Poor Yorick

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. At a length of 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and with its fondness for gags, pharmacology, cultural theory, popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe that David Foster Wallace's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but nor is it the fodder for the Moronic Inferno that Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms does truly capture their milieu and their fixations. Wallace hits false notes, however, using that same language to draw the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house, as if they were operating from the same frame of reference as the rich kids at the tennis academy.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake in a work. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts (and Wallace's pretentious character names), not Wallace's rendering of boy or his story, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, Don Gately, a thirtyish petty thug recovering from drug addict at the nearby halfway house, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation and his more advanced age. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise be willing to invest in him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does -- and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But there's disparity between a laundry list of contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these. And that disparity is, well, just about limitless.

Juan Bobo Goes to Hear Mass

The following is my translation of “Juan Bobo va a oír misa” by Rosario Ferré. I will confess to a lack of familiarity with Ferré and her writing style, which could not have helped this translation.

Juan Bobo is a character from Puerto Rican legend, and the simpleton his name implies.

Juan Bobo Goes to Hear Mass

“Ma! I wanna go to mass today!” Juan Bobo said to his mother one Sunday.

“Oh, Juan Bobo, mijo,” his mother replied. “How wonderful it is that you want to go to mass! But I can’t take you. I’m very sick.”

“Don’t worry, Ma. Don’t worry,” Juan Bobo said. “Tell me where’s the church, so I know what I half to do!”

Then his mother told him which way to go and that where he saw a lot of people coming in and going out, right there was the church. Before she’d even finished speaking, Juan Bobo put on his new windbreaker and left to look for the church.

After walking a while, he arrived at a house where a baptism was being celebrated. Many people were coming in and going out from the house, and Juan Bobo moved closer, to see what was happening. The table was set, and all sorts of trays sat on the lace tablecloth, illuminated by silver candelabra. The trays were filled with an array of exquisite dishes: sausages of veal and chicken, golden-fried pork, cold baked ham, duck jelly, pickles, pickled meats, soft cookies, deep-fried bananas filled with meat, fried cornmeal, fried strips of codfish, and so on and so on.

Juan Bobo approached the table like someone who passes the gates of delight. But seeing the world on its feet greeting each other and making polite conversation, he kept himself in a corner, watching everything without breaking in to try anything. The child baptized and anointed with oils and salts, the obligatory congratulations between priest and parents fulfilled, the guests came to the table, where with great elegance they ate and drank everything. Finally, they left the church, saying goodbyes as they went. When Juan Bobo found himself alone before that table, with a feast of leftovers and crumbs like he’d never seen in his life, he had his afternoon snack and dinner all at once, scarfing down what they’d left him. As soon as he was full, he ran back to his house.

“Hey, Ma,” he said. “If you only knew what a great mass I heard! I stayed there until the end, and boy, did I eat!”

“Eh, muchacho, but what have you done!” his mother said. “God knows where you’ve been. I was very afraid you wound up where there was no mass.”

The next week, Juan Bobo said, “Listen, Ma. I wanna go back and go to mass this Sunday.”

“Oh, yes, mijo,” his mother said. “How nice that you want to go to mass! But be careful where you stick your nose, and remember, the church is over where all the people are coming in and going out.”

Right away Juan Bobo put on his jacket again and, as misfortunes seek and find the unlucky, he went out in the street to look for the church. He actually came across it this time.

When Juan Bobo cam in through the atrium, the main mass was being held. He greeted the whole world with great ease. At the back of the nave he made out a great table laid with beautiful lace tablecloths and lit by silver candelabra, something that reaffirmed his confidence that he was in the place he’d been looking for. He stopped at the door of the church, and saw how all of the people coming in dipped their hand in the stoup of holy water and made the sign of the cross. Juan Bobo thought that, as they were very refined people, they would only come over and, with their fingertips, try he delicacy at the bottom of the stoup. He kept himself stolen away in a corner, waiting for all of them to go by. When he found himself alone, he grabbed the stoup of holy water with both hands and drank it all in one gulp.

“Avemaría purísima! What a salty stew!” he said. “Why, if they ate all the stew and left me nothing but the water…”

Juan Bobo waited for the ceremony to end. When he saw that the parishioners, at communion time, approached the altar on the tips of their toes, he kept himself put one last time. Then he drew himself closer and closer, with great affectation, to where the priest stood. He opened his mouth wider than a funnel, so that he too might be given something to eat. But when his turn came and the host was placed on his tongue, he shouted out, “Avemaría purísima! What a sick-looking little cookie they’ve given me!” And, sticking his hand in the chalice, he grabbed ten more hosts and swallowed them in a single gulp. With that, the priest rose, indignant, calling to the usher. The two of them threw Juan Bobo out of the church on his ass.

