Books Week #4: "Get on the goddamn ship, Dad!"

     "Don't Give Up the Ship" (Ballantine, 2002) was my biggest bomb. Nobody reviewed it, to my memory, or if they did, it was with a shrug. It wasn't excerpted anywhere. My parents despised it. Which seemed fitting after the difficult voyage with my father on his old ship, where he had been a radio operator in the 1950s. Writing it, I figured: "I'm 40 years old. At some point I get to just say what happened." Still, with the passage of time, I'm proud of the book, and glad I went on the trip. Or as I tell myself whenever I am tempted to bemoan the whole thing: "How bad could an experience really be where someone pays you $50,000 and you end up in Venice?" 

     The pier was hectic with a festive, summer camp sort of commotion, busy with families, girlfriends, boyfriends, and cadets—trim teens in bright white shirts and dark navy pants, their "salt-and-pepper" uniforms. They towered over their parents. Mothers held bunches of balloons. Fathers lugged big portable coolers, cases of soda, cases of juice. I worried that we were unprepared—we had no juice—and puzzled over the balloons. At least a dozen families had brought bunches of them. They seemed an odd, child's birthday party touch.
     My father stopped short and I ran thud into him, like a vaudeville act. Disentangling ourselves and our rolling luggage, I wondered, Is this how it's going to be? Frick and Frack? I looked around to see if anybody had noticed.

  Turning onto Dock 19, where the ship was tied up, I saw that the pier was named for A.F. Olivet, the no-nonsense captain during my father's cruises. I paused to make note of that, and of the dinghies moored under a protective wooden roof leading to the ship. They had bold, forward-straining names:  Courageous, Freedom, America, Magic.
     Looking up, I saw that my father, the good New Yorker, had kept walking. I called to him—"Dad! Wait!"—and he turned, "I'll go slow," he shouted back. But he didn't go slow. He strode toward the ship. I hurried after him, the luggage wheels humming against the concrete.
     I got alongside the ship, almost to the gangway, just in time to see him go up without me, lugging his suitcase, a wide smile spread across his face. He said something pleasant to the officer at the top of the gangway, and disappeared inside the Empire State. I stood on the pier a moment, shocked, then raced after him, hefting my suitcase in both hands and clattering up the awkward low metal steps. After months of arranging—the conversation, the phone calls, the formal letters, the visits—I had figured that our boarding the ship would be an obvious moment of high drama: an exchange of loving glances, a pat on the back, a shy filial smile, a fatherly ruffled of the hair, a deep breath and up we go together, arms linked. Ta-daaaaaah!
     Not in this life.
     "What's your hurry, sailor? I hissed, out of breath, catching up to him at the cabin, C1, marked by a note card reading MR. STIENBURG SR. and MR. STIENBURG JR.
     He offered this explanation: he wanted to get his suitcase aboard before the tide came in, raising the angle of the gangway, making it more difficult to walk up. He actually said this. Stunned, I turned away, puzzling whether his excuse was a mountainous lie or, worse, a sincere delusion.

Bold adventurers

     I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: how was I going to do this? Six weeks with my father. A month at sea, then ten days in Italy. We'd kill each other. Or I'd kill him. Or myself. Or he'd kill me. One way or another, somebody was going to be killed.
    Then the anger, a hot fluid at the back of my brain, drained away, and I almost laughed — the tide, so ridiculous — and I remembered that, up to this moment, I had been genuinely worried my father wouldn't get on the ship at all. That despite his promise, when the moment finally came, he would freeze up in the gangway. Many times I had imagined, not entirely without pleasure, him grasping the handrails, white knuckled, rigid, me behind him, ramming the heel of my hand into the small of his back, forcing him forward, "get on the goddamn ship, Dad!"
     That had been the preconception. The reality was 180 degrees opposite. Instead of hanging back, fearful, needing a shove, he had raced ahead, excited, forgetting all about me. Realizing this shocked away the anger. It struck me that, all all these years, I didn't know my father at all. Not a bit.

Book Week #3: "Do you have any identification?"

     "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," true to its name, was a pain in the ass. My long-time editor and, I imagined, friend, went our separate ways because of it. The 1996 collection of 26 essays about the frustrations of life only received a few, largely dismissive reviews.  It didn't sell that well, though "F is for Fat" was excerpted in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, which was a consolation prize.  The chapters I most enjoyed were those panning Disney, Elvis and UFO fanatics, but the beginning of the "J is for Journalism" chapter resonates, particularly given my post last week on trying to do a story about the Chicago Public Schools. It never ends. 

