, which we generally have on after the evening news while we are preparing dinner (we miss some, but then we know all the episodes by heart anyway), we watch something we've recorded earlier on the DVR, or we watch one of our Netflix DVDs.

I sometimes wonder what the future of broadcast television will be. I will go to considerable lengths to watch programming without commercial interruptions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this preference. Of course, I realize that commercial TV was the great generator of programming I still enjoy, especially the network news programs. The loss of independent network news will be a serious problem, I suspect. Nevertheless, so far as I'm concerned, I could now exist without broadcast television. I have sufficient personal programming resources, just with my library of DVDs, to entertain myself without recourse to broadcasting. And then there are the streaming options, which continue to grow in quality and range of selections.

I suspect that television will follow the same path as radio, which I still listen to when driving in my car. Until earlier this year I always tuned in to public radio, but when I bought a new automobile that came with a trial subscription to SiriusXM, I began experimenting with the commercial free options. Soon I found the Real Jazz channel, and I was hooked. Now I never listen to anything else. I've even extended my subscription. I can get just what I want and without commercial interruption. It's great, even though I recognize that it's a bit like living in my own entertainment bubble. I worry about that a little, and what it might mean for the future of both radio and television, but not very much.

On Reading: More Random Thoughts

As September draws to a close, I feel a mild compulsion to record something about my reading over the last few weeks. After finishing Bellow's Letters, I picked up a copy of Eileen Simpson's Poets in their Youth, which Bellow commented on, and which we happened to have a copy of in our much too extensive library. I've been reading this and catching up on back issues of TLS and the most recent Sewanee Review. As usual it's a rather desultory program, focused primarily on writers who lived and flourished just before and after World War II, and sometimes into the third quarter of the last century.

It's not entirely nostalgia that feeds my interest in that era, although it is probably a large part of the attraction, but also a growing curiosity about the ways those earlier generations perceived their own time and their relationships to it and previous times. With age and experience comes the realization that everything has happend before, many times, and that while we feel the immediate experience of our own passage through life as somehow novel and unique, that was precisely the way others experienced it themselves. And one common thread seems to be the sense of belatedness, that we've missed out on some important opportunities that our predecessors enjoyed. That appears to be the case even when writers are self-consciously rebelling against the past and trying desperately to push themselves into a future more or less unknown.

Simultaneously, we seem to feel ourselves both connected to and isolated from a past that was both better and worse than our own time, and which has left us a world that we cannot seem to alter to suit ourselves. On the one hand we can assess the various examples of technical and social progress, the automobile, air conditioning, television and computers; an end to Jim Crow, acceptance of inter-racial marriage, wide availability of college educations, social mobility. But these have all come at a price that includes for many wrenching displacement from deeply established communal attachments and from strong feelings of belonging and personal identity. There has also recently been a sense of accelerated change, but it takes only a little historical research to recognize that the sense of acceleration reaches back at least to the nineteenth century, and I would suspect even beyond that. Which is not to deny the reality, but perhaps more to reinforce the inevitability of the feelings of alienation that have come along with whatever progress we can point to.

Although this may seem to be depressing, in fact I find it comforting to know that my own experiences are far from unique. I have discovered that I enjoy learning more about those who came before me and attempted to cope in their own way with all the things I must learn to cope with myself. One lesson I have learned is that modern humans seem to be susceptible to the tyranny of the present. This takes at least two distinct forms: first, we seem to feel that the present moment is the culmination of history, the destination toward which all historical forces have been directed; and the second is that somehow, having reached this particular moment, this perceived destination, we will now rest here for a time. Of course, neither of these suppositions is accurate, as perhaps younger generations are coming to realize. Nothing human endures for very long; change is the only constant. We live in a versioning world; we always have and always will. Life is all about evolution.

Anyway, all this reading has made me want to return to my own little writing project and get back to recording my impressions of growing up in the middle of the twentieth century in San Antonio, Texas. At the time, I felt it was both the center of the universe and also a total backwater where the forces of history never seemed to reach. Much of that changed on November 22, 1963, when the real world came to Dallas, not really that far away, and again on August 1, 1966, in Austin, where my wife to be and I had just been to look for our first home. Strange that history should come in the form of tragedy and meaningless death, but then I suppose that's what history is when you get right down to it. History is final, but life goes on, even if it goes on without us. Everyone, it seems, wants to make a mark or at least leave an impression.