Juan Bobo beat it out of there, and as soon as he arrived back at his house, went to where his mother was and sadly told her of what had happened.

“Oh, Ma, if you knew what a crappy mass I heard! I feel like I haven’t even had breakfast! I got to the church and waited patiently for the ceremony to end. But when mealtime came, they wanted to give me a little pot of salt water and a little cookie, and when I asked them to give me more, they beat the crap out of me. I wound up where I shouldn’t have.”

And Kikirikí, Kikirimoche, this story is over. To anyone who takes a turn, may you shit during the day, not at night.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockey

It’s still impossible for me to describe: the feeling of taking a five-dollar bill from the outstretched hand of Gordie Howe. It’s taken more than a decade to sort out in my mind what probably didn’t add up to thirty seconds in the presence of Mr. Hockey.

I was working as a grocery store cashier back then. What remained of my adolescence was being drained by days behind the register and in sleepy undergraduate classes. My nights were spent alone, at my parents’ house, staring at a news magazine or a new video release. Everyone else my age seemed to have found a more joyful, hedonistic way of killing of the rest of youth. But I’d finally been cured of the acne that had turned my boyish skin into a landscape of blemishes that ran the spectrum of purples and reds. Clean skin, as I saw it, was a both an auspicious sign in general, and one that boded particularly well as I entered adulthood more and more fully.

By that time, just over a decade into his second, final retirement from professional hockey, Gordie Howe had reached the usual retirement age of the world’s assembly line workers and engineers – a remarkably short gap, considering that the longest-lived careers in the sport rarely extend into an iron man’s forties. Naturally, he was no longer the specimen he’d been through his playing days. White-haired and bald on his crown, carrying his extra weight in the rear and gut, his body was more like that of a bottom-heavy cartoon penguin than of the sleek bird on the Pittsburgh squad’s jerseys. He set down on the conveyor belt a box of a dozen doughnuts and a bottle of Coca Cola. My sebaceous glands started pumping double time, at the thought of the snack.

Back then, I thought that there was something sad in the sight. I, too, had been a hockey player, and a Gordie Howe fan even though his playing days had ended before mine began. Growing up in a part of the country where hockey wasn’t much more than a footnote in the sports pages, I gorged myself on the kid-friendly player bios the local library did stock. In his day, Howe had been a Greek god on ice, helmet-less and greased-haired, his physique so powerful and efficient that the thin protective equipment of his playing era seemed useless on him. My own hockey equipment was growing mold in my parents’ basement, where I’d consigned it not long after the revelation that my playing days were over, the highlight of my career likely skating, in double-digit losses, against a kid who would go on to be a marginal big-league player for the better part of a decade. My old barbells were rotting down there, too. And I could feel it, in a way, standing behind the register, my back aching like it never would have before I’d given up the barbells.

It was my first college roommate, a fullback on the football team, who had given me my initial firsthand glimpse of the unmanly self-absorption and petty cruelty that are like the birthright of male athletic prowess. Fresh back from their start-of-the-year orientation trip, he and his new friends gathered in our dorm room to down massive quantities of cheap beer and relive, again and again, his bringing to tears some homely girl who had been on the trip with them. Soon, he would befriend a lineman known throughout the college as Mr. Date Rape; and by the end of the semester, he would have cheated so often on his girlfriend, halfway across the country, that even the distance could not keep the rumors out of her ears. Ten years after leaving the grocery store, I would witness a coda, of sorts, to this strain of boorishness. In the early hours of the morning, my housemate and her boyfriend the ex-pro football player would burst into the house, screaming at each other about the abortion she refused to have.

“Hockey is a man’s game,” Howe once said. If the statement now seems retrograde, it would not be unfair to contrast Howe to the prefab celebrity athletes who fill the professional ranks today. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, the young Howe building his legendary strength through work on the family farm in frigid Floral, Saskatchewan, as the Depression gave way to the Second World War. It’s even harder to imagine my old roommate or my former housemate’s ex in the sort of caretaking role Howe has assumed, as his wife struggles with Pick’s Disease.

And so Gordie Howe turns eighty today.

For years after our encounter, I continued to believe that the physical decline of Gordie Howe was somehow sadder than anyone else’s – as if Mr. Hockey had not merely stepped off the ice at the Olympia one last time, but had descended from Olympus to the world of mere mortals. But I’m no longer so sure, now that the flashes of my own inevitable decline are getting a bit too clear and regular. And I don’t regret the dead end that my hockey career turned out to be: Better to know you just don’t have it than to wander through life convinced otherwise.
Not that Gordie Howe has lost much. Just taking that five-spot from him, I could feel that he was the strongest person who had ever graced me with his presence.

