As Promised, A Little Bit About Siblinghood

As any NCHS graduate who has ever sent me an email can tell you, I am tied for the world’s worst keeper-in-toucher. The explanations I offer are these: 1) I don’t want to send back a thoughtless reply, and it takes me a while to find time to respond thoughtfully; 2) You don’t think I’m good at responding to former students? You should talk to my family.

I should probably realize that being a loser in terms of contacting my brother and sisters doesn’t mitigate my loserness in keeping in contact with anyone else, but whatev. The point of the post is supposed to be what a wonderful family weekend I had last weekend.

You see, Lebron, my sister Mary Katherine, the firstborn, is best among all of us at keeping the family ties tied. It was interesting how all of our siblingness was funneled into one place last Saturday. We went on our annual pilgrimage to Plymouth, Massachusetts (if you didn’t chuckle at that, Lebron, read it again) to visit Mary Katherine’s family. We had rejected other weekend visits because some combination of Caitlin, Conor and Brendan wouldn’t be around to hang with us. This is Exhibit A of Mary Katherine’s nomination for Family Keeper Together of the Year: her children – one college graduate, one college student, and one high school senior – actually want to make time to see their New York relatives and spend time with a fifth grader and a second grader. This, to me, is no small thing.

So the plan was this: we’ll get up there late Friday, hang out by the pool, and on Saturday we’ll go on a harbor cruise (a test to see if the girls will have the tolerance for a whale watching cruise when we go to the Cape), jet ski, do more pool hanging and have a clambake-ish dinner. For the jet-skiing part of the program, my sister Maureen came up from Providence so that Gaby could join the fun. We get to the pier – my two sisters, Uncle Jimmy, Conor, the three younger girls and me – and find that we’re limited to the two jet skis we’d reserved. So Jimmy and Conor pilot the jet skis and the three girls get dispersed. I drop out, and head over to the deck bar at the Cabby Shack to watch over the harbor and have a couple of beers.

Of my siblings, Maureen is the one I speak with the least, not for any discernible reason, but just because that’s the way it is. As much of a loudmouth as I can be, I am a horrible initiator of conversation with my family and old friends. I am not the type of guy to pick up the phone to say hi, talk about my kids and then admit that I have nothing new going on in my life. Of course, I think lots of people would say, “Nothing’s new” when they don’t have a reason to call someone, but that plenty of News could be drawn out with minimal prodding. That’s why it was particularly nice to have a couple of Bud Light Limes with my two older sisters. Yes, Lebron, I was drinking Bud Light Lime, and not only that, but I really liked them. Yes, to me, a Bud Light product tasted good.

The even better part was that Maureen and Gaby didn’t boogie soon after jet-skiing; they went back to the house and hung around for quite a few hours. During that time, my brother Dan was sending texts to Mary Katherine updating her on the status of his bicycle ride in the Connecticut Challenge, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. He was riding for one of his friends and for Uncle Jimmy, who is eligible for the Survivor Walk that launches any Relay for Life event. So by 5:00, everyone is accounted for in the family hub except for younger sister Christine.

Well, Kate must have intuited her absence, because for some reason, she gets hold of my cell phone and calls Aunt Christine. We were only able to speak for a moment because Christine was headed for a high school reunion with all 37 or so of her classmates, but the point is that she was, in fact, present on Mary Katherine’s deck that afternoon.

It is a wonderful thing to have normal siblings, especially if they don’t give you shit about appearing aloof or self-centered. A body just has to wonder how far out of touch he would be, though, if it weren’t for his sister Mary Katherine.

Maybe, Lebron, a little more attention to your family would keep you out of those embarrassing Las Vegas situations with reporters who are pretty scummy themselves and never actually identify themselves as reporters. Peace.

Heart of Darkness and Henderson The Rain King – Kurtz and Dahfu

The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer; it’s really about voices that have a powerful effect on people, but my inquiry, I guess, is based off these two characters. In chapter 15 of Henderson, I’ve folded the pages so much it looks like I’m practicing origami. Here is the core of the discussion about the truth that Henderson is seeking, a truth that may have eluded him so far because, as Dahfu says, “as to truth, a person may be unready to receive except what he has anticipated as true.” This is after he has referred to Henderson as “somatically,” “monumental.”

What I find most interesting about this chapter is that I realized at some point that everything I was folding was Saul Bellow’s idea, not Dahfu’s or Henderson’s. I kept folding everywhere I perceived an expression of truth, or a truth I know beautifully expressed. People praise the hell out of Conrad, but he never gave us the conversation Marlow had with Kurtz. And why not? Were the words beyond him at that moment that he was, in his words, writing a story “for the sake of the shekels.” What Conrad’s narrator keeps a secret Bellow’s dialogues about and reflects upon. Interestingly, this conversation, so thoughtful in its elucidation of some truth, follows the rain ceremony in which Bellow used imagery straight out of Conrad to depict the “savagery” of the scene.

But this discussion of the book is taking me away from what I was trying to get at: namely, where do these authors go to find characters who can be so intensely affected by words? In HoD, I have always accepted that a type like Marlow exists, but if I were to meet a man so easily moved by eloquence I’m not sure I’d think highly of him. Henderson is a more earnest seeker, and more open about what he needs to hear (though to what end, to what course of action he’ll apply the words, I’m not sure). Anyway, Dostoevsky talks about character types in the critical essay embedded in the beginning of Part IV of The Idiot, and the fact that this type repeats itself in these two books (how present might it be in all the books I haven’t read?), tells me that this dude must exist in real life.

So it got me thinking about my own experience. I can remember a few years ago sitting with Tim O’Toole at Starbucks in Rye and listening to him talk about his Allied Effort project, a plan for identifying personal beliefs and aligning them with goals for personal and professional development. I remember feeling uplifted, thinking that here is a guy who can make you do things you don’t think you can do simply by through the force of his will. You can listen to him speak and be ready to run through a wall.

