Busy Sept. 23

 

     I love writing books. You learn so much, though never enough — particularly when you bit off a big topic, such as Judaism, and have only a few months to furiously chew it down to a size that you and some as-yet-to-be-determined-but-certainly-small group of people can swallow.
      But writing a book does narrow your range of reading. Pretty much limited to the subject at hand. People will suggest other books to me, interesting books, books that I'd like to read, were I not occupied with adding to their numbers, and I'll smile and say "I'll put it on the list" without mentioning that the list is in suspended animation until after Jan. 15, my deadline, at least.
     I've also been neglecting my heroes, such as Dante and Samuel Johnson, who I like to take in regular doses, like medicine. But Facebook, for all its downsides — AI slop, intrusive advertising, constant harping on topics I'm coming to Facebook to be distracted from — is redeemed by the "Memories" section, which I check each morning to see what I was doing last year and the year before, and all the way to ... ulp ... 18 years ago, when I first began using it, at orders from the newspaper.

     Wednesday served up some prime Johnson quotes, which I'll get to. In a minute. After I submit to recounting a few of the other things mentioned as memories for the day.

     What's that line from the movie? "You've had a wonderful life." Particularly on Sept. 23.

     Sept. 23's pack of associations was satisfying bordering on amazing, beginning with the reopening of the Goodman Theatre after COVID five years ago, then including the Symphony, the Lyric Gala, the Goodman again,.

    A dozen years ago: "Fun hanging with Joakim Noah and his mom, Cecilia, at a party raising money for Noah's Arc Foundation."
     In 2012, after being slapped around by the New York Times Book Review, the paper added compliment to injury by winking at me from the Style section, a moment I described thus:
     "Okay, take your New York Times, pull out the Sunday Style Magazine, turn to page 40, direct your attention to the tiny photo on the bottom right. 'A rollicking newspaperman's memoir ... and strong case for Second City exceptionalism...' Right there next to books about China, South Africa and other exotic locales that few New Yorkers would actually visit. What I had thought last week was a NY Times travel blog pops up in print. Not quite the treatment I had hoped for, true ("Kinda small..." Ross sniffed) but still, the mighty New York Times pauses, cocks its head, detecting the faintest 'ping' from somewhere in the vast undifferentiated expanse of nothingness that is the nation beyond the Hudson. It'll have to do."
     Dinner at the Star of Siam, 15 years ago, then bumping into Rick Kogan in the Goat and over to the Tribune Tower to learn about Twitter, the future X. "My takeaway from the whole thing: Keep the day job" which turned out to be rare prescience.

   In 2009, I wrote: "just returned from a late night dinner with writers and editors from Granta" where earlier I had scoured the British Museum (I didn't mention it, but the room where my friends, the Lewis chessmen were on display, was being re-carpeted, and I couldn't go in, though for one desperate moment considered plunging into the bowels of the museum to find them. Gotta go back to London).
     The earliest entry, 18 years ago, was: "is saddened at the departure of his colleague Robert Feder, which will make the Sun-Times an even more grim and lonely place to work than it already is." Have to give him a call — we're overdue for lunch.
     None of which would have prompted me to write this post. Bragging, I can resist, with effort. But Victoria Driver — who I see, from her still-current Facebook page, is back in Chicago; welcome! — posted these 1758 Samuel Johnson quotes from a column which, now that I re-read it, is worth posting in its entirety.  That means you'll read the quotes below twice, if you come back Saturday. Which is okay, because they bear repeating, a reminder that what strikes us as a current depravity is actually a universal:

     “Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great for the evidence from which opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man."
     “Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots . . . [who] resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow . . ."
     “[They] deny the most notorious facts, contradict the most cogent truths, and persist in asserting today what they asserted yesterday, in defiance of evidence and contempt of confutation.”

    The more things change ... 

Is it OK for adults to wear pajamas in public?

