FLW

It's been over a month. I know. Sorry.

I've been reading a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright lately. As everybody knows, Wright was kind of the atom bomb of architecture in the 20th century. He's been dead for over fifty years, but his designs are still ubiquitous in books, documentaries, calendars, films, etc. His influence was so powerful and so wide-reaching that even after all this time, he's probably one of the only architects anywhere that your average joe can name. He was a big deal and continues to be.

What not many people know is that when I was growing up, before I wanted to draw comics or write poetry or do anything else, I wanted to be an architect. I don't know where the idea came from -- my mom probably -- but some of my earliest memories are of me drawing plans for ridiculously fanciful houses. (One, as I recall, used a rainbow as an entry sidewalk. That should tell you how young I was when I was making these drawings.) Anyway, when I was twelve, my dad arranged for me to visit an actual architect's office and hang out for a while. John Watson was a family friend and he had a small firm that at the time had its offices on the second floor of a beautiful old building just across from the river in Idaho Falls. I sat at giant drafting table and had my run of all the tools and materials I wanted. I talked with Mr. Watson and he answered all my questions. At the end of that visit, I was more of less resigned to not being an architect. Too much math, too much management and seemingly not enough creativity. I left with the impression that it was an architect's job to just sort of manage everyone else, and that idea didn't appeal to me in the slightest. So I left that idea behind and went on to study portrait painting, landscape painting, literature, and poetry. (Jeeze, is it any wonder I am poor? Look at that list. I might as well have taken classes in "Would you like fries with that?")

Anyway, even though I left it behind as a professional pursuit, I have always been interested in and moved by architectural design. A well-planned, beautifully designed building can be as exciting to me as a good poem, song, story, or movie. I just dig it. Working in downtown Detroit from 2006 to 2009 was kind of a thrill for me because, for all the homeless guys and decay, there were all the gorgeous buildings everywhere I looked. Narrow row houses and Victorian mansions in Corktown, art deco sky scrapers downtown, crazy Modernist and Brutalist campus buildings at Wayne State - it was an architectural bonanza.

So, like a lot of buffs, I'm fascinated by FLW's designs - his big, famous ones like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim but also his small, obscure ones like Teater's Knoll, a tiny artist studio perched on an outcropping of basalt above the Snake River, the only FLW design in the entire state of Idaho. Every aspect of his buildings is fascinating - exterior, interior, landscaping, lighting, all of it. His designs always catch my eye, are always distinct and, I think, really lovely.

So, out of curiosity, I've been reading about him lately. First I finished a small, narrowly focused non-fiction book called Death in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan. It focuses on a story I'd heard about but never really understood. In 1914, seven people were killed and a fire was set at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin. Written by an academic but with a nice literary flourish, the book carefully explains and contextualizes what Wright was doing in rural Wisconsin, who was in the house, who committed the murders, and a lot of other information about Wright's career and life at the time.

Once I finished that, I checked out The Women by T.C. Boyle. The book fictionalizes Wright's relationships with his first wife, Kitty; the mistress he builds Taliesin for, Mamah Borthwick; his crazy, heroin-addicted second wife, Miriam Noel; and his mistress-then-third-wife Olgivanna Lazovich. As that list might indicate, FLW had his issues with women.

While I've been reading these two books, I've been checking out big coffee table books filled with pictures of FLW's drawings, houses, office buildings, textile designs, etc. So I've been going back and forth between full-color evidence of the guy's obvious inspired brilliance and tales of his dishonesty, unfaithfulness, impatience, and just sort of ridiculous hypocrisy. It just combines into a really weird picture in my head.

The guy straight up abandoned his wife and six kids. Left them in the dust and took off with the wife of one of his clients. He was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, borrowing here, taking out loans there, hawking prints and drawings, taking advances against projects he knew he'd never complete, the whole deal. He was a control freak who would manipulate his apprentices' personal lives, use their property as his own (if they brought a car to Taliesin, they had to repaint it to Cherokee red at their own expense to match everything else on site), and generally use them as slave labor on his property. While his creative work continues to influence the world even now, as a person he wasn't very admirable at all. In general, he comes across as deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous as a human being. It seems like he was almost a savant -- super brilliant in one area and almost completely helpless in every other way.