Tim was a college basketball coach, and had been an assistant under Boeheim and Krzyzewski, so he knew a little about inspiration. I get the feeling from listening to him that there’s something in our nature that wants to be contacted, that some people are capable of using the power of language to tap into another’s desire for accomplishment. Once that desire is brought to the surface, a person is receptive to another’s energy. This, I suppose, is the biggest benefit of being a student-athlete at a place where you’re mentored by a teacher-coach. You learn the truly lifelong lessons about leadership; you learn to internalize the idea that a confluence of belief, desires and action is essential to success.

After that meeting, I worked with Tim to adapt the language for different questions and prompts so that the questionnaire could exist independently in different niches across different age groups. And what I found is that it changed the way I approach my life and my work. Right now, for example, I could be facing a difficult decision: do I coach basketball for one more year as I’ve planned (until Emma reaches middle school) or do I acquiesce if my daughters want to swim year-round and give up coaching this year? But truth be told, I don’t have any angst about decision-making like that because of the questionnaire. When you can prioritize, you have a basis for decision-making. Family first. End of story. No drama.

It can be very fulfilling to just listen to the O’Tooles of the world who give you the opportunity to imagine everything that’s possible, to lose yourself for moments in what the world could be before you return to the world that is and then do what you have to do to make it, or at least your part of it, more closely resemble that possibility. As Bono sang, “I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me, if I rejoice.” (the idea being that rejoicing is a choice, as opposed to having your mood respond to whichever wind is blowing in a moment)

I’m guessing that these very literary types are more likely to engage in deep and meaningful conversation than the rest of us who are unencumbered by things other than words. You hear about things like the Algonguin Round Table or Greenwich’s White Horse Tavern, or the Bloomsbury Group, and you realize that where conversation is an art, people will necessarily innovate on existing thinking or existing ways of using language simply for social survival. At the same time, the participants must take a great deal of pleasure in the listening, and a novelist can’t really be a novelist if he doesn’t have a great facility for listening.

Back to Henderson, what probably makes this elucidation of Truth in chapter 15 so enjoyable is that it is delivered through the English of an African king, which has a certain grace even where it lacks a certain correctness. Of course, there’s more to the Truth than just these words, and it looks like Dahfu is going to take Henderson on another little literal journey toward truth.

Henderson the Rain King

Sorry to keep you waiting so long for a post, Lebron, but I knew you were in Vegas indulging yourself, and I didn’t think you’d make the time to read, so I cozied up to a book in a way slightly different from the way you allegedly cozy up to waitresses. Before you proceed any further, Lebron, I have two words for you regarding waitresses and hostesses and other ambitious young women: Tiger Woods.

So I started Henderson the Rain King, and I have to be honest, I had a hard time liking it. But given that you call yourself a King, I thought it would give us something to talk about. About 80 pages into it I decided that come heck or high water I would finish it, that I would approach the experience the way a diligent student might approach being assigned a book she didn’t like. So I plugged away at it.

The problem was the narrator, the eponymous Henderson. He’s not really very likeable, and if you’ve read my other book-based posts, you know that I need to find something redeeming in a character in order to like the character. Henderson’s problem is that he’s an asshole. He’s a button pusher incapable of resisting his impulses.

There are mitigating factors, however, in his assholity. He’s very aware of himself, very knowledgeable and very passionate, not just in feeling but in action. So he is prone to debate his impulses with an awareness of the effect his actions would have on other people, realize what harm might happen, decide to do the right thing and then, without fail, give in to the initial impulse. He absorbs himself in his passions to the point of ignoring everyone around him. On those rare occasions when he parents his children, he doesn’t quite understand why they don’t respond to him as he thinks they should.

When you take this lack of consideration of others, and you combine it with his physical size and presence, you create a picture of a bully, but one who can explain himself, one who is aware of just how much of a bully he is. Given that we are defined by what we do, and not what our intentions are, or what our regrets are, Henderson is thus defined by the pejorative above.

But I’m glad I kept going, because now I have some momentum that I think can push me through the last one hundred pages in a day or two. Where got I this momentum? Funny you should ask. I got it from the themes, and for some reason, from the allusions. I’ve written and talked a lot about how people need someone to provide a way in to those works they feel excluded from, and Saul Bellow gave me that way in through Oedipus and Hamlet. Before I go there, I should mention that some of Henderson’s reflections on solitude kept me going when I was at my furthest remove from the book; I thought that fate might have picked out this book for me as a follow-up to One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Anyway, Henderson finally undertakes his journey into the deepest parts of Africa, and much of what he thinks and notices echoes Marlow’s observations in Heart of Darkness. I probably should have mentioned that in the preceding paragraph. And Henderson makes clear that his physical journey is really a journey within, a journey that is going to explain the Truth to him so he can overpower the “I want, I want” that drives him to his boorish behavior. He is as much a wanderer as Oedipus, seeking to avoid a life fated for him at home, and he, after one comic failure, does for the Wariri what Oedipus did for Thebes. The comparison isn’t mine; Bellow has Henderson consider himself in the role of Oedipus at Colonnus at the end of the trilogy. The Wariri believe that Fate brought Henderson to them at their moment of need.

Like Hamlet, Henderson is full of every sin that has a name. He takes all the taints and blames Hamlet places on himself in his “You should not have believed me” speech to Ophelia, and he makes those things his own. But as he journeys, he has an epiphany about the difference between Becoming and Being. He considers himself to be Becoming, and believes that that’s why he’s so awkward, so uncomfortable in his own skin. I folded over the page in which Henderson reflects on this distinction, and I hope I’ll find the time to transcribe it.

