John McPhee has recently written two pieces for the New Yorker* that have made me feel much better about myself.  The first word in one is “Block” – as in writer’s.   The other begins (well a sentence or so in…): “I lay down on it (a picnic table) for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing…I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it…”

  The project I’ve undertaken is a big one and the research part is fun.  I greatly enjoy learning new stuff and meeting interesting people.  The problem comes when I try to convince myself to to make something out of it all.  As opposed to McPhee though, I don’t fight fear or panic, I just daydream,  something at which my roommate will tell you I am very very good.

  Above you see the view out the window of my office.  Nice, huh? On the far side of the river is a ‘tow’** making its way through the lock and dam.  It is interesting because the river’s high just now and I’ve noticed that there is an extra towboat out there to help ensure smooth passage of the narrow channel.  I looked into it and found that the Corps of Engineers mandates the presence of  auxiliary muscle when the river level is above a certain point.  And that each nudge costs the barge line hundreds of dollars.

  The bridge you see isn’t the original.  The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi was up river just a hundred or so yards  from there.  Its development and construction were problematic and contentious with Jefferson Davis,  Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce,  preferring a span further to the south and the steamboat lines, fearful of competition, claiming that a bridge would impede efficient river travel.   Litigation ensued but the project moved forward nonetheless with a survey by Robert E Lee.

   The last rails were laid on the morning of April 21, 1856 and a steam locomotive pulled the first cars across soon thereafter.  Fifteen days later disaster struck.  On the evening of May 6 the nearly new Effie Afton, was making her way up river and several hundred yards after she passed through the draw, something caused one engine to fail, she heeled to starboard, and crashed into the bridge.  The resulting conflagration destroyed both. 

  Hearing the news the next day, steamboats up and down river blew their whistles in solidarity.  Capt John Hurd filed suit against the Railroad Bridge Company claiming that eddies created by the bridge’s piers had been the cause of the loss of his ship and cargo.  The Rock Island Railroad Company held that the crash had been deliberate and hired Abraham Lincoln to defend their interests. 

  The case ended with a hung jury which was considered a victory for Lincoln, the Rock Island Lines, and Chicago over the steamboats and St Louis.  It was crucial to his career as a lawyer and an important precursor to his first presidential campaign three years later… Lincoln? The Rock Island Lines?  Steamboats and St Louis?  Wait, uh, what were we talking about?

*1/14/13 and 4/29/13

** “Tow” is the term used to describe a floating means of transporting freight comprised of a towboat and as many as forty 200’ barges, though not so many this far north.  Odd that they’re call ‘tow’boats because they don’t  tow, they push.

  OK, as those few of you who occasionally visit this space can attest, I have a very short attention span and find it impossible to stay on the same subject for very long.  Nonetheless, it is necessary to return to one, a rather arcane one at that, less than twelve months after having first addressed it . * Rabies.

  You know it is going to be something cool when your kids call in the middle of the night.  Like about  3:00AM a few Saturdays ago.  Picked up the phone and youngest daughter – who I knew to be in Costa Rica – was on the line.  “Dad!  I’m freaking out!  I think I’m going to die!”  She had plenty of breath so I figured her demise was probably not exactly imminent so I asked what was up.

  “I’m staying in this open air hostel in the middle of the jungle and I just woke up with some sort of huge possum or rat biting my toe!  There’s blood everywhere.  Think I’m going to die?”  Well, I thought, she probably won’t exsanguinate if only her big toe was involved.  “Everybody’s got to go sometime.” I replied, “but I don’t think this will be yours.  You’re going to have to get rabies vaccination when you get home though”.

  After she hung up I messaged Dr Brother who agreed about the rabies series and said that she should organize some antibiotics.  Fine teeth of small rodents or marsupials insert bacteria more deeply with less likelihood of being easily washed off than, say, in the case of a dog bite.  Just as wife began to rub her eyes and make inquiries phone rang again and daughter asked “figure anything out yet?” 