The more I read and watch about people who are the absolute best at what they do (pick anything - sports, arts, politics, etc.), the more it seems they all share a kind of extremity of personality. They're all focused on their pursuit in an intense way that excludes almost everything and everyone else around them. They shut out their families and children because they need to design, write, practice, whatever. Their focus allows them to excel in their field but it also almost always seems to encourage a really messy kind of selfishness in their personal dealings. It almost makes me wonder if someone can be the very best at what they do and still be a balanced, kind, faithful human being or if excellence automatically equates egomania. Or, more realistically, is it simply that they are people like everyone else but none of the rest of us have biographies or feature articles written about us? If anyone researched and wrote about your life, how good would you look? For myself, I imagine I'd come out looking a lot like FLW - deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous, but minus the famous, world-changing influence or lasting works of beauty.

These driven genius types are just regular human beings with hang ups and obsessions and mistakes, but amid all that, they manage to create stuff that lasts, that moves people, that changes the world. I guess I can admire their accomplishments and have compassion for the rest.

A Long Post About Nothing

One of my mother's favorite sayings was, "Everything is connected." She was a very faithful woman who saw God's hand in just about everything and believed strongly in a Mormon version of karma. Whatever happened in life, she was able to connect the dots and point out the ways in which this event was somehow the result of these earlier choices and actions. She simultaneously loved and didn't believe in coincidences. "Everything happens for a reason" was one of her other favorites.

I was thinking about this worldview of hers this morning as I was reflecting on my master's thesis. It was not nearly as big of a deal as my dissertation is turning out to be, but it was certainly important at the time. The last year of my MFA program was spent working on what eventually became The Book of Saint Anthony, a book-length series of poems about a Mormon kid named Tony who slowly falls away from his faith, makes bad choices, ends up accidentally shooting and killing his best friend while they are out target practicing, and gets sent to the Saint Anthony Juvenile Correction Center. Shakespeare it ain't.

Before it became this whole thing, it started as an idea I had a year and a half before while in a poetry workshop. I wanted to write a series of six or seven poems based on things that had happened to my best friend, Tony, and I when we were teenagers. There were four or five moments in our friendship when we probably should have died - driving too fast on icy roads, climbing too high on treacherous rocks, building fires in stupid places, etc. So I wanted to write this series of poems called "The Dangers." I liked the idea of calling some poems "The" something, you know? Like the name of a band - The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Commitments, etc.

I had an idea for a little chapbook and knew what I'd do for the cover, the binding, and so on. So I started tinkering with the poems and ended up writing a kind of preamble poem about Tony himself, a very loose, mostly fictionalized biography of him that I called "Hagiography." I'd recently learned that a hagiography is a biography of a saint in the Catholic church. I thought it was funny that, as Mormons, technically any biography of any of us would be a hagiography - because we're all saints, right? So I thought that was witty and wrote around that for a while.

The idea of a series of biography poems about this fictionalized version of Tony started to take hold. I figured I could add in "The Dangers" in with all the other work. Somewhere along the line, I melded Tony's fictionalized story with an actual experience from high school - a friend of a friend who had accidentally shot and killed a kid while a bunch of kids were out on a group date.  I was supposed to be on this date. The plan was to go out to the riverbottoms to shoot cans and then roast marshmallows over a fire. I was too lazy to find a date and didn't like guns anyway. Tony, who was never too lazy to find a date, went. There wasn't any drinking - it was just an careless mistake. Sitting around the fire, a kid named Chad noticed he had a few of bullets left in the chamber of his rifle. He pointed the barrel up to the sky and pulled the trigger three times. The problem was that the barrel wasn't pointed straight up but instead slightly backwards. A kid named Matt had just gotten up to get something from his coat. One of the bullets hit him in the back of the head. His body hung on for two or three days, but he was probably brain dead from the moment Chad pulled the trigger. It was a horrible thing. Needless to say, it stayed with me for years.

Somehow, a version of these events found their way into these poems I was writing, and I had this idea to have my fictionalized Tony end up in juvenile detention in Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony is a real town and there is a juvie there. Again, like Tony's life, I took a vague bit of truth and had my way with it. I really liked that in the Catholic tradition, St. Anthony is, among other things, the patron saint of lost things. That seemed appropriate. Also, the idea that St. Anthony's creepy reliquary leftover was his tongue. Supposedly, his tongue never decayed and you could visit a reliquary to see it. A holy tongue seemed appropriate for a poetry project, I thought.

Around this time, the project evolved into a bookarts project that was going to be a file folder full of hospital and police reports, letters and postcards to and from St. Anthony, psychiatric notes, photographs, journal entries, and other ephemera that a reader could go through and end up creating their own version of the book.

That idea eventually shaped the different kinds of poems I wrote. I visited home and made a couple of special trips out to the Menan butte (where my version of the shooting takes place) and to Saint Anthony to take black and white pictures. I eventually incorporated the pictures and other images I found in public domain books into the final manuscript though the file folder of ephemera version never came to pass.

