Feeling Dumb...

Recently, I asked my daughter to send me a reading list of some of the works that she has been pouring over for the last year and a half in grad school at Wake Forest. She is studying English Literature, I like to read, so I thought it would be nice to get on the same page…as it were…with her, so I can better understand what her scholastic life is like. She forwarded the following list:

　

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Self-Reliance”

“The Poet”

“The American Scholar”

“Nature”

“Uriel”


T.S. Eliot:

“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”


Nathaniel Hawthorne:

“The Birth-Mark”


Truman Capote:

"In Cold Blood"


Walt Whitman:

“Song of Myself"


Jonathan Safran:

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”


Toni Morrison:

“Beloved”


Amy Tan:

“The Joy Luck Club”

　

So far, I’ve read everything on the list up to Whitman. I’ve loved everything except “The Poet” which was just too airy and bored me to the bone. Emerson and Eliot are pure genius, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing has always seemed beautiful to me. But the best thing about the list that Kaitlin sent me was her editorial comments about each recommendation. Without her permission, I share a few of them here:

About Whitman she says,” Whitman radically changed the American intellectual/artistic landscape. He collapsed the body/soul divide…”

Concerning Emerson’s poem, “Uriel” about which she will be writing a paper she explains, “ I’m going to read “Uriel” through an Ovidian lens, because in the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes about “discordant concord” as “the path life needs”, and I think “discordant concord” is rampant in “Uriel”. Ovid explains that fire is the enemy of water, but “moist heat engenders all things”. Both Ovid and Emerson complicate traditional binaries.”

Ok, she lost me at “Ovidian lens”. It is a continuing fascination for me to observe my children and the paths they have taken. I have a daughter whose mind burns with a passion for great writing, who reads great works of literature almost three dimensionally and takes such great joy in stumbling onto the centuries-old truths found there. I have a son who, as a composition student, daily reaches within himself to create music, and thinks in a musical language few can speak. What baffles me is the realization that when I was their age, the deepest thought that ever entered my head was, why is it that if you pour beer directly into the bottom of a glass, a huge head of suds rises to overflow onto the counter, but if you tilt the glass slightly, you can empty the entire bottle without spilling a drop…WHY??  For me, “discordant concord” is a perfect description of the 2012 Boston Red Sox, and I had to Google “binaries” and I still don’t know what it means. The apple may not fall far from the tree, but it must pick up 50 IQ points on the trip.

Election Prediction Update

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I have predicted that President Obama would win reelection in 2012, most emphatically here and here. Now that there are only 5 days until the election, the question is, have I changed my mind?

The low point for the Romney campaign was on September the 17^th when his now famous 47% video surfaced. Since then however, the Romney campaign has done virtually everything right. Obama’s pre-debate strategy had been not to run on his record, but to demonize his opponent. Millions of dollars of ads ran depicting Romney as a vulture capitalist, hater of women, hater of minorities, and all around bad man. That strategy was vaporized by Romney’s performance in the first debate. Americans saw a man who seemed even-tempered, in command of the facts and thoroughly presidential. In contrast, Obama seemed totally annoyed at the fact that he had to spend his anniversary on a stage with an opponent that he refused even to look in the eye. By every measure, the night belonged to Romney, and he has been on an uninterrupted roll ever since. Even Obama’s better performances in the subsequent debates were not enough to put the genie of his inevitability back in the bottle.

Still, the race is terribly close, the margins in key swing states razor thin. The path to victory for Romney is still much more perilous. People forget how difficult it has been historically to defeat an incumbent President. It’s only happened 3 times in the past 50 years. In 1968 LBJ resigned rather than run for reelection, in 1980 Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter with help from a 3^rd party candidate who pulled away 6% of the vote, and Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush winning only 43% of the vote because of Ross Perot’s candidacy which pulled a whopping 19% of the vote. So, incumbency is a powerful weapon in presidential politics.

While I have been surprised by the strong showing of Romney, and equally surprised at the rattled, chaotic campaign being run by the President, I still believe that Obama will eek out a slim electoral college victory with the very real possibility that Romney wins the popular vote. Much depends on turnout. No matters who wins, it will be extremely close and afterwards, be prepared for torrents of conspiracy theories from the losing side. The air will be thick with charges of voter suppression, intimidation, rampant racism, and fraud. My advice will be to turn off the television for a month, and turn your life back over to saner pursuits.