Fallen Angel, Rising Pop Star

I am as put off as John and Jane Q. Public by unctuousness on the part of public servants, especially when the self-styled angels reveal themselves to be practicing exactly what they have sermonized against with so much zealotry. But I am not gloating at the fall from grace of ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer. One possible outcome of his trysts with alleged call girl Ashley Alexandra Dupré must represent the most perfect union of word, deed, and supposed intention of the man's career -- unintended though the union certainly was.

Spitzer gained his crusader reputation in large part from the vehemence and tenacity with which he prosecuted prostitution and sex trafficking rings. But prosecution alone of the sex trade comes with no guarantee of a new and better life for the women the trade has exploited. Even less likely is the sex worker's chance of life anew as an entertainment celebrity, that Holy Grail of American popular culture.

It has been well-documented that Dupré is an aspiring pop singer, and that the scandal has spiked the demand for the tunes she is selling through the music site Amie Sweet. ("For Ashley Alexandra Dupré, Selling Music Beats Selling Sex") It's hard not to wish for Dupré to rise to fame, as she was promoting herself rather innocently through My Space and Amie Sweet rather than through her work as a call girl. And if her My Space postings and statements to the media are any indication, Dupré had been humbled by experience well before the scandal broke. (Ex-Governor Spitzer, take note.)

So, the public servant blessed with every opportunity in the world now retreats from public life, disgraced, his kingdom for a pricey romp in the sack. Should Dupré become a bonafide pop star, Spitzer will have (inadvertently) created the sort of opportunity for a sex worker that none of his work in law and goverment ever did -- or ever could have. The sanctimonious arbitrator of human law will have helped enact divine, poetic justice.

Away from my desk

The past week or so has been a bit too chaotic for me to have dedicated the proper time and attention to composing a blog entry. So I am posting a link to an article I wrote about two years ago for Mi Gente magazine, about the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation's annual technology-themed breakfast.

"Leaders in Education Bridging the Digital Divide"

Edith Grossman, Don't Eat Your Heart Out (Just Yet)

The following is my translation into Spanish of the Wikipedia entry for the late filmmaker John Cassavetes. Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, criticism, and/or notice of any translation error on my part. (Note: The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cassavetes has been edited a bit (for the better) since I began this translation -- and there is now in fact a translation into Spanish posted on the site.)


Vida y obras

John Nicholas Cassavetes era actor, director de cine, guionista y dramaturgo estadounidense mejor conocido por sus películas naturales e intensas. Se considera el «padrino del cine independiente», y su obra ha influido a directores de cine de varias generaciones, desde contemporáneos suyos tal como Martin Scorsese hasta Paul Thomas Anderson.

Cassavetes nació el 9 de diciembre de 1929, en ciudad de Nueva York, hijo de Nicholas John Cassavetes y Catherine Demetri, inmigrantes griegos. Crecía en Long Island, Nueva York, y asistió a Blair Academy, colegio en Nueva Yérsey, antes de entrar en la American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Después de graduarse en 1950, seguía trabajando de actor teatral, además de haciendo papeles en películas y empezando a actuar en televisión, en series antológicas incluso el Alcoa Theatre.

Primeras películas y actuación

Durante esta época encontró a la actriz Gena Rowlands y se casó con ella. Para 1956 había empezado a dar clases de la actuación del método en ciudad de Nueva York. Shadows (1959), la primera película que escribió y que dirigió Cassavetes, fue inspirado por un ejercicio de teatro improvisado. Cassavetes podía reunir el dinero para hacer la película gracias a sus amigos y familia, y a los oyentes de un programa de radio nocturno de línea abierta al público.

Ninguna compañía norteamericana estaba dispuesta a distribuir Shadows, así que lo llevó a Europa con el fin de conseguir un convenio de distribución. Se estrenó la película en Europa y ganó el Premio de los Críticos en la Feria de Películas de Venecia. Más tarde las distribuidoras Europeas lo estrenaron de una película importación en los Estados Unidos. Aunque lo miraban pocos norteamericanos, Shadows ganaba atención de los estudios de cine, y a principios de los años sesenta Cassavetes dirigió dos películas por Hollywood, Too late blues y A child is waiting.

También representaba dominantemente en películas como tal The dirty dozen (1967), recibiendo la propuesta por el Premio de la Academia de Mejor Actor Secundario por su papel de un soldado raso ansioso. Otros papeles notables de Cassavetes incluye un actor mentiroso en Rosemary’s baby (1968) de Roman Polanski, la victima en The killers, y el justo castigo vicioso del gobierno a Kirk Douglas en The fury (1978).