The title changed from "The Dangers" to "Hagiography" to "Casebook" to "The Book of Saint Anthony." I tinkered with it a little even after I submitted and defended it, and now both the library version (hardbound with an introduction and my committee's signatures) and the handmade version (chain stitched signatures between two cardstock covered bookboards) sit on my shelf.

When I think of what I originally intended and what actually happened, I am reminded of John Lennon's lyric, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." I thought I knew what I was doing, knew where I was going, knew what I wanted. Rather, I ended up with something entirely different and probably better and more interesting.

This has to do with my mother's favorite quote like this: everything is connected. Everything is part of God's larger plan. It isn't as though things happen in our lives (professional, personal, academic, or spiritual) and He's like "Hey, how did that happen? I did not see that coming!" He knows. It's all part of the gig. So, He can work through my bad ideas, my half starts, and my mistakes to get me to where I need to go. A small malformed idea I had in a poetry workshop in Martin Corless-Smith's living room in Boise, Idaho eventually evolved into something that allowed me to graduate, get a job, and be eligible for more schooling.

So often we see inspiration or revelation depicted as this big, light-filled moment in which we can see the whole picture from beginning to end. It probably happens like that sometimes, but I think more often than not, divine direction comes in the form of falling asleep at an unexpected moment so you miss the bus and are late for class and take the long way to campus and end up seeing the flyer advertising the job that you apply for but don't get but leads to the other job that you do get that eventually leads you to meet that really great friend that you otherwise never would have met.

Suzy got called to the nursery like two weeks after we'd been in the ward. No one in the Bishopric or any presidency met with us, asked about our skills or previous experiences, or knew a single thing about us. The call seemed totally uninformed and, frankly, kind of stupid. They just needed a body to fill a spot. A couple had just moved out, and the ward was short one nursery leader. No one likes to feel like your needs aren't being taken into consideration or like you're just a generic space filler. And for the Primary Presidency and Bishopric, I'm guessing that's all this was.

However, my point is, God can work through people's uninformed choices and dumb mistakes too. I'm not saying Suzy being in nursery for another year or two will necessarily result in the greatest spiritual experiences or best friendships of her life, but it could. Our mortal limitations don't necessarily thwart what God has in store for us.

I guess I am trying to see the world more the way my mom saw it: an organized, purposeful design that, while sometimes difficult and sad, is ultimately beautiful. I'm much more of a cynic than she ever was, and I don't think that tendency helps me when life gets hard. I think I would rather be a person who believes that everything is connected, rather than always doubting people's motives and always looking for the dark cloud in the silver lining.

Everydayness

I handed back my last batch of papers for this go-round last night. Today I spent my office hour recording odds and ends, updating grades, and planning the next essay (argument!), and so now I feel alright about spending a moment or two blogging before getting out of here.

It's that middle season when it's as cold as a winter day, but we don't have any snow and the sun is out most days. You look out the window and think, "Oh, it looks really nice outside. Maybe we should go for a walk!" But when you get outside, your nose hairs freeze together, and you scamper back into the house to watch some more tv. Ah well. It beats having cold weather AND cloudy skies and slushy snow everywhere.

We are getting used to the everydayness of life in Midland.

Our stake got a new president last Sunday. We didn't know the old one and don't know the new one, so it means about as much to us right now as a shift in the city council of Taos, New Mexico. It's just kind of a meh moment for us.

We had Parent/Teacher conferences this week which Northeast Middle School treats as a giant cattle call. Teachers sitting at tables and long, long lines of parents waiting to have their five minutes. There's no schedule or sign ups. You just dive into that pool of sweaty humanity and hope for the best. In an hour and a half, we made it to three teachers - one of Avery's and two of Maryn's. It was a sweaty, b-o filled night.

Parker started a new dance class last week and so is now interested in showing off her sweet moves every so often. She still had her tutu on yesterday when I got home so did a mini-recital in the living room which was a sight to behold. The thing is, you'd think all these things we have her doing (a dance class, an exercise class before that, preschool) would wear her out and make her sleep really well all night. But no. Apparently, Parker is some kind of life-force vampire who only gets stronger the more tired her poor parents become. Lately, she's taken to waking up somewhere between 3:30 and 5:30 to come into our bedroom to sleep. We've started turning her away so she'll go back to her own bed and, oh I don't know, go the heck back to sleep?! But instead, she just wanders around the house turning lights on. So instead of doing what I would like to be doing at 5:30 a.m. (you know, dreaming about unicorns and rivers of soup), I am corralling her back into her bed, shutting off lights, and praying that I can go back to sleep before my alarm goes off. I love Parker. More specifically, I'd love for her to stay in her own freaking bed and sleep through the night.