Found it! Here it is. Not only does Bellow use language directly from the play, but he also attaches it directly to a key theme in both texts: whether or not our free will is powerful enough to make us who we want to be. And so, in the moment when Henderson seeks permission to move the immoveable Mummah, he says to Dahfu:

“I’m a pretty good judge of men and you are a fine one. And from you I can take it. Besides, truth is truth. Confidentially, I have envied flies, too. All the more reason to crash out of prison.
Right? If I had the mental constitution to live inside the nutshell and think myself the king of infinite space, that would be just fine. But that’s not how I am. King, I am a Becomer. Now you see your situation is different. You are a Be-er. I’ve just got to stop Becoming. Jesus Christ, when am I going to Be? I have waited a hell of a long time. I suppose I should be more patient, but for God’s sake, Your Highness, you’ve got to understand what it’s like with me. “  (191)

Part of Henderson's solitude is that he feels alone everywhere, and he feels alone everywhere. To Henderson, Civilization is a prison.

So now we’re a little over 200 pages into the book, and instead of trying to empathize with a character I don’t particularly care for, I’m reading for an understanding of the themes that occupy so much of literature: fate v. free will, belonging and unbelonging, the power of the journey. The next time you read, Lebron, I may have some specific things to say about those things, provided I don’t leave the book in the poolbag in the car and decide I don’t want to run outside to get it. Or, I might write about my trip last weekend to America’s Hometown, and a reflection on family.

Now, however, I better get up to the pool so my children aren’t running ragged and unsupervised. Perhaps I’ll take Mr. Laptop with me. Later.

Despite the fact that I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude almost a week ago, I haven’t moved on to the next book. It feels like if I move on without some kind of closure ritual, I’ve been somehow unfaithful to the story, kind of like hooking up the weekend after you broke up with your girlfriend.

So let this brief reflection serve as a poor man’s closure on the novel. Let it serve not as a last thought, but as a stopping point, as future forays into Marquez’ Macondo short stories will surely resurrect the novel itself, as will plans to bring the book into my AP class.

I’ve been avoiding this discussion because it’s too much right now. Too much to go back into the book and examine all the different solitudes. Too much to think that the characters are representative of anything other than themselves. Too much to think of the ways I’ve experienced and observed solitude.

So can you define solitude as something as simple as mine-ness. If my sadness is a place to which I escape the minutiae of daily life, if playing around in the kitchen for this one, in the workshop for that one, is a way of getting some “me time,” then yes. I choose that part of my character most defines me, or most readily protects me from definement, and voila!, I have found solitude.

The physical places to which we escape are the most easily discernible forms of solitude. My basement forays to be sad by myself as a child – solitude. My friend’s sister’s hour-long periods of hair-washing and hair-drying after her parents’ death – solitude. My daughter disappearing under water in the tub or pool when she doesn’t feel like being bothered with instruction or rebuke – solitude. The hours you spend gaming, Lebron.

What is more interesting is our ability to create compartments within ourselves for the sake of solitude. Madame Defarge knitting, knitting dropping heads. Amaranta (and Penelope), weaving and unweaving, figuratively and literally. To keep potential lovers at bay; tapestry as impenetrable wall.

IN Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, he defended himself against the intrusion of the world, against relationships with others. There, he communed with the family had had left behind, his father existing through crystal shards as adviser, as oracle. We all have secrets; we all compartmentalize identities and allow some people to know us in one way, others in another.

It would be silly to boil the theme of solitude into a meaning. It is an opportunity to think different thoughts, to try on different lenses through which we might see ourselves and others. It is the place we go to in an enactment of our own journey motif, our Ithaka, I suppose. Sometimes we recharge, and sometimes we go to some more malevolent place, a place whose sole virtue is its inhospitability to anyone else, a place where we destroy ourselves from within.

Perhaps now I can get to Henderson the Rain King. And then, if luck holds, Gary Shteyngart’s new book will be available at the library.

In the meantime, I will try to discover why I can’t copy and paste from word into Blogger when I’m in Windows 7, which forces me to email the blog pieces written here to myself so I can open them up on the computer that runs Vista so I can post them on the blog.

If you have any suggestions about how to get Windwos 7 to do what I need it to do, Lebron, feel free to post them in the comments section. Maybe you can also tell me why Word 2010 doesn’t autocorrect Windwos to Windows. You think it doesn’t have Windows in its dictionary?

PS, Lebron. I did a little research and found out that I have to run blogger in compatibility mode. I'm like a freakin' internet detective, man.

El Posto Blogo en Espanol, Part Deux

By now, Lebron, you know that I'm trying to learn Spanish. One of the things I'm trying to do from time to time is write posts in Spanish as a way of making fun of myself before anyone else can. It's also pretty useful to go through the struggle of trying to write something but not having the words or any confidence in the order in which you put them.

So this is what I wrote poolside this afternoon in my effort to put my Rosetta Stone lessons to practical use.

Mi Casa

Afuera, nosotros tenemos el pasto verde.

Cuando usted abierta la puerta,usted vea la sala de estar al izquierdo, y la sala de estar al derecho, donde hay un televisor y un coche y dos sillas. Hay un radio y hay los juguetes.

En la cocina nosotros tenemos una mesa y cuatro sillas. Cuando nosotros comemos, nosotros miramos el televisor algunas veces. En los cabinetos nosotros tenemos tazas, tazones y platos. Nosotros compramos las frutas, las verduras y las vegetales, y carne y queso, y leche y huevos del supermercado. Nosotros lavamos los platos en el fregadero.

En la oficina, nosotros tenemos un computadora, un laptop y un telefono. El telefono esta sobre la mesa en la oficina, pero el cumputador esta debajo la mesa.

Nosotros tenemos los dormitorios cuatro. En todos de las dormitorios, nosotros tenemos las camas con las almohadas, las sabanas y las frazadas. En el dormitorio de mi y mi esposa, nosotros tenemos un televisor. Mi esposa tiene sus joyas su la mesa del noche.

Por ropas, tengo algo de camisas, las camisetas, los pantalones, sueters y calcetines. No tengo muchos cinturones, pero tengo mucho corbatas. Mi esposa tiene muchos, muchos camisas, faldas y vestidos, y mucho, mucho zapatas.

