Books on the TV tray next to the reclining chair. And on the phone...

     An EGD reader asked me what books I've been reading during my convalescence. Good question. I'm working on my own book, about the benefits of Judaism, so for the past year have been trying to make a dent in modern Jewish literature, pressing forward on three fronts: audiobooks, physical books and, the first time and at my wife's urging, reading on my iPhone, since I can hold it easily in one hand.
     The first book I read on my phone was "The Chosen," by Chaim Potok. I read it 50 years ago, but only vaguely remembered something about a baseball game. It's an excellent novel, a crisply-written character study of the friendship between the protagonist, Reuven Malter and his friend Danny — slated at birth to become the next tzaddik, or leader of his particular sect  of orthodoxy. Plus their relationships with their demanding faith and strong-willed fathers. A reminder that, like all religions, Judaism is not a block of uniformity, but a spectrum; the various factions sometimes hate each other. The opening game is played between the Hasidim and a less rigorous sect. We might see them as both orthodox Jews, but the Hasids really despise their opponents, warning them that they're going to hell for being apostates.
      Right before the surgery, I read Harry Golden's surprisingly-useful
"Only in America." I googled "10 best contemporary Jewish novels" and one of them was Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" which I picked because it won the prestigious Man Booker award. The funny, thoughtful. book was published in 2010 and is surprisingly current, with much of the plot pivoting on the Palestinian situation. One character joins a group he calls "Ashamed Jews" and they go around apologizing for the continued existence of the state founded in their name.

     The physical book I'm reading is James Loeffler's "Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America," published this month by Metropolitan Books. It's set in Chicago, beginning in 1949 with what is essentially an anti-Jewish pogram in Englewood. One of the book's many shocks is realizing how American antisemitism cruised right through World War II, largely unaffected by the Holocaust, a term rarely used until 30 years later, after a TV series of the same name. Much real estate is given to Terminiello v. Chicago, a Supreme Court case that grew out of a anti-Semitic priest holding a hate rally on the West Side, and the question of whether groups can be protected from libel in the same way individuals are.
     The center section is about the legal ramifications of the 1977 attempt of Nazis to march in Skokie, while the last third brings us up-to-date to the present day I'm going to write a column about it so I don't wanna get too far into it, but it makes her gripping read with a caveat that the center section explores every legalistic posture, maneuver, and nuance in microscopic detail. 
     I'm also finishing Andre Aciman's sweet and melancholy "Out of Egypt" on Audible, which I read years ago and was really just fact checking one passage but ended up listening to the whole thing. It's a sentimental look at his family before they were kicked out in 1965 part of the Arab world's purge of Jews into Israel, where it turns out they don't belong either.  The book is billed as a memoir, though Aciman, who went on to write "Call Me by Your Name," recreates conversations and scenes from decades earlier that he couldn't possibly remember, and as a writer of memoirs myself, I wondered how much art embroiders the reality he is describing.

     What's next? Beyond the obvious Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. I think I'm going to polish off Elie Wiesel's "Night," which I managed to miss in high school, when everybody else read it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Flashback 2012: The semi-precious joy of a campus tour

Charles Martin Hall statue at Oberlin College
(Photo by Gary Cohen, '11, used with permission of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine)

     August is college tour season. Sometimes I suggest to parents embarking on the process that they check out my odyssey with my older son, "Nice work if you can get it."
     I didn't remember that I'd also written anything in the paper. But Facebook disinterred this 2012 column on Wednesday, and I couldn't resist sharing it, if only so I can show my son that his path to the law wasn't quite as straight as he may now believe it was.