Letters

I wasn't sure I would read the recent edition of Saul Bellow's Letters edited by Benjamin Taylor, but I saw it at the local library the last time I was there and decided to check it out. (That's what I like most about public libraries: you can read the books you don't want to buy.) Letters fall into the larger category of biography, autobiography, memoirs, and personal essays and journals that I've been exploring these last few years, especially those written about and by writers. And with letters there is often the added interest of observing the letter writer's self presentation, as well as the growth and changes in personality over time.

Bellow was a great writer of letters, both in the sense of the quality of his writing, and the extent of his correspondence. This edition covers a period from 1932, when Bellow was seventeen, to 2005, the year of his death. Readers can watch the letter writer grow from a modest but ambitious youth to a very successful and celebrated author. Much of Bellow's correspondence collected in this volume concerns his career, both as author and teacher. Despite his own frequent disclaimers, Bellow devoted a considerable amount of his life to teaching, and although he tended to cast himself as anti-academic, he nevertheless depended a good deal on academic employment, especially early in his career as a novelist. The more personal letters offer glimpses of Bellow as friend, husband, father, lover, and mentor.

One of the most interesting aspects of Bellow's letters is the insight they give to his personality. He obviously took care to write each letter in a voice and style best suited to the recipient. He could be deferential when requesting letters of reference from James Farrell or Edmund Wilson or Robert Penn Warren, but even there the tone differs depending on the closeness of those relationships. And it is amusing to watch him gauge the proper levels of respectful distance and informality or intimacy. With John Berryman he is always careful to offer encouragement and flattery, with Ralph Ellison he is intimate and slyly understanding, but with his old friends, especially those he grew up with in Chicago, he is often direct and cajoling, sometimes critical and scolding. Bellow had a tremendous capacity for friendship, but he must have been quite a handful for friends to contend with. Like all writers, he also had a very large and yet fragile ego, and no one felt this more than his own family and his various editors and agents.

I enjoy reading letters because they are like snapshots: they give a very accurate representation of a particular and quite specific moment frozen in time. They record a moment of intimacy, of anger or affection, that once existed, but may well have been ephemeral, and may have passed as quickly as it was recorded. Bellow seems to have known this, and it is clear he wrote very carefully, even when his emotions were most aroused, perhaps especially so then, which makes these letters so engaging. And yet I can't say that after reading his letters I find myself feeling any closer to the man. As a writer, even of letters, Bellow was always an artist in control of his own rhetoric. He lets his readers see mainly what he wants us to see of himself. He is certainly charming, but also manipulative, and a master of control, even when he seems to be most revealing of himself. His letters were small installments in his own story, and he was, of course and quite naturally, the hero of that story, with everyone else cast in a supporting role. He could be sympathetic, but also could withhold his sympathy.

Nevertheless, letters are a wonderful genre of self-writing, and it is too bad we will have so few examples in the future, for with the advent of electronic communication, email, instant messaging, and so-called social media, the art of letter writing will likely soon be lost. As I was going through my own papers in preparation for our coming move and relocation, I looked over my files of correspondence, dating from graduate school in the mid 1970s through the years I spent as an academic and the early years at the National Endowment, and ending in a trickle of letters to a few correspondents who were not yet online in the late 1990s, with even one or two in the new century. That I suspect is fairly typical. It's true I've kept files of my earliest email correspondence, which I still have archived somewhere. And I continue to archive my email in a haphazard fashion. But with a few exceptions email correspondence is not the same, and I seriously doubt that electronic records will long endure. They are easily saved, yet just as easily erased and lost. Just as well, perhaps, but it will be a different sort of world without the genre of letters.

Entropy Update

I was thinking about entropy again, and I realized that I hadn't posted anything about this topic since November, 2006. It's not that I'm getting more optimistic, quite the contrary, I'm more resigned than ever to the inevitable. First, a reminder: what is entropy? There are several definitions. For example, in classical thermodynamics, entropy is the amount of energy wasted in heat when energy is converted to work; it's a waste product. Entropy always increases, it never decreases. In statistical mechanics, entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. Again, it always increases and never decreases. The more complicated and larger a system grows, the greater the entropy and the amount of waste. I covered some of this in a previous post.

Here are some thoughts on recent events: The American system of government has grown so complicated and cumbersome that the amount of entropy is making it unsustainable. Likewise the world economy. But for those who imagine that our technology will be our savior, I submit that our reliance on computer technology is in fact likely to bring about a total breakdown as the systems grow in complexity. The overhead in computer systems, like the amount of economic overhead going toward sustaining our debt, will, like the heat in any physical or chemical system, only grow, never decrease, until the system grinds to a halt.

