tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48792685072627539252024-02-08T06:39:02.323-08:00The CollapseAndrew Santella's entirely unnecessary weblogAndrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.comBlogger191125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-20175912412341868582012-01-06T10:19:00.000-08:002012-01-22T08:37:56.606-08:00A Brief Update on My New Year's Resolutions for 2012<style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"MS 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"MS 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --> </style> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"> </b>As we reach the end of the first week of 2012, it seems fitting to review the progress I have made in realizing each of my various resolutions for the New Year. It is my hope that this exercise will prove instructive, if not inspirational, for others. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">1. The Ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">Let me begin by thanking all those involved in my rescue from the mountain’s north face. Truly, without your help this new year would have been, for me, a short one indeed! Who could have known that the temperatures would grow so cold and the weather so fierce as I approached the mountain’s summit? While I confess to disappointment at having failed in my first attempt to climb Africa’s tallest peak in 2012, I take comfort in knowing that 51 weeks remain for me to reach my goal. I will be sure to wear long pants in my next attempt. Also, no more flip-flops! In the meantime, if any of my readers happen to be in the area of Kilimanjaro and have the chance to retrieve my house keys, which I seem to have left behind somewhere on the mountain, I would be most grateful for your help.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">2. My Novel</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">Progress on my novel has been, I am pleased to report, brisk. Although originally I had planned to set the story in the microfiche room of the local public library, I have decided instead to have the action take place in some slightly more exotic locale—either a 17<sup>th</sup> century village of the Sami people on the shores of Lake Inari during the early days of King Gustav Vasa’s ruthless colonization or the produce section of the Highland Park Costco. A final decision has been delayed until I have selected my author photo. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">3. Inner Peace</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">I was made to feel most welcome at my first yoga class, even after I had explained that my phobia of bending over in the presence of others made it difficult for me to participate in several of the exercises. My instructor has promised that if I continue to make an honest effort, and refrain from ever again wearing my distressed cutoff jeans shorts to class, I may someday be allowed to ring the class gong. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Namaste</i>!</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">4. Redesigning the 50 State Flags</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">All state flags bearing the image of an animal—California’s bear, for example, or Wyoming’s bison--may remain as they are. This is in keeping with my deep respect for North America’s native fauna and my lifelong inability to draw animals. (Really, my horses always look like dogs!) Also, I am having difficulty with five-pointed stars, so these will have to become six-pointers. (If you can draw two triangles, you can draw a six-pointed star!)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And do we really need so many eagles? <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>North and South Dakota I have combined into one state to be called South Saskatchewan, for obvious reasons. Delaware I have eliminated from the Union altogether. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">5. Mastering Conversational Spanish</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">Here I have exceeded even my own lofty expectations. Yesterday, for example, I successfully ordered two <span style="font-style: italic;">chalupas</span> from the local Taco Bell. Also, I learned that the Spanish for Mountain Dew is simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Mountain Dew</i>! <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Muchas gracias</i>! Tomorrow I begin work on ordering breakfast burritos and saying hello to beautiful young women (or <i style="">chicas bonitas</i>). </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><b style=""><br /></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">6. Improving My Penmanship</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">How fondly I remember my time as a first-grader when Mrs. Thompson, my teacher, would gently place her hand over mine and guide it as I learned to form letters and words. Unfortunately, my inability to hold the pen in precisely the manner urged by Mrs. Thompson compelled her to prescribe the use of what she called “the harness.” This device did indeed help me to master the proper positioning of the writing implement in my hand. Unfortunately, its too frequent use atrophied the muscles in my right arm and rendered me, by the time I was an adolescent, unable to unclench my fist. But those days are behind me! Years of physical therapy have restored to me the full use of my muscles! Now, with the help of an excellent book called “The Palmer Method for Fun and Profit,” I am again mastering the art of penmanship. What a pleasure it is to write a letter and not have the phrase “please write me back” misread as “pour water on my bush.” I am certain that Mrs. Thompson would be proud.