  “Ya, I’m glad you’re on your own insurance.  When I got the rabies shots it cost me several thousand dollars.  Also, I talked with your uncle and he said that you should get some antibiotics or something in the morning.  Is there a witch doctor in the village?”  “Thanks Dad… I’ll find a pharmacy”, which she did later that morning and at which she discussed her allergies and arranged a course of ‘Ciprofloxacina’ with the help of her IPhone and Google Translate.

  She returned to her home in the mountains of Colorado without further drama where we visited her on part of a previously planned trip a few weeks later.  It was fun to accompany her for the first round of shots.    It had been a long while since she’d had an injection and she didn’t believe me when I said that they really didn’t hurt.  Much to her surprise then, the first of six – tetanus – brought a smile to her face.  “You’re right!” she said. 

  However, she wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of loading up her big toe up with gamma globulin which process you can see below.  I said that I wouldn’t be either, but that it was going to be much easier for me to observe than watching the orthopedic doc some years prior stick a big needle in deep behind her kneecap.

In the event, she did drop an F bomb, quietly, and the docs laughed happy to have counterpoint to my commentary.

    *June 15, 2012  “Exercise is stupid”

   …Pretty soon all rose, we were sworn in, and one of the two young men in the center of the courtroom told us that the other guy, ‘The State’, got to go first, but that we should withhold judgment until his turn to present.  The twenty something Rebenesque brunette seated before us had been at a bar, admittedly, had had two beers, admittedly, and the on the way home rear ended a parked car.  “State’ll tell you she had been drunk.  Truth is she’d fallen asleep after two twelve hour shifts and then an emotional late meeting with her sister.”

  This should be easy I thought.  She had declined the breath test, but we were going to be able to see the squad car video of her performing the series of field sobriety tests.  Long story short though, no one thought that she appeared obviously inebriated.  Especially given the facts that she’d been up nearly twenty-four hours at the time of filming and that her last nimble moment had likely been more than several years prior.

  In the deliberation room a forewoman was quickly selected by reason of  previous experience and, well, her ebullience.  “it made me proud to be part of this system.”  Her charge was to help us get to a unanimous position “beyond a reasonable doubt” regarding the defendant’s sobriety or lack thereof.  There was considerable back and forth, give and take.  First vote was six to six.

  The basic contention was between those who felt that with the first gulp of the first Blue Moon the defendant was “under the influence” and those with a need to be convinced that to be guilty the young woman’s blood alcohol content had been close to or in excess of the state’s limit of .08%.  Some never spoke, some (such as me) offered pithy words of wisdom (“they have car wrecks in Utah”) and some regaled the groups with extensive tales of familial yore. 

  All conversation, but for one brief exchange, was reasoned, polite, and earnest.  After another vote, we had become eight with reasonable doubt of insobriety and four with none.  By 5:00PM there had been much repetition and no more changes of mind.  Clerk came with judge’s instructions to go home, not discuss (not even with wife or dog – I asked), and return at 9:30 AM the following morning.

   9:30 to noon more of the same.  We were summoned into the courtroom where sat the judge and stood the lawyers and defendant.  Told of no progress, the judge asked us to return to the jury room, reread his instructions, and wait for the pizza he’d ordered for us.  By this time we were all sort of friends and enjoyed good natured probing for weakness in the other side’s line of reasoning. 

  We all wondered why neither side had procured witness from the bar.  It was apparent that had some disinterested sworn soul have told us that defendant either had indeed imbibed only the two beers over the course of the two hours or  in fact had had more, deliberation would have ended with first vote.  Absent that, the group could not be convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that defendant was guilty of more than falling asleep at the wheel.  Or that she’d been drunk.  Hung.

  Afterwards, Judge told us that the case would never have come before a jury had not both sides good reason to be hopeful of holding sway.  That from his preview a decisive first vote seemed highly unlikely.  And that fully a third of the proceedings over which he’d presided had ended with a hung jury.  I was amazed.  And impressed that some combination of fatigue, boredom, and callousness hadn’t yielded a more decisive denouement.   

*I am thrilled that there was not more here at risk – for anyone.