That much seems obvious, but I always assumed it would happen sometime after my own lifetime. I may have failed to take into account the rate at which entropy tends to grow as the disorder in the system builds up near the end at an ever increasing rate. I thought I had very cleverly arranged things so that I would see the gradual deterioration without having to experience total breakdown. Now I'm not so sure. It seems I failed to account for the willful destructiveness of politicians who don't believe in physics, economics, or logic.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens when the system collapses. Will we realize our system of government -- the one we point to as an example for the rest of the world -- is broken? Or will we more likely continue to say "we're number one" and blame either the Republicans or the Democrats, depending on our own particular political delusion? It would make a good Star Trek episode: "Can't you see the difference? They're black on the right side; we're black on the left." And with hands firmly gripped around each others' necks they jump into the void. Unfortunately, this time, we're all going to be dragged in after them.

Well, I'm going to the beach, while there still is a beach, and I'm going to turn off all of my electronic devices. When I get back maybe everything will be all better. Yeah, right, and maybe everyone will suddenly go sane. Or perhaps some super being will zap the world with a smart ray and everyone will realize how stupid this all is. Yeah, I bet that could happen. I'm going with that: looking forward to seeing everybody on the smart side.

My American Presidents

When I was born, Harry Truman was president. He didn't leave much of an impression on me at the time, although I would later look back on him as quite a character, but I do remember the 1952 presidential election when Dwight Eisenhower was elected. I was just a kid, but I went along with my parents to the polls in the evening after my Dad got home from work. My Mom voted for Stevenson, but my Dad, otherwise a life-long Democrat, voted for the General, his old World War II commander. I suspect many other veterans did the same. I can't say I liked Ike at the time, but later, when I taught a college course on 1950s American culture, I came to respect him. He was exactly right about the military-industrial complex. Too bad we ignored him.

The first president I remember well was John Kennedy. He was president while I was in high school, and was assassinated during my senior year. I also have vivid memories of the fear we all felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like many of my generation, I sensed that those were historical turning points. With time my estimation of Kennedy as a president has gone steadily downward. With Lyndon Johnson, it's been the opposite. When he took over, he inherited both the good and the bad of the Kennedy presidency. Good on civil rights and social issues, bad on Vietnam. The war dominated everything for young people in the sixties. Later I came to appreciate some of the complexities of Johnson's presidency, particularly his ability to get things done politically in Washington. I'll never forget the speech he made saying he would not run for re-election. I had to ask my wife if I'd heard that right. I mistakenly thought it was a good sign for the country!

After Johnson, the American presidents have been on a distinctly downward trend. So we replaced Lyndon with Richard Nixon (now there was a paragon!), and after he resigned, we've gone from Gerald Ford (the accidental president), to Jimmy Carter (well meaning perhaps, but not up to the task), to Ronald Reagan (I mean, seriously, he was a mediocre actor who often did just the opposite of what he said he was doing: raised both the deficits and taxes), to the elder George Bush (in retrospect, we might have done worse, but he was no leader) to Bill Clinton (who squandered his opportunities, yet still managed to leave us with a bit of capital), to the younger George Bush (my least favorite president; probably a great frat brother, but made a mess of the country for all of us as well as the next poor sucker: unnecessary wars and ill-timed tax cuts), to Barack Obama (no one was likely to succeed in this time, but while he was a great candidate, he was not ready or able to govern; besides for some reason half the country hates him like poison).

Perhaps it just comes with old age, but when I look back on this rather depressing list, I find myself wondering whether things haven't been getting steadily worse since George Washington. I can't figure why anyone would want to be president, then or now, but especially now. It surely is the sign of a serious psychological defect. Anyone who wants to be president is probably ipso facto not the right person for the job. Where is our Cincinnatus? Alas, I suspect even he would have a tough time bringing order to this poor nation. I wonder if we're not on the brink of another civil war? Isn't that what happened the last time we stood on our principles and refused to compromise? Well, at least there's one bright spot. I suspect we won't have to worry any longer about immigration, legal or illegal. Soon we'll all be looking to emigrate, if we can just find somewhere to go. Not Norway, obviously.