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> I look forward to providing you with further updates as the year progresses.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p>Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-5204623503074439172011-03-25T11:59:00.000-07:002011-03-27T04:14:36.419-07:00Walt Whitman Prepares to Drive His Family South for Spring BreakOut of the driveway endlessly driving,<br />Out of the garage, the annual trek!<br /><br />To the beach we drive! To sands democratic!<br />To palm tree,<br />To Waffle House.<br />To humidity and sand<br />And that musty, slightly cockroachy smell.<br /><br />Of the slightly cockroachy smell, I sing!<br />Of the smell of motel rooms not properly ventilated,<br />Of rooms where someone has recently smoked!<br />Or recently done god knows what.<br /><br />And the smell of too much chlorine, I sing this as well. <br />The smell of swimming pools, the smell of headaches. <br />You smell it, too, do you not, fellow citizen?<br />Ay, for it has seeped up the elevator shaft of the motel,<br />And it has crept down the hallway<br />And it has passed unchallenged down the hallway,<br />where the ice machine snores like a sentry dozing.<br />And now the smell has entered our room.<br />It loafs. It invites itself. <br />It is in our clothes<br />Ay, even in our underwear.<br />Do you smell it, too, fellow citizen?<br />Or am I just nuts?<br /><br />Of the Interstate I sing!<br />Black unspooling river. <br />Of lanes closed and lanes clogged, <br />And of Mack trucks looming ominously in rear-view mirrors.<br />I see you, Mack truck driver, and I say we are as one, <br />Pilots of our fates alike, captains of the road.<br />Strong of arm and clear of vision,<br />Though you are more buzzed on Red Bull than I. <br /><br />I sing of drive-through fast food and the need for a rest stop.<br />I sing too of the lack of rest stops when we most badly need one.<br />O! Rest stop 27 miles ahead, your array of white urinals awaits me, <br />Like a platoon of porcelain troopers at attention,<br />(Each one made in Kensosha, Wisconsin.)<br />But, fuck, I don’t know if I can wait that long!<br /><br />Do I contradict myself?<br />Very well, then. I contradict myself.<br />You’d contradict yourself, too, if you were as stressed out as I’ve been lately.<br /><br />I sing of being stuck in the slow lane,<br />Stuck behind a slow-moving Presbyterian church van. <br />See! How even now on my left the Lexus does pass me. <br />See how I am passed by the Element and Vibe. <br />See the Escalade, see the Volvo laden with camp gear and two bikes strapped to its tailgate rack.<br />And the kid in the back seat giving me the finger, as he too passes me. <br /><br />O! kid in the backseat giving me the finger, where are you going at such high rate of speed?<br />Bound across rivers, surging and masculine. <br />Bound across fields, fertile and prone.<br />Are you going to Hilton Head or Biloxi or Sarasota?<br />Wherever you go,<br />I hope it rains there all week.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-52140975726003628182011-03-15T09:45:00.000-07:002011-03-15T09:51:52.445-07:00(Probably Not) Coming Attractions[After Anthony Lane]<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The following film projects, having halted production, will not be coming to a theater near you any time soon.<br /> </span><br />Criminally Delicious<br />Steve Buscemi plays a New York mobster and foodie who must conceal his love of baking from his criminal cronies. But when his recipe for a Dutch apple breakfast puff qualifies for the national finals of the Betty Crocker Bake-Off, his secret is threatened—with hilarious consequences. What will he do when he is asked to fly to Miami to “whack” a gangland rival on the very day of the Bake-Off judging? <br /> <br />The Indecision<br />Hoopster Lebron James takes a star turn in this film, loosely based on “Indecision,” Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel of existential distress, as a dithering NBA star unable to decide where he should “take his talents to.” Paul Rudd co-stars as the high school social-studies teacher James hires to advise him on geography, and Rosie Perez as the league executive they both love. <br /><br />The King’s Leech<br />The court of King Edward VII grows alarmed by the King’s inability to say no to a commoner who continually hits His Majesty up for loans of twenty pounds and sixpence until payday. The social order is nearly overturned when the commoner moves into a spare bedroom in the royal palace and begins hosting stoner parties for his loser friends, but the courtiers are eventually revealed as snobbish boors when the houseguest helps cure the King of hiccups, saving him from embarrassment at a state dinner honoring the Prince of Bohemia. <br /><br />Dude, She Digs My Beard <br />Seth Rogen, playing a fleshy and unkempt underachiever grown weary of fending off the advances of intelligent and stunningly attractive women of his own age, embarks on a troubled relationship with an intriguing older woman who may be displaying signs of early onset dementia. Co-starring Dame Judy Dench. <br /><br />Tranny Hall<br />Woody Allen returns to his roots with a reimagining of his 1977 classic, directing Jason Schwartzman as a whiny New York writer who begins an unlikely romance with a reserved WASP of indeterminate gender (Cynthia Nixon). New York Magazine reports that the famous lobster-boil scene had been replaced by one in which Nixon’s character discusses with her life coach her vegan diet.