     Lately I’ve been walking down the street in my pajamas.
     Not regularly. A couple of times.
     OK, four. Maybe five.
     Which might be a cause for concern, right? Older guy, strolling the neighborhood in his pj’s. One immediately thinks of Vincent Gigante, the Genovese crime family boss who wandered Greenwich Village for 30 years in a robe, pajamas and slippers. Pretending to be crazy, trying to build an insanity defense and keep himself out of jail.
     Not the best company to be in. (Plus it didn’t work; he died in prison.)
     So what’s my excuse?
    Well, I have a few — not excuses, but reasons.
     First Kitty, our elderly dog. She’s 16, or 112 in human years. Without going into detail, her habits are changing. While she used to be a regular 7 a.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. kind of gal, now she might feel the urge at 1:30 a.m., or 3 a.m., or 5 a.m. or, one recent night, 1:30 and 3 and 5 a.m.
     Let’s put it this way — right now my wife is in Washington, D.C., enjoying grandchildren No. 1 and No. 3, while I’m here, tending to a dog. Because we just couldn’t hand the dog to a neighbor with a wave and a breezy — “Oh, by the way, you might need to walk her every two hours, bye!” — as we waltz out the door.
     Second, let me tell you something about Center Avenue. It isn’t like strolling Michigan Avenue in your jammies, though I imagine that happens. Not many people at noon. At 5 a.m. it’s pretty much me. So far, this fashion leap is only taken at night.

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Flashback 2003: Ground down? In a rut? Just go fly a kite

The original 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum)

     Not only do I write for the Sun-Times, but I read it, and can tell you, one of the central joys of being a subscriber is watching Lee Bey hit it out of the park on a regular basis — bam bam bam bam. Monday was his front page story on how the Museum of Science and Industry ... oh, all right, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — is further defacing itself, not just in name, but in physical reality, by adding a nearly 30-foot-tall, 458-foot-wide "Welcome Hall." The thing is, well, let Lee describe it:

     The Welcome Hall is too tall and much too wide. It promises to sit there like a carbuncle in the park. And its arched grass roof makes the structure resemble a displaced section of Teletubbyland.

     It also eradicates the north lawn of the museum, which not only is visually important, but serves an important civic function as well, such as the kite festival this 2003 column relates, eventually. I apologize for the unashamed bitching of the first 2/3 of the column; I must have thought it was funny, at the time, or at least honest, and was trying to build up to the glorious end, not realizing that half the readers would probably never get there. Plus I didn't mention the facts of the story — Glen Ellyn airplane enthusiasts had spent four years hand-constructing an exact copy of the Wright flyer, and 2,000 people — including my family — gathered on the MSI lawn to watch them try, and fail, three times to get the thing airborne, in honor of the centennial of the first manned, powered flight at Kitty Hawk. The type of event which can't be held should the Griffin Carbuncle be built.
     Anyway, I offer up this 23-year-old chestnut as back up to Lee's scoop. 