 **I cannot but wonder about the numbers of incarcerated innocent and those guilty wandering about carefree.

*** We were each paid $70.00 for the experience.

 While back I mentioned a project I’d undertaken.  It’s a biography of the woman you see above pictured as a young girl.  She was born on Bastille Day in 1920 in an aerie nestled in a valley of the mountains of central China.  She led an amazing life and as proof that I’m not the only one with that opinion, behold a small portion of her papers held deep in the vault of an Ivy League archive.  Access is limited and they’re tended by several learned and caring souls.

  The lady has left us, but relatives, friends, colleagues, as well as a few detractors are yet around to recollect.  Interestingly, the level of candor is in direct proportion to emotional proximity.  The process of going through papers, reading books, and talking with these folks feels like having embarked upon a treasure hunt, the spoils of which to transmute into a fabric of essential truth. 

  Only part way in I’m incredibly humbled by both the scope of the undertaking as well as the tremendous responsibility I owe the entire cast of characters.  In each of those with whom I’ve had the good fortune to cross paths a subtle apprehension has manifested one way or another.  They know that a tale of high point short shrift would be easy, quick, and likely command rapt attention.

  Nope.  This is going to take a while.  Besides, I’ve got to figure out how to go about it.  I’ve never done anything like this before.  “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I learn how to do it.”

*Picasso

**Toyo Ito won the Pritzker Prize.  Read about him below at 4 13 12 and 2 12 10      

 

In the New  York Times the other day* there was an interesting article about Norwegian firewood.  Apparently the subject arouses considerable passion in the Land of the Midnight Sun.  There is a bestselling book – Solid Wood  - and a twelve hour television documentary that, through its course, catalyzed a string of invectives via text of which half complained that the firewood was stacked bark side down and half worried about what they saw bark side up.  Uhm, the denouement of this program was a live, fixed, close take of a hearth borne conflagration log after log after log.

  Thinking that perhaps related emotions were cathected into the Beatles’ tune Norwegian Wood, I investigated.  Probably not.  The lyrics most likely refer to cheap pine paneling in allusion to a venue of illicit love.  John: “I’d always had some kind of affairs going on, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair…”  Really great melody in the key of E Major and was their first song to employ Harrison on the sitar.  Rolling Stone placed it #84 on the list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

  But back to the bark.  If you need some firewood, let my little black angel help as she did in the photos above and below.  At top you see a kitchen chair she dispatched to the woodpile by gnawing through all four of the lower horizontal cross members.  It still stood, and I would have kept it, but wife was concerned for embarrassment should it one day collapse beneath a friend or relative.  Pulling apart its back I felt like how I imagine a surgeon does while making way through a ribcage.  In contrast, the seat fell with measured grace to my Scandinavian axe.

  The scene at bottom is another of creative firewood procurement and this one is special on two counts.  First, the painted shingles shorn from the front of our house add a certain sparkle to the fire made all the more special with the knowledge that they are no longer available.  Second, notice the exposed TV and Internet cable at lower right.  Service has lately acquired a special intermittency.

  Oh well, she has my heart  and as per Pascal: “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing”.

*NYT 2/20/13

** This is a wood cut by daughter of her friend Max

  Last month I read an interview with Alan Arkin in which he recalled observing a fellow actor synapticly filing away a bad emotional experience for future use.  “I had done it myself many times and it was one of the things I found horrible.  I don’t do it any more.  Until my late forties acting was my reason for existence.  Now it’s a reflection of my existence”*    The bit came to mind last week as I began to clean out my office and prepare for something new.**  It dawned on me that if Plan B was to be an acting career I had just hit the material mother lode.

  My father and grandfather were previous occupants of the office and my mother had been just down the hall.   The first thing I noticed when I started though the secure storage was the sheer scale of their work product.  Those people worked hard and long.  I felt guilty as I began to shred.  Had to call upon Dr Brother for support.  “Hey man, I’ve moved twelve times, get over it, it’ll be good for you”.

  Then I began to find stuff.  Oldest document, so far, was deed to a farm in Texas dated 1909 next to which was related correspondence with farmer.  I remember hearing about my great grandparents taking a month long trip down there leaving my sixteen year old grandmother in charge of the farm here and her five siblings.  Then found a file regarding mineral rights and thought of Dad’s zeal in related self education.  Farm was sold in mid sixties.