La próxima película que dirigió Cassavetes fue Faces, también producida independientemente, de la que Rowlands John Marley, Seymour Cassel y Val Avery fueron las estrellas. Representa un matrimonio contemporáneo desintegrándose. Faces fue propuesto por tres Premios de la Academia, Mejor Guión Original, Mejor Actor Secundario y Mejor Actriz.

Cassavetes él mismo fue una de las estrellas de Husbands (1970), junto con Peter Falk y Ben Gazzara. Representan un trío de hombres casados quienes han ido de farra en Londres.

Obras maestras de los años setenta

Sus tres obras maestras de los años setenta fueron producidas independientemente. Rowlands es la estrella de A woman under the influence (1974), en la que representa una ama de casa que se llega a estar cada vez más preocupada, rodeada por gente que no entiende su preocupación. Recibió la propuesta de la Academia por Mejor Actriz, mientras Cassavetes fue propuesto por Mejor Director.

The killing of a chinese bookie (1976) trata de un dueño de club de striptease, Cosmo Vitelli, representado por Ben Gazzara, a quién la mafia le obliga a matar a un bookmaker chino para pagar su hábito de juego descontrolado.

Opening night (1977) es otra obra seminal de Cassavetes que presenta a Rowlands como protagonista, con un reparto que incluye a Cassavetes, Gazarra y Joan Blondell. El personaje de Rowlands es una actriz que envejece se llama Myrtle Gordon, quién hace papel en una obra de teatro mientras sufre una crisis personal. Debido a su celebridad Myrtle es sola y poco querida por sus colegas, y teme su envejecimiento. Después de haber visto la muerte accidental de una aficionada joven, Myrtle empiece de beber en exceso y sufrir alucinaciones. Pero Myrtle se enfrente a sus demonios internos y por último realiza la mejor interpretación de su vida. Según cabe suponer Cassavetes dedicaba varios años a perfeccionar el guió, mientras acabar la producción de la película duró más que un año al costo de más que $1,5 millón. El primero corte corrió más de cinco horas de duración, y estrenaron en los Estados Unidos solamente una copia de la versión final.

Carrera tarde

En Gloria (1980) Rowlands hace el papel de la amiga de un gángster. Ella huye con un niño quien queda huérfano por la Mafia y entonces llega a ser el blanco suyo. Cassavetes volvió a la pantalla grande en Love streams (1984), en la cual representa a un libertino envejeciendo quien sufre la afección imperiosa de su hermana recientemente divorciada. Cassavetes él mismo pudo completar su última película, Big trouble (1986). Andrew Bergman, quien escribió el guión original, reemplazó la producción de la película durante el rodar.

En 1989 Cassavetes murió a la edad de 59 años de la cirrosis. Fue sobrevivido por Rowlands y sus tres hijos.

Nick Cassavetes, su hijo, siguió las huellas de su padre. Hizo papeles en películas tal como Face/off y Life, y dirigió varias películas, incluso John Q. y The notebook. También hizo la película She’s so lovely del guión original que había escrito su padre.

Cassavetes y la improvisación

Con frecuencia se entiende mal la influencia de la improvisación en las películas de Cassavetes. A excepción de Shadows sus películas dependieron de guiones muy detallados. Sin embargo Cassavetes dio a sus actores mucha libertad para crear sus personajes. También, si Cassavetes vio que la interpretación de un personaje o una escena que tuvo un actor fue diferente a lo que había imaginado él, estaba dispuesto a cambiar el guión para acomodar esa interpretación.

Homenajes

En septiembre de 2004 el Criterion Collection estrenó una colección de sus cinco películas independientes: Shadows, Faces, A woman under the influence, The killing of a Chinese bookie y Opening night. La colección también incluye A constant forge, un documentario que trata de la vida y obras de Cassavetes, y un folleto en que unos críticos ofrecen su juicio sobre las obras del director, además de homenajes a Cassavetes por unos amigos suyos.

Cassavetes también es el sujeto de unos libros biográficos. En el volumen comprehensivo Cassavetes on Cassavetes, una colección de entrevistas recopiladas por el historiador de cine Ray Carney, el director habla de sus experiencias, influencias y punta de vista sobre la industria.

En el 2005 un articulo en la revista Vanity fair rendó homenaje a Cassavetes como parte de su edición sobre los premios Oscar.

La banda Fugazi de Washington, D.C., grabó la canción «In on the killtaker» como homenaje a Cassavetes, mientras el álbum epónimo de Le Tigre incluye una grabación que trata del director.