En el bano, nosotros lavamos con jabon y agua sus los manos y las caras cuando estan sucias. Nosotros usamos las toallas lo hacer seco.

Gracias pos leyendo por mi casa.

Excuse me for a few minutes while I go and paste this into a free translation website. I'll paste their translation below, and we'll all have a big laugh, except for me. I'll be the one crying.

Actually, it's not that horrendous. This translation was courtesy of translate.google.com. I had put it into a different translator but it kept including the Spanish words in the English translation. Enjoy.


Mi Casa
Outside, we have the green grass.

When you open the door, you see the living room to the left, and the living room to the right, where there is a television and a car and two chairs. There is a radio and there are toys.

In the kitchen we have a table and four chairs. When we eat, we look at the TV sometimes. In the cabinets we have cups, bowls and plates. We buy fruit, vegetables and vegetables, and meat and cheese, milk and eggs from the supermarket. We wash the dishes in the sink.

In the office, we have a computer, a laptop and a phone. The phone is on the table in the office, but the computer is under the table.

We have four bedrooms. In all of the bedrooms, we have the beds with pillows, sheets and blankets. In the bedroom of my and my wife, we have a TV. My wife has her jewels its the night table.

For clothes, I have some shirts, shirts, pants, sweaters and socks. No I have many belts, but I have long ties. My wife has many, many shirts, skirts and dresses, and many, many shoes.

In the bathroom, we wash with soap and water its the hands and faces when they are dirty. We use the towels to dry.

Thanks for reading my post house. (oops, "pos" was a typo for "por," which likely wouldn't have made sense anyway)

Let's see what el futuro brings us once I learn how to use pronouns and verb tenses other than the present.

The Perfect Pint: Top of the Pint

This was typed on Thursday, written on Wednesday on the last page of extras in my edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and posted whenever this post says it was posted. At some point, I’ll figure out how to get pictures taken with my new cell phone into my blog.

Just got up to page 375 on the train from North White Plains to meet Marty Sullivan. It’s 4:50, the rain has just stopped and I’m sitting on a dry stool that stayed dry under a thatched eave over the rooftop bar (aka Top of the Pint) at The Perfect Pint on East 45th Street. I thougt to myself as I sat down that I wished I’d bought my notebook because this is a location that at this moment wants me to write something rather than read. (Yes, I was the geek at the bar carrying a book.)

I’m the only person here, and have been so for the last five minutes, settled in this little patio, red brick and lanterns on the west wall, large Guinness mirrors nestled underneath embedded plasma screens with ESPN crawl crawling its way northbound toward the entrance, which is framed with a sign that says St. Jame’s Gate (such poor proofreading!) that arches over the doorway. On the roof you get your Guinness (and later, your Kilkenny cream stout) in a plastic cup, but now the solitude is broken by two peole speaking Spanish, one of whom is Irish. I’ll pay closer attention then to the newer Irish music playing at just the right volume. I’ll also take some photos so I can more sophisticatedly blog the moment.

This is a place where I could sit and drink Guinness and write and stand by the railing watching the pedestrian traffic on 45th Street and Third Avenue and watching the folks working on the third or fourth floor of the gray brick office building across the street, people who must look with such envy at so many hours in the day when they would rather be sipping beer than sending email.

But now it’s 5:05, and my pal Marty is here, so farewell.

Epiblog: Marty informs me that you can reserve tables that have a circle of taps coming out of the middle of them on each floor. You get charged by the ounce. If you’re sitting at three o’clock and you want to drink from the tap that’s on the other side of the table, you can just turn the taps, lazy susan style, until the quaff you desire is yours. Now that’s a concept.

One Hundred Years of Solitude – The end

Let’s get the book review out of the way first: this was a great fucking book. Or, you could look at it as a fucking great book. Either way.

If you’re planning on reading the book yourself, Lebron, then stop reading now or else I’m going to give too much away for you.

Here is a book that was clearly begun with the end in mind. How many otherwise really good books end with all the punch of a Saturday Night Live skit. But Marquez ends this so naturally, so gracefully. While I’ve been looking at the different solitudes within which the characters exist, Marquez has had a town living its entire existence in solitude. I particularly like how every character’s circle is completed except for one of the four friends, Gabriel, who exists in Paris, and might perhaps be able to tell the tale of Macondo. As you’ve undoubetedly read before on this blog, I’m very interested in texts that challenge conventional ways of thinking about space and time. When you consider Melquiades’ parchments, and the key divined by Aureliano Babilonia at the very end, you get even more appreciation for the ambiguities and unrealities of the novel. Here’s a sentence from page 415:

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same on in which Rebeca had sat during the ealy days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colono Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amaranta Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.” (414)

It is at this point that the key to the parchment is revealed to him, and after he discovers that secret, he discovers this about the parchments:

“It was the history of the family, written by Melquiades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd oned in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection, which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta Ursula, was based on the fact that Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” (415)

At one point in the story there is mention of nesting dolls; as I was reading the second half of the novel I had that image come into my head a few times when I considered the way that something happening in the novel’s present had already happened in its past. I’ll write more later about what happened between the previous post and the ending, about the way the foreshadowing mentioned before came to fruition, but when you’re sitting at some beachside table next to Michael Weston, Lebron, you really need to read this book. It will give you an entirely new perspective on place, and on the free will that we’re so certain governs our decisionmaking.

In the meantime, I’ve got to get to something else non-literature related, and then type up a bunch of the great sentences and passages from the book, sentences I haven’t organized into thematic categories. Adios.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I don’t know why the introduction of the gringo saddened me, but it somehow signaled the introduction of a new kind of corruption, not an abstraction as Colonel Aureliano Buendia recognized when he was told that all he needed to do to get popular support was change each of his positions, but instead some concrete stereotypical American rapacity. Yes, there have been gratuitous killings and violent deaths, but all that has happened behind a scrim of unreality.