  My father’s settled estate is still in a cabinet in my office and so I’ve frequently touched it in the years since his death.   In the safe are documents related to seven others.  Two grandparents, four great grandparents, and my brother.  Middle brother’s been gone since a week before 9/11 and I hadn’t looked through that box since receipt of the AOK from the IRS.

   I kept everything.  Medical bills, receipts from a trip to Oregon to box up his affairs, emails I’d printed out from Dr Brother explaining the inexorable,  the will I vividly recall drawing out near the end.   Emotions rose with such force I was nearly overwhelmed and had to shut the door.  It was as if I’d gone back in time.  I realized fully what Arkin was talking about.  The idea of summoning all that forth to repurpose is sort of terrifying.   What if you couldn’t shake it?

  On another shelf I found an accordion file filled with documents and correspondence.  Dad’s report cards from elementary school, letters from his parents to him in college, a epistolary exchange between his father and brothers, a letter to him from my mother’s father, several from his soon to be brother-in- law in preparation for the wedding.

  Not all somber and purposeful though.  There are several  Valentine’s from my mother to him.  The one you see above was postmarked February 14, 1952.  I was born four months later.  Glad to know I had that goin’ for me!  They were younger then than any of their grandchildren are now.  Wow.

*http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-last-word-alan-arkin-20130110

**Which is why my posts have been a bit irregular.  If you’ve missed them, thanks and sorry

 

  Translating something from one language to another, it is impossible to convey the depth and richness of meaning of the original.  The essence with any luck, but not the full flavor.  Surprisingly perhaps, a good way to demonstrate this is by first examining a random passage in English.  The last page of, say, of the Economist, which is usually an obituary.

  Indeed, the last page of the January 19, 2013 issue of the magazine is the obituary of computer programmer and activist Aaron Swartz.  In it will be found the following sentence: “He already had access to the library network; no need to hack into the system.”  Fairly simple and straightforward, right?  Well not so much as it might seem.  The word “hack” proves to be problematic.  In my pocket French/English dictionary there is no ‘hack’, but the translation of ‘hacker’ is given as “pirate informatique”.  “Pirate” is basically the same in both languages.  So “hacker” translates into French as “computer technology pirate”.

  Gets the point across, but not the etymological provenance and thus much is lost.    Look up “hack” in an American dictionary and you get: “To cut or chop with repeated and irregular blows; To break up the surface; To cut or mutilate as if by hacking; taxi driver”.  Only in new dictionaries do the final possible definitions refer to computers.  Thus with “technology pirate” one would not understand what we here do innately, that “to hack” is the infinitive form of a verb  adapted by Americans to describe the process of unauthorized entry into or usage of an information system through actions analogous to the cutting and chopping in days of yore. 

   This all came to mind while attempting to translate an article* from French to English about lessons for the French from the sexual harassment case of Dominque Strauss Kahn in New York City some months ago.  L’Affaire DSK caused quite a bit of discussion about “harcelement sexuel” in France where it has had a much lower profile and different tone than on this side of the Atlantic.  Hard for us to imagine, but a former French minister essentially said about the DSK incident: “what’s the big deal, it wasn’t a murder”. 

  As opposed to in the USA, the rare person accused and convicted of workplace sexual harassment in France may suffer minor punishment, but not the employer.  Thus, there is not in place a system of sensitivity training, reporting responsibility, and serious adjudication with the potential for severe penalties.  There has even been some snickering about American prudishness.

  The article concludes with the following: “… le subject ne risqué pas de tomber aux oubliettes”.  First part is easy: “the subject doesn’t risk falling into…”  The last word is the problem.  A quick glance at my dictionary has the whole phrase “tomber aux oubliettes” and translates it as “sink into oblivion”.  The word alone translates as jail cell.  So, now, in France, due to  all the publicity surrounding the affair DSK, a reexamination of sexual harassment doesn’t risk falling into oblivion. 