     On my way to and from work I often cut through City Hall and the County Building. They're two halves of the same massive, square, block-filling structure, as you probably know if you work downtown. The nearly century-old corridors bustle with genuine Chicago types--loitering knots of cops, engineers clutching hard hats and pastel logs of rolled up blueprints, bright young good government sorts surging out of brass-faced elevators, while the older, shady, yellow-plaid-jacket crowd they inevitably become lope in to replace them.
     Then there's the architecture: marble, curving mosaics on the ceilings, brass frou-frou fixtures that would spark three scandals if the government paid for them now but which at the time seemed simply giving civic life its proper due.
     I cut through the building because it's cheering and, frankly, on some days I need cheering. Nobody who isn't in a refugee camp or a burn ward has the right to complain, of course, but I'm sorry; the routine gets oppressive. Like most people — perhaps like you — life gets dull. After three years in the suburbs and eight years with the children and 13 years being married and 17 years at the newspaper, well, I'll tell you, buddy, on some days the sparkling sense of newness and wonder just ain't there. The last time I walked through City Hall, I barely broke stride, even when a big poster caught my eye — "Mayor Daley's Kids & Kites Festival" it read.
     "Right," I said to myself, eyes forward, hurrying on, squelching the urge to stop and see where the festival was, thinking, "No way I'm dragging the crew to one of Hizzoner's bread-and-circuses."
     I'd rather have jumped on the L and gone out to O'Hare and charged a plane ticket to Fiji, where I'd end up standing at a grass shack bar like a character out of Conrad, gazing for hours at the flat blue horizon, silently nursing my wounds and my dark rum, the focus of glances and whispers. "The Mystery Man."
     Only I wouldn't. The Fijian authorities would track me down after three weeks and ship me home and I'd be right back where I am right now, another gray-faced workadaddy grinding back and forth in his rut between job and family, bouncing like a rubber ball from home hassles to work woes and back again, stumbling each morning from the company of my inert, mutely waving neighbors in the bland, soul-sucking suburbs through the grimy indifferent city, to the stasis of my office and my shrugging, impassive co-workers, then back to the changeless shoebox diorama of Northbrook, now bathed in twilight, to mark time until it begins anew next morning.
     Only, after Fiji, I'd have another $10,000 in credit card debt.
     Fortunately, I have a rule that I would like to pass along, just in case it might prove helpful to you. And that rule, which kicks in like a computer logic loop at these bleak moments — okay, bleak minutes and hours and whole days -- of vinegary unhappiness and boredom, is this: life is not dull or unpleasant, not generally, and certainly not in a great city such as Chicago, and thus anybody finding it dull or unpleasant needs to kick himself in his ample backside. The world does not fade to black merely because you happen to close your eyes.
     That is why I did not stay home and work as I should have Saturday morning, particularly with the book due April 1, a date whose ironic, mocking aspects only strike me now that I set them down.
     I wanted to. But despite the looming due date and the whole house liable to collapse in a puff of asbestos dust, I blew off my responsibilities and took the family downtown to see the Wright Flyer fly. It didn't, merely putted along a track on the windless front lawn of the Museum of Science and Industry, as earthbound as a root.
     But somehow that was all right. After an hour, we went inside the museum, and it was great. Normally, I occupy myself searching for signs of corporate spin in the displays, all of which seem to have been paid for by oil companies.
     But this time I just enjoyed the exhibits, particularly the new ToyMaker 3000. They've set up a faux toy company, and we learned about design and marketing and then were set before an automated production line where, for three bucks apiece, my kids watched their own cool gyroscopish Gravi-tron toys assembled and customized before their popping eyes.
     But that wasn't the best part. The best part came about 3 p.m. We had been in the museum for four hours, which is a lot, even with lunch. The boys were melting down. It was time to go home. Normally, just going outside after four hours in a museum is a diver-breaking-the-surface delight, a return to sunlight and air.
     But Saturday we went out the museum's front doors, and there was the kite festival. I had ignored it, but it had found me. Surprise intensified the wonder of an expanse of blue sky filled with multicolored kites of all shapes and sizes. A brass band played jazz. People of all races and ages enjoyed themselves, flying kites, strolling, picnicking. I can't begin to express the joy of the thing. It was like God reaching down and ruffling my hair and smiling. I stood on the steps for a long time, trying to burn the image in memory, and then hurried after the boys, eager to join the excitement.

               — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2003

At least Joe Biden isn't being airbrushed away — yet

 

   In this job, it helps to have stock phrases. That way, you don't have to think up something new and clever every time you answer an email. Not when something old and clever will do.
     For instance, if a reader writes to me, confused — my lucid, well-reasoned argument is just crazy to them — demanding I hold their hand and explain it to them again, perhaps using a felt board, I barely pause.
     "Sir, I have found you an argument," I reply, quoting Samuel Johnson. "But I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
     Not many actual Nazis write. But when imitators and admirers share their thoughts, to stretch the term, often in an argot I call the Fascist Plural, "We were amused at your feeble Semitic attempt at..." I often deploy a line that is my own, though well worn from use.
     "You know, the whole Nazi thing didn't work out so well for the Germans."