The New Braunfels Run

I came across a news story recently about a little Texas town near where I grew up in San Antonio that's trying to recapture it's German roots. I'm all for it; my maternal ancestors were among the earliest German immigrants to Texas, although with few connections to New Braunfels. Growing up, I was vaguely aware of that German heritage. I had great-grandparents who were able to converse in German, and an uncle who subscribed to a German language newspaper, although he lived in Boerne, a different little German community.

When I was a teenager, however, New Braunfels had a very different personal connection. Later it would be one of the little towns we regularly drove through on the way back and forth to the University of Texas in Austin, but in my senior year at Edison High School, it became the destination of the "famous" New Braunfels run. I put famous in quotes because in reality it was really nothing more than a silly stunt on an otherwise boring Saturday night, the sort of thing four teenaged boys will get up to if they have time on their hands and a car to drive around in.

Like most such stunts, it wasn't actually planned. We had been out driving around, as usual, hitting all the local drive-ins, looking for friends, burning up some of that cheap gas of the 1960s. We were in my '57 Ford Fairlane, Frost Blue Metallic, with a Thunderbird V8, a great car for Saturday night cruisin', and as I recall there were four of us: Ted, Robert, Bobby, and myself at the wheel. We were on our way to a joint called the Bun 'n' Barrel on the old Austin Highway, when someone wondered how long it would take to drive to New Braunfels and back. I suggested that since it was something like thirty miles away, or about sixty round trip, it should be possible to do it easily in under an hour. My friends split over this estimate, which I'd thought pretty conservative, with one insisting it would not be possible to average better than sixty miles an hour the entire trip.

After several minutes discussing this, considering the various reasons pro and con, I suggested we give it a try, and we set off immediately for I-35. By then it was already late in the evening, and the traffic was light, so it began to look like our chances might be pretty good. We were making excellent time, when one of my friends said, "you know even if we do this no one will believe we actually went to New Braunfels." This seemed a minor thing, since the results would be known to the four of us, and who else would care? But we decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to bring back a souvenir of the trip. It would have to be something small, and fairly easy to acquire; we did not want to waste precious time searching for this proof of our visit. And the New Braunfels city limits sign was not a reasonable option.

As we approached our destination, someone, I think it was Ted, suggested we should grab a New Braunfels phonebook from a public phone booth. This seemed a stroke of genius to the rest of us, and as we approached the New Braunfels city limits we began searching for a likely public phone, something that was fairly common in the sixties. Well, it turned out not to be as common as we thought. We got off the highway and began driving around looking for our target. Finally, I'm ashamed to say, we found our quarry, and one of us ran over to it and quickly jerked the little phonebook off its mounting, chain, decorative phonebook cover, and all.

With our souvenir in hand, we raced back to the highway and started the return trip. By now, however, we knew we were falling behind schedule. On the way to New Braunfels we'd been cruising along at about 70 to 75 miles an hour, nothing to brag about, hardly even speeding, even then. But now we began to suspect that we would not be able to make it back in less than the estimated hour, so I started to open it up a bit more. My little Ford V8 was starting to really hum, as we cranked it up past 80, then 90, and -- being so close -- decided it was worth going for the magical 100 miles an hour, which we did, at least for a brief time. It was the fastest any of us had ever driven, but the highway was straight and nearly deserted, and there was little danger beyond picking up a police escort, which we fortunately avoided.

And so we did it: made it to New Braunfels and back in under an hour, with stolen phonebook as our proof that we'd actually been there. I'm not sure it was nearly so eventful as we thought it was, although it would probably be impossible in today's traffic even late on a Saturday night, certainly not without getting pulled over by the police. I kept the little phonebook under my front seat for ages. Until my mother found it one day. I don't remember what story I made up to explain why I had a New Braunfels phonebook under the seat of my car. I'm sure she didn't believe it. After that I think I held onto it for a while, a souvenir of my "wild" youth, when we did such stupid things for fun.

Now, looking back on our adventure, I am most ashamed of stealing that phonebook. It had such a cute little cover, embossed vinyl, with New Braunfels in raised letters against a fake leather background. I'm not sure why our idea of having fun had to include such a transgression, but I don't think we gave it very much thought. In any case, one of the little ironies I enjoy most about our teenaged adventure is that one of those friends would later become a rather distinguished member of the San Antonio police force. I sometimes wonder if he ever thought about that night we made the New Braunfels run when he picked up some misbehaving teenagers looking for fun on a boring Saturday night? I hope at least it made him chuckle to himself when he lectured them about their misdeeds.