What a Wonderful (Disney) World

Day One: A pleasant flight with the girls. They watched Twelve Dancing Princesses and looked out the window while Suzanne and I read trash celebrity magazines. (My great vice when I travel. It's the only time I would ever think it's okay to pay money for things like People or US.)
Once we actually made it to sunny Florida, we rested for a bit in our 7th floor hotel room and decompressed. We got our bearings and walked the quarter mile to an area called Downtown Disney. It's a complex of shops and restaurants that enables people to blow tons of money on Disney merchandise without having to actually go to the park. As everything seems to in Florida, the place is centered around a lake. We walked to the dock and took a 20 minute ferry ride to one of the Disney resorts, Old Key West where we ate at a place called Olivia's. We figured we could afford to eat overpriced Disney fare once so we went for it. Prime rib for me, lime chicken for Suzanne. Kid food for the kids. Our waiter was named Brahim and he was from Morocco.

After the meal, we went back to Downtown Disney and wandered through the cavernous gift shops. There was also a stage area and, without question, the highlight of the entire day was the kids dance party that we held there. This schlubby looking guy with a ball cap, glasses, and a headset microphone led a mob of people (mostly young kids but also teenagers and "feeling young again" parents) through dance moves to the tunes of "Car Wash," "Respect," "Hey Ya," and others. Why was this the highlight, you ask? Well, let me tell you, my friend, my 5 year old loves to shake it. That's right, shake it. At first she was just sitting on my lap and trying to be subtle about the fact that she was following along with schlub-man up front. I asked her if she wanted to go down to the pint-sized mosh pit and she said no. But within 5 minutes, she's jumped up and went down there entirely on her own and was completely enveloped in the kid's dance party experience for the next twenty five minutes. It was the funniest, cutest thing I'd ever seen. This was good but the best part was when we sent Older Sister down to retrieve Younger Sister because it was getting late. We watched Maryn walk down, find Avery, talk into her ear, and then, almost instantly, get swept up in the rapture of Aretha Franklin's R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and start dancing too. It was like she'd gotten assimilated by a herd of dancing Borg or something. One minute she's the responsible older sister and the next she's shaking it. That's right, shaking it. It was hysterical.

We eventually pulled them away from the dancing, bought some Ghiardelli's hot chocolate (because it was a little chilly), and walked back to the hotel.

Day Two: Breakfast at Perkins and then off to the Magic Kingdom. It was bright and warm. 78 degrees feels pretty hot when there's 100% humidity and you just came from snow and 34 degrees.

Keep in mind, I'd been to Disneyland before when I was a kid and as a teenager. Suzanne, on the other hand, had never been to Disney-anything. It was all new for her and the girls so it was a thrill to be with them when they saw the ornate, cleverly laid-out Main Street U.S.A. and to hear Maryn shriek as she pointed, "There's Cinderella's castle!" It's cool to be around for stuff like that.

We spent a lot of time in Tomorrowland that day without doing a whole lot. It was a Saturday and, in retrospect, I realize that's probably not the best day to to to the park. Long lines were everywhere and, at times, it was hard just to walk. Avery and I rode the Astro Orbiter while our more weak-stomached companions, Suzanne and Maryn, went on the Carousel of Progress. After that, we made the very fateful mistake of taking the girls on Stitch's Great Escape. The whole premise is that you're a guard in the prison where Stitch, the blue dog-like alien from Lilo and Stitch, is being held. He escapes and causes mayhem. There are long periods in complete darkness, unexpected loud noises, spraying water, and at one point, the smell of chili dog burps being blown in your face. (I'm not kidding.) Our little guide book said the ride was mediocre and might frighten small children. Let this be a lesson to us all: believe your guidebook. Do not disregard what it tells you. The girls came out of there crying, screaming, and pretty much traumatized for the rest of the trip. From that point on, right when the line to a ride turned a corner to the unknown, Maryn would start crying and freaking out. It wasn't cool.

We bought a hot dog, chips, and a drink for each of us for lunch to the tune of 30 dollars and moved on to the Toon Town Fair. (We did ride the Tea Cup ride on the way though and it was pretty sweet. It was a precursor to what I discovered the next day -- the older rides are better than the newer rides.) We toured Mickey's house, Minnie's house, Donald's boat, and took the train around the park before returning to Toon Town. Both girls refused to go on Goofy's Barnstormer which is a small roller coaster for kids. There was no convincing them so we moved on.

It doesn't seem like we did all that much but it did take us five or six hours to get through all this. We ended the day by going to Mickey's PhilharMagic which is a computer generated 3-D movie about Donald Duck chasing the wizard's hat from Fantasia through four or five Disney movies. The 3-D effects were incredible and we all loved it. We figured that was a good note to end on so we headed out.

(Heading out involves a lot down there. We walked to the monorail that took us to the transportation center that brought us a bus that drove us to our hotel. The whole park-to-hotel experience took an hour with all the walking and waiting.)

Dinner at TGIFriday's and sleep.

