Never think about hot-from-the-oven bagels

     Certain food is so good that you cannot seek it out on your own volition. You must not even allow yourself to think about it, but wait to be prompted by others.
     Lou Malnati’s pizza comes to mind. I live a three-minute walk from the Northbrook branch. But for 17 years I have never, ever, said, "Let's get a Lou Malnati’s pizza." Because if I let myself to say that, even once, I would say it every day, and then where would I be?
     As it is, I order it plenty, usually because my older son is home, and requires being greeted with Lou Malnati’s on his first day back. It's tradition. 
     However. He was just here in November, to celebrate Thanksgiving and attend "”Walkure,” though not in that order of significance. So when he came home for Christmas break, rather than order Lou Mitchell's, we decided to shake it up, and go to Pequod's, whose nearly-burnt deep dish is almost as good as the etherial Burt's Pizza.
     As it happens, Pequod's screwed up our order—they gave our pizza to another table, who discovered it wasn't theirs by beginning to eat it. After half an hour we were informed. That wouldn't have bothered us—things happen, particularly in restaurants. We were talking, catching up, having fun—but what annoyed us is that the waitress never came over to either bring the bad news or apologize. She sent the manager to do it for her, and never returned to our table for the next hour. I considered that bad form, and Pequod's dropped out of my heart—I decided to satisfy my desire for caramelized deep dish at Burt's and, should I ever feel tempted to go for a change of pace, to resist that temptation and still go to Burt's.
     But that isn't what this about. What this is about is what happened afterward. We had to go to Northwestern to pick up some paperwork for my younger son. On the way, it was suggested that we stop by New York Bagel & Bialy, 4714 Touhy in Lincolnwood, to pick up bagels for breakfast the next morning. 
     We did, ordering a variety. When I received the bag, I felt that some were still warm. Very warm. Fresh from the oven. Hot. 
     Of course they were. New York Bagel & Bialy is open 24 hours a day. The bagel place that never sleeps. There's always something fresh from the oven. We immediately divvied up an everything bagel. We didn't eat much—we had just had pizza and salad and fried mushrooms remember. 
    So we each had a quarter bagel. Just a couple bites. But that was enough. Hot. Fresh. Fantastic. The best damn thing I'd eaten in a long time.
     "Why don't we come here more often for fresh-from-the-oven bagels?" one of the boys asked. 
     A reasonable question. I had the answer.
    "If we allowed ourselves to do that," I said. "It would be all we'd ever do."

Republicans and the death of truth

     Donald Trump is not the only politician who can let his mouth fall open and utter a lie so bald it takes your breath away. 

     There is also Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

     Did you hear his remark at the late-night press conference celebrating Congress closing in on birthing the GOP's horrendous and obscene tax reform bill? This giveaway to the wealthy, the pillage of middle and lower income America that it's been preparing in secret and ramming through the House and Senate?
    McConnell said:

     "After eight straight years of slow growth and under-performance, America is ready to take off."  

     Words fail me. Which doesn't happen much as a writer. Sincerely, they do. So instead I am going to share a graphic. This is the stock market under Barack Obama's administration, with Trump's tacked on the end:

    Am I the only person who remembers the economy Obama inherited in January, 2009? The banks and financial service companies imploding? The car industry about to collapse? I understand partisanship, and it is nothing new. But this is the death of truth. This is disease. This is mendacity so extreme it is alien to both our country's past and its future. Yet people believe it. Lying Republicans have joined hands with a shameless right wing media to create a sector of the electorate that will believe anything, accept any premise, that lives on fantasies and delusions and conspiracy theories. That runs on malice. The kind of partisan blindness we are used to reading about in dystopian fiction. Black is white. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This is our future unless patriotic Americans who value the freedom of truth find a way to stop it.