     Charles Martin Hall is not famous in the way that, oh, Monty Hall is famous. Which illustrates the deadening effect of TV, since the place in our brains where the shrieks of strangely costumed audience members on “Let’s Make a Deal” still reside could instead be dedicated to the young Ohioan who discovered an easier way to extract aluminum from ore.
     Though the most common metal on earth — present in almost every plant, animal and rock — up to Hall’s discovery in 1886, aluminum was vastly expensive to refine, and what little was made was seen as a novelty of the wealthy, a semi-precious metal used in jewelry. The crown jewels of France included bars of aluminum. That changed after Hall went on to found Alcoa. The price of the metal dropped to 1/1000th of what it had been previously, which is why we use aluminum in soda cans instead of wedding rings.
     The only reason I know this is because — gosh — 20 years ago I wrote a book on college pranks, and Hall was a 21-year-old graduate of Oberlin College working on the college campus when he made his discovery. At his death, he gave a ton of money to the school, which expressed its gratitude by naming a variety of buildings after Hall. Alcoa continued the praise by commissioning a life-size sculpture of the lad out of aluminum and donating it to Oberlin, which for the next 50 years had to contend with students — who like nothing better than to mock the pieties of their elders — stealing the easily transportable, hollow-aluminum statue and dragging it to various spots around campus.
     Mildly interesting, perhaps, but not the kind of knowledge that has much practical daily value, and it sank deep into my subconscious until early last week when, snooping around Oberlin’s campus with my family on our first official college visit for my older boy, nearly 17, we strolled past Hall Auditorium.
     “Who Hauled Hall on Top of Hall?” I exclaimed, to puzzled stares. “It was the name of a song.” I described the Hall saga to my boys who, truth be told, couldn’t have cared less.
     No matter. As much as parenthood involves sacrifice, there are eventual benefits, such as the chance to hie yourself to various college campuses around the country and kick the tires of academic institutions. This is a new joy for me. People didn’t do it back in the 1970s — at least not people in Berea, Ohio. I signed up for Northwestern having never seen the campus, and still recall my relief, pushing beyond Norris Center and glimpsing the little curling promenade along the lake and thinking, “Hey, this is nice...”
     Nowadays we hedge our bets, and parents of college-bound kids are convinced that if we’re going into hock for decades, we better go see what our sprouts are getting. Though I almost missed out a second time. My older son is nothing if not headstrong and at first dismissed with a wave of the hand our suggestion that he visit schools. A waste of time. He would attend Johns Hopkins, become a doctor of neurology, end of story. My wife and I exchanged worried glances. You need to go take a look first, we insisted. “What,” my wife ventured, “if you don’t like the campus?”
     “Mother,” he said, in a tone of frozen contempt that I’ll be chuckling at for the rest of my life. “I’m not going there for the campus.”
     I’d like to say that our reason prevailed but suspect we had nothing to do with it. Rather a book he is reading — The Thinking Student’s Guide to College, I believe — encourages visits, adding that students hot to do research should consider small liberal arts colleges, because while at a big university you’ll end up in an auditorium with 150 other freshmen listening to some grad student mumble about the research a professor you’ll never meet is conducting in a lab you’ll never see, at a small school you might work with the professor yourself. Hence Oberlin.
     I went along for the information session — a good thing, because I could counter my lad’s revulsion at the idea of co-ops, a bewilderment that some students would voluntarily choose to manage their dorms and cafeterias when they could be studying the folds of the brain, and I could explain that it takes all kinds to make a world, and some kids are interested in business management.
     But I skipped the walking tour and hot-footed over to the college’s art museum, a lovely building resembling an Italian villa, which reminded my younger boy of the Gardner in Boston. Later, I walked the dog on the quad, marveling at my good fortune: Now I get to visit colleges. With time growing short, I realized what I had to do — hurry over to the science building to pay my respects to Charles Martin Hall, tucked away on the second floor, his statue bolted to a one-ton block of granite, to discourage future wanderings, but decorated in sunglasses and a lei by some creative student carrying on the fine tradition of undergraduate derision.

         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 5, 2012

'To write is to err'

    

     With time on my hands, I thought I would catch up on my movie viewing. I don't remember ever actually watching any of the Marx Brothers, movies or, if I did,0 it was so long ago, in the distant mist of the 1970s, that I've forgotten. 

     So I started in on "Animal Crackers," but barely got a minute into the film when I had to stop and go back (I originally said, "rewind"). The spelling of the first name of the Groucho character, Captain Spaulding, in the credits was different than the spelling in the movie itself, "Jeffrey" versus "Geoffrey." The kind of continuity flaw you don't see in modern Hollywood movies very much. I wonder how many viewers notice.

     Errors are both trivial and important. Trivial in the sense that we all make them. When a loyal Sun-Times reader with basic math skills pointed out to me that the Chicago Tribune had botched some simple math trying to figure out what 10.5% of $10 might be — "Not that the Sun-Times would ever gloat..." he began — my impulse was not to rush it into print. 

     He then followed up with the Trib:

"Please check your arithmetic. Your editorial last Friday stated that "beginning Saturday, Chicagoans will pay $1.50
on every $10 in retail purchases. On August 1 the sales tax is going from 10.25% to 10.50%. 10.5% of $10.00 is $1.05 not $1.50. Whether this error is AI related, the work of a summer intern or just a simple mistake, the prominence of the Tribune's erroneous statement entitles the readers to an explanation."