Day Three: This was, by far, the best and most enjoyable day of the trip. We had a better sense of how to navigate the park and what not to do (don't backtrack, just keep moving). Plus, as much as I wouldn't ever advocate willful, purposeful Sabbath-breaking, Sunday is totally the day the attend the Magic Kingdom. Lines were short, crowds were thin, and it was just a much more enjoyable experience in general.

We started back in Fantasy Land and got in line to Ariel's Grotto. There's a little splash park for the kids to play in while parents hold their place in line so they can meet an actress dressed in what must be a the world's most uncomfortable costume. Really, it's the worst of two worlds -- she is simultaneously overdressed and underdressed. She's in a super-heavy wig that's made to not budge an inch and her bottom half is wrapped in a faux fishtail. Can't be comfortable, right? But besides that, all she has up top is a seashell bikini so she's pretty vulnerable. How would you like to sit for four hours at a time so strangers could look at your bare abdomen? Not I, said the jelly-bellied Mark.

Anyway, the girls were pretty enchanted with her and enthusiastically waved good-bye when we left. Then we moved on to two classics in a row -- It's a Small World and Peter Pan's Flight. Both were just sort of deliriously great in how old-school they were. I mean, the Small World ride is really uncomplicated but the music and the colors and all the change that people have thrown into the water -- it's just cool. Plus, I loved it when midway through Maryn looked me and said with sudden understanding, "Dad, they're singing to us in the words from the different countries!" I was pleased that she was paying close enough attention to notice that the song was being sung in a different language in each room. She's such a little smarty pants.

Peter Pan's Flight was awesome just because of the way they mess with reality using really basic technology. The sprawling but tiny model of London as you fly over in your individual pirate ship is just freakin' magic.

We ate lunch at Pinochio's Haus and I thought it was really funny that we ate pizza, salad, and a Philly cheese steak in a German-themed restaurant while being served by people from Peru and Puerto Rico. Disney World really is a surreal place in many ways.

After lunch, we tried to get the girls to go through the Haunted Mansion. I can't say this with enough emphasis: It. Did. Not. Go. Well. I tried to casually walk them up to the door and get them in so they could see that it wasn't a big deal. But the recording of a howling wolf that was coming from a hidden speaker near the door sort of gave it away and the whole affair ended in a wrought-iron-fence-clutching, crying, screaming, wailing, terror-stricken fit. I tried to convince them that it was fun scary rather than scary scary but they would not be swayed. So we walked back through the entrance line, passing curious onlookers as we went, tear-stained daughters being led by the hand.

So we headed to Adventureland and, overall, it rocked. The Swiss Family Robinson tree house, the Jungle Cruise, and the new addition of Aladdin's Flying Carpets were all a lot of fun and had short lines. The Jungle Cruise might as well be made from pure Velveeta but I loved it. The animatronic lions eat the animatronic zebra while the animatronic (and seemingly politically incorrect) headhunters look on. It's awesome.

There was some sort of live Pirates of the Carribbean show going on outside the ride itself. Some Johnny Depp-lookalike was having a sword fight with someone else and there was a whole, mesmerized crowd watching. We were not mesmerized so we just kept walking and walking and walking until our little stroll led us right to the boats of the P of the C ride without so much as a pause for breath. No lines. At all. Do you know how rare that is? It was like finding a 20 dollar bill in my pocket (which, if I had found, I promptly would have spent on one ice cream cone and a box of peanuts from Disney vendors. I would have had .75 cents left over.) Anyway, all that joy was stymied when the ride stopped for ten or fifteen minutes right at the "Dead Men Tell No Tales" part before the big drop off. That long pause sapped a little of the magic but once we actually dropped down and went into the fort attack room, I was happy. It was a lot for the girls to take in so I'm not sure how much they really enjoyed it. Once we got out into the well-placed gift shop, they definitely enjoyed sword fighting with each other.

We went to Tom Sawyer's island for a while and the girls took turns leading us through the various caves and mines. Standing on the dock to go back, I was certain I was directly across from Miguel Ferrer, the actor from Crossing Jordan, Bionic Woman, Traffic, and the Kevin Costner festival of badness, Revenge. I couldn't tell if the guy was looking at me in a "Please, don't make a big deal of who I am" sort of way or a "Why is this jug-headed guy staring at me" sort of way. I've looked at photos of him on the Web and I'm still not sure. Suzanne says no but I would love the brush-with-fame mediocrity of it. I'm never impressed with people who have had dinner or spent real time with celebrities. I'm always more interested when I meet someone who cleaned Jamie Lee Curtis's cabin at Red Fish Lake or someone who delivered a custom shower door to Bruce Willis's house.

I digress.

We watched Fairy Godmother light up Cinderella's castle for Christmas and then had a terrific view of the fireworks show while we waited in line for the Tomorrowland Indy cars. Avery was a driving machine and loved being at the wheel. She purposefully banged the car into the guide track and then would say, "I can't help it, Dad. It's just the wheel."