The banana company’s banana republic, with its imported workers, its barracks and its company scrip, reminds me too much of an article I read in The New Yorker a few years ago about orange growers in Florida and illegal migrant workers. While the novel is not predictive of that kind of exploitation or of the seriocomic banana republics of movies like Moon Over Parador, this part of the story keeps a place in what seems to be some sort of immutable law of economics; it reflects both what has happened in the history of labor (and in Steinbeck), and what was to follow.

Another reason I may have felt saddened is the foreshadowing of the end of Macondo in the first sentence of one of the chapters I’ve just read. The novel has been thick with foreshadowing of firing squads and deaths, but this one seems somehow more fatal, more diabolical. On top of that, the Segundo brothers and Fernanda are characters less interesting to me than those in previous generations of the Buendia family.

On the plus side of this part of the story is that Jose Arcadio’s ambiguous existence is making him more interesting. I particularly liked the part where:

“In Melquiades’ room, protected by the supernatural light, by the feeling of being invisible, he found the repose that he had not had for one single instant during his previous life, and the only fear that remains was that they would bury him alive…Free from old fears, Jose Arcadio Segundo dedicated himself then to peruse the manuscripts of Melquiades many times, and with so much more pleasure when he could not understand them. He became so accustomed to the sound of the rain, which after two months had become another form of silence, and the only thing that disturbed his solitude was the coming and going of Santa Sofia de la Piedad.” (312-313)

It is kind of sad that, in the solitude of invisibility and silence, grown decrepit in a short time, only Jose Arcadio Segundo is aware of the reality of the town square massacre.

And so we enter the last hundred pages of the last hundred years.

If I’d had a brain in my head I would have a week ago enumerated the chapters myself. Alas. In the chapter that began on p. 315 it rained. For four years. At the end of the chapter, it stopped. And it didn’t rain again for ten years.

While it rained Gerineldo Marquez died, Aureliano Segundo spent a lot of time showing Aureliano Jose and Ursula Amaranta the encyclopedias, then he stopped and dug and dug and dug for the treasure that Ursula had buried in the backyard for the man who would come to reclaim it from his old statue of St. Joseph.

In Beowulf at the Beach, Jack McGuigan includes his favorite sentence or passage from each book he discusses. For this one, it has to be Fernanda’s singsong buzzing, a sentence that takes pages and fits perfectly her character and the general character of ranting.

This chapter contains a lot of foreshadowing, all the things that people are going to do after the rain stops (Ursula is waiting to die). On p. 330-331:

“The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth.”

I should probably mention that Mr. Brown and the banana company have been given godlike powers in this chapter, as the four-year rain is referred to as the rain that Mr. Brown created or the banana company hurricane.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Again, p. 202-272

In the chapter that begins on page 203, Marquez offers a couple of perspectives on the nature of solitude.

Regarding Aureliano Segundo, who found solitude in his father’s workshop and in his conversations with Melquiades, only to be drawn away from it by Petra Cotes into a life of get, squander, get:

“Nature had made him reserved and withdrawn, with tendencies toward solitary
meditation…” (203)

Contrast this with Rebeca, so forgotten about by everyone else that she is thought to be dead even while she still lives in the house she had shared with Jose Arcadio Buendia. She spurns Aureliano Triste’s desire to rent her house, and the narrator tells us that when Aureliano Segundo offers to bring her into the Buendia home, that:

“his good intentions were frustrated by the firm intransigence of Rebeca, who
had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges
of solitude and who was not disposed to renounce them in exchange for an old age
disturbed by the false attraction of charity.” (219-220)

Page 222 (end of one chapter) and page 223 (beginning of another)seem at first glance to be a critical turning point, which would make sense, given its position in the middle of the novel. On one hand, Aureliano Triste opens the ice factory that the original Jose Arcadio Buendia had imagined. Once Aureliano Triste is joined by Aureliano Centeno, their ability to produce a surplus of ice sparks the idea of a railroad. Marquez foreshadows:

“The innocent yellow train that was to bring as many ambiguities and
certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes,
calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo…” (222)

The changes take place in the form of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ technologies of reproduction: movies, the phonograph, the telephone. I absolutely love the way Marquez characterizes this progress as it concerns Macondo:

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and
was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between
excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no
one knew for certain where reality lay.” (224)

If that little piece of irony isn’t delightful enough, Marquez follows with this sentence:

“It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of Jose
Arcadio Buendia under the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all
through the house even in broad daylight.”

As much as Marquez has presented unreality as reality, we are confronted with the things we think of as real as things that call reality into question, and then the ghost awakens, and that’s supposed to be the real reality. Beautiful.

So anyway, Macondo is back to reality with the wandering ghost of Jose Arcadia Buendia. Then, with Mr. Brown, a new gringo character:

“He was in the captive-balloon business, which had taken him halfway around the
world with excellent profits, but he had not succeeded in taking anyone up in
Macondo because they considered that invention backward after having seen and
tried the gypsy’s flying carpets.” (225)

Now for some speculation about the timing of the novel. It takes place sometime between the invention of the daguerrotype, which off the top of my head means 1840ish, and to this midway point, it must be about 1920 if the motion picture has reached the swampland of Colombia. Yet my sense of time is once again frustrated when I am presented with the fact that, on p. 246:

“…a dying Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who after so much war and so much suffering
from it was still not fifty years of age.”

Given all that had happened, and as many generations as have seemed to appear, I thought he was at least seventy. It particularly surprises me on page 250, when Pilar Ternera is described as “also almost a hundred years old.” The “also” refers to Ursula, who has just drawn the conclusion that Aureliano’s crying in the womb was a sign of his incapacity for love. Anyway, what this means is that Pilar Ternera is more than fifty years older than Aureliano. Which means that she was almost seventy when she first seduced the teenage Aureliano.