     Maya Angelou is filled with joie de vivre. She strides onto the podium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel and begins to sing. "I shall not be moved. I shall not be moved. Just like the tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
    Her voice is deep and strong. She then begins to talk, telling stories, reciting her poetry. You are powerful, she tells her audience. You are beautiful.
    The crowd eats it up. They roar, these two thousand women attending a national women's conference. They applaud. 

    Sitting in the back, hunched in a dark corner of the huge ballroom, I scribble a few of Angelou's more succinct comments onto a narrow pad. I didn't want to come here—had felt that sinking sensation I get when given an assignment I consider to be a dog. But now that she's up there, singing, reading, speaking, laughing, the whole process is so skilled, so entertaining and, yes, so uplifting, that I am having a good time.
    Maya Angelou is finished. She is escorted from the stage. The two thousand women finish clapping and make for the exists. I have one more task. Journalism has conventions as strict as kabuki, and a story of this sort, the "Famous poet speaks here" story, must end with a blurt of audience reaction: "It was great," said Jane Doe, dabbing a tear form her eye. "I greatly enjoyed the greatness of the great Maya Angelou."
     I pick  a women at random—somebody pausing, a straggler from the herd. "Hi, I'm Neil Steinberg," I say. "I'm a reporter from the Sun-Times. I'm writing a story about Maya Angelou's speech and I wonder what you thought of it?"
     She flees without a word, just turns and rushes away, as if I'm a panhandler. So does the second woman I ask. This leaves me frustrated and a little angry. There is an inverse law in reporting—the more benign the information you are seeking, the more difficult it will be to get. When I stopped hookers on Cicero Avenue, every single one, without exception, told me anything I wanted to know—about their neglected kids, their raging drug habits, how much money they charge for sex.
     But these professional women at the Hyatt don't want to talk. I have no idea why. Overeducation? They know what happened to outspoken people during McCarthyism. Prudence? They see the villains who unwisely consent to be grilled like burgers by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" every Sunday, indicting themselves, babbling, ruined. Professionalism? They are trained not to speak to the media—"Call public affairs, they'll answer your questions."
     Or maybe they're just struck dumb by Maya Angelou's eloquence. The third woman I approach and ask about the speech doesn't run away, but she doesn't answer either. She just stares at me, with the startled expression a frog must give a swooping raptor. So much for Angelou's brave words about romance and beauty and power.
    There is a pause, the woman and I looking at each other. Then I do something I haven't done before or since in my entire professional career. I raise my hand into the gap between us and snap my fingers three times in front of her face.
     "Hel-lo!" I say, and she unfreezes, utters a syllable or two, then runs away.
    That's it. I figure, I'll do without the quote, or use the woman's monosyllable. I tried, which is the important thing in journalism.
     Outside, a lovely autumn day. I stroll west on Wacker Drive, toward the newspaper. On a corner I encounter a knot of three women, talking to each other, still holding programs from the conference. Okay, I decide, the full Boy Scout try I whip out my notebook, uncap a pen, present myself to the group and utter my burning question. There is a pause.
     "Do you have any identification?" one of the women asks. 

Book Week #2: "There is no alternative but death and failure."

     I'm on vacation this week. So, hoping to keep you occupied, I'm running brief excerpts from my seven published books and, on the last day, a glimpse at my upcoming book. This is from "Complete & Utter Failure," published by Doubleday in 1994, from the chapter on bad timing. 