We finished off the night by going on Buzz Lightyear's Space Spin (or something.) I still think the old-school rides are superior but this one is a worthy addition. You're in a spaceship that you can make spin left or right and it carries you through a series of shooting galleries. Each ship is equipped with two laser guns and you fire at the targets in the galleries and accrue points. You fight the evil Emperor Zurg from Toy Story 2 and just generally have a great time. Maryn scored 800 points, Avery scored 2000 points, I had 80,000 and Suzanne, freakishly, had something like 400,000 points. I don't know how she did it but I know that she was the Zurg-slaying queen.

Avery fell asleep in my arms as I carried her to the monorail that night and slept until we were almost to the hotel. Maryn slumped against me on the bus and fell asleep too. For the record, though she may only be 5, carrying Avery is like carrying a small NBA player or a newborn Clydesdale. Seriously, it's like she's made out of sandbags and leftover legs from the giant-making factory. She's a long, tall Sally for sure.

Anyway, the next day was uneventful. The girls swam in the hotel pool, we checked out, and went back to Downtown Disney to buy souvenirs. Suzanne and I got a set of Christmas ornaments (our tradition is to buy an ornament whenever we go on a trip so our tree will represent places we've gone together). Maryn got a Polly Pocket Tinkerbell doll and Avery, ever the surprising little girl, got a sword, eye patch, and telescope.

We returned our car, waited for our delayed flight, crossed the continent from south to north, and returned to snow and 34 degree weather. It was a great time and I'm glad we went.

Don't you feel well rested and tan just for having read the blogging equivalent of a neighbor's slide show of their vacation?

P.S. As an ironic afterword, I want to point out that the first movie the girls wanted to watch when we got home was Lilo and Stitch.

29 Things

So it's been over a week since I last posted. In the last seven days, I have eaten a lot of really good holiday food, traveled to Florida, spent a ridiculous amount of money on park admission and food, walked all over Uncle Walt's creation, had a wonderfully good time with my family, traveled back to freezing Michigan, written a paper on Arendtian Action and the African concept of ubuntu, watched a lame film adaptation of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi, and taught my students about the proper use of quotation marks using a homemade worksheet about Snoop Dogg drinking Kool-Aid from his gold-encrusted goblet. Yes, it's been a full week.

Consequently, there's much to write about. I kept notes on our trip to Disney World and I'll offer a few highlights later once I have access to the photos but for now I think I'll post a couple of random things. First of all, something I stole from Tracy's website:

29 Things About Suzanne

1. Who is your woman?
I can’t really claim ownership, but my sweetheart is the one and only, Suzanne Marie Day Brown.

2. How long have you been together?
If you count our dating time, it's been close to ten years. Officially, our 9th wedding anniversary is December 19th.

3. How long did you date?
We knew each other for four years before we actually started dating. Once we became a couple, we dated for less than a year.

4. How old is your woman?
33

5. Who eats more?

Me. Easily. Hands down. In fact, if you put your hands down on the table, I may eat them too.

6. Who said “I love you” first?
Hmmm. I think it was me.

7. Who is taller?
Me, although not by much. It's pretty cool being with a tall woman. She's powerful, y'know?

8. Who sings better?
Neither of us. Singing time at FHE is pretty rocky at our house. (Although if I was allowed to sing hymns Mel Torme-style, I'd totally be the better singer. I sound great when I do that.)

9. Who is smarter?

We're both pretty intelligent people. Suzanne has a very clear, logical mind and she can organize with almost alarming efficiency. I think we're equally smart, just about different subjects.

10. Whose temper is worse?
Hers.

11. Who does the laundry?
We both do but I'm swiftly losing my laundry privileges. I ruined a sweater and a shirt of hers last week by drying them when they weren't meant to be dried. Maybe we're not equally intelligent after all.

12. Who takes out the garbage?
Me.

13. Who sleeps on the right side of the bed?
If you're looking at the bed or laying in the bed?

14. Who pays the bills?
Me

15. Who is better with the computer?
She is.

16. Who mows the lawn?
I do.

17. Who cooks dinner?
Usually her. She's infinitely better at it. I am the king of homemade cheese burgers, soups, and chocolate chip cookies but Suzanne is better at everything else. (Actually, she's probably better at those too but they just happen to be the things I don't mind making.)

18. Who drives when you are together?

Me. "It's not a 'man thang,' it's just how I get down." (Name that movie folks.)

19. Who pays when you go out?
Depends on who has money in their account that day and who paid last.

20. Who is most stubborn?
Uhhhhhhh

21. Who is the first to admit when they are wrong?
Hmm. Probably me.

22. Whose parents do you see the most?
Hers but I talk to mine more often.

23. Who kissed who first?
I kissed her after she goaded me into it.

24. Who asked who out?

Me, I guess but there is much debate as to what qualifies as our first date. According to Suzanne, it took place in 1993. According to me, it didn't happen until 1998.

25. Who proposed?

I did. In a cemetery.