The semester is on the downhill slide now. Week after next is Thanksgiving and once that happens, the rest of the term is pretty much a bust. It feels like I just started here, so it's weird that the first semester is winding down already. But I'm glad. I need a couple of weeks off to reset and recalibrate. All the newness has thrown off my game quite a bit, and this has been far from my best teaching session. Hopefully, next semester will even out a little, and I'll feel a little more settled and less insecure. I think I really took tenure and the security it provided for granted back at IVCC. Now that I'm here, I feel all nervous and uncertain about everything again. That's a weird sensation to have at age (almost) 40 after teaching full time for over ten years. I'm not a fan.

Well, my office hour has run out. I'm due to head back to Midland for a dentist appointment. Suzy had her time there this morning and apparently they took two hours just to get through a basic cleaning. Awesome. Guess I'd better bring a book.

The Answer Is Love

I think a lot about tv. Probably more than I should given all that I have to do. But because I am Mormon and, therefore, not a beer drinker, tv is the thing that I use at the end of a long day to unwind and relax. Favorite shows come and go. We give some new, hyped-up program a chance, and sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't. Some shows we watch out of morbid curiosity (most reality tv), and some we watch because, like a good book, they have characters and plots that we care about.

Right now, Wednesday night is our primo night for good stuff. Our DVR hums with activity on Wednesday night and makes up for the wasteland of Tuesdays and Thursdays through Sunday. (Dancing With The Stars still brightens our Monday evenings with lots of glittery fringe.) On Wednesday, we get Revolution, Nashville, Top Chef, and Arrow - four hours of what I like to call "high quality programming."

Arrow is strictly for me. Suzy has never seen an episode, and that's okay. It's a modernized adaptation (a la Superman in Smallville) of the DC superhero Green Arrow. It's fun to see physical versions of characters I've been into since I was a kid, and the writing is good. Most every character has an arc and evolves a little with each episode. I bank up two or three of them and binge watch when Suzy goes to a church activity or something.

Top Chef is simply Top Chef. It's one of the less exploitive, more enjoyable reality shows. The personalities are big, but more importantly the talent is big. I enjoy watching experts do their thing. It fascinates me. Tom Colicchio is getting curt and crabby in his old age and Padma Lakshmi seems to be on auto-pilot in this, their 11th season, but it's still fun to watch.

This brings me to our other two shows: Revolution and Nashville. Thanks to the magic of DVR, we usually watch them one after the other after the girls have gone to bed and we have a solid two hour block to just veg out. Because they are always right up against each other, I've given some thought to the differences in the two shows and in our reactions to them.

Revolution is a sci fi show that takes place in a future when all electrical power is gone. Something happened and suddenly there was no power of any kind other than steam and other pre-electrical sources. The country falls apart and society basically devolves. The story focuses on one family who have various connections to the reason why the power went out in the first place as well as to the crazy military government that rose up after the fall of the United States.

It got a lot of hype leading up to its premiere last year, and Suzy and I were both intrigued. Dystopia can be fun, you know? So we started watching last year, and spent a lot of time making fun of some of the bad acting (Tracy Spiridakos, are there Razzie Awards for television? If so, you're gonna clean up, sister!) and counting how many people died literally by the sword in each episode. (Guns are in short supply, so most people defend themselves with knives and swords.) But we kept watching because we were interested in seeing what happened next.

Nashville is a drama set in the titular city and revolves around the lives of people involved at various levels  of the country music scene (struggling singer/songwriters, old established stars, agents, managers, etc.) The central character, Rayna James, is a Faith Hill/Reba Mcentire type - a "queen of country," and we follow her as she tries to continue her career while raising her daughters, dealing with her flawed but ambitious husband, navigating a relationship with the true love of her life and bandleader, and facing off with a young upstart Carrie Underwood type. Some would argue it's a soap opera, and it might be hard to argue otherwise. There's bedhopping, secrets, and dramatic revelations about fake pregnancies and that sort of thing. I would argue though that, if it is a soap opera, it's an excellent one and not because of it's extremity or absurdity (see Desperate Housewives.)

It's excellent for the same reason that I look forward to it far more than Revolution.

Before I go further, I should point out that, on the surface of things, I should enjoy Revolution way more than I do Nashville. R has action and an impressive speculative future where the WHOLE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND MAYBE THE WORLD hang in the balance. N is about country music which I don't really even like and has precious little in the way of what might be called "action." Lots of people talking in rooms, you know?