     The most unambiguous cases of bad timing are those people brushed aside by what English pundit Clive James has called "the Fonck Factor." Rene Fonck was a French aviator pushing hard int he mid-1920s to be the first person to fly from New York to Paris nonstop, thus claiming a $25,000 prize offered by businessman Raymond Orteig.
      Fonck was confident the prize was his. He convinced aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky to provide a S-35 triple-engine airplane—the most advanced plane at the time and, at $105,000, also the most expensive. Since such an epic flight deserved a certain degree of magnificence, the interior of the plane was beautified by an interior decorator, who added panels of Spanish leather and mahogany walls so that it resembled "a tastefully furnished drawing room." Fonck ignored Sikorsky's plea that the aircraft first be thoroughly stress-tested. With a takeoff weight of 28,000 pounds due to the extra fuel, 10,000 pounds past its design maximum, a stress test might have been a good idea. To make matters worse, the plane was loaded down with all sorts of optimistic tokens, from a bouquet of orchids for the French President's wife to a full-course celebration dinner for six, prepared at a New York hotel and packed in vacuum containers so it would still be hot when consumed at the Crillon in Paris. Moments before the departure from Roosevelt Field, on the cold, gray dawn on September 21, 1926, Fonck was handed yet another gift from a well-wisher. He "lifted it in his hand to test the weight, and with a rueful look placed it aboard the already overloaded plane," according to the New York Times report the next day.....
     Literally burdened with the expectations of success, the plane never became airborne. Its landing gear collapses during take-off, and the plane cartwheeled into a gully at the end of the field and burst into flames. The plane's mechanic and radio operator were killed. Fonck and his navigator survived. Later, Fonck summed up the rash by uttering this wrenching expression of Gallic grief, "It is the fortune of the air," and immediately vowed to make the attempt again.
    Alas for the gallant Fonck, the following spring, on May 20-21, 1927, a 25-year-old former airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh, flying a stripped-down single-engine plane (pilots preferred those two- and three-engine planes in case one of the engines died in the middle of the Atlantic; Lindbergh was thinking of saving fuel), alone without a crew, crossed the Atlantic in 33 hours, 30 minutes. At times holding his eyes open with his thumbs, or hanging his head out the window to be revived by the icy air, Lindbergh also reported that he kept himself awake by repeating "There's no alternative but death and failure" over and over again.
     Lindbergh got the fame and fortune. Fonck got, well, Foncked.

Book Week #2: "Hi, I'm a stranger writing a book on failure..."

     Writers, like people in general, inflate their own significance, so I try to emphasize my complete lack of impact on the culture around me, since it happens to be true. The closest thing I ever did to being an innovator of anything was the "Shiver like rhesus monkeys" chapter of Complete & Utter Failure, which followed a girl through a year of the National Spelling Bee. Myna Goldberg was inspired by it to write "Bee Season," so she says in the book's acknowledgments, which kicked off the whole bee-as-literature genre, with the movies and plays and such that followed, all of which did better than my book, although it was reviewed, well, in the Washington Post, and landed me on "Oprah," so I shouldn't complain either.

     My plan was to pick someone who had competed in the nationals the previous year, on the assumption that she had to be good to have gotten that far once and, having whiffed victory, would redouble her efforts this year.
     I settled on a twelve-year old girl named Sruti Nadimpalli, basically because she lived close to Chicago and her last name did not present the phone book problems implicit in finding Gary Lee, the other local speller who had made it to the nationals the year before.
     Even as I was leaving a message at the Nadimpalli house, I was nervous about explaining precisely what I had in mind. I couldn't lie and say I wanted to track Sruti's triumphant return to the nationals, culminating in victory this time.
    But I couldn't say I wanted to document her second failure on the national stage either, to observe her humiliation and dissect it for my own particular purposes. "Hi! I'm a stranger writing a book on failure, and thought that I'd devote seventy-five pages to your young daughter, provided you give me access to her...."
     What then to tell the mom? In my mind, I had conjured up a wildly protective, fictional mother for Sruti, someone who would share her daughter's bee compulsion. A fearsome image who would probably turn me down cold. And then what?
     Even at the moment we were on the phone together—up to the point when Sruti's mother, in her charming, lilting accent, asked "And what is this book about?"— I wasn't sure what to say. Naturally, I fudged. I said that the book was about "success and failure," then slowly peeled away the success part.
   As always, the reality was more interesting than what I had imagined before the fact. Dr. Nadimpalli didn't need me to soft-pedal at all—she quickly grasped, and even seemed to embrace, the idea of the spelling bee as a failure metaphor, and cheerfully agreed to present my proposal to her daughter. A week later I was at their home.

Photo atop blog: Tom Mansfield, a guard at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, standing before "Homage to Uccello #5" by Boston artist Anna Hepler.

Book Week #1: "I would sooner send my son to hell than send him to Yale."