26. Who is more sensitive?
Her. But I have my moments.

27. Who has more friends?
Here? Probably Suzanne. I don't really have friends. Sniff sniff.

28. Who has more siblings?
She does. 6 kids in her family, 4 in mine. But my siblings are all boys and most of her siblings are scrawny girls so if we ever got into a family to family rumble, the Browns would totally win.

29. Who wears the pants in the family?
We work on sharing the pants. Co-pants.

Pre-Thanksgiving

Pre-Thanksgiving. Tomorrow we head up to Commerce Township for the big meal with Suzanne's family and then on Friday we load onto a plane and head for (hopefully) sunny Florida. Actually, the weather forecast says it will be overcast but in the high 70s. Seeing as how it's in the 40s and raining like crazy outside here, almost anything is an improvement.


Last night in film class, we were subjected to Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel. The professor prefaced our viewing by saying, "I've never heard of anyone besides myself liking this movie -- but I do think it's kind of wonderful." When the teacher made that comment, I wanted to share his vision, you know? I wanted to be one of the few, brilliant students who could appreciate this hidden gem, right? Well, unfortunately, I hated that movie -- hated it the way I hate Zach Braff. It was all ambition and no talent, all directorial back-patting and self-congratulation for being so clever and complicated. It was ugly to look at, boring to follow, and a failure at being any kind of science fiction (which is supposedly was). Once it was over and we took a mid-class break, one of my classmates asked me what I thought. I told him I'd had more pleasant experiences at the urologist's office.

But it did get me thinking about my teacher's taste in movies. I think academia sort of fetishizes complication and makes it a virtue unto itself. That was certainly true in the Boise State MFA program. The more difficult something was, generally the more praised it was, at least on the poetry side of things. Inscrutability was this high art. If someone had to scratch their head over your work, that meant they were paying attention. Though it was never articulated in this way, getting a reader to Pay Close Attention was regarded as the Holy Grail of writing. That's what you want. Basic pleasure was always viewed as a lowly, less brainy, and therefore less admirable second-stringer reaction to writing.

Pleasure in reading wasn't outright denied but it was always spoken of in connection with difficulty and complexity. The idea was that being required to think really, really hard and being made to look at a poem or story (or film or book) as some sort of puzzle to be solved or some sort of inexplicable experience that can't ever really be captured or articulated is what gives a reader pleasure. There's certainly something to that and I'm not opposed to complicated ideas or works of art. But ultimately, pleasure for me comes from feeling something more than thinking something. Most complicated, academic writing just doesn't make me feel anything.

Anyway, back to my teacher's taste in movies: as I sat there resenting him for making us watch this terrible piece of junk, I wondered what his favorites movies are. Asking a person what their one favorite movie is isn't that useful. I never have an answer for it. There are too many choices, too many different films for different moods. Even when you ask people what their favorite food is, they usually answer with "Mexican" or "Italian" or something like that. It's a whole genre of food rather than one specific dish.

So, rather than trying to narrow it down to one favorite movie, I wondered the old desert island question: if you were stranded on a desert island but got to bring ten movies to watch (presumably on a coconut and bamboo tv and dvd player invented by the Professor), what would you choose? I didn't ask Dr. Shaviro but, being the narcissist that I am, I asked myself.

In no particular order, my essential ten are:

Always (Spielberg, 1989)

Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)

Liar, Liar (Shadyac, 1997)

The Mormon Trilogy (Dutcher, 2000, 2001, 2005)

The original Star Wars Trilogy (Lucas, Kershner, Marquand, 1977, 1980, 1983)

The Incredibles (Bird, 2004)

A River Runs Through It (Redford, 1992)

Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989)

Grosse Point Blank (Armitage, 1997)

Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)

I can elaborate on these choices another day but for now, I tag Suzanne, Darlene, Tony, Tracy, Dan, Ellen, and Tawnya. What are your ten desert island movies?

Friday Randomness

Even though it's Friday, I don't have the usual sense of relief. The end of the semester is approaching and there's less and less time to do less and less. I have an eight page position paper on how the African concept of ubuntu figures into western concepts of rhetoric that's due after Thanksgiving and then two 15 page papers, one on Richard Dutcher as an auteur and one on identity and Mormon film, are due in about three weeks. They'll get done; they always do. But man, it makes me look forward to Christmas break quite a bit.

Four Random Facts About Me:

1. One of my childhood preoccupations was cleaning out the caps to Elmer's Glue bottles. In grade school when there would be a dozen bottles of white paste clogged with dried glue, I was the go-to kid. I got a lot of satisfaction out of prying the sheets of dry gunk off and pushing out the gummy plugs that were stopping the free and unobstructed flow of glue for kids everywhere. My tools were a straightened paper clip, a pencil, and sometimes a pair of scissors. Writing it down now, it sounds immensely nerdy and weird but, frankly, even now when I use PVA glue for a book project, I spend the first five minutes cleaning the lid of the jug off before I do anything else. I'm a freak. Sue me.