As Roy Moore rides off into the sunset, a reminder: no costumes

Sir John Floyd on Horseback, by Richard Westall (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    
     Roy Moore lost Alabama's special senate race a little over a week ago, but he already seems like ancient history, a sepia figure out of a tin-type: the cowboy-hat-wearing, hang-the-1o-Commandments-high judge, praised by a supporter introducing him at a campaign rally for refusing to have sex with child prostitutes in a Vietnam brothel.
     Because that's the gold standard now.
     Before we let Moore ride off in to the sunset ... where do these guys go? I picture some Failed Republican Candidate Saloon, with Alan Keyes playing honky tonk piano and Al Salvi behind the bar.
     As Moore goes wherever he's bound—back to the 19th century from whence he came, perhaps—I'd like to make an observation that might have flown past people in the general hoopla that met his defeat.
     You might have missed the gales of ridicule Moore faced for riding his horse Sassy to the polls. (Is Alabama the frontier? I don't think of the state as being built on horsemanship. I guess Moore couldn't go to the polls riding piggyback on the shoulders of a slave. Maybe an aid talked him out of it.)
     He held the reins wrong—in both hands. The horse looked like it hated him. His legs stuck out awkwardly. The Internet and late-night television echoed with ridicule.
     "Can we vote for the horse?" Jimmy Fallon asked.
     There is a lesson here. Not for Moore—he'll never run again, please God. But Illinois is a stateful of politicians, and there is a clear, unabiguous message here:
     No costumes.

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Avert your eyes, idiot

Diana and Actaeon—Diana Surprised at her Bath, by Camile Corot (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    "It is no crime," Ovid writes. "To lose your way in a dark wood." 

    Gosh that's familiar. No wonder Dante places Ovid among the quartet of classical poets he encounters soon after getting lost in his own dark wood and blundering into Hell. Homer, Horace and Lucan are the other three. A little nod for just how much he, ah, borrows from Metamorphoses.
     Not to minimize that moment—I feel it's where modern literature begins. The poets welcome Dante—"Hey look, it's Dante!"—and they chat, though Dante turns to the reader and says, in essence, "I'm not going to bore you with what we talked about: poetic stuff."
     I had pulled down "Tales from Ovid"—translated by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband—because I read, on my friend Didier Thys's Facebook page, that the city council in Rome last Thursday revoked Ovid's exile, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of his death. 
     Here I thought the Chicago City Council had a monopoly on empty symbolic legislation. The temptation is to conjure up some Italian Ed Burke—Edwardo Burkioni—suitcoat over his shoulders, one hand wrapped around an elbow, the other gesturing with a twist of the wrist as he rises in the assembly to correct the wrong committed against Ovid, punishment for what the Roman poet enigmatically referred to as "a poem and a mistake."
    A little late.
    Still, nobody should complain about anything that nudges us back to the ancients. The "lose your way in dark wood" line was in the opening of Actaeon—I had marked it with a Post-It note during a previous read, for reasons mysterious, probably the Dante echo.
    As so often happens in classical literature, the tale was particularly apt for our moment. Actaeon is a hunter. The day's hunt over, he heads towards his palace, becomes lost, and stumbles into a grove sacred to Diana, goddess of the hunt, who—whoops!—at that very moment is being bathed by her nymphs after her own long day of supervising all hunts everywhere.
    "Steered by pitiless fate" Actaeon comes upon the clearing, the pool, the bathing goddess, and is set upon by her attendants.

Screaming at him in a commotion of water.
And as his eyes adjusted, he saw they were naked,
Beating their breasts they screamed at him.

And he saw they were crowding together
To hide something from him. He stared harder.
Those nymphs could not conceal Diana's whiteness 

The tallest barely reached her navel. Actaeon
Stared at the goddess, who stared at him...

    Let's just say ... spoiler alert! ... that Diana does not take this intrusion well. Her weapons not at hand, the goddess turns Actaeon into a stag. He leaps away, straight into the slavering jaws of his well-trained hunting hounds. 

His own hounds. He tried to cry out:
"I am Actaeon—remember your master,"
But his tongue lolled wordless, while the air

Belabored his ears with hounds' voices... 