If Obama wins with 50.1% of the vote, it will be hailed as a triumph of democracy. If Romney wins with 50.1% of the vote it will prove beyond doubt that America is irredeemably racist.

Sigh……

Frankenstorm: Day Two and My Favorite Political Ad

Tuesday morning dawns cold and miserable but under full power. Frankenstorm has lived up to it’s clever name in places like New York City, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in the higher elevations of Appalachia. For those of us living in central Virginia, Frankenstorm has turned out to be an over-hyped frenzy of meteorological hysteria, resulting in an extended school holiday, and a sales bonanza for the grocery business.

The biggest beneficiaries of this storm have been the 9 million or so people in the northeast who are at this moment without power and consequently are temporarily receiving relief from paid political advertising. My television has become an HD, flat screen, full color bullshit dispenser for the past two months, and to be totally honest with you, it’s starting to chip away at my sanity. There is no escape, no broadcast island I can escape to. No matter what I might be watching, be it sports, the History channel, or even a cooking show, every 13 minutes I am bombarded with rapid-fire character assassination. Tim Kaine is a puppet, Eric Cantor is a corporate tool, no wait,… he’s actually a savior of small business. Mitt Romney is the Snidely Whiplash of American politics, busy tying the screaming blond virgin that is the middle class to the railroad of poverty, as he greedily counts his millions. Barack Obama is coming after our guns, indeed the very foundation of western civilization crumbles literally under our feet every second that he remains President. George Allen is either the champion of black secretaries everywhere, or single-handily responsible for every lost job over the past ten years. I know all of this because the TV ads that are approved by each candidate tell me so.

My personal favorite is the one that lists every failure of Obama’s first term in rapid fire bullet points while ominous music plays in the background. Mysteriously, lights flicker throughout the add suggesting that Tim Kaine favors electrical blackouts. Then, a 2 second clip of Tim Kaine being interviewed by an unidentified journalist flashes on the screen in grainy black and white. Tim Kaine is heard saying…”I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.” What we don’t hear is what the question was. We don’t hear anything said before or after this sinister declaration. The glaring omission of context leaves it to the imagination. Here are a few possibilities…

Info-Babe: Governor Kaine, Is it true that you not only pray for President Obama every day, but the Republican leaders in Washington as well?

Kaine: Well, I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.

-or-

Info-Babe: Is it true that you are working daily behind the scenes to obstruct the will of the people of the State of Virginia by issuing regulations that will lead to communism and Sharia law?

Kaine: Well, I’m just doing what the President has asked me to do.

　

See, context can make a huge difference. But providing such context would be like taking the sizzle out of the steak. Instead, the men and women who create these ads prefer to treat us all like idiots. And as long as we allow such adds to influence our votes…and they do…we should get used to our status as idiots. *

　

　

　

　

　

　

* I’m Doug Dunnevant. I’m not running for office. This blog costs me nothing to produce, and I approve of it’s content. If you’re a Kaine supporter, don’t get excited. I’m not voting for him.

Chronicaling The Devastation

The next 24-48 hours will be, no doubt, one of those events that I will one day tell my grand children about…God willing. Watched the last weather report last night around 11 o’clock, then settled in for a fitful night’s sleep. When I said my prayers I remembered to thank God for the wisdom on display over at the Henrico County School Board. That ever-vigilant bunch had the good sense to cancel school for today, adhering to the sage advice of generations of mothers and grandmothers that you would much rather be safe than sorry.

When I woke up, I fought back the rising panic and dread that began to overwhelm me as I lay there listening to the faint sound of soft rain on my windows, clearly the prelude to the torrents to come. Part of me just wanted to pull the covers tight and stay there, pretending that the horror that awaited me outside was all a dream. But, part of me really, really had to go to the bathroom…so, I screwed up all the courage I could muster and trudged downstairs.

I grabbed my cell phone to record everything for posterity. Luckily for me, no satellites had fallen from the sky during the night, and no damage had yet been done to cell phone towers on the beleaguered east coast, so I still had service. When I opened the garage door, I was greeted by this:

　

                                                                             
　


A mere 36 hours ago I had taken my leaf blower to this area and had it entirely free of leaves, pine needles, and other fall foliage. I can hardly imagine what the next 36 hours will visit upon us.

