What the Devil is This?

It arrived in my CSA salad mix a while back. Does anyone know? Because it tastes very forcefully of The Evil*

*If you were raised in a contaminated home amongst the fallen and the broken and the lost, you may be laboring under the misapprehension that The Evil is called "celery." It is not.

Relatively Speaking

A wedding at which the only people you know are those to whom you are related is not a simple celebration of marriage. You know about marriage, if you’re among family. You’re onto its tricks: the way it ropes you in, binds you to dozens, whole tribes of people and people-to-be with whom you have little in common save for an outsize nose and a tendency to fight dirty.

A wedding is a commitment to the institution of marriage. A family wedding is a commitment to an institution, period. With straitjackets, rules of conduct, electrified fences, and shrinks. Yay family!

There are exceptions, of course. Happy families. Families that sally forth in formation, sing in the car, devise family badges, assign happy, ego-boosting nicknames. Maybe you are a part of such a family. If you are, you can bite me.

What is it about family? An hourlong family dinner has more currents, more undertows and dangerous reefs, than the Bermuda Triangle. Yet, rather than disappearing, we keep coming back for more! Is it masochism? Sadism? Psychosis? Surely somewhere in the DSM lurks a diagnosis for the deep-seated neurosis that is a four-day sojourn with relatives.

Naturally, I exaggerate. Naturally, I retreat to a corner with my laptop subsequent to faking my own death. I wouldn’t trade family for anything. We have so many choices in life: what to study, who to date, whether to order a latte or a scotch. Family is one of the only remaining cards you can’t trade in, but must play as you’re dealt.

There’s a particular liberty in constraint. Ante up.

Friar Trek!

The points upon which the conservative arm of the Catholic Church and I reliably agree are two:

1) Poverty = bad
2) Renaissance polyphony = good

Other than that, the Pope and I don't have much in common. I do occasionally admire his ability to pass silly hats off as solemn ceremonial garb, but most of the positions espoused by the pontiff and other conservative Catholics scare me at best and anger me at worst. The misogyny! The authoritarianism! The disregarding of empirical evidence in matters of national and international public health!

So the last thing I expected was to be moved by this article about friars. An acquaintance posted the link on Facebook, and since I was trying to avoid cleaning the toilet, I clicked through. According to the Washington Post, six Franciscan friars, young and old, walked the 300 miles from Roanoke to DC, stopping along the way to talk to anyone who wanted to talk, but generally trudging single file along secondary highways and county roads.

The Franciscans were making the trek to commemorate the wanderings of the founder of their order. They saw themselves as participating in a spiritual pilgrimage, an expression of their faith in God. I see them as six men doing the most basic, sacred, life affirming thing a human being can do: walk.

So, to my list, I humbly append:

3) Walking = awesome

In every sense of that term. Godspeed, men. Maybe next time you'll let the women walk, too.

Hamlet: William Shakespeare

Hamlet: Will you play upon this pipe?
Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet: I pray you.
Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.
Hamlet: I do beseech you.
Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.
Hamlet: It is as easy as lying.

Act III, Scene 2: The recorder as sinister prop. I actually think lying is kind of difficult

Be More Variegated

Friends, the DMV has changed. First of all, it's called the BMV. Or maybe it has always been called the BMV in the great state of Indiana but was called the DMV in books; three guesses where I grew up. Secondly, my transaction took all of four minutes. Or three minutes and fifty two seconds if you want to be precise.

Four minutes! That's all it took for me to saddle myself with a truly appalling photograph for the next five years of my life. And we're not talking throwaway years, either: 29-34 is the prime of life, the good stuff, a time when you still have your health but are finally wise enough to appreciate it. Precisely that time of life when you don't need to face down a pasty, sullen, chinless, wall-eyed sanitarium escapee every time you open your wallet.

(A third change: Indiana BMV's no longer allow smiling. Come in for license renewal and you must face the camera dead on, as if you were a game animal hypnotized by the glow of approaching headlights, then stretch your lips into a strange, close-mouthed rictus. No tilting of the head; no showing of the teeth.)

Still, four minutes: not bad! I'd blocked off an hour and a half, so by the time I completed my transaction, 86 minutes early, I was so exhilarated that I voluntarily spent another half an hour perched contentedly on the misshapen plastic chairs in the BMV's holding pen, ogling the crowd.