Happy Is As Happy Does, Wherever Happy May Be

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

I will admit that I was initially put off by the title of NPR correspondent Eric Weiner’s engaging, highly readable travelogue, The Geography of Bliss. That conjunction of the global and the delightful conjured visions of a frequently flying chick lit heroine named, without irony – you guessed it. Thankfully (happily?), the book’s title is a minor bump along the road to an otherwise largely satisfying read.

While the author’s self-confessed grumpiness kills any chance of a candy-colored happily ever after, the nature of Weiner’s project insures against the opposite extreme: “What if,” Weiner writes in his introduction, “I spent a year traveling the globe, seeking out not the world’s well-trodden trouble spots but, rather, its unheralded happy places?” Candace Bushnell might not have signed up for the journey, but neither would William T. Vollmann have.

That year of traveling keeps Weiner zigzagging over an impressive swath of the Northern hemisphere, with junkets to nine countries spread across various geographic regions of Asia and Europe before return to the United States. Along the way, Weiner examines the pithy conventional wisdom on happiness – that it can’t be bought, and so on – and recent findings on the emotional state. Though Weiner hits enough global-travel clichés (a hashish bar in the Netherlands, a sex show in Thailand, an ashram in India) to make his journey recognizable, the best passages aren’t the ones that evoke place or custom but those in which the author taps locals’ minds for interpretation of their cultures’ emotional well-being. In the chapter on Switzerland, “Happiness Is Boredom,” the ongoing dialogue the author conducts with himself, his Swiss contacts and the more canonical wisdom of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell leads to these insights: the urbane Swiss owe no small part of their collective happiness to their relationship with nature, their lack of envy and ostentation to the small town-like close knitting of their social fabric. Whether or not Swiss happiness truly is boredom is another question, one whose cultural components are indirectly alluded to in the image of an ex-pat Hollywood agent nervously thumbing her Blackberry, and surprise from the Swiss that, statistically speaking, they are happy.

The further Weiner travels, geographically and culturally, the more perspicacious his book seems to become about happiness in the United States. This is partly due to the range of farther flung countries he visits. In India, though Weiner does visit that ashram and socialize among the Indian middle class, he of course glimpses that country’s endemic poverty – and concludes that, in certain fundamental ways, it is less grinding than extreme poverty in the United States, the Indian “houseless” (as Weiner refers to the indigent of India) maintaining strong social and familial ties all but unknown among the American homeless. On the other hand, the oil kingdom of Qatar is, in Weiner’s analysis, a Wahhabite Brave New World whose dry cultural well is greased with Starbucks coffee. Happiness isn’t, it seems, a reserve of iced mocha vast enough to caffeinate the world for the next hundred years.

But Weiner’s a-ha moment in an exotic country comes during a conversation with Karma Ura, who runs Bhutan’s most important think tank (which, as Weiner notes, “also happens to be Bhutan’s only think tank”). “I have achieved happiness,” Ura tells Weiner, “because I don’t have unrealistic expectations.” This perspective is so opposite Weiner’s own (“In America,” he writes, “high expectations are…the force behind our dreams and, by extension, our pursuit of happiness”) that Ura’s expounding temporarily disarms Weiner of his personal guardedness. He drops his guard to tell Ura the story of a recent visit to the hospital, scheduled by the author after be began experiencing numbness in his extremities and shortness of breath; MRI results confirmed that these symptoms were brought on by a panic attack, by hypochondria. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day,” Ura responds. “It will cure you, sanitize you.” His rationale? Human beings must be prepared for death, as most Westerners are not. Ura then reveals that he was once a cancer patient.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so,” wrote John Stuart Mill. Indeed, Weiner’s findings mostly confirm the old adage about the preferability of existing as a happy Forrest Gump rather than as an unhappy Socrates. Weiner relates the story of his firing from the New York Times, which came a few weeks after the paper’s executive editor labeled his work “naïve and unsophisticated.” It is only in Iceland, where “being naïve is okay because you can always start over,” as it’s put by a relatively young music producer on his career, that Weiner finally gets over the insult. “The world, I now conclude, would be a far better place with a bit more naïveté,” writes Weiner.

But Weiner’s book suffers less from simplicity than from not treading certain paths. His travels begin in the Netherlands, with a visit to the Dutch professor who compiles the World Database of Happiness. The ostensibly scientific focus is, for all intents and purposes, mostly forgotten once the WDH has been left behind. And that’s a shame. Some of the most interesting, and promising, recent neurology research has focused on the relationship between the brain’s structure and its functioning. Could happiness be a well-wired brain? Is it possible to rewire one’s brain and thus recalibrate the happiness gauge of one’s psyche? That Weiner devotes almost no space to such questions is understandable on the one hand – it’s the geography, not the neurology, he’s after – and puzzling on the other: as Sharon Begley describes in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, neuroscientists are now beginning how meditation practice actually changes the brain’s physiology; two of the nine countries Weiner visits are predominantly Buddhist; another the birthplace of the Buddha himself. And geography, like all received stimuli, influences the way we think.