Carry A. Nation at Yale

      I'm taking a break for the next week. And while my wife would respect me more, I believe, if I just left the blog blank—"'Every goddamn day' doesn't mean you have to post every goddamn day," as she so sensibly puts it—the truth is some tiny handful of people expect something new here every day, and by gum, I don't want to disappoint them. It's a disappointing enough world as it is without my adding to the general swamp of let-down. Besides, I hate to stop now. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said, but it's my hobgoblin, and I'm sticking with it. 
     So since I have eight days to fill, and have written eight books, I'm going to run an excerpt each day from each of my books, secure in the knowledge that it'll be new to most people. I thought of tying it in somehow with Banned Books which was last week. But none of my books were ever banned, unfortunately, as that's a boon to sales, something would be censors never get their heads around. I'll include a link where you can buy the book, but as most are out-of-print, it's a pure service, since the money won't go to me, and you can check them out of the library too, if you are interested.
     The first excerpt, from "If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks," which came out in 1992, is perhaps my favorite episode in the book:

     Like most collegians, then and now, Yale students at the turn of the last century liked to drink and have a good time. In fact, students at Yale had a special reputation for living the high life. "I would sooner send my son to hell," a minister's wife said at the time, "than send him to Yale."
     In 1901, a group of eight party-happy friends got together, secured four rooms at Fayerweather Hall—three for study and sleeping and the fourth as a sort of clubhouse—and dubbed themselves the "Jolly Eight."
     A fellow student, a junior not in the Jolly Eight but feeling "a real or fanciful grievance" against one of its members, sat down on February 20, 1902 and typed out a letter to hatchet-wielding saloon-busting temperance crusader Carry A. Nation, describing the club as a "party of Yale men who have banded together to promote the cause of total abstinence," calling itself the Jolly Eight "to show that men may lead consistent and yet cheerful lives." He asked for words of counsel and encouragement from Nation.
     A short time later, the group received a letter and several autographed photographs of Nation, shown standing with an open Bible in one hand an upraised hatchet in the other. The author of the letter was found out and confronted. He confessed his guilt, the Jolly Eight let him off with stern threats. It was assumed the prank had run its course.

   They had seriously underestimated Nation, who was capitalizing on her career breaking apart saloons by lecturing on the carnival circuit and even in burlesque houses, taking donation and hawking her little souvenir hatchets. Her zeal had made her something of a national joke.
     On September 29, 1902, the letter-writing Yalie, whose name has been shielded from posterity, was walking on the campus when a fellow student ran up and informed him that Carry Nation was waiting to see him in the rooms of the Jolly Eight. He assumed the club was getting its revenge for the letter—"It was preposterous," explained an eyewitness narrative of the event, published in 1931 in the Yale Daily News. "Carry Nation had only occasionally been even read of, demolishing some saloon in distant states." But his smugness dissolved into terror when he discovered the somber Nation seated in the center of the Jolly Eight's Fayerweather suite.
      Nation, who was not known for her savvy, suspected nothing. She had spoken several times on campus, years before, and soon was lecturing a hasty gathering of the Jolly Eight and their guests on the vices of drinking and smoking, not to mention short skirts and foreign foods. Her audience was respectful, though many had to bite their lips to force back a smile. 
      "Occasionally a man would as decorously as possible bolt out of the room to explode in laughter in the entry and then return, composed," the Daily News said.
     Those in attendance reported that Nation's smiling face clouded into an angry frown when she noticed a well-filled pipe rack hanging over the fireplace. But some quick-thinking "Eight" explained that the pipes were trophies given up by smokers persuaded to abandon the vice by their organization.
     "It was a reply worthy of a degree in itself," noted the history, and Nation bought it.
     Nation then announced she would speak from the steps of Osborn Hall at 5 p.m. In the meantime, she went to visit friends in New Haven and to harangue a dean for serving champagne sauce in Yale commons.
     If it may seem odd that Nation was not informed by someone that her host on campus was a drinking club, remember that Nation was known for her attacks on saloons. The driving force behind keeping her deluded was a general desire to get her out of town before she could turn on Yale's beloved tap houses.
     "The deception must be continued for should Mrs. Nation learn the truth a hatchet crusade would be inevitable and would probably be directed upon Mory's where near-innocent tobies of ale attended upon surpassing rarebits and English mutton chops," reasoned the narrative. "The newspapers, always eager to distort with sensationalism any unfortunate mention of Yale men, would revel in the story of such an attack and, to the unknowing, make Yale appear to be an inebriate's asylum."
    At 5 p.m., Nation mounted the steps of Osborn Hall, a grandiose structure with soaring archways. she was robustly cheered and members of the glee club, scattered throughout the audience, led the crowd in singing "Good Mornin' Carry."
     It was a wild, stormy encounter, with Nation trying to deliver her temperance message amidst the constant interruptions of cheers and increasingly double-entendre songs from the crowd (such as "Down with King Alcohol," which pleased Nation until the part of the drinking melody where the singers make the down-the-hatch gesture). 
     Finally, after about an hour, during which Nation managed to have some respectful silence by brandishing her bible aloft, the songs grew more blatantly inebriate, the catcalls more unabashed, and she beat a hasty retreat.
     The prank would have just been an amusing episode had it ended there. But it didn't. Invigorated by the day's events, eight students—it is unclear whether these were the Jolly Eight or another group from the Yale Record—grabbed a camera and flash apparatus and headed for Nation's room at the New Haven House.
    Waiting until Nation had finished selling her little hatchets (with DEATH TO RUM emblazoned on the handles) to a crowd in the hall, the men interviewed Nation about her views on prohibition and requested she pose for a photograph. 
     In 1902, taking a photograph after nightfall was a complicated process. It involved extinguishing all the lights, exposing a photographic plate in darkness, igniting flash power, then covering the plate before turning the lights back on.
     Nation was handed a glass of water. It was explained to her that she would be photographed toasting to temperance with life's essential liquid. The eight students took the places around her. One held another glass of water, to toast with, but he others were empty-handed.
     Empty-handed, that is, until the lights went out. In the momentary darkness, the Yalie to Nation's right produced a large beer stein, and the others reached for concealed props and arranged themselves around the temperance leader in a tableau the Daily News compared to a "Bacchanalian orgy." 
     ...Later, [the photographer] doctored the second photograph to add a cigarette in Nation's hand and a foamy head on the beer stein. It looks as if Nation has just blown a trio of perfect smoke rings to the delight of her drinking buddies....
    To rub in the insult, the real Yale Record published the photo on October 1, 1902, adding the caption: 'I have always taken mine straight,' she said, laughing."
      One can't help but wonder if Nation ever caught on to how much she had been ridiculed during her day at Yale. It appears likely she did. In her 1908 autobiography, Nation displays herself as a woman quite aware that she was taken for a fool in New Haven. Her chapter on college life is titled "The Vices of Colleges, Especially Yale."