2. I dressed up as the Scarecrow and teamed with three other Ricks College students who were dressed as Dorothy, Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man to be part of the Grand Opening festivities when Wal-Mart came to Rexburg. I saw several people I knew (including my smirking father) as I flopped around on the hard tile floors for three hours and sang "We're off to see the wizard" with Loreen "Dorothy" Muhlstein. For all that, I got paid fifty bucks. It was awful. I don't know what's worse -- dressing up as a scarecrow for money or the fact that I had some small part in welcoming Wal-Mart to my town.







3. I once got to hold and wear an Olympic gold medal when I interviewed pole vault champion Stacey Dragila for NPR in Boise. It was heavy and, though she was tiny, Stacey Dragila could have easily killed me just by flexing her calf muscles and crushing me against a nearby wall with them.

4. As a waiter at the dearly-departed Pocatello Big Jud's, I sold 24 Big Jud burgers in one night. Missy Cummins says she won the who-can-sell-more contest that night but I know that I did.

Acer Palmatum

Just a couple of photos of the Japanese maple that's growing in our backyard. From the looks of things, yesterday was the last warm day of fall so I'm glad I got these shots when I did.

From The Writer's Almanac for November 13

It's the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1850), who was a sickly, moderately successful essayist and travel writer, living in France, when one evening he walked to a friend's house, looked in through the window, and fell instantly in love with a woman sitting there at the table. To make a grand entrance, he opened the window, leapt inside, and took a bow. The woman was Fanny Osbourne and she was both American and unhappily married. She had come to Europe to get away from her husband, but after spending months getting to know Stevenson, she decided to go back to California.

Stevenson got a telegram from her a few weeks after she'd returned to the United States, and he decided on the spot to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him. His health, as always, was terrible, and the trip to the United States almost killed him. He collapsed on Fanny Osbourne's doorstep, but she nursed him back to health. She did divorce her husband, and they got married in San Francisco and spent their honeymoon in a cabin near an abandoned silver mine.

They moved back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage, and one rainy afternoon the following summer Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him and idea for a story and in a single month he had written his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883), about the young Jim Hawkins, who finds a treasure map and goes on a journey to find the treasure. He meets pirates, survives a mutiny, and gets to know a one-legged cook named Long John Silver. The book has been in print for 124 years now.

Around the same time that Treasure Island was published, Stevenson woke up one morning and told his family that he did not want to be disturbed until he had finished writing a story that had come to him in a dream. It took him three days to write it, but when he read the story aloud to his wife, she said it was too sensationalistic. So he sat down and rewrote the whole thing. By the end of the week he was fairly happy with the result, which he called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), about a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal.

Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous. He spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to the next, producing about 400 pages of published work a year. He finally settled on the island of Samoa, where his health improved greatly, and in the last five years of his life, he wrote 10 more books. He died at the age of 44, not from his respiratory illness, but from a stroke. His contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation, but he's now remembered mainly as a writer of adventure stories. Critics wish he had finished the last novel he had been working on, about colonial life in Samoa, because the fragments that survive are among his best work.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, "Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."

Random Fact O' The Day

Dome beehives, the kind that are the state symbol of Utah, are made of coiled, braided straw and are officially called "skep" beehives. So the next time you're looking at the Utah state flag or watching an old cartoon that features goofy bears trying to filch honey from coiled domes, you can casually say, "Oh look, skeps."

Be the first kid on your block.

Just Beeing Me

It is gray and lightless here in Detroit this morning. I'm used to it but I do see how visitors could find this a very foreboding, grim looking place -- broken concrete under skies the color of tin. Sunny California it ain't.

Over the weekend, we took the girls to see Jerry Seinfeld's opus, Bee Movie. It was bright and funny and, despite almost everything I read about it, enjoyable. The critics I read all seemed to say the same thing, "Oh sure, you'll laugh and the jokes are funny. . . but . . ." and then they'd go on to critique something or other. One reviewer from NPR thought the whole movie was a veiled metaphor for Seinfeld himself. The bees, like Jerry at the end of his sitcom, stop working and then entire world turns gray and dead. Then they start working again and everyone is happy. The reviewer (Bob Mondello, I think) saw the movie as a testament to Seinfeld's ego. Whatever.

I think people either wanted more from Seinfeld's return to mainstream, mass media entertainment or they were just set on disliking whatever he ended up finally doing. Whatever it is, as far as I'm concerned, they could have just said, "Oh sure, you'll laugh and the jokes are funny" and left it at that. It's not as good as Ratatouie but still loads better than Shrek 3, Happily Never After, Barnyard, The Wild, and most of the other computer generated junk that's been produced in the last several years.


Other things to recommend Bee Movie: it features the best performance Matthew Broderick has given in years, it's got Patrick Warburton essentially playing a very intense version of his sitcom character Puddy, John Goodman is hilarious as the honey industry lawyer, and it ends with a cover of George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun which is one of my favorite songs of all time.