The Geography of Bliss ultimately begs larger questions about the nature of happiness. To what extent is happiness a function of culture, and vice versa? And does happiness translate easily from one culture to another? Weiner’s findings suggest a negative answer to the latter, as he admits that much of what accounts for the happiness of other cultures would be an acquired taste for most in the United States.

It’s not a giveaway to say that nowhere does Weiner find utopia. The happiness he does encounter reflects in the book itself: imperfect but charming, and as stimulating for the questions it raises as for those it answers.

Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the Hurricane Katrina of Mayors

I sat out the 2001 Detroit mayoral election, the vote that would bring the city its youngest elected chief executive and current poster boy for corruption in office, Kwame M. Kilpatrick. Sometime before the general election, Kilpatrick injected the race with a nasty shot of homophobia: “I don’t ever want my children to see that kind of lifestyle,” proclaimed the candidate – as if the mere sight of the so-called gay lifestyle were, say, inspiring the Detroit Public Schools pornographic dropout rate. Whatever the intent of Kilpatrick’s denunciation, it also offered an oblique preview of his public response to criticism (and was itself a prescient, though unwitting, auto-criticism). Just as the mayor doesn’t believe his own lifestyle problematic, nor does he, guilty of perjury but for the legal formality of a criminal trial, see himself as legally culpable party in this case. Kilpatrick publicly charges the Detroit Free Press with having illegally obtained the text messages, and the secret deal to keep them from the public, that may well end his reign as mayor.

But as serious as Kilpatrick’s legal trouble is, his lying under oath does not constitute his gravest breach of public confidence.

The mayor’s shameless assumption of a double standard favorable to him should rightly spark Detroiters’ ire. The United States’ poorest city simply cannot afford public “servants” cursed with Kilpatrick’s appetite for excess on the public dime. While the mayor and his posse party like fey, over-privileged high school kids given run of the mansion, actual DPS high school students suffer along with a substandard education doled out by a system in such dire straits that its operation had to be assumed by the state of Michigan. Kilpatrick’s announcements of significant reductions to city bus service nearly coincided with the revelation that he had used public money to lease his wife a brand-new Escalade. And the firing of the three cops who brought the whistle-blower suit against the mayor once again highlighted the fact that Kilpatrick keeps 21 bodyguards on his security detail.

The mayor’s apparent lack of empathy for the plight of his constituents in their majority, combined with his “tin ear for symbolism” (as Governing Magazine Executive Editor Alan Ehrenhalt described Kilpatrick’s indifference to public perception) oddly echoes the tone deafness of George W. Bush. Remember how Bush’s praise for his highly under-qualified then-director of FEMA, Michael Brown, instantly became an oral metonym for Bush administration nepotism gone tragically awry: “Heckuva job, Brownie.” Kilpatrick’s text messages reveal a similar callow fraternal cluelessness. “I’m all the way with that!” he wrote to Christine Beatty, then his chief of staff and mistress, in response to a text message from her defending their firing former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown, a 24-year veteran of the Detroit force. Brown’s crime? He had begun to investigate allegations of abuse by the mayor’s security detail, including the fatal shooting of Tamara Greene, a Detroit woman rumored to have performed as an exotic dancer at the Manoogian Mansion bash hours before her death.

As the nightmarish images from the internal refugee camp that was the New Orleans Superdome during the fall of 2005 confirmed who was disposable in the eyes of the Bush administration, so do the recently published photos of Greene, a young mother looking to start a business, give the Kilpatrick gang’s expendables a face.

Yet, from the beginning of the scandal, Kilpatrick has sought to portray himself as the victim. “If I was 60 years old, if I came from the 'country club community,' if I came out of an established private firm or something like that, none of these [rumors] would get the lift that they have,” complained the mayor. “I guess it's believable that a 32-year-old black man with an earring would have parties like that.” It is in Kilpatrick’s political best interest to present the case against him as an attack on his surface, his dapperness and swagger, which a significant portion of his electorate no doubt finds inspiring, especially at a moment Detroit faces a perfect storm of economic, social and civil collapse. The disingenuousness of Kilpatrick’s baiting lies not primarily in his attempt to obfuscate the truth but in his knowledge of that obfuscation’s context. The whistle-blower suit would wind up costing Detroit over $9 million, no chump change in a city where over one-third of the children live below poverty level and many quality of life indicators are at Third World levels. Not many Detroiters are part of the country club community, either. The money lost in the suit, essentially another bill racked up by the mayor, could have made an impact on public education or transportation; it could have paid full salaries and benefits to tens of city workers. It could have served as a protective dike of sorts, if you will. But Kilpatrick was willing to exploit his city’s justified fear of racial profiling, all so that he could continue living high, and without consequence, on the labor of predominantly black, mostly poor Detroit. The diamond earrings and oversized gangster couture only costume a soul that is old-school in the manner of the country club community’s starchiest.