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-78708895300636609002011-03-11T15:19:00.000-08:002011-03-12T06:37:55.570-08:00Recommended Non-ReadingI just finished my annual Mardi Gras read of Walker Percy’s novel <span style="font-style:italic;">The Moviegoer</span>, about which you can find more <a href=http://andrewsantella.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogging-moviegoer-wednesday.html> here</a>. In honor of the occasion, here's an incomplete list of books I might have read if I hadn’t been busy reading <span style="font-style:italic;">The Moviegoer</span>. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Van Halen: A Visual History</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Morey Amsterdam’s Benny Cooker Crock Book For Drinkers</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Chicken Soup for the Soul: NASCAR</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Lord Jim</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Thirty Years of the Rockford Files</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Women Who Love Cats Too Much</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Remarkable Millard Fillmore</span><br />Suzanne Somers' <span style="font-style:italic;">Sexy Forever</span> <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Jesse Ventura Tells It Like It Is</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Cooking for Mr. Latte</span><br />Dennis Rodman's <span style="font-style:italic;">Bad As I Want to Be</span> <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Basic Plumbing With Illustrations</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Belly Dancing for Fitness</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Become a Better You</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Turn the Beat Around: The History of Disco</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Dr. Phil Getting Real</span>Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-32081661443605553192011-02-04T08:39:00.001-08:002011-02-04T08:49:38.274-08:00Bears (Redux)If you just can't get enough Super Bowl-related content: GQ.com is re-running my <a href=http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200010/chicago-bears-1985-super-bowl>retrospective of the 1985 Chicago Bears</a>. This is the piece for which I had to telephone William "Refrigerator" Perry at home at 4 a.m. Also: the piece on which I learned that even Mike Ditka's wife calls him "Coach."Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-9647524936555559902011-02-03T11:32:00.000-08:002011-02-09T07:03:12.520-08:00The Blizzard and The Damage DoneOver on Facebook everyone seems to be posting their blizzard photos. The enormous snowdrifts. The bizarre icicle formations. The cars hopelelssly immobilized and abandoned. <br /><br />I took a few of my own photos, because the enormity of the storm and the mammoth hassle of digging out seemed to require some commemoration. But after a while all the pictures start to look alike. They’re awful or they’re beautiful, but it’s hard to know exactly how to respond. And you can’t not look. It’s like blizzard porn.<br /><br />We can’t stop talking about it, either. That’s the thing about catastrophe: It’s exciting. You can dread a storm like that—and I confess that I spent a lot of Tuesday’s runup to the blizzard creating various scenarios involving power outages and fallen trees and collapsed roofs and dead furnaces. And when I went outside to try shoveling on Tuesday night, during the storm’s first hours, I was a little surprised to discover that it was every bit worthy of my anxious imagination. I’d never seen anything like it. The snow, yes, and the wind, as well, which was ridiculous. But it was thundering and lightning out there, too. Great green flashes of light across the sky. I mean: I didn’t even know that kind of thing was allowed. <br /><br />It made me think of a scene in <i>The Moviegoer</i> where a violent rain storm momentarily cheers up the suicidal Kate Cutrer. She tries to explain to Binx that, with her, the worst times are the best times. That’s a theme in Percy: That catastrophe is a kind of existential rescue. That even disaster is preferable to everydayness, to mundane, muddling Tuesday-afternoon-ness.<br /><br />I’m not willing to come out so forcefully in favor of catastrophe. But it's true that you don't see so many pictures on Facebook of ordinary Tuesday afternoons. Maybe catastrophe is like a loose tooth that we can't stop fiddling with. Is FB trying to tell us something about our secret attraction to disaster?Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-25381152599317971902010-12-30T16:21:00.000-08:002010-12-30T16:24:54.582-08:00The Ten Best Existential Crises of 2010Everyone’s a critic. And every critic, at this time of year, has to publish a best-of-the-year list. So here is a list of the ten most profound existential crises I experienced in 2010.<br /><br />(Check back tomorrow for “The Ten Best Sandwiches I Made in 2010.”)<br /><br />1. Running through the train station to catch the 4:16 Northwest Line express, I find myself unable to choose between the stairs and the escalator. At midnight, when the building closes, I am removed by Security. Is there no consolation?<br /><br />2. I wake one morning in August to find only decaffeinated coffee in the house. Why do we go on trying?<br /><br />3. An email invoice sent to a publisher in Minneapolis is returned as “undeliverable.” Absurdity is an open hand that strikes one repeatedly about the head. <br /><br />4. Attempting to order a cocktail, I am unable to make the bartender understand what I mean by a “Gibson.” We live alone and die alone and our cries go unheeded.