        Ironic, huh? Kinda like assorted movie and media moguls being torn apart by the very  24-hour-a-day publicity machine they helped create. Not that their crimes are as innocent as Actaeon's. But then there's a lot of random punishment tossed out in ancient times. Think of Noah's son, Ham, whose progeny gets cursed forever because he happened to notice his father reeling around drunk and naked in his tent.  At least the modern men who get lost in a dark wood and end up getting it in the neck have earned their punishment, to a greater or lesser degree. Progress!
    And the moral of the story is: if you blunder into the wrong glade, avert your eyes, idiot. 

          

Donald Trump doesn't like to be investigated; neither did Al Capone

     

     "What the hell is going on in Chicago?" Donald Trump asked a group of law enforcement officers at the FBI Academy on Friday. "What the hell's happening there?"
     Glad you asked, Mr. President.
     What's happening here is that murders skyrocketed in big cities in the United States in 2016 and Chicago is a big city in the United States.
     A 59 percent jump over the year before. Quite a lot, though other cities were worse—San Antonio jumped 61 percent.
     Which means what? You can't judge anything with a statistic as narrow as one year's increase over another. On that scale, Orlando would be the Murder Capital of America, with 169 percent increase in 2016 over 2015, because of the Pulse nightclub massacre. Crime in Chicago is generally down.
     If you look at a more significant statistic, the murder rate—the number of people killed per 100,000 residents—Chicago is behind St. Louis and Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans, Cleveland and Newark and Memphis.
     Not that it matters to the president. Trump doesn't keep bringing up Chicago to illustrate the knotty problem of urban crime, but to kick something at the headquarters of the FBI, an organization he had been kicking hard earlier that morning.

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Can't wait for these "handymen" forever

      James Thurber was blind, nearly. His increasingly sightlessness gave him a very keen ear for language. He loved word games and odd accents, and had a wonderful smooth rhythm to his writing.
     Nowhere is this on greater display than in his short story, "The Black Magic of Barney Haller," a seemingly simple tale of a Swedish handyman. 
     "Barney is my hired man," Thurber explains. "He is strong and amiable, sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily competent."
      So far, so good, the image of the capable helper that any ham-handed wordsmith would covet. 
    There's more, however.
    "But he is also eerie: he trafficks with the devil."
    As evidence of this, Thurber offers the obscure remarks Haller is always saying, starting, during a thunderstorm, "Once I see dis boat come down de rock."
     The phrase plays to Thurber's darker fears.
     "It is phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread," he writes. "Boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood, old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight."
     It is the beauty of the last part of that sentence—"old regrets and dreams in the form of Luna moths fluttering against the window at midnight"—and others like it that lodge Thurber under your skin.
     Well, my skin anyway.
     In the story, which perfectly captures lazy summer evenings in an old country house, Thurber figures out what that particular phrase means—"a bolt coming down the lighting rod on the house; a commonplace, an utterly natural thing."
      I won't recapitulate the entire story. It isn't online, alas, but it's in The Thurber Carnival, which Amazon will sell you for two dollars, and you should own if you don't already.
     I think of Barney Haller whenever my wife, with occult powers of her own, tries to summon up a handyman. There will be some significant task around our 110-year-old house that needs doing, and she will muse idly that we should get a handyman to do it. 
    In years past I might snap, "Handyman? What handyman? Find him! There are no handymen."
     We have, in the past, hired skilled men to do various tasks. But they always do a bit of work then vanish, irretrievable. Part of my annoyance is based on that, part based on the fact that my wife is wishing for these supposed handy men because she is convinced that I am unable to do much of anything when it comes to home repair. Even though I can.
     I'll never forget her shock, almost anger, when she came home to find I had installed a pair of light fixtures in the boys' rooms—another task for the supposed handyman or the even-more elusive "electrician."
     "Well, mister, I hope you popped the circuit breakers first," she said, referring to the switches in the basement controlling power to the various parts of the house.
     "If I didn't pop the circuit breaker," I said, evenly. "I'd be dead."
      Anyway, after a decade or so of hearing my wife muse about someday getting a handyman to put in a linen closet in an old closet on our third floor, I girded