Back to Ursula, and to the idea of solitude: she is blind and her body is failing her. Marquez writes:

“Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such
clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family
that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former
times had prevented her from seeing.” (248)

A couple of other things:

Here is the description of Amaranta’s solitude:

“Amaranta seemed to carry the cross of ashes of virginity on her forehead.
In reality, she carried it on her hand in the black bandage, which she did not
take off even to sleep and which she washed and ironed herself. Her life
was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove
during the day, and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating
solitude that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.” (258-259)

A nice little twist on Penelope and her suitors, except that Amaranta doesn’t reject her suitors because of her faith in her true love; heck, she has even rejected her true love, if Pietro Crespi and/or Gerindeldo Marquez can fit in that category.

On page 267, Aureliano Buendia dies.

On page 272, Aureliano Segundo’s companionship with Meme, the sort of wayward daughter, “freed him for a time from the bitter solitude of his revels.”

Well, LeBron, you and I both know that you're reading this, that this blog is really the only way we communicate lately, so I just have to say it: Bad move. Yes, I followed this entire saga as closely as anyone else who didn't give a shit about it, and from where I stand, you made the worst possible choice.

I'm not sure I would have chosen Chicago if I were you, because the comparisons to Jordan would have been inevitable, and you still would fall short if you won four championships. Plus, you would have had to take time off to play, and fail at, football as a parallel to Jordan's baseball career.

But Miami? With the other two guys who were the class of the free agent class? That's like the three best players in town walking into the gym, and instead of choosing teams, or shooting for teams, saying, "We'll take this guy and that guy against you five." Then you get to win a bunch of games in a row against inferior teams because one of you was scared to be on the losing side in a few games.

So now, the best you three can do is win championships, and when you do, there will be no joy. All everyone will say is, "Of course you won. When you stack the deck, you're supposed to win." There will be joy, however, if you don't win. Oh, the potshots. Seriously, if you win a championship this year, I bet your final game is one of the lowest-rated telecasts in NBA history; nobody wants to watch a show in primetime when they already know the ending.

Of course, your opponents will still want to play the games, and they'll win some of them. Don't worry about it. If you lose, you lose. But even when you win, you still lose.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but when Otis Smith said he thought you were more competitive than this, when Chris Webber said he'll never compare you to Jordan again, when people say that this move shows a decided lack of courage: they're all right.

Enjoy the season. TTFN, Mike.

All the Stuff I’ve Written About One Hundred Years of Solitude up to page 180 or so

Originally, I was planning on reading for enjoyment. By the time I got to page 268, I was stopping to jot down thoughts and observations on the novel without even resenting the interruptions. What you'll see below is what I've typed from my notebook. My thinking goes from the chronicling of facts on July 2, to some thoughts about the events of the story, and then to making connections (wow, just like school). By the time I get to the next post, which covers pages 181-268, I'll be copying quotes and developing a way of seeing how solitude is relevant to each of the characters. I have a feeling that I'm on my way to doing some reflecting about the nature of solitude, but I guess I gave that one away in my last post.

July 2: Just the Facts – the time for noticing things

The Buendia family – Juan Arcadio and Ursula – establish Macondo on a failed pilgrimage to the sea as they followed another one of Juan Arcadio’s dreams. They have two sons – Juan Arcadio and Aureliano – and one daughter, Amaranta. Both boys impregnate Pilar Ternera, after which Juan Arcadio runs off with the gypsies and Aureliano stays, removed now from his gloomy inner life and his days spent in the workshop by the passions of Pilar Ternera. Rebeca is left on their doorstep with a sack containing her parents bones and an appetite for dirt and whitewash.

The worlds of the living and the dead are blurred, as Prudencio Aguilar frequently visits his killer, the elder Juan Arcadio, and Melquaides, a gypsy who died a long time ago, returns to Macondo because he can’t stand the solitude of death. When he dies again, he becomes the first person to die in Macondo.

Time, too, is blurred, as generations last what seems to be a hundred years. A story that seems to have its roots in the 1800s features a gift that Sir Walter Raleigh gave to someone’s great-great-grandmother.

The family trade is dreaming, alchemy and metallurgy. Aureliano falls in love with a nine year old girl named Remedios, the daughter of his father’s only sworn enemy, the local magistrate; in America today, we’d call Aureliano a pedophile, though he is willing to wait until she reaches puberty to marry her. Amaranta and Rebeca fall in love with the same Italian craftsman, Pietro Crespi, and when Rebeca is set to marry him, Amaranta promises that she’ll do anything, including murder, to stop the wedding. She’s a pretty tricky plotter, too.

I’m only eighty pages in, and I don’t even bother tracking the magical things, and the magical sentences, that Marquez puts into his story because there is simply too much of both. This may be a good book to include in the AP choice reading (aka Sparknotes) unit.

Oh, I almost forgot that the crazed patriarch of the Buendia family now lives tied to a chestnut tree.


July 3
Ok, so Macondo exists for years without laws and without a cemetery.

Don Apolinar Moscote comes as a magistrate, and Jose Arcadio Buendia tells him that there is nothing to judge and expels his soldiers, but allows him to stay because he doesn’t want to embarrass him in front of his daughters.

Then a priest comes, and wants to build a church. I need to stop interrupting my reading with this writing stuff, but the political reader in me is noticing the intrusion of institutions on the pure place that was Macondo.

What does Macondo have to teach the institutions of civilized society?


July 7
It was a long weekend with a lot of rapidly emptying coolers poolside, which inhibited the reading and writing. I left off with a question about Macondo and civilized institutions, and I discover that it wasn’t really the best question, given what followed. What did the institutions bring to Macondo? Death and violence.

In the return of Jose Arcadio and his marriage almost by force to Rebeca, we witnessed a depravity so strong it caused Pietro Crespi’s suicide and Ursula’s exile of her own son. In Colonel Aureliano Buendia’s continuous rebellion for an idea he doesn’t seem to believe in, or believes in only partially, we get a glimpse into the ignorance of militancy – and he’s the leader who’s not corrupt.