<br /><br />5. I make a cheese omelet, but forget to include the cheese. Beauty mocks us by offering fleeting glimpses of the joy that we would have last for all eternity. <br /><br />6. Unable to choose between a purple crewneck sweater and an orange cardigan, I spend the morning in bed watching “The Price is Right.” Nietzche: Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we do not know its nature.<br /><br />7. Entering K-Mart, I step aside and hold open a door for an elderly couple, but receive no acknowledgment or thanks. Can there be any greater proof that the universe is a cold and pitiless place?<br /><br />8. When, after months of effort, I at last birdie the fifth hole in Wii Golf, I find the triumph not as satisfying as I had hoped. Ah, life.<br /><br />9. A Facebook status update about my stamp collection is “liked” by only six people. The world is an enigma made more terrible by our own mad attempt to grasp it. <br /><br />10. Unable to sleep, I walk outside in the remorseless quiet just before dawn. Gazing at the stars and considering my mortality, I am overcome by what I assume is a sensation of utter dread, but which turns out to be a raccoon urinating on my foot. <i>Ma pensee, c’est moi</i>.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-42911567352259099122010-12-24T13:03:00.000-08:002010-12-24T13:13:18.842-08:00Scanning the SkiesI grew up the youngest of four children, and my role in the family was to be credulous. On Christmas Eve we would pile into my father’s Dodge and drive to an uncle’s house in some distant suburb. In the backseat, my brothers and sisters would scan the sky and try to spot Santa Claus. “Over there,” they’d say, pointing. But by the time I looked he was always gone. <br /><br />I’ve <a href=http://www.slate.com/id/2132387/>written before about the so-called War on Christmas</a>, but I don’t entirely get the distinction between the secular and religious versions of the holiday. Both are about scanning the skies, and waiting, and finally the arrival. <br /> <br />My son, who is nine, tracks Santa Claus online now. It is hard to know exactly how credulous he is, or if he is as eager a believer as I was. I think he is shrewd enough to understand that as long as the gifts keep coming, there is no need to ask too many questions. He believes in acquisition and in unwrapping things and in piles of consumer goods reaching to the ceiling. Today, Christmas Eve, he came home from his best friend’s house with a Christmas present. The boys have never exchanged gifts before and AJ didn’t have anything for his friend. He was taken by surprise. So he went up to his room and for the next half-hour or so, I could hear him digging through the mess of his closet, looking for something that could be re-purposed into a last-minute gift. He finally settled on a bit of leftover Halloween party swag. His buddy loved it. <br /><br />Tonight we’ll be driving to another Christmas Eve party and scanning the skies again. I don't know if my son believes or disbelieves. But on Christmas Eve, you have to look. It is our job, for this night at least, to be credulous.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-56737973760097702122010-11-26T16:47:00.000-08:002010-11-26T19:03:24.719-08:00With or Without a Chute?My son and I have always taken turns trying to impose our tastes on each other. There was that multi-day car trip with him when he was three years old, for example, during which we listened to nothing but a single Ralph’s World CD. In our family we still call that The Nervous Breakdown Trip. <br /> <br />When he got a little older, and when I’d finally had enough of listening to kiddie tunes, I started making him mix tapes with some of my favorite music—lots of Guided by Voices and Young Fresh Fellows. There’s some kind of cheap thrill in having your kid explore your own musical past. Yesterday I had the Jayhawks’ “Tomorrow the Green Grass” on the turntable during Thanksgiving dinner prep. We got to the end of side two, and AJ had two questions: Who was that? And, can you play it again? I was proud. <br /><br />Dan Chiasson gets at something similar in a recent <i>New York Review of Books</i> <a href=http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/nov/17/stephin-merritt/> blog post</a>. He says his little kids have been asking to listen to Magnetic Fields in the car. “Until you have heard a four-year old boy sing the lines, ‘Should pretty boys in discos/Distract you from your novel/Remember I’m awful in love with you,’ you haven’t approached the full depths of this band’s appeal.”<br /><br />A while back, with my wife out of town for the weekend, AJ and I were on our own in the house. He was upstairs for a pre-bedtime bath; I was collapsed on the couch with the remote, and and surprised to find “Bridge on the River Kwai” on TV. I’ve never been able to resist this movie. Please, I thought, let the kid take a nice long bath. Let me have a few minutes alone with the tv. Let me at least see the scene at the commando school when the British officer tells Bill Holden that he might as well parachute without any practice jumps, and Holden asks him, “With or without a chute?” <br /><br />But something funny happened. AJ came down, freshly bathed, and settled in on the couch next to me and didn’t even ask to put something else on. He wanted to watch the movie! So we did. We stayed up way past his bedtime, we watched the rest of the movie, and he pronounced it excellent. We even had a mini-debate about whether it was right for the British prisoners to build the best bridge possible for the Japanese or whether they should have tried to sabotage it. (AJ argued for sabotage, a position that struck me as consistent with his longstanding refusal to clean up his room or do any other household chore unless threatened with extreme Colonel Saito-esque punishment.) <br /><br />For the record, I did get to see the scene at the commando school. When Bill Holden asked, “With or without a chute?’ AJ laughed. It made me proud, again.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-70932095956352409702010-11-11T12:38:00.001-08:002010-11-11T13:30:57.978-08:00The Legend Lives On, Slightly RevisedThis time last year, I was <a href=http://andrewsantella.blogspot.com/2009/11/gales-of-november.html>confessing my continued fondness for Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."</a> I didn't get to hear any mini-marathons of "Wreck" cover versions this year, but I did see this: <a href=http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/local&id=7775182>GL has revised the lyrics to his song</a>. The consensus among Edmund Fitzgerald experts (how many can there be?) about the cause of the wreck appears to have changed. Out is the old theory about the ship taking on water through her hatchways. In is the idea that the ship hit bottom, tearing a hole in her hull. So GL has reworked the relevant line of his song. He used to sing: "At 7 pm a main hatchway gave in/he said, 'Fellas, it's been good to know ya.'" Now it's: "At 7 pm it grew dark. It was then/he said 'Fellas, it's been good to know ya.'"<br /><br />Maybe I just don't understand the rules governing mounrnful maritime folk, but I'm not sure I like the idea of lyrics being revised for accuracy. George Harrison didn't change his lyrics to "Something in the way she moves/continues to really annoy me" just because his relationship hit the rocks. <br /><br />In any case, as my friend TH observed: Under the circumstances, a comment like "Fellas, it's been good to know ya," was likely appreciated by no one on board.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-76767592920645987042010-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:002010-10-11T12:03:19.378-07:00NotedMy piece on the science of happiness (read it <a href=http://magazine.nd.edu/news/14206-happiness-is/>here</a>) was selected one of the year's notable essays by the editors of <i>The Best American Essays 2010</i>.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-44829530456795822452010-10-11T06:19:00.000-07:002010-10-11T06:29:54.951-07:00Needs SaltThere’s nothing like seeing a really confident book reviewer bite into a really lousy book. Here’s Dwight Garner, who used to edit my work at the <i>New York Times Book Review</i>, <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/books/06book.html?_r=1&ref=books>weighing in on</a> <i>Ferran</i>, Colman Andrews’ fawning biography of the avant-garde chef Ferran Adria: “Reading <i>Ferran</i> is like being waterboarded with truffle oil.”Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-33587199479179805112010-10-08T13:48:00.000-07:002010-10-11T06:19:01.075-07:00Save It For LaterI have been staring at a half-dollar-sized hole in a screen in one of our side-porch windows. This hole has been there since at least last April, when I first resolved to mend it. I still intend to get to the repair one of these days. I think I can have it done by Thanksgiving. <br /><br />But I had other things to do today, like reading James Surowiecki’s <a href= http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki>essay on procrastination</a> in the <I>New Yorker</i>. Surowiecki’s piece is a review of <i>The Thief of Time</i>, a collection of academic essays on procrastination. It turns out that all the while I’ve been trying to ignore my torn window screen, I’ve been doing more than just slacking. I’ve been, Surowiecki writes, “engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time.”<br /><br />Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about the window screen.<br /><br />Surowiecki cites some famous procrastinators, including Civil War general George McLellan, of whom one colleague said, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.” And he mentions some notable solutions to the problem of procrastination. Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.<br /><br />He also quotes academics like the social scientist Jon Elster, who explains what he calls “the planning fallacy,” which refers to people underestimating the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”<br /><br />That’s a pretty fair description of me trying to paint my deck.<br /><br />I especially like the existential take of philosopher Mark Kingwell: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” Think he does screen repairs?Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-81957990982061083012010-09-24T11:53:00.001-07:002010-09-24T12:32:14.208-07:00Talking with David BrooksLast week, I interviewed <i>New York Times</i> columnist David Brooks in advance of a lecture he's giving at leafy Elmhurst College on October 1. The Q and A--which focuses on religion and Brooks' intellectual hero (and Barack Obama's), the mid-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr--is <a href=http://ecquickstudies.com/people/a-conversation-with-david-brooks/>here</a> . <br /><br />Here's Brooks on church-shopping: <blockquote>I remember during one of the Democratic primaries, I think two elections ago, every single candidate had switched denominations at one point. I think Wes Clark did it twice. Howard Dean did it because his church didn’t support a bike trail that he was supporting. Everyone was moving. That’s part of where we are. But I think the downside is consumer religion, where it’s all pretty thin and people are competing to fill the pews with whatever works in the market.