    Of course the Trib neither ran the letter nor corrected the error.

    Still, my thinking was mostly: "There but for the grace of God ..." Particularly after I noticed that the $22 million Alex Giannoulias has in his campaign fund was inflated into $22 billion in Tuesday's Sun-Times. We all do it.

     But the growing world of AI slop and constant social media bilge raises the questions of how we approach the slurry of mistakes sprayed at us along with it. Obviously finding the creator and demanding some kind of fix isn't possible. Nor is the problem limited to anonymous content creators I've noticed that the more august source, the more reluctant they are to fix mistakes. I've given up notifying the New York Times of their occasional gaffes. They never respond.

     Can we become so comfortable with mistakes that we start to accept them? That the margin between fact and fiction, ever broadening in the Trump era, can grow so wide that nobody cares what's real and what's not, and we all live in our own dream worlds of delusion and fantasy. Maybe we already do. For instance, I'm convinced this thinking and veracity stuff is important.

     For writers, our duty is clear. We have to be fierce proponents for accuracy in our own work. An easy task for me as every mistake that's ever found its way into print still stings. Thirty years ago, on the opening page of "Complete and Utter Failure" I refer to a cornet, the instrument, but spelled it "coronet," like the crown. Thank God, the chapter was excerpted in Doubleday's company magazine, and a New England English professor pointed out to me in time for the typo to be corrected in the book itself.

      That's the weird dichotomy a writer must straddle: vigorously trying to eradicate mistakes while acknowledging that they're bound to happen no matter what. Or as I sometimes say: too right is two air.

     Whoops, what I meant was, "to write is to err."

Flashback 2010: Lots of innovation goes into housing inmates

     Two days on "Paradise Lost" worked surprisingly well. So when Facebook served up the memory of this column, built around "Prometheus Unbound," I couldn't help sharing it. What I remember most about it is I was doing weekly commentary with Bob Sirott on Channel 32 and I tried to get the station to send a film crew to Navy Pier. They sort of looked at me strangely and said "We don't do that kind of thing." Most of the studio cameras were automatic, and they were very few people around. A harbinger of things to come.

     Need a straitjacket? Humane Restraint of Waunakee, Wis., sells a handsome model in heavy-duty canvas with leather straps. List price $163.50.
     But don't call it a "straitjacket."
     "It's the 'humane jacket,' " corrected company rep Stacy Schultz.
     We were at Navy Pier, at the 140th annual Congress of Correction, the American Correctional Association's convention.
     Yes, 140th -- the group began in 1870 as the National Prison Association, the trade organization for the ever-burgeoning American incarceration industry.
     As I wandered the booths promoting one-piece steel toilets, digital imaging, heavy-duty locks and concertina wire, I had to adjust my vocabulary to meet industry trends. What I considered an electric fence, for instance, is now a "non-lethal electrified system."
     We don't think about jails much, and some products defy imagination, though once you see them, they make perfect sense.
     For instance, the Swintec Clear Cabinet Typewriter, which is just as it sounds: an electric typewriter made of clear plastic -- even the ribbon cartridge is transparent -- so prisoners can prepare their legal briefs without having a place to stash their shivs and drugs.
     Prisons are a $40 billion industry in the U.S. because we are addicted to punishment -- about one out of 100 adults in this country is currently in jail.
     "No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free," the Economist noted in a scolding cover story last week. "The rate of incarceration is a fifth of America's level in Britain, a ninth in Germany and a twelfth in Japan."
     None of this is ACA's fault -- their job isn't to decide how many prisoners should use Humane Restraint's No-Shank Toothbrush -- think of a plastic thimble with bristles. They just have to figure out how to safely and economically warehouse the millions upon millions of people we insist on sending them.
     The corrections conference offered five days of workshops, most on practical topics like "Upgrading Suicide Risk Assessment Practice" and "The North Dakota Department of Corrections' Better Results for Therapy of Hepatitis C."
     But one session Tuesday afternoon seemed out of place: "Prometheus Bound -- A Reading of the Greek Tragedy and Its Relation to Corrections."
     The workshop is the creation of Bryan Doerries, a New York writer and translator who founded Theater of War, a group that puts on readings of ancient Greek plays for soldiers, to get them talking about the war.
     He realized that prison guards are another group under constant pressure with little opportunity to discuss it, and that "Prometheus," the tale of a god chained to a rock, punished for stealing fire and giving it to humans, might provide such an opportunity.
     He brought the idea to George Lombardi, director of the state of Missouri's Department of Corrections, where last year "Prometheus" was performed four times for staff.
     "They got it," Lombardi said. "We do lots of stuff for offenders, all kinds of programs, but we don't have a whole lot for staff.
     "Prometheus has great relevance for those of us working in correctional institutions, particularly with very recalcitrant offenders."
     A quartet of Chicago actors from the Steppenwolf Theater read four scenes, with James Meredith particularly fine as Prometheus. A discussion followed, and participants -- most weren't turnkeys fresh from the cell block, but longtime administrators -- immediately offered ways the play relates to them.
     "He was resolute," said S. Elwood York Jr., director of pretrial services for Key West, Florida's 16th District, who heard in "Prometheus" the echo of boastful gang members. "His attitude was, 'I'm taking my lumps. I'm tough. I'm proud of what I did.' "
     Beforehand, I had thought Prometheus' pride would make the play less relevant -- he did something noble, in bringing fire to man. But the corrections workers said many criminals feel exactly the same way.
     "Sometimes we forget that the person who committed the offense is committed to the cause," said York, mentioning gang loyalty. "It's a different set of priorities."
     John Gannon, a forensic psychologist, called it "a kind of heroic disorder" -- a pride in their ability to absorb punishment, a failure to see the goal of correction.
     Bringing prisoners around to a different view is more important than ever.
     "With overcrowding, you get double bunks, triple bunks, 3,200 people in a space for 1,600," said Adrienne Poteat, a federal corrections official from Washington, D.C. "That's a lot of people, and what do you do with them?"
     What indeed? Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who oversees nearly 10,000 prisoners at any given time at the County Jail, is concerned with this issue, and I asked him about it.
      "Other than a very small segment of the jail population, they're all getting out," he said. "The question is: How would you want them to be when they get out? Better or worse than when they went in?"
     He said that except for a minority who are "damn close to evil," this "other, much, much, much larger group should be handled with far more flexibility" than we currently muster, focusing more on treating their problems with programs far less costly than prison.
     "You don't even have to get into the debate whether you're liberal, conservative, tough-on-crime -- let's talk about being fiscally smart, for once," Dart said. "We cannot continue to do it this way. Our grandchildren -- heck, our children -- will have nothing left."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 4, 2010 