   Good thing certainly, but as above, richness of meaning is lost.  Knowing that the infinitive “oublier” means “to forget”, I was curious and got a bigger dictionary where I found that an “oubliette” is a particularly awful sort of medieval dungeon down into which prisoners were lowered through the only opening.  Native French speakers would have understood the emotion attendant to the use of that word and that all hope would have been lost for the occupant of the oubillette as well as any relatives, friends, and sympathizers.    

*Les lecons de l’affaire DSK, interview of Abigail Saguy by Anne Senges, France – Amerique, September 2011

 

  The official NRA reaction to school shootings in general and Sandy Hook in particular, announced on December 21, was that there should be an armed guard in every school.  Apparently noting that this proposal was made on the last day of the Mayan calendar, sports team owner Mark Cuban tweeted that the NRA recommendation was what the Mayans had in mind when they predicted the world would come to an end on that day.

  A bit oblique, but I wish I’d thought to say that.  Why just public schools?  How about private schools, day care facilities, uh, movie theaters, churches, malls, factories, businesses, and oh ya post offices? Everyone should have at least a sidearm, no, a brace.

  Really, more guns are the answer?  According to Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center (and a former NRA member) more Americans die every year from gunshot injury (acts of will, emotion, accidents, and self infliction) than have from incidents of terrorism – in total – that have ever been recorded.  Every year.

  Furthermore, more Americans die from gunshot wounds every year than do citizens of the whole rest of the planet from acts of terrorism.  Yet nothing has been done to even attempt attenuation of all this carnage while, since 9/11, the search and seizure and self incrimination protections provided by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been reduced to a degree legal scholars would have previously thought not possible.

  It is important to acknowledge that there is no short term solution, but helpful to understand the origin and nature of the problem.  There would be no gun violence without guns, obviously.  Hunting weapons are involved in a small portion of these incidents while handguns comprise the largest.  And the industry is on record as having appealed to our “inner soldiers” by making available to the public high capacity semiautomatic pistols and ammunition originally procured by the military.

  I have hunted, own a shotgun, and have many friends for whom hunting is an important part of their lives.  Tellingly however, “there has been and continues to be a decline in hunting.  “Young people are much more interested in electronic games…”  Thus, sales of traditional sporting weapons have also been on a decline.  The arms industry has rejuvenated their markets by “heavily marketing not just semiautomatic, but military derived semiautomatic guns”.  Sales to governments are advertising and loss leaders.       

  Incredibly, there is abundant data available about what types of guns are used in what types of crimes, but both the ATF and CDC have been precluded from distributing it by acts of Congress which were initiated by the NRA.  “The data is in the files of the ATF, but it cannot release it.  [They are] forbidden by law from releasing it…. There was … peer-reviewed research about gun death and injury… but there was a funding restriction which essentially says that the CDC cannot do any research related to gun control”.

  Like I said, there is no short term solution, but that’s no excuse for not getting started.  The magnitude and complexity of issues related to the eradication of smallpox were overcome.  No reasonable person will suggest we suspend a similar effort aimed at polio because of the murder of three clinicians in Pakistan by a few misguided backward fanatics.

  The Second Amendment was written when a musket was the most lethal firearm of the day and there was in the land taxation without representation.   Even Justice Scalia says that there is room for federal gun control regulation, that: “We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons”

  If I looked out the window of my home to see a bad guy approaching with a ‘modern sport rifle’, would I wish I was armed?  Sure, but is that an answer to the right question?  How could it not be a good thing if, a generation from now, there had been a significant decrease in the number of those weapons designed specifically to kill people and lots of them? 

  In most states it is illegal for duck hunters to use a gun with a magazine holding more than three rounds.  Let’s give ourselves a sporting chance.  Write your congressman.

*Some of the material above was paraphrased and/or purloined from an interview by Terry Gross of Tom Diaz on the December 20^th edition of NPR’s Fresh Air

*Men and Guns?  cf October 9, 2009

 

  Maurice Herzog led an expedition of French Alpinists that in 1950 became the first to summit an 8,000 meter peak, Annapurna.  His stirring account remains the best selling mountain adventure book to this day – more copies having been sold than even Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.  Herzog’s final line: “There are other Annapurna’s in the lives of men” has been an inspiration to many.