Such power Pilar Ternera held, using sex to turn these young men away from intimacy and to a life of itinerant bloodshed. Cormac McCarthy should follow these guys around.

Back in Macondo, we see that governmental authority, civilian and military, exists, but capriciously. It is easily turned from one master to another, except during the tenure of General Jose Raquel Moncado, whose efforts to make both war and peace more humane lead him to one of Aureliano’s firing squads. Now Mom is really mad at him.

…one chapter later…

Interesting how the logic of the war ultimately revealed itself on page 168 right after I had written the lines above.

What has become most interesting, however, by this point around page 180ish, is the role of solitude in the novel. Aureliano’s solitude is almost impenetrable, an inner coldness that requires him to wear a blanket around his shoulders. Several times in this past chapter Marquez makes mention of his solitude. Ursula’s solitude has also been mentioned a few times, but she seems to more actively shut the world out, and then re-engage it through her own will.



The elder Jose Arcadio Buendia is the most explicitly solitary member of the family, but I can’t recall right now whether or not Marquez has connected him to the word solitude since his connection was made to the chestnut tree.

Little Things

One of the things I do really poorly is write short posts. So here goes.

Tarring and feathering was a creative punishment that has sadly gone out of vogue. If it still existed, I'd like to see it applied to the scammers who make all the radio commercials that say some version of "the American public may now..." or "due to changes in the government, members of the public may..." Those commercials, which I hear all the time on the three AM stations I listen to - CBS, the FAN and ESPN radio - used to create the misimpression that something genuinely new had happened to change credit card payments and the like; now they just announce that they're trawling for suckers.

David Brooks' column in today's New York Times is definite food for thought. The prevailing thought about old media (books and other non-digital things) is that it is in an existential battle with new media. I haven't understood why we have to put books out to pasture because we have Nooks and Kindles, but there's plenty of room for everyone to get the information or entertainment they want, isn't there? Anyway, Brooks finds that place where both things can exist and fulfill different purposes to develop different aspects of our selves.

If I'm going to keep it short, then I better go now. Ciao.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Multitask

I can’t remember now if this post is supposed to be about One Hundred Years of Solitude or if it’s supposed to be about something else. I better check the notebook.

Ah, here it is. There’s another post about the novel, but this one is about summer goals and stuff like that. I wrote it by the pool this afternoon when it was about 100 degrees. Just like me back in the day – you know, very hot.

Given the title, you can imagine that solitude is important to the story. It’s a great novel. But it’s causing me some problems. You see, I’ve set out this summer to be a reader, a writer, a Spanish learner, a father, a fitness dude…in other words, too many things. So here’s what I wrote at the pool:

Maybe solitude is the theme for a poem. But I think I’ve got to get to blogging about the challenge of literary multitasking for me – my inability to be a reader at one time of day and a writer at another. I think I’ve learned that I’m happy I give kids class time to write, because I have a hard enough time of making time for it myself.

How much of the issue is guilt? How much of it is knowing that I’m not marking up One Hundred Years of Solitude but still trying to be attentive to detail? How much of it is thinking that, if I have time to write, I should be writing about the book? How much is it the fact that reading the book is an easily understood assignment, while the writing has no clear assignment to guide me?

I saw the CWP email about the lyric essay writing workshop, and I immediately thought about Segolene’s Camus project and his lyrical essays. Maybe an effort to do my own piece inspired by “Summer in Algiers” is the kind of assignment that is both doable and can lead to some poetry. Such a task won’t give me a chance to read as much as I set out to, but it will give me a chance to accomplish both kinds of goals (reading and writing) to some degree rather than accomplishing one to a significant extent only as I feel really badly about not really accomplishing the other at all.

I think this means that War and Peace will be incubating in the summer of 2010.

Ok, so I'm learning Spanish. Today I wrote the following in my notebook:

Mi Dia
by Miguel McAteer

Yo se despierto debajo de la sabana en mi cama. Yo voy al bano, se cepillo los dientes con mi cepilla el dientes, y se lavo la cara. Yo voy a la cocina y desayuno, bebo café con leche.

En el verano, llevo camisetas. Yo tengo el pelo negro y pequeno canoso. Yo se cepillo el pelo, voy a trabajo en mi carro. Yo soy maestro en una escuela. Enseno leyendo y escribiendo.

Despues trabajo, yo voy a mi casa. Antes cenar, yo se lavo los mano sucios. Bebo vino, cerveza o agua, se cepillo los dientes con dentrifico. Yo duerme en me cama en mi dormitorio, y sueno.


Now I will enter the same text into a free translation website.

My Day
by Michael McAteer
I was awake under the covers in my bed. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth with brushing teeth and wash my face. I go to the kitchen and eat breakfast, drink coffee with milk.

In the summer, I have T-shirts. I have the black and gray hair. I will brush my hair, and handling to work on my car. I am a teacher in a school. I teach reading and writing.

After work, I am going home. Before dinner, I wash my hands dirty. I drink wine, beer or water, brush your teeth with toothpaste. I sleep in my bed in my bedroom, and sleep.

Compelling story. Geesh. This translator must not be speaking Latin American Spanish. After all, it couldn't possibly be me.

Summer Reading

Let’s try to get some funner stuff out now.

I’ve started to keep a little reading log in my notebook; I’ll figure out soon enough whether that gets tedious or if it has any value. In the five days since I finished grading and all that fun stuff, I’ve really eased into my summer reading. By this time last year, I think I’d already finished two books.

Part of what has held me back, I think, is avoidance behavior: before school ended, I started One Hundred Years of Solitude, then put it on hiatus as June ended up providing much more work than it should have. In addition, on my initial summer reading foray into Barnes & Noble, I picked up War and Peace, and two shorter books, Love and Obstacles, a collection of short stories by Aleksandr Hemon, and Si, Puede, by Jorge Posada (yes, that Jorge; I’m trying to learn Spanish, and figure I may as well start with something a little easier than Almodovar).