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this Frankenstorm, I took the following video to help you appreciate the power of the winds that this mega-storm of the century has unleashed:

　

                                                                         

 After I got dressed, I headed for the office, praying for the best, expecting the worst. Thankfully, the power was still on. However, when I walked out onto the sidewalk that runs behind our office, I discovered the first signs of what is to come:

                                                                           

Obviously the first of many displaced planks that soon will be sailing through the air around here like sabers of death. I will do my best to faithfully chronicle the devastation as long as I am physically able.

Peace.

Stay strong.

Bring It On, SOTC!!!

Never let it be said that I let my natural cynicism get in the way of being prepared when it comes to the STORM OF THE CENTURY, or SOTC for short. We have done the following things as of 7:47 Sunday morning the 28^th day of October in the year of our Lord 2012:

# Cut the grass

# Moved the electric light up fake jack-o-lanterns into a corner on our front porch, and secured their chords to the iron railing to prevent them from being blown over by the 280 mph winds to come

# Went to Martins and filled our pantry with two weeks worth of staples, essential for the preservation of life without power. These include but are not limited to…canned soup, milk, peanut butter, fresh fruit, Snyder’s cheddar cheese flavored pretzel bites and one six pack each of Killian’s Irish Red and Samuel Adams Boston Lager

# Did an extra load of dark clothes before going to bed last night, since everyone knows that you should never wear white during a SOTC after October first

# Gave Molly a bath

# Took extra care in emptying the dish washer this morning

# Remembered to not wash either car yesterday, what with all the rain in the forecast, it would be pointless

　

Moving on to other topics…last night Pam and I sat down to prepare today’s lesson in the Art of Marriage class we are teaching. This one was about defining the proper roles for husband and wife. You know, the submission thing and who should be the leader etc… Once again, we discovered that we are totally unqualified to teach this class. We have done practically everything wrong! There was this one section entitled..”25 ways to spiritually lead your family” I read through the list and was only able to check off 14 out of 25 and that was because of a very optimistic scoring. The crazy thing is, Pam and I have always gotten along great, and have always been pretty proud of what we have put together here for the past 28 years. That is, until we started teaching this class, and discovered what terrible failures we have been! Actually, I exaggerate. But only a little.

STORM OF THE CENTURY

Today, for lunch, I picked up some Chick-Fil-A and brought it back to the house. I reached for my cell phone and turned on Pandora. It was set on shuffle. I was getting a nice mixture, a fairly representative sample of my eclectic musical taste. There was a rare live version of "I Saw Her Standing There" by the Beatles, a great R&B song by Duffy called “Mercy”, and then an Adele song I can’t remember, then “Tightrope” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. About the time I started to pound the cup of coleslaw my cell phone began blaring the Piano Sonata #8 in C-minor by Beethoven. Ok, I know what you’re thinking. What in the world is Beethoven doing in your mix?…to which I answer, because I think him to be the most interesting man in the world…THAT’S why. Anyway, this piece is over 8 minutes, and by the end of it, my lunch was eaten, and I was leaned back in my chair staring off into the distance. What an exquisitely brilliant lunatic! What kind of man could possibly have conceived and written such a work? As wild and scattered as is the first movement, the second contains quite possibly the most beautiful melody ever written. I hope and pray that old Ludwig was a believer, because when I get to heaven, he and I are going to talk!

When I got back to the office my computer screen was warning me in bold, red letters about the latest “storm of the century”. It’s official name is Sandy, but the headline writers at Drudge were trying out “Frankenstorm”. Breathless forecasters were using phrases like “damage of Biblical proportions” We’ll see. But I would be careful breaking out biblical references. That’s setting the bar quite high, for one thing. I mean, Noah’s Floods don’t come around too often. And, I can’t remember the last plague of locust. I don’t recall any rivers turning red with blood…although now that I think about it, didn’t the Cuyahoga River catch fire once? Near Cleveland, I think it was. Anyway, it just seems to me that every year there’s a “storm of the century”. Could be global warming. Might be global cooling. Or, it might be sweeps week over at The Weather Channel. Either way, Pam and I will be sure to have plenty of bread, milk, eggs and bacon so we can weather the storm. I hear that there might be 6 inches of rain, 40-50 mph winds and hyperventilating meteorologists starting Sunday and lasting through Tuesday. Just in time for my Son to get trapped in Nashville. He’s down there visiting his college buddies and girlfriend for fall break, and his return flight is Tuesday, I think.