Stuff happens

 

     Did Jeb Bush really say what the Washington Post reports him saying, in regard to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon?

     "We're in a difficult time in our country and I don't think that more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's just, it's very sad to see. But I resist the notion -- and I did, I had this, this challenge as governor, because we have, look, stuff happens, there's always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

    Stuff happens? Really? Isn't that what his brother said in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005? Oh well, what's a guy to do? It's not as if the president can help or anything. Donald Trump says some crazy, opera buffo stuff, but at least he wants to be president to do things. I expected more of Jeb Bush, as the adult in the room, than shrugging, sorry-not-my-table indifference to the nation's woes. If it were a big business in trouble, he'd suddenly find himself motivated. 

    "Stuff happens" is going to haunt him, during the brief period he is a presidential contender in 2015, assuming it isn't over already.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, Hive. You're so smart. You're so good — win every time, you do. 
     Score: Hive: a bazillion; Neil: zip.
     Okay, smartypants (or should that be "smartypantses"? Hmmm, thoughts? Because "pants" already has an....)
     Sorry, back to the matter at hand. So where's this guy? I'm not going to give you any clues at all. None whatsoever. Somewhere in Chicago. Well, one clue then. Probably not a synagogue, since Jews are forbidden from decorating their sanctuaries with human images, though we don't make the big honking deal about that other religions do, and I will name no names. You know who you are.
     That's two. Two clues. But no more.
     Enough. Time's tight. I've going to be taking a week off at the paper. My wife would respect me more if I left the next eight days blank here, but I'm not going to do that to you. Or me; I do have my reputation to consider. Instead I'm going to kick off "Book Week" tomorrow, featuring excerpts from the seven books I've written and, on the eighth day, a first glimpse at my next book. 
     I was going to loosely tie it into Banned Book Week last week, though none of my books have been banned, alas, because that's great publicity. Not incendiary enough, I guess. And my books, because I have seven published and one on the way.
     Yes, eight days is more than a week, technically, for you sticklers, no need to point out the obvious, though everybody else does. Publishing being what it is, you have to play with the conventions a bit. A little added value.
     Post your guesses below. Winner gets one of my superfine 2015 blog posters, unless you've already won that, and then we'll find something else for you. Have fun, good luck, blah, blah blah, ba blahbitty-blah.
    Boy, I need that vacation.