</blockquote><br />And here he is on religious literacy in the U.S.:<blockquote>I’d say it’s pretty awful, but I’ve been places where it’s worse. When my oldest son was born in Belgium and we named him Joshua, I remember the doctor at the hospital assumed we were big U2 fans because of the Joshua Tree album. On the other hand, I’d met a business executive who had a son at Williams College. He was taking an art history course and they were studying the Renaissance and he noticed there were a lot of pictures of mothers with male children. He was appalled because they never showed a mother with a girl. It didn’t occur to him that these were all Madonnas and that child was a specific child. So there’s a lot of illiteracy out there.</blockquote><br />I didn't get to ask him any questions about Sarah Palin, Rahm Emanuel, Mitch McConnell or Mark Shields. But I was absolutely relentless on the topic of epistemological modesty.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-40913417187595801092010-09-22T10:08:00.000-07:002010-09-22T15:18:22.813-07:00Gordon Wood, Office Decorator<a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqhWpbK0kUM&feature=player_embedded>This video</a> from Book TV about Brown University historian Gordon Wood’s (three!) work spaces is a little like HGTV for the overeducated. Wood shows us how he organizes his home library (“Helter-skelter” is one category) and demonstrates how to rationalize effectively when your department boots you out of your office because it doesn’t have room for emeriti. (“There are some advantages,” he says of his alternate digs in the bowels of the university library. “There are no phones.”) <br /><br />My favorite moment comes around 5:39 when Wood shows us the box of 5x8 note cards that became <i>The Radicalism of the American Revolution</i>. You can almost hear the gasps of thousands of junior American Studies faculty. <br /><br />Next week: Gary Wills hems his drapes.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-43069441789276726082010-09-02T14:44:00.000-07:002010-09-02T14:49:01.532-07:00Quick StudiesQuick Studies, my new blog about life at leafy Elmhurst College, is online. Check it out <a href=http://www.ecquickstudies.com>here</a>.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-14710963024458829852010-09-02T04:59:00.000-07:002010-09-02T05:04:05.904-07:00Human Joke MachineThe Chicago <i>Sun-Times</i> leads this morning with a <a href=http://www.suntimes.com/technology/2665564,CST-NWS-nojoke02.article>story</a> about a Northwestern AI researcher working on “machine-generated humor” and defending his work from critics like John McCain who don’t like federal funding for “joke machines.” Sadly, no mention is made of the original <a href=http://www.originalmmc.com/images/Guests/Morey_Amsterdam.jpg>Human Joke Machine</a>, a programming breakthrough familiar since at least the early 1960s to fans of the Dick Van Dyke Show. Its efforts were often crudely ineffective. Asked to produce a joke about horses, the HJM came up with this: If everyone owned a horse, this country would be a lot more stabilized.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-74695355042001595982010-08-23T19:29:00.000-07:002010-08-23T20:15:02.563-07:00Sky, FallingI’ve never had much use for hobbies, unless you count worrying, which I’ve always considered more of an avocation. Whatever you call it, I’ve been practicing it for as long as I can remember, which give me a kind of precedence over the bandwagon jumpers who waited for the global economic meltdown before they started worrying in earnest. A <a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=eternal-fascinations>piece by Michael Moyer</a> in <i>Scientific American</i> takes a stab at explaining our talent for fretting over impending catastrophe: global famine, melting icecaps, economic disaster, Mayan doomsaying. Remember Y2K? Why all the apocalyptic dread? Try this:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself also has roots in another human trait: vanity.<br /><br />We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet—with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. . . Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />Fine, but what about more modest anxieties? Any real worrier knows that worrying about the end of the world is for amateurs. The truly accomplished worrier can work himself into a panic over something as simple as the nagging feeling that he may have left the coffee pot on at home. In its own way, that's just as vain (or at least as self-absorbed) as any doomsday premonition. When I was researching <a href=http://magazine.nd.edu/news/1349-feeling-anxious/>this piece</a>, I kept encountering warnings about the health dangers of anxiety, about all the stress hormones settling in our tissues, waiting to do us in. What we should really be worried about, they seemed to be suggesting, was all that worrying.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-12214913028435404202010-08-19T20:01:00.000-07:002010-09-02T05:08:20.592-07:00St. Germain in MilwaukeeBack from 24 hours in Milwaukee, where, its Brew-town rep notwithstanding, I had not a single beer. I did enjoy a cleverly named cocktail, whose clever name I no longer remember. I can tell you that its ingredients included St. Germain, the elderflower-based liquer. What has happened to our world when a man goes to Milwaukee and ends up enjoying the scent of elderflower? What has happened to Milwaukee? The drink, by the way, would have been a very good one, if it had only been cold enough. Bartenders: Don't scrimp on the ice, and put your martini glasses in the damn freezer for a few minutes. And I won’t complain if you don’t pour my drink into one of those fishbowl-sized glasses. Martinis and the like should be served in glasses small enough that they can be enjoyed while they’re still cold. <br /><br />Anyway, where was I before I launched into my tirade against tepid cocktails? Oh, I was about to apologize for walking out on Catapult without saying goodbye. It’s not true that I’ve spent the last four months in in the basement listening to old Foghat LPs. But the less said about all that the better. Let’s move on. There is a world full of elderflower out there just waiting for us.