  Herzog died last week which is why I dug up my copy of the book, the cover of which you see above.  Interesting how cartoonish the image appears to us these many years later.  Had to be that way, I guess, because the nature of the narrative had not yet entered the common consciousness, hadn’t become part of the zeitgeist.  Sir Edmund Hillary, National Geographic, and the likes of Patagonia have changed all that.

  Subsequent books, one by Herzog’s daughter, portray him as having been controlling and egocentric.  Other members of the team had to sign a pledge not to publish their own accounts of the climb until long after his was on the market.  This resulted in the diminution of the heroic efforts of the others, particularly his partner on the summit Louis Lachenal.  M Lachenal remained essentially unknown while Herzog was highly decorated and went on to hold important government posts.

  Whatever happened, it remains an incredible and famously macabre tale.  According to Herzog, Lachenal suggested that conditions were too severe, that they retreat.  They of course did go on to make it to the top and back down, but at the cost of terrible frostbite.  The attempts by Dr Oudot to minimize the ramifications of exposure to high altitude and low temperature can only be described as horrific.  They lost all fingers and toes.

  Whatever he may have been, his description of his first time in the Alps sure makes me think about doing something other than stare into a screen:  “I believe what I felt that day closely resembles what we call happiness.  I also believe that if I felt such happiness in such rigorous circumstances it is because the planned, organized, predigested happiness that the modern world offers is not complete.  It leaves certain sides of man’s nature unsatisfied”.   

  He wrote that in 1953.  Jeesh.

*The quote appeared in his NYT obituary – 12/15/12 

 

  This is three steps from being original, but I found it so touching that I could not but pass it on.  Not original because I didn’t do the research, haven’t read the book, and did not conduct the interview.  Heard Terry Gross discussing Man Booker Prize winning historical novel Bringing Up The Bodies with author Hilary Mantel.

  This is the second in a series of three books set during the time of Henry VIII in 16^th century England.  The first concluded with the demise of Thomas More because he opposed Henry’s move to split with the Church of Rome in order to facilitate his trading Catherine of Aragon in for a newer model – Anne Boleyn.

  As you might know, a relationship with Henry doesn’t turn out all that well for Anne either.  But in the interview I learned that it wasn’t because Ms Boleyn wasn’t able to produce a male heir as I’ve long thought and most fiction holds.  Author Mantel says: “I think it is a great mistake to regard these women as victims.”

  The power that accrued to a Queen of England created a far larger sphere of influence than existed for other women of the era. And both Catherine and Anne were very intelligent, strong, political, and clever. “They are really strong; they are really involved.  They’re deeply drawn into the political process, and they’re actors in it…agents of their own fate.”

  Henry divorced his first wife for her inability to bear a son, he didn’t kill her.  Anne Boleyn didn’t have a son, but her fate was different because her activities led Henry to believe that she had become a diplomatic liability and perhaps involved in a plot on his life.  She had to be executed.

  The benefit to Anne for apparently not having made ice cold Henry’s heart?  Glad you remembered to ask.  He ordered for her the most expeditious manner by which to leave this world and enter the next – a horizontal swing of a broadsword through her erect neck as opposed to a chopping block and a grunting axe man.  The former was thought to be more humane. 

  “But she will kneel.  She must be informed of this.  There is no block, as you see.  She must kneel upright and not move.  If she is steady, it will be done in a moment; if not, she will be cut to pieces… Between one beat of the heart and the next, it is done.  She knows nothing.  She is in eternity.”   

  Ms Boleyn would have been blindfolded and the executioner (of renowned talent and brought all the way from Calais, by the way) approached  silently in slippered feet from an unexpected angle.  Nice guy that king Henry, really.  He could have had her burned or hanged, let alone dispatched with an axe.  I’ll admit though that one does wonder what of his qualities most attracted wives three through six.

*Interested in the last thoughts of anther wife’s head?  Go to post of May 20, 2011

**Photo above of Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn in “The Other Boleyn Girl” in which she goes to the block for failing to produce a male heir…