So why am always excited for Nashville and generally "meh" about Revolution? The answer is love. I don't mean Valentine's Day, hearts and flowers love, although there is that. I mean, the characters in Nashville experience love with and for each other. Parent/child, friends, mentor/student, husband/wife, etc. I am convinced that that these characters are, for the most part, three dimensional human beings who go through their lives giving and receiving love in its various forms - compassion, devotion, desire, forgiveness, affection, etc.

Revolution, for all its budget and big name talent (Jon Favreau co-created and produces), lacks love. It is ultimately a plot-driven show that cares more about what happens than about who it happens to. It is a puzzle to solve and little more. The characters, even those who are supposed to love each other, are simply cardboard cutouts with swords, acting as placeholders. They're meant to represent real people but aren't actually emotionally real in any way.

I took an acting class in college, and our textbook was by the famed teacher Uta Hagen. One of the chapters focused entirely on the importance of finding the love in every scene. Didn't matter if it was Shakespeare, Miller, Wilson, or a new scene fresh from the hands of some untested playwright - every human being experiences love, even if it's only in the form of wanting it or not having enough of it. Hagen argued that if you want your character on stage to be a real, convincing human being, you have to find the love in that person. I think that is absolutely true for any kind of character, written or performed.

So, I know I began by saying I was thinking about tv, but what I really mean is, I've been thinking a lot about stories. TV shows are just one form of storytelling in our 21st century world, and, I would argue, one of the most important and powerful. But because I am teaching a creative writing class this semester and have been reading a lot of stories that involve trick endings, jokey premises, and an almost rabid insistence of writing sci fi or fantasy, I have been trying to articulate what it is I want from stories of any kind.

There are lots of reasons to read or watch or listen to stories. But in the end, for me at least, I want stories because I want to feel something, and since we spend our lives (or should) pursuing love - for and from our family, for and from God, for and from our fellow man, doesn't it make sense to seek out stories that help me to experience and understand that emotion better?

One of my mentors, Scott Samuelson, once told me that he reads "in order to love people more." The older I get and the more I think about my relationship to stories and storytelling, the more this makes sense to me. I'm not saying Nashville is some kind of spiritual experience or a guide to how to live your life. Not at all. What I'm saying is is that it accomplishes what good stories do: it makes me care about not only what happens but who it's happening to.

Speed Post

I just let my morning class out fifteen minutes early. They'd worked hard, and I figured they deserved a little treat. What I should be doing is grading papers. I've gotten myself into the familiar place of procrastinating grading a large portion of papers until they've absolutely got to be handed back. So I do some crazy three-day grade-a-thon bonanza and get them off my back. As soon as I do it, I think, "Man, that feels good. Why don't I just do that first thing next time? Just get it over with and then have ten days to two weeks of nothing major hanging over my head?" And then I don't do it and suffer instead. I'm kind of an idiot sometimes.

Anyway, I'm going to use this little window to blog because I feel like I need to do something other than grade for a couple of minutes in order to maintain my humanity.

We spent the weekend in Detroit with family and loads of bees. We had an excellent dinner of soup and rolls at Ben and Erin's - and how can that not be awesome? Soup AND the Griswolds and Paul and Linda? It was fun. The soup was great but not as tasty as Addy, the world's most delicious baby. I could dine on her chubby awesomeness every day and be pretty happy. Saturday, we went to Parmenter's Cider Mill and fought the bee swarms in order to claim our birthright of spiced doughnuts and cider so fresh I wanted to slap it.

In the afternoon, Suzy and I went to the Detroit temple for a session. It was the first time we'd seen the new session film, and we both really enjoyed it and had a lot to talk about afterward. I think it's a huge improvement over the other two films they've been showing for the last couple of decades. The old ones were fine, but professional actors and 21st century production values go a long way to making it more of a compelling experience for me.

Now we're back in the Dow country ("Come to the where the dioxins are. Come to Dow country!") and back at the old grind. Class this morning, class this evening. School and meetings for the girls. Suzy is combating what we hope isn't the cold both her parents had last week. She is also battling for Parker's soul - little Parker who has decided recently that it's a good idea to be contrary in almost every way. When she sings songs, she even sings opposite lyrics - as in, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star. I DON'T wonder what you are." She seems to like the rise she gets out of me when I say, "Parker, you're such a good girl" and she says, "No, I'm not. I'm a bad girl!" So Suzy is trying to teach her to be obedient and sweet without Parker taking that as even more opportunities to be a contrary pain in the butt, you know?

Anyway, it is now 12:02 and I do have papers to grade. Eeesh. Wish me luck. Maybe next time, I won't put so many of them off. (Fingers crossed.)