I heard some whack-job on the radio wondering what impact this storm might have on the election, if any. Seriously? What, are the Obama people going to blame the Romney campaign for wind and rain? I suppose the Romney people could blame the President for failing to keep the promise in his 2008 acceptance speech that his election would result in the lowering of the sea levels. I can see the campaign commercial now…a violent storm surge lashes the New Jersey coast as an ominous voice intones..” Yet another empty Obama campaign promise. He told us he would fix this, but here we are 4 years later and there are still hurricanes…Vote for Sunny and 75. Vote Mitt Romney”

A Night At Carnigie Hall

On the map it looked like an easy straight shot. We would walk from Penn Station down 8^th all the way to our hotel on 56^th street. Mapquest informed us that it was 1.2 miles, or 23 blocks. But when we emerged from Penn Station out onto 34^th street we discovered that it was raining. I say to Pam, “Maybe we should take a cab”, to which she bravely replied, “No, I’m fine.”

Unlike me, she was prepared, her feet fitted with comfortable walking shoes, and her umbrella at the ready. So, we headed uptown.

Forty-five minutes later we stumbled into the lobby of the Wellington Hotel. We should have taken that cab. But, we made it, and now we could check into our spacious room, relax, and rest a little before going out to explore the city. I knew something wasn’t right when as I opened the door to our room it immediately slammed into the closet door. The door on the left opened to a bathroom roughly the size of the shower stalls on cruise ships. When sitting on the toilet, you couldn’t lean forward without slamming your head on the sink. For the first time in our 28 years of marriage we would be sleeping in a full size bed. The good thing was that I could adjust the thermostat on the air conditioner without getting out of bed. “ This room looked so much bigger on the website”, “I offered in way of explanation.

Then we went out and walked our little slice of Manhattan. Though designed and built for a race of pygmies, our hotel could not possibly have been more convenient. Carnegie Hall was literally across the street. We checked out several diners, cafes, and bars where we might meet Patrick for dinner before the show. We chose PJ Carney’s for the sole reason that a review of it appeared on Yelp that could have been written by Patrick himself. It turned out to be a perfect spot. Fish and chips, chicken fingers and ice water without ice, all for the reasonable price of $52.

When it was time for the show, Pam and I left our Lilliputian hotel and walked across the street to the entrance to the grand hall. Our tickets entitled us to the upper balcony view, which required us to walk up five flights of stairs, Pam in high heels. The friendly usher told us to keep walking up stairs until you couldn’t walk anymore and then we would be there. Sure enough, in section J seats 31 and 33, we settled in, and gazed down at the tiny ant like people filling the stage. I felt like I was in a blimp at the Rose Bowl. Patrick’s choir marched in and we could hear the shuffling of their feet. The acoustics in Carnegie are legendary, but you have to be in Balcony J to really appreciate the miracle.

Pam and I are not opera aficionados. Frankly, our exposure to most of classical music is a direct result of our son’s gifts. Add to that the fact that this entire piece is performed in Latin, and well, this had the potential of being a long night. But, as a parent, you discover that you learn to love the things that your kids love. I did my homework before hand. I Googled this Verdi guy, and researched the work, read reviews, so I was semi-educated on the subject. Listening to Patrick before the show at dinner and seeing the passion and excitement on his face helped prepare me.

There were parts of the piece that bored me, to be honest, mostly the parts where the soloists were singing. But whenever the conductor would coil up like a spring and turn the orchestra and the choir loose, well, it was as powerful and moving a thing as I have ever heard. Following along with the English score, the music crackled with emotion and passion. At times I honestly expected the floor to open up releasing the demons of hell into the hall. Watching that conductor was amazing. What a feeling of delicious power it must be to have all that musical energy and talent at your disposal, waiting for your skilled exploitation. An hour and a half later he held his hands up, then hesitated after the final note. They hung there in silence. The sold out crowd hushed in reference. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, an eternity of soundless appreciation. Finally, his hands dropped to his side and the house erupted. Good stuff.

We met Patrick after the show at the Europa Café for tea and cheese cake. He was spent, but thoroughly satisfied with the performance. We walked with him down to the 53^rd street subway entrance, hugged him, then watched him disappear down the steps.

No parent can ask anything more from life than to see their kids doing what they were born to do. I am blessed beyond measure.