Forgiveness and Empathy

"Although forgiveness is often regarded as an expression of weakness, the decision to forgive can paradoxically elevate the victim to a position of strength as the one who holds the key to the perpetrator's wish. For just at the moment when the perpetrator begins to show remorse, to seek some way to ask forgiveness, the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires -- readmission into the human community. And the victim retains that privileged status as long as he or she stays the moral course, refusing to sink to the level of the evil that was done to her or to him. In this sense, then, forgiveness is a kind of revenge, but revenge enacted at a rareified level. Forgiving may appear to condone the offense, thus further disempowering the victim. But forgiveness does not overlook the deed: it rises above it. 'This is what it means to be human,' it says. 'I cannot and will not return the evil you inflicted on me.' And thus it is the victim's triumph (117)

"One reason we distance ourselves through anger from those who have hurt us or others we know is the fear that if we engage them as real people, we will be compromising our moral stance and lowering the entry requirements into the human community" (120).

"Connecting on a human level with a monster . . . comes to be a profoundly frightening prospect, for ultimately, it forces us to confront the potential for evil within ourselves" (123).

"The absence of empathy, whether at the communal or personal level, signals a condition that, in subtle but deeply destructive ways, separates people from one another. When criminal offenders, even of the most egregious kind, show contrition and apologize, they are, quintessentially, acting as human beings.

"What enables some victims to forgive heinous crimes? What distinguishes them from those who feel unable to do so? In addition to an external context that makes reconciliation normative through the language of restoration - a truth commission, for example, or a counseling agency that focuses on victim-offender encounters, or a national dialogue that begins to put in place the symbols and vocabulary of forgiveness and compromise - there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into his pain, regardless of who that someone is. The possibility of making an empathic connection with someone who has victimized us, as a response to the pain of his remorse, stems significantly from this underlying dynamic. The power of human connectedness, of identification with the other as 'bone of my bone' through the sheer fact of his being human, draws us to 'rescue' others in pain, almost as if this were a learned response embedded deep in our genetic and evolutionary past. We cannot help it. We are induced to empathy because there is something in the other that is felt to be part of the self, and something in the self that is felt to belong to the other. Empathy feels with the other in a reciprocal emotional process in which one asks for it, or his very situation seems to ask for it, and the other responds by offering it. Empathy reaches out to the other and says: I can feel the pain you feel for having caused me pain" (127).

Thursday, Books, Forgiveness, and Bad Design

It's Thursday and, unlike every other Thursday for the last two months, I am not frantically reading film theory in order to prep for my night class. Good ol' Dr. Shaviro is off at a conference somewhere so we students have a week off to watch Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing and do the reading for next week.

Consequently, I'm reading blogs, answering e-mail, and grading papers. It's a sweet life I have.

I finished reading A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela last night and I really, really liked it. PGM is a psychologist who was invited to be part of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the dismantling of apartheid. The book is a meditation on the idea of forgiveness in the face of despicable evil. It centers around her interviews with Eugene de Kock, an apartheid government operative who had been dubbed "Prime Evil" by the media. De Kock was responsible for countless murders, assassinations, night raids, bombings, disappearances, and instances of torture during the 70s and 80s and was the post-apartheid poster boy for everything that was depraved, evil, and wrong with the previous regime. Following the shift of power, he was sentenced to 212 years in prison and it was there in Pretoria that PGM interviewed him.

I know it sounds all "Hello, Clarice" but it's not that at all. The book asks questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and what the act of forgiving does for both the victim and the perpetrator. De Kock, who looks like a dowdy suburban dad rather than a killing machine by the way, deals with the weight of the crimes he's committed and PGM deals with completely unexpected feelings of compassion for someone who killed a lot of people who looked a lot like her. It's a very hopeful, intelligent, compassionate book and it's one of the best things I've been introduced to since I started here at Wayne. It's not academic or dry. On the contrary, it's quite compelling and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read something meaningful about real forgiveness.



I also wanted to mention that I finally (after close to 20 years) got around to reading My Name Is Asher Lev. I mentioned it on my blog a month or two ago and wrote about how I couldn't bring myself to read it because the copy I had was too ugly. A few people wrote and urged me to get over it and read it anyway. I found a good looking copy on Amazon and read it in a couple of days. Not long after that, I tracked down its sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev, and read it over it a weekend. Needless to say, I loved them both. I loved the ideas about how God's world can/should be inclusive and that art can be as much of God as other, more traditional forms of worship. I had issues with the ways in which the first book in particular implied support for the whole "an artist creates because he has no other choice" way of thinking but I still loved the books very much. In fact, when I finished The Gift, I was really sad because I realized that Chaim Potok, the author, had passed away and that there wouldn't be any more books about Asher, his family, his friends. I felt a sense of loss -- like I was leaving a group of friends that I knew I'd never see again.


On the top is the version of My Name that I have. The lower on is one of the ugliest, funniest things I've ever seen. My copy The Gift was nicely designed. I came across this version while searching for the nice one. I was so struck by the awesome crapitude of this version, I had to share it. Thank me later.

(Yeah, that's right. Crapitude.)