And so, no matter the eventual legal and political outcomes of the scandal, Kwame M. Kilpatrick has shown himself to be all he warned of, rightly or wrongly: flamboyant dresser with a flair for jewelry; philandering epicure; fallacious upholder of the unjust end of the status quo.

“Service,” children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman said, “is the rent we pay for the space we occupy.” The quote is a favorite of Kilpatrick’s, one he frequently tosses into speeches. (It is not so ironic from Kilpatrick’s lips if the pronouns are changed, and the mayor’s enormous physical presence considered.) The canonized formulation of the modern social justice movement that more thoroughly damns the Detroit mayor comes from Martin Luther King, and does not need such an ironic twisting: “An injustice against one is an injustice against all.”

Al Gore, King of All Media?

I orginally posted this review ofThe Assault on Reason by Al Gore. on the Good Reads website.

I find it a bit ironic that, after the news media's characterization during the 2000 election of Al Gore as the stiffest of unelectable suits, Gore reinvented himself in the traditionally sexy worlds of publishing and movie-making -- and now has a Nobel to show for his efforts.

If Gore's split public persona reflects in his writing, it serves him well: he brings to the page an admirable combination of restraint and passion, qualities largely absent in most of the current bumper crop of political books aimed at a general audience. The contrast between Gore's tone and that of, say, right-wing megaphone Glenn Bleck should leave fair-minded readers with no doubt as to whose motives are essentially pure here.

The strengths of The Assault on Reason are possibly its weaknesses as well. In his elucidation of the current, titular assault, Gore skims through the European Englightenment and the American independence movement, invoking thinkers from Thomas Paine to Thomas Pynchon along the way. Gore's palate is broad, and squeezing so much information and so many ideas into a relatively short book necessitates superficial treatment of this material. However, at a time when a solid majority of American adults supposedly cannot name a Supreme Court justice, a bit of remedial history is not at all patronizing.

Thoughts on Blogging and the Death of Old Friends

If Rob’s death had occurred ten years earlier, while we were still best friends stuck in high school, I wouldn’t have learned of it online. This has nothing to do with Rob’s lack of notoriety in those days, but with the desolation of cyberspace in its nascent stages: The Internet was still nothing more than a loose network of virtual bulletin boards and military mainframes, a finite and relatively unknown world not yet a glimpse of the viral mirror to reality we have come to know. There simply would not have been anywhere online to announce the death. Not that Rob would have protested – at least not too much.

Rob was a classic naysayer, if he lacked the experience to give any substance or balance to his doubt. No sooner had we arrived, separately, at the small Midwestern boarding school that would be our home for our last couple of years of high school, both of us nearly two weeks late, than Rob began proselytizing me with his vision of our new milieu: our schoolmates were a gang of fey, over-privileged kids whose sole motivator was intramural popularity. He maintained that multiplex attitude toward private school students even as their gestures toward him ignored that attitude. Handsome enough to attract girls while almost actively working not to – he resembled a young James Spader with dark hair and eyes – Rob stayed faithful to his girlfriend back home, who nevertheless called Rob with tales of her shenanigans backstage at every hard rock show that came to town. “You just want to be like everyone else,” he scoffed at me, after I’d copied someone’s Jimi Hendrix tape, as if this really were a sign of mindless conformity. At a school where under-dressing was the norm, Rob was self-consciously proud to wear to class white canvas dock shoes, thing ties like a convenience store clerk might sport behind the register, and casual shirts that seemed to have become permanently wrinkled traveling through a time warp from the early eighties. (Predictably or not, Rob was turned off by The Great Gatsby, when we read it junior year; I would have liked to witness his reaction to The Catcher in the Rye, to see whether or not he understood that Holden’s lament against phonies was also autobiographical.) Yet Rob’s scorn was most easily stoked by schoolmates’ posturing, whether in dark trench coats or preppy sweaters. His scorn wasn’t reserved for anyone in particular, though: the drill team and the chronic masturbators, the aspirant druggies and the overachievers – other people’s quirks damned them, in his eyes. It was the first time I’d had so much social contact with such a young person whose worldview was so dark.

Of course, it’s unfair to hold a pose against a teenager, taboo to speak ill of the dead. On the other hand, were Rob alive today and still in his adolescence, no doubt he would be raging against YouTube celebrity, Facebook popularity, and the rest of the Web’s detours to cultural cache that did not exist when we were of the target age to be bowled over such achievements.