And crowd it was! I saw a surprising number of children: white, Asian, black and Hispanic. (I shushed one of them by accident: working with kids is hazardous to your sense of what you'll put up with.) I heard parents, in between driving tests and license renewals, scold their progeny in three or four languages. I saw gangsters and hipsters, grandmothers and teenagers, the tattooed and the coiffed, the downtrodden and the upwardly mobile.

Our schools are largely segregated. Our neighborhoods are stratified by income. Our advertising is narrowly targeted. Our planes have sections.

The BMV may be smelly and ruled by an army of women in navy T-shirts, but it may also be the last bastion of integration. I wonder how often I can get my license renewed without attracting suspicion.

Commencement

I stole the title of this post from J. Courtney Sullivan's debut novel Commencement, an engrossing yarn of a book which twists together the collegiate and post-collegiate stories of four Smith College graduates. In doing so, the book illumines and amplifies the double resonance of its title, exploring the bewildering interconnection between beginnings and endings in college life and beyond.

It also works as straight-up Chick Lit, albeit Chick Lit largely absent that perennial standby of the genre, men. Or perhaps Commencement is Chick Lit distilled to its essence, and men are, and always have been, rhetorical flourishes in a genre that fundamentally speaks to women's conceptions of their lives.

The fluidity of these conceptions -the assumption that they are both dynamic and interpersonally mediated- is one of Chick Lit's central conceits. Strip away the bad dates and the Christian Louboutins and the brooding ad execs with inexplicably rent controlled pre-war apartments, and what you'll find is a find a bunch of women changing their lives through chatter.

It's a vision both seductive and off-putting. Do women, in this post-feminist age, really still need to view men as trophies or predators or anything other than flawed and complex human beings? Does the insular female world described in Commencement and other novels presume that men are either precursors to, or rewards for, transformation, rather than partners in a woman's process of self-actualization?

The lure of women's colleges, and more broadly of women's friendships, is that you are evaluated and cherished as a whole person, rather than merely as a potential wife or mother or fuck. Perhaps society has moved beyond when Harry met Sally and informed her that men and women can't be friends "because the sex part always gets in the way." But why risk it, Chick Lit asks, when you can stay up all night talking to your girlfriends? In Commencement, the wedding of one of the main characters is one of the novel's major events not because it binds her to a man for the rest of her life, but because it temporarily reunites her with her bridesmaids.

Yet, I wonder if women's issues aren't Commencement's red herring. It's true Smith is a women's college, but perhaps the second word of the pair deserves as much emphasis as the first. In these days of increasing specialization and ever-lengthening work weeks, when unfocused resumes are liabilities and dilettantes are scorned, the undergraduate years are the last time of life when both men and women are encouraged to diversify, to try new things, to be whole and variegated human beings.

Commencement may mark the start of "real life," but all too frequently that life proves to be narrow, cramped, and breathless. It's no wonder the women of Commencement cling to a time in their lives when The End was just the beginning.

#8: Catch-22

Because I read the bulk of Catch-22 at music camp, it seems only fitting to describe the novel in musical terms. Catch-22 was like a baroque trumpet fanfare that, despite containing only three notes, nevertheless saw fit to carry on loudly and with great exuberance over an extended period of time. Catch-22 was the brassy, drawn-out exegesis of single chord.

I GET IT! I wanted to shout at Joseph Heller twenty pages in (and 40 pages, and 140, and 400). WAR IS ABSURD: I GET IT. Enough already.

Catch-22 was a book I'd dreaded -guiltily- for years. I hate war novels. But even the title was a cultural touchstone! People were always citing Catch-22: it had become one of those books so integrated into the fabric of contemporary culture that to not read it seemed untenable. The perfect candidate, in sum, for My Year of Reading Dangerously.

Except I should have read the thing years ago. I mean this both in the sense that I have been culturally delinquent, and in the sense that Catch-22 seemed to me to be a novel profoundly sympathetic to the adolescence predicament. Yossarian, Heller's infamous bombardier, is the only sane man in a universe full of lunatics. Isn't that what most teenagers feel like every day?

Catch-22 was clever, funny, and boring as all get out. Just because a whole line of baroque trumpets playing a C chord in tune is impressive doesn't mean you want to listen to it.