Guest Post

This is the most recent post from Suzanne's blog. I really liked it and so I thought I'd post it here (with her permission, of course.)

"One-Year Anniversary for Maryn...

...of being lice/nit free. You may recall that it was almost exactly a year ago that Maryn came home with the "scratchy's". My theory now is that it came from that stupid Jack Sparrow pirate hat that was popular last year at Halloween. There was a little boy named Max who was Jack in her kindergarten and he, of course, let everyone try on his nappy, dread-locked, lice-infested disaster. It was only a few weeks after that we started getting the notes in the cubbies to wash all of our linens and winter gear. Then we got the emails from the Center director to treat all family members for preventive measures. Then the Dr. started visiting their class and checking the kids, and teaching the teachers how to check the kids, then the parents, and then the dreaded lice came anyway. As you may recall, that was the longest month of my (and Maryn's) life. It sucked in every way possible. It was incredibly disgusting to begin with...imagining tiny bugs crawling through your hair...laying eggs on your folicles, and those eggs hatching and growing into more bugs. Yuck. It was also incredibly time-consuming. The laundry! Oh, the laundry! It never ended. We bagged up lots of stuff and sent it over to Mom&Dad's, where they washed it and then it just stayed there because I didn't want any kinds of fabric in our house until we were all clear. For a month, we had no blankey's or pillows or stuffed animals to snuggle with while watching TV or reading. It was a cold, spare time. We also had to do the initial shampooing and combing...which literally took us into the wee small hours that first night. We had to go to dr's to get notes, and we had to repeat the nit-checking process every night. The scene went like this...imagine our biggest, brightest lamp, and two chairs. I was in back, Maryn was in front of me. I started at the front of her hair and worked back. Lots of clips held the already checked hair in place, while I combed and separated her fine mountain of never-ending hair with a fine-toothed comb and tweezers. Phrases like "nit-picky" and "lousy" had new meaning for me. But this was not all about me. This was about poor little Maryn too. The poor girl was only 5 at the time, and was forced to sit in that chair while I scraped and pulled and actually plucked out her hair for hours at a time. She had to have the stinky shampoo at bathtime and sleep on plastic tablecloths (at her Dad's). She even had to lie to her teachers a few times because I couldn't afford to take off any more work. She was a real trooper and had to grow up a lot during that month. She also had one of the most spiritual experiences of her life to this point.

"We were so exhausted and frustrated with the lice. She used to cry about how much she hated the lice, and why did she have to get it, and she wished she'd never gotten it, and on and on. We started praying more earnestly in our bedtime prayers. Every night. And then every morning. And then at meals. And then before we started the "nit-picking" rituals. Maryn's faith was really tested because after the first time she prayed, the lice didn't go away. I found more the next night. And the night after. They didn't go away as if by a miracle. But they did go away. There were fewer and fewer until they were eventually gone. She learned that Heavenly Father doesn't just take away our trials, and make things miraculously better all at once. But if we are patient and have faith, He hears our prayers, sees our humility, and blesses us. He also gives us trials and experiences to make us stronger and to teach us lessons and to remind us that He is in control.

"This is a long story, but the reason it is fresh in my mind is because we had our Primary Program this past month. The topic was "Faith in Jesus Christ". Maryn's class all came up with their own talks. How has their faith in Jesus grown this year? Maryn's teacher asked her class to think about it and she helped them write down their feelings. Maryn's talk went something like this..."I got sick...with head lice...I prayed and it got better." I got a call from one of the Primary Counselors who told me what Maryn was planning on sharing in the Program. She was pretty tentative about it...maybe we could encourage Maryn to choose another experience to share with the entire congregation, she thougt. I concurred. I encouraged Maryn to come up with something different, which she did. However, the new talk never got written down and the original notecard was included in the master Program script. Maryn got to the podium and waited for her teacher to whisper in her ear. She knew it was the wrong talk, but she said the words anyway. "I got sick...with head lice...I prayed and it got better." Of course, she was a little red in the face and the Ward snickered and shot glances in my direction. I knew she knew that it would get this reaction, but she perservered. She got down and returned to her seat. I tried catching her eye, and when we did I gave her a thumbs up and she returned it with her closed mouth little grin. When she came back to our pew after the program ended, she was a little nervous. I told her she did great and gave her a big hug. I think she knew she had done well, and I think both of us realized that this was the talk and the lesson she needed to share that day...unedited and true to life. Maryn's faith in Jesus Christ did grow and for that I am thankful."

Pretty cool, huh?

My pumpkin. . .

rocked.

Projector

I love the idea of a project, some kind of governing plan behind activity. I became consciously aware of it in grad school when my teacher, Janet Holmes, talked about how a book of poems shouldn't just be a random collection of your writing. Instead, a manuscript should have a trajectory, an architecture. Half of her second book of poems, The Green Tuxedo, was a series of poems based on her discovery of her late father's planner/diary/calendar from when he was a young, single journalist working in (I think) Chicago in the 30s or 40s. She wrote this really interesting bunch of poems speculating about his love life, comparing the man she knew and the man that was revealed in the journal, and those sorts of things. She pursued the project of interpreting this discovery about her dad over the course of several years and dozens and dozens of poems.