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-18488950639461340102010-03-03T14:38:00.000-08:002010-03-05T05:38:03.429-08:00Barry HannahCompared to some of Barry Hannah’s other talents, his genius for titles might not seem worth mentioning. But I’ve been reading the tributes and eulogies and <a href=http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/03/writers-remember-barry-hannah.html>remembrances</a> that have followed his death on Monday and I’m a little surprised that no one has even nodded in the direction of his titles. So let me say here and now that the <i>The Tennis Handsome</i> is a wonderful title for a novel and that <i>Captain Maximus</i>--his 1985 story collection-- may the best title of anything, ever. <br /><br />I went to see Barry Hannah read in, well, 1988, it must have been. I drove out from the city to a massive exurban community college campus with a friend from work--and there he was reading his story “Idaho.” It was already a story I liked and had gotten busy trying to imitate, but hearing him read it that night only made me goonier about it. After the reading, I joined the line of people wanting to get their books signed or talk with the author. I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to ask Hannah. I just wanted to meet him. When I got to the head of the line, all I could think to say was, “honest sentiment,’ which is a phrase Hannah uses in the story to describe the poetry of Richard Hugo. Hannah, looked at me, blinked and said back, “honest sentiment, yeah.” And that was about it. It occurs to me now that my words might have been interpreted as a challenge or a mockery. I hope it didn’t come across that way. Anyway, Hannah did tell me that I had to read Hugo. Of course, I did as I was told, and, of course, I became a Hugo fan, too. <br /><br />What I remember is that when I got up close to Hannah, he looked a little tired. Like maybe he had a little eye-strain headache. This was a surprise. So much of my idea of him as a writer was tied up in the wildness of his prose and his boozy, swaggering, motorcyclish motifs that, in my callowness, I was a little surprised to catch that small glimpse of ordinary vulnerability. <br /><br />I’ll also remember how he said back to me, with a certain patience: “Honest sentiment.”<br /><br />Here’s the opening of his novel <i>Boomerang</i>:<br /><blockquote><br />We were such tiny people in the Quisenberrys’ pecan orchard.<br /> <br />We were so tiny but we were sincere. The Quisenberrys’ house looked like a showboat on the Mississippi River, and when we were tiny we fought and we had secret intrigues. The kids would roam out and find pecans and horse apples and a stick of dynamite.<br /><br />There were Reds and Nazis out there. . . <br /><br />In my back yard Tommy Poates was in an Admiral television box moving slowly ahead, attacking the rest of us with an automatic rubber gun. Rod Flagler had brought in the idea of the automatic rubber gun from Culver City, California. The television box was as large as a refrigerator. Every time we ran up close, we got stung. We all dressed in short pants and nothing else. Fairly soon we learned not to get stung. Edward Ratliff set the box on fire with lighter fluid. It was quite amazing to see Tommy get out of the flaming box. Darn it, I'd never thought of that.</blockquote>Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-62720181692670212462010-02-23T13:30:00.000-08:002010-02-23T13:31:27.949-08:00The Pastor's RemixMy mini-profile of Otis Moss III, the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity UCC—you might remember it as “Obama’s church” from the 2008 campaign—is online <a href=http://public.elmhurst.edu/home/news/84643052.html>here</a>. Moss likes to quote Mos Def and Common, and one of my favorite exchanges came when I asked him about calling the apostle Peter “a thug” in one of his sermons. He said: “He cut off someone’s ear! That’s acting like a thug!”Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-21245566876289884692010-02-17T15:55:00.000-08:002010-02-21T07:10:19.050-08:00Blogging The Moviegoer: Ash WednesdayIt has always bothered me a little that <i>The Moviegoer</i> ends on what is not only Ash Wednesday, but Binx’s 30th birthday, too. The day is practically doubled over with the weight of meaning. The timing, I suppose, raises all sorts of questions about Binx and his search and his faith or lack of it, but I’m more interested in a simpler—and yes, dopier—question: What happens to Binx and Kate? They’re supposed to marry, and Binx is supposed to go to medical school and the plan is for them to “walk abroad on a summer night. . . and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine.” But, really?