Whether or not his raging truly would be insincere is another matter. I do remember that his displays of disdain for seeking others’ approval were sometimes elaborate enough to make me question whether they were only displays. Once he ditched an all-school awards assembly, at which he was supposed to receive a certification for his selections to one of the all-conference hockey teams. Another time, after we sneaked into the lone movie theater in town, he spotted one of the school cooks, an enormous, lumbering man who always wore a couple of days’ growth of his dull blond beard and kept a plug of chew bulging against the lower corner of his mouth. To the cook’s surprise, Rob greeted him from across the theater, and we took two of the empty seats next to him. Over the next few weeks, Rob began wandering back into the school kitchen, where he and the big cook would make small talk about the prairie cold and amateur hockey. Eventually, Rob would bring his hockey sticks back there to customize their blades over the open-flame burners on the institutional stoves. The cook would bring him extra helpings of the plebeian grub the kitchen served our small mass.

Rob’s volunteering at the local food bank was either his most conspicuous reaction against what he perceived as the school culture, his most selfless activity in the years I knew him, or both. Early every Saturday morning, the school’s guidance counselor drove a van down to the town’s food bank, where a small group from the school would work with other volunteers stuffing brown paper grocery bags with donated food for poor families. The volunteer activity was famous around the school for its low attendance among students, with no one but the guidance counselor’s family and a few sedulous members of the student vestry ever even signing up. “We’ve got everything,” Rob said, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “and there are people in town who can’t even pay for food.” He didn’t try to make it seem as if he’d made an original observation on human inequality. For a string of Saturdays probably shorter than I now remember, I joined Rob and the other volunteers stuffing grocery bags in the bleary-eyed discomfort of an indistinct box of a pantry, rushing to put the bags together before the poor families arrived and could be shamed by the sight. His volunteer work rivaled the anonymity of anyone’s MySpace comments.

Rob’s life after high school remains something of a mystery to me. He majored in computer science, for the purely pragmatic reason of the job market’s prevailing forces. Just to be like everyone else, in some sense. He got engaged to a girl he’d met in their university’s library. She eventually broke it off, possibly because of parental pressure. But Rob had given up our email correspondence by that time, and I got the news from a mutual friend.

So I don’t know how much time or what events in Rob’s life interceded between our last conversation and his death. The last time we spoke, though, his tone so pointlessly bitter I imagined all his bile had metastasized in his voice. I was on a road trip through the Northeast, where he lived at the time, stopped for the night at the cheapest motel I could find within striking distance of New York City. I’d looked up his number on a whim, and dialed it on one too. And while I don’t remember many of the details of our conversation or its course, I can’t forget its rhythm. I went through the usual greeting and ice-breakers. Rob’s responses, a grumbled word or two at a time, came only after awkward pauses, after each of my attempts at small talk had died out. He started letting out long, letting out long, annoyed breaths through his nose as I continued. Then he started firing back. It was stupid to take a road trip. Stupider to stay at a cheap motel. And why on earth had I looked up his number? Why did I call? Did I think we were going to meet up? There was no way he was going to…

I hung up on Rob before he could finish some thought.
After the shock of that exchange had worn off, I didn’t think much about it until a former classmate of ours called (on a land line) five years later with the news of Rob’s death. When I asked the inevitable “How do you know?” the classmate shot back, a bit smugly, “It’s online.” The randomness of it all gave me the uncomfortable sense that he was right: Who ever thinks the last he’ll hear of his old best friend will be a bafflingly hostile voice coming over the phone in some fleabag motel room? I bit my tongue and let the classmate, five hundred-plus miles away, direct me to the school’s website, through registering for an account, and finally to our class’s page. Beside Rob’s name were the letters “DC,” the site’s impersonal shorthand for “deceased.” Once I’d ended the call, I spent the next hour scouring the Internet for an obituary. Having been a minor schoolboy hockey star and a collegiate player, I figured, would guarantee Rob some published notice of his death. It did not. Or, if there was something written about him, somewhere online, I couldn’t find it among the millions of web pages whose text included Rob’s almost satirically common full name.

“Everything is online,” the classmate had once told me, with all the unchecked wonder of a cub cable news reporter. But there was no other sign of Rob on the Internet, among the millions of profiles detailing their posters’ pop cultural savvy and exhaustive social networks, the Balkanized multimedia fiefdoms spliced together by overambitious would-be wunderkinds, the Babel-like paperless trail of rants and raves on everything under the sun, and the electronic ticker tape of the major news media.

The obvious refutation didn’t occur to me at that moment.