I fell in love with the thought of having a great idea and pursuing it, especially creatively. There's a great Frank O'Hara poem that touches on this idea that I will now reprint here with absolutely no one's permission at all:

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

I love that poem for a number of reasons. Number one, I would probably rather be a painter than a poet too but I am not. (Of course, these days, I'm not really a poet either.) Number two, the way he describes going from thinking of a color to ending up with a dozen poems that never even mention that color is really interesting and accurate. I think most creative people are driven by ideas and emotions and symbols that are ever present but never fully unearthed. I think projects are ways we try to both kill and feed these subterranean thoughts that follow us around.

Take scrapbooking, for instance. It's this really mainstream, kinda cutesy, folksy activity that a lot of people do but, underneath the die-cuts of sad eyed puppies and metal stamped letters that spell out "Families Are Forever," what is it other than people using creative methods to negotiate their family histories, to give order and sense to their past, to write/edit/revise the events of their lives and create a document for the future? Scrapbooking is as much a project as Janet Holmes' journal poems or Frank O'Hara thinking about the color orange.

What got me thinking about this today in particular was an article in Newsweek about all the recent memoirs about people spending a year following some sort of rules. Again, with no permission whatsoever, I reprint some of Jennie Yabroff's article:

"The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs's forthcoming chronicle of his yearlong quest to follow every mandate in the Bible, is just one of a recent flurry of "year of" books. Sara Bongiorni gave up buying Chinese products for A Year Without 'Made in China'. Judith Levine gave up shopping altogether for Not Buying It. Barbara Kingsolver fed her family with what they could grow or source locally for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Ellen Currey-Wilson banned TV from the house for The Big Turnoff. And Colin Beavan swore off luxuries like toilet paper, disposable cups and air conditioning for his blog No Impact Man."

I think those all sound fascinating and I want to read them all just to see how 21st century people dealt with deprivation.

(On a side note off the topic of projects, there are some great quotes in the Yabroff article about why people would do stuff like this: "'We're such a hyperaffluent society, what else is left for us to do than take things away from our lives?' says Ron Hogan, author of the publishing-industry blog Galleycat.com."

"'Part of the idea of saying no is a little old-fashioned,' says Judy Clain, the Little, Brown editor who bought Julie and Julia, a year-of memoir in which writer Julie Powell made every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 'We are so overwhelmed by technology, we have so much access to so many choices, these books offer a way to deprive or limit ourselves.'"

"Jacobs finds himself longing for the simple, Biblical life once his experiment ends: 'The first day was the worst. I felt unanchored. Too many choices.'")

Anyway, back on the subject of projects, November is National Novel Writing Month. Thousands of people across the country started yesterday with the goal of reaching 50,000 words before the end of the month. I won't be one of them but I think it's so cool that it's being done.

When President Hinckley asked the members of the church to read the Book of Mormon before the end of the year, people loved the feeling of accomplishing an important goal in a limited amount of time.

For about three months I wrote a poem a day. Regardless of whether or not I was in the mood or whether or not the poem was any good, I wrote one every day almost without fail. That produced my book Morning, Noon, and Night which was an anniversary gift for Suzanne way back when.

Obviously, my master's thesis, The Book of Saint Anthony, was a project that I pursued even after I decided I wasn't all that crazy about it.

It goes beyond mere goal setting -- it involves some sort of grander, sometimes self-delusional vision. I don't think you have to be grandiose or crazy to take on a project, but I'll bet it doesn't hurt.

Projects I Would Like To Take On (some feasible, some not):

I would like to go all Kerouac and live somewhere remote for a month. (Jack Keroac lived for 63 days in a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington state.) No tv, no phone, no Internet. Just some books and maybe a radio. I just wonder what it would be like to be quiet for a while. I wonder what I might think, feel, and do if I didn't have e-mail, grad school, and Dancing With The Stars to occupy me. (Thing is, the whole family would have to come along and be part of my project. I couldn't happily go that long without las tres mujeres.)

I would like to create a series of artist trading cards. Artist cards are sort of like personal tarot cards that you decorate with symbols, images, words, etc. that are meaningful to you. I'd like to collaborate with other book artists and trade cards through the mail.

I want to create a book called Cuyahoga. It would be a collection of photos, poems, and small essays about the various places that were meaningful to me as a teenager and young man. The title comes from the REM song of the same name. The lyrics go "This is where we walked, this is where we swam. Take a picture here, take a souvenir."

I want to create my own line of screen printed t-shirts. Shirt number one would simply read "From Mars."

I want to buy the campus of the Albion Normal School in Albion Valley, Idaho, renovate the buildings (and, believe me, that would be no small feat), and turn it into a year-round artist's colony.

I would also (sorta) like to go for a year without soda pop.

What about you, O my loyal 15 readers? What would you like to spend a year (or a month) doing or refraining from doing?