<br /><br />I got a kind of answer when, a few years into my annual <i>Moviegoer</i> routine, I read another very good New Orleans novel, John Gregory Brown’s <i>Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery</i>, from 1994. I was almost at the end of that novel when I came to something that just about knocked me out of my chair. A stockbroker-turned-doctor named Jack makes a brief appearance. Some things about Jack seem awfully familiar. Jack drives a tiny red sports car. Jack likes to go to the movies. Jack’s a Korean war veteran who once lived on Gentilly Boulevard. There's not much mystery about it. It’s Binx, of course. But there’s one more thing about Jack, and it’s the detail that made me sure of his identity. Brown says that he “had been married, but his wife had killed herself some years before.” I'm not sure I've ever been quite as stunned by a single sentence in a novel as I was by that one. <br /><br />Odd as it was to come across Binx rendered older and sadder, and odd as it was to find Kate killed off, I had to give Brown credit. He was a Percyist, it was obvious, and he'd pulled off the best possible <i>Moviegoer</i> homage: to borrow Binx for his own novel. And better still--and sadder still--I think Brown gets him, and Kate, right.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-84357337990110503162010-02-16T05:59:00.000-08:002010-02-17T14:32:53.237-08:00Blogging The Moviegoer: TuesdayFor all the buildup to Mardi Gras that runs through <i>The Moviegoer</i>, it’s almost inevitable that Binx and Kate are nowhere near New Orleans when Fat Tuesday finally comes. I had a crazy writing teacher who liked to refer to this sort of thing as “the swerve.” It reminds me a little of one of my favorite Barry Hannah stories. It’s called “Idaho,” and it’s about a year he spends teaching at the University of Montana, riding his BMW motorcycle up into the Lolo Pass almost—but never quite—to Idaho. <br /><br />Binx and Kate spend most of Mardi Gras on a Scenicruiser bus “plunging along the Illinois bank of the Mississippi through a region of sooty glens” on their way back to New Orleans from Chicago. It’s an oddly decorous choice for a novelist--to skip the wild color of the carnival and the crewes and the party and to give us instead the gray routine of the Scenicruiser rolling through Evansville. It’s almost like one of those scenes in old movies that primly cut away just as the lovers fall to the couch. <br /><br />By the time Binx and Kate get back to New Orleans, all we can see is the exhausted mess, the street cleaners pushing “confetti and finery into soggy heaps in the gutters.”Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-13750113650631118542010-02-15T09:14:00.000-08:002010-02-15T12:42:52.658-08:00Blogging The Moviegoer: MondayAfter three months sunk in the gray of Chicago winter, it’s almost perversely fun to come to Binx’s take on Chicago. It’s so bleak and despairing—and dead-on--that I have to laugh:<br /><br /><blockquote>The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the building. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and sharpening and silencing—everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America.</blockquote><br /><br />This makes me want to stay under covers until maybe June. <br /><br />When I was going to school at Loyola in the '80s, I found out that Walker Percy had come to campus for a reading a year or two before I started there. I was so mad that I’d missed him that I asked around the English Department to find out if anyone had recorded his appearance. They hadn’t. But one professor told me that Percy had read something about visiting Chicago as a boy to see the World’s Fair. That sounds a lot like Binx’s memory of his first boyhood encounter with the fearful “genie-soul” of the city. I wonder if Percy was about as enthused about traveling to Chicago as Binx is: “Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. . .”<br /><br />I can’t really argue with him.Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4879268507262753925.post-36890425218942058242010-02-14T12:23:00.000-08:002010-02-14T12:26:09.840-08:00Blogging The Moviegoer: SundayI went to Catholic schools in the '70s, which put me among one of the first waves of Catholic kids who never knew a Latin Mass. Our parish had a guitar Mass and a youth group and a cool, young, sideburned priest. All of it—even the sideburns—seemed part of the new spirit of progressive, post-conciliar reform. We were taught to feel fortunate that the Ancient and Eternal church was now New and Improved. The old ways—Latin, and Communion rails, and priests facing the altar—seemed dark and mysterious and were rarely mentioned. <br /><br />So I have to sit up and take notice when Binx and Sharon get dragged to Sunday Mass in Biloxi with the Smiths. The whole scene seems like a time capsule from that fabled era just before the Church, finally, entered modernity. The first thing that seems odd is that Binx tell us that the place is packed:<br /><br /><blockquote>A woman comes up the aisle, leans over and looks down our pew. She gives me an especially hard look. I do not budge. It is like the subway. Roy Smith, who got home just in time to change into a clean perforated shirt, gives up his seat to a little girl and kneels in the aisle with several other men, kneels on one knee like a tackle, elbow propped on his upright knee, hands clasped sideways. His face is dark with blood, his breath whistles in his nose as he studies the chips in the terrazzo floor.</blockquote><br /><br />I’ve seen men give up their seats and kneel florid-faced in church aisles, too, but only at midnight on Christmas Eve. Finally, Binx gives us the scene through Sharon’s eyes, with her “sweet catholic wonder peculiar to a certain kind of Protestant girl:”<br /><br /><blockquote>She thinks: how odd they all are, and him too—all that commotion about getting here and now that they are here, it is as if it were over before it began—each has lapased into his own blank-eyed vacancy and the priest has turned his back.</blockquote>Andrew Santellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08643989707527823889noreply@blogger.com0