To date, I’ve read a few of the Hemon stories, but I’m finding that reading them at once is not a great idea. I realize that there is a connectedness to the stories, from the crush Azra in the first to the Azra whom I might have known before in the last. But the stories of futility and awkwardness in the quest for love (and maybe or maybe not, sex, have given me a sense of same shit, different day. Even though the stories ring true, I’m not interested in going back to my own successfully repressed teenage years, even though Hemon’s narrator is a guy whose pursuit of women makes my seventeen year old self look suave by contrast.

I’ve also opted for poetry, starting with the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, which is designed to explore the connectedness of themes across time and place. Its introduction cites Ecclesiastes and it’s poem about time as the basis for so many echoing poems across so many different continents and generations. It’s a pretty cool concept when you’re interested in seeing how literature reflects a sense of our human nature.

It was fun coming across Cavafy’s “Ithaka” the day after Aubreigh Guynn used that poem as a guide for her senior reflection at graduation. As I listened to her speak, I felt myself getting more interested in the poem, and I think that Ithaka and I will share a relationship with future students going forward.

I thought that Garcia Lorca would be more instructive to me in my quest to learn Spanish, but what it did most markedly was point out to me the difference between the Spanish I was exposed to in college and the Spanish I’m learning now. So I stuck with his Brooklyn Bridge poem in English. It connects in a way with this nebulous goal I have of doing a Whitman thing to our pool, Westwood, whose middle class-ness strikes me as a thing too easily overlooked, and in need of celebration. There is a wonderful diversity to the middle class, while at the same time an adherence to core values. It’s a satisfying thing to behold But more of that later. Today’s resolution: back to Marquez, and no fooling around until I’m finished.

Teachers and Unions and Better Schools

It’s been a long time since I posted an original thought here. The speech is kind of an original thought, but it doesn’t necessarily belong to the blog; it was posted here that it might inspire the thousands of readers who visit this site every day, fingers crossed that there might be a new message from the mountaintop.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. A few weeks ago there was a great article in The New York Times Magazine that probed the question, Are teacher unions killing education reform?” The answer, of course, is yes. So I marked up my copy of the article, scrawled notes in the margins, and set myself the task of responding to the article piece by piece. But a coherent response failed to reveal itself to me.

What has stuck with me in the ensuing six weeks or so are the convictions that:

1. tenure, as it is currently constructed, is not a good thing
2. it is almost farcical that student achievement data is not part of teacher evaluation
3. performance-based pay is essential to educational improvement

The main problem is that teacher unions would have you believe that reforming the system is synonymous with destroying the system, that the alteration of any safeguards to teacher employment is a removal of all safeguards from the arbitrariness of poor administrators.

Let’s take tenure, for example. One can easily get the impression that change to tenure equals removing tenure, putting every teacher in his or her free agent year. Who says tenure can’t be adjusted into a thing that comes in five year or seven year increments? If districts had some flexibility with tenure, they could more easily remove poor teachers. And a multi-year system would allow a teacher to develop a history of performance evaluations, which would protect teachers from arbitrary decisions by administrators, and protect schools from teachers who only occasionally decide to work hard.

Union rhetoric about tenure seems to be rooted in the assumption that all teachers are hard-working, and that administrators are generally ill-intentioned. Neither of these is true. And in the event that an administrator continues to fire qualified teachers: well, how long will that pattern last before the administrator’s employers start to wonder why he is so ineffective at retaining employees, why he is so bad at hiring, why he is so bad at developing teachers. Changes to teacher tenure would demand as much improvement from the evaluators as it would the evaluated.

And why in the world are schools incapable of coming up with performance-based evaluation? The current rhetoric gives the impression that student performance data equals standardized test data. Well, just as we are supposed to look at student performance across multiple means of assessment, so we should look at teacher performance using multiple means of assessment. Students have to meet all sorts of standards: school-based performance standards measured by assessment rubrics; state standards and national standards, where they exist (SAT and ACT, for example).

If a district doesn’t have local standards, then get off your asses and develop them. Why can’t reading and writing be assessed based on local benchmarks? Why can’t levels of math or language or science have standards that inform curriculum, instruction and assessment? Given the amount of community control over schools, it is irresponsible not to have community standards for learning that are guided by relevant state standards, but also reflect the character of the community. If there is a way of giving a kid a report card grade for music or art, then there is a way of articulating a standard for performance. And if end-of-year reviews for special education students are designed to assess progress toward goals, then we have standards, and we have evaluation – what more do we need?

When we talk about teacher evaluation in the abstract, it is this very cold, unhuman thing. The truth is that evaluators and evaluated are co-workers. They have human relationships. They have ongoing communication about the challenges that exist in each classroom. But when we hear performance data as part of teacher evaluation, we tend to ignore the “as part” part. Everything exists in a context; make the assessments fit your district context, make your teacher evaluation responsive to building and classroom contexts, and you should be able to have more valuable teacher evaluations.

And once you do, you can start to tie evaluation to performance. This doesn’t mean we scrap contracts; it just means that contracts establish a level of base pay, and teacher evaluations then dictate whether or not a teacher will be paid above base, and if so, how much. Come up with a formula that has a low base in the contract within the existing seniority system, and then have performance-based compensation that raises pay to existing levels for teachers whose students achieve an acceptable level of performance. Let those whose students exceed performance expectations, or whose students achieve excellent results (in improvement, not necessarily in raw scores) make more money than they do now.

But because unions have a fundamental distrust of their employers, we automatically believe that the threat of abuse and subjugation of teachers is inevitable. I simply don’t think that’s true. So under the existing system, excellent teachers are valued exactly as teachers who don’t suck. That’s why a thirty year veteran whose students underperform on every standardized measure can makes scores of thousands more than a five-year veteran whose students consistently outperform standards. What’s the difference between the two? Not students. Not curriculum. Just that one has, for whatever reason, continued showing up for work for a much longer time.