     It really didn't. What gets overlooked in the glare of their crimes — at least 70 million people killed in World War II — this toll includes 7 or 8 million German citizens and soldiers. Quite a lot really. Not to mention their country pulverized and divided in half, with the Soviets ushering in a half century of jackboot repression.
     What I'm really saying is, "Look to history." Because history is a guide.
     We see how hatred blows back in the face of the hater. The old adage "hatred is taking poison and expecting someone else to die," is true, and on a national scale, multiplies. Didn't end well for Hitler. Despots, surrounded by yes men, make awful blunders. Mao's Communists remained in power, so got to write their history. But 30 million Chinese died in Mao's incompetence-induced famines.
     They don't teach that in China. Squelching history is what totalitarians do. And budding totalitarians.
     This past week, the U.S. Interior Department announced it will be putting warning signs outside the Smithsonian, advising the displays within are hopelessly biased (every accusation of this administration is a confession) because they include bad stuff, and not the cavalcade of greatness leading up to the apotheosis of national joy, triumph and achievement of Donald Trump, Imperator Supremus Maximae Gloriae.

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Farm kitten

 

      Cute kitten, right?
      I try to have a point to these posts and columns, but can today's be simply that? A kitten that is cute. Do we really need more?
      Perhaps. There could be more. Cats are certainly having a good week. The first new cat species identified in more than a century, leopardus tilcayo — or the tilcayo tiger cat — was discovered in the Bolivian cloud forest.
     Admit it — just reading "cloud forest" gave you a certain thrill, did it not? Our reward for pushing for something beyond "cute kitten." The very cute kitten above was one of five kittens crawling around a tractor at a farm I was visiting Friday. My first thought was to simply put out my hand and say, "I'll take this one," as my wife and I are currently catless, a condition underlined by minding, for the past month, Casper and Boo, the pair of troublemakers that belong to a certain peripatetic lad, his equally peripatetic wife and their surprisingly-peripatetic-for-a-4-month-old child (peripatetic adj. traveling from place to place).
     But nobody offered me the kitten and though rich in chutzpah, I'm not forward enough to ask, remembering the demands of caring for kittens, which might involve eye droppers and expensive vet visits and general household disruption. Plus she (or he) might not be weaned. Plus I don't think we're ready for one, the departure of Natasha still being too fresh. My wife says she's just not ready for a new cat. And I'm trying to make my life easier any way I can, not more complex.
     There was a moment when all five kittens and their mom were gathered in one spot, but I was slow on whipping out my phone for a shot and they scattered. Just as well. The concentrated cuteness might be overwhelming.

       

You can take the girl out of the city...

     The lonely stretch above is Miller Road, just east of 155 and west of the Prairie Creek in Hopedale Township, about 160 miles southwest of Chicago.
     We stopped in that unlikely spot because, in the fields beyond, a variety of pieces of big equipment were doing some harvesting that I was interested in observing for a story I'm working on, one you can expect in a couple weeks. 

      In the half hour we lingered there, one car, maybe two came by, and didn't stop.
     We did have a good laugh. As we walked away from the car in the picture, that lonely speck, a blue Ford Focus, toward the muddy field, we heard a distinctive double beep.
     "I locked my car and put on my flashers," marveled Ashlee Rezin, the Sun-Times photo editor, who was driving. "Could I be more of a city girl? I am a through and through city girl." 

     Old habits die hard. Though we were in depopulated and — it is assumed — relatively safe rural heartland, the idea of not taking prudent precautions, well, is not cast casually cast aside.

     That happened several times, frequently enough that a local remarked on it, also with a laugh. Unnecessary safety steps by anxious city slickers are funny. We don't lock our cars here. 
     Later we grabbed lunch in Morton, "The Pumpkin Capital of the World" and sampled their pumpkin-flavored ice cream, pumpkin-spiked chili, plus pumpkin cake pops. When I had called the village hall the day before, getting the lay of the land, an employee warned me that with the Pumpkin Festival going full swing, parking might be a problem.
     "Oh, I imagine we'll manage," I said. If agrarians smile at our consciousness of criminality, we return the favor regarding what they think of as crowded. I thought back to the parking meters in Lemont accepting pennies last time I was there — albeit a while ago. 

     Let's just say parking was not a problem for a professional newspaper photographer. We managed.

     I hadn't been out for a story for two months, since I had my rotator cuff repaired in late July, and it felt really good to hit the road, eyeball an expanse of this beautiful state, talk to some hardworking, interesting people, including my colleague, who I hadn't seen for quite a while. We talked and talked and talked — I was hoarse when I got home. I left the house shortly before 7 a.m. and returned shortly after 7 p.m. It was a day very well spent.

      
 

Muzzling Macklemore changes nothing. What now?

"From Jerusalem," by John Singer Sargent (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I hate to pile on Macklemore, the rapper recently yanked from Ed Sheeran's tour, further muddying his reputation by association. But I kinda like him, primarily for his song "Starting Over," an explicit look at sobriety and relapse. I did smile at first listen, because he presents himself as "some wise monk" and a big famous celebrity, since I'd both never heard of him before and — to me anyway — there is something limp and ersatz about white rappers, though Eminem seems to do OK.
     I paused before using the present tense, "I like him" in the opening paragraph. I still like Macklemore, based entirely on that song, despite the controversy over his remarks related to Palestinians. Then again, I have an oddball view on this subject, one perhaps unique to myself — I see it as a highly emotional issue, where people of goodwill believe deeply across the spectrum. So I don't feel the need to flutter my fingers at my sternum and gasp whenever someone says something I disagree with. I certainly don't see how stifling anybody helps. I would no sooner want to see Macklemore silenced than I would want to be silenced myself.
     I also thought before I used "related to Palestinians" rather than "pro-Palestinian" because I don't quite understand how shouting "Free Palestine" in various circumstances, whether from a concert stage, or at random Jews going about their business in the street, is actually helpful to Palestinians. I wouldn't shout "Down with Trump!" at someone wearing a cross because evangelicals tend to back the president. Macklemore-like outbursts certainly don't relieve an iota of suffering in Gaza, or get any closer to a solution to this intractable problem. Maybe it helps the person shouting, giving themselves a big wet kiss of virtue signaling.
     And yes, I know that beside his "Free Palestine" remarks, Macklemore also once went onstage wearing a false Jewish hooked nose and beard. I wear something similar myself, permanently affixed to my face, everywhere I go, so heck, the more the merrier. Mel Brooks once dressed as Hitler and performed a rap song — that isn't an endorsement.
     We are allowed to tune him out. I deleted both Instagram and Facebook off my phone because I was tired of the endless "Punch & Judy Show" on this subject. Everybody's talking, nobody's listening. If I could inject a thought into the slipstream — and I guess I can, through the vehicle of a newspaper column, which isn't quite writing a broadsheet with a quill pen and pasting it to the post office wall, but close — I would point out, to Jews, that the true peril is not from tertiary musicians making earnest speeches, but the U.S. government using your cause to squash free expression. I care about Israel, but care 10 times more about this country, and since there is a risk of Jews being eventually seen as the folks who hurrahed Donald Trump while he ravaged the Constitution, I want to add an emphatic: Not In Our Name.
     As to Palestinians and their supporters, well, I would point out that being the darlings of Hollywood and college sophomores did not help Tibetans, still under the heel of China last time I looked. If your point is that Israel should never have been created in 1948, I can understand that. But it's still there, your feelings notwithstanding. The relevant question is: What happens next?

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