'Complicit in our own seduction'

    While I am the sole writer, editor, and proprietor of this blog, I'm not the only person who helps make it a success. Sometimes I forget that. Not only are there occasional contributors, such as my pals who helped tide me over after surgery, but there are readers whose comments point out errors and add valuable perspective. 

     Being a little abashed Sunday at not having read "Paradise Lost," I invited any readers who have read the book to share their thoughts. 

     I was impressed by the quality of the replies, particularly this email, which I found both interesting and beautiful, and will share with you in full. 

     Linda Clarke-Borre writes:

     Best wishes for a swift recovery. At least you are in a leafy suburban paradise. You mentioned Paradise Lost. It’s epic, and I thought you might appreciate a couple lessons I derived from reading it before life happened- and I began to understand…
     It’s a Puritan Epic for our times. Milton gives the Devil the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Milton, the failed revolutionary, writes his own fury into the fallen angel. (In Christian writings the Devil’s name is Lucifer — which means angel of light. Milton seduces readers into admiring his elaborate lies, making us complicit in our own seduction). 

     Then there’s heartfelt humanity of Adam and Eve. Their fall isn’t about an apple. It’s encoded in the conversation between them. Eve isn’t seduced by fruit, but by the flattery of her own reflection. Adam cannot bear to lose her. He looks at her and says, “She is my other self,” and chooses her over God. It’s the writing that is so moving; Milton makes you feel the bones of their relationship. When they hold hands and walk into a world of thorns, they are us.

     The third “thread” running through the epic story is the blind poet’s prayer. At the very beginning, Milton invokes a muse, calling on the Holy Spirit to illumine him, because he is blind. He can’t see the page, and dictates this entire epic to his daughters at night, as he asks God to be his inward eye. So when he describes the light of Heaven or murky Hell, he isn’t painting pictures; he is remembering light. Here, the poem becomes an act of radical faith, not in certainty, but in the very act of seeking. He dares to “justify the ways of God to men,” but in the end, he doesn’t justify them logically. He justifies them aesthetically, through the exquisite beauty of his verse. The poem is a glorious paradox: a Puritan epic about disobedience, a political tract that transcends politics, a tragedy that ends with hope. Every time I read the final lines—“They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way”—I am still much moved, not because they are punished. But because they are together.

     I don't know about you, but that makes me want to read the book.

William Blake

'The mind is its own place'

Satan, Sin and Death, by Thomas Rowlandson. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     "F… F… F… J… J… J…"

     I don't remember much about seventh grade. But for some reason, I remember sitting in touch typing class, listening to a monotonous voice on a record slowly enunciate the letters to type, starting with the above, first with our left index finger then with our right. Maybe because it was so god-awful dull. We drilled and drilled, practiced and practiced, until it became hardwired into our limbic systems. I couldn't tell you where any of the letters are on a keyboard; my body just knows.

      Why did I take typing? My wife-to-be studiously avoided it, because she didn't want to end up a secretary. But I wanted to be a writer, and a writer needs to know how to type. About the same time I also used all my paper route money to buy a walnut roll top desk, because a writer also needs one of those. It wasn't quite as useful, but it's sitting right behind me now as I talk, and it does hold a lot of stuff.

     Frankly, it's not something I think much about. Flop my fingers onto the keyboard, start to write and what I want to say appears on the computer screen in front of me. Like magic. Until a few days ago when, already looking ahead to returning to work, and with my left arm and a sling for the next four weeks, I figured I better learn how to dictate.

     You would think, being a newspaper man, I would have dictated before. When I started, there were reporters, out in the field, collecting information, jotting down notes, and what were called "rewrite men." They would sit in the paper and take dictation. They never left. Heck, I used to joke that I never saw one particular rewrite man, Phillip J. O'Connor, stand up. Though I must have, because he was very tall. I might've dictated once or twice; I remember being at some event, clutching a payphone, composing lines into the receiver. But that seldom happened.

     I'll tell you what my first thought was after I decided I had to learn to dictate these columns. It's a little embarrassing, but I thought of John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost." Any idea why? That's right. Milton was blind and dictated the masterpiece to his daughters, composing it in his head, 40 lines at a time. 

     I've never read "Paradise Lost" – an astounding lapse, I know, for all the times I read "The Inferno." Let's say the opportunity never arose. Plus, I heard it was dull – maybe you guys can help here: has anybody read it? Liked it? 

     Sorry to toss the ball in your court. I wanted to read it now, while recovering from shoulder surgery – it seemed the ideal time. But I was deep into other books and I just couldn't muster the gumption to do it. Its reputation is not one of deep fascination. Though I shouldn't criticize because, as I said, I haven't read it. Yet.

     I do recall a quote from it that I use from time to time, one very apt in my present condition: in a sling, sleeping in a chair under a wool blanket, trying to heal, day by day: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Hell of heaven, a heaven of Hell."

     That has to be true, as anyone knows who has been in a good situation, only to see it sour due to some unforeseen circumstance, or managed to redeem a bad situation by approaching it with the right attitude. 

And you think that's a good thing?

     “Help yourself to some salad,“ said my wife, pushing an attractive bowl of feta, tomato and cucumber in my direction. I gazed at the pair of salad tongs tucked in the bowl, at the ready, for a two-handed person.
     "I can't help myself,“ I said. 
     We both laughed.
      Habit a stern taskmaster. Even in my second of six weeks of having my left arm in a sling, immobilized with a foam pillow against my chest, our default occasionally still is: I can do it myself. Which, to be fair, sometimes I can. And sometimes I can't.
     The good news is the surgery went well, the torn rotator cuff repaired, apparently, and I am off narcotics and on the mend. Sleeping in a chair in the TV room — 10 days and counting — is not the brutal hardship I had imagined, and quite necessary when twisting in my sleep could rip out the surgeon's handiwork. Don't want that.

     Plus, it's a really nice chair. A blue leather electric recliner. When we bought it, I worried it was a cross between a prop from "Wall-E" and a medical device for the infirm. Now I'm glad it is.

     My wife has been extraordinarily helpful and while I don't wanna speak for her, I'm fairly confident she'd agree that the process has been generally endurable, even pleasant, generally, at least more pleasant than I anticipated it would be. 

     There's been a surprising amount of laughter. The biggest laugh came on Tuesday, when I joined Edie outside for the morning dog walk and then was invigorated enough to actually go up to my office and give writing by dictation a try. Which is how I am doing this now. Weird for a touch typist since the 7th grade, and there are definite kinks in the system. I say "surely" and it types, stupidly, "Shirley." But it works well enough.

     Toward lunchtime, I walked downstairs. into the living room and kissed her on the head
     "I feel almost like my old self again,” I said
     “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she replied, not missing a beat.
     We both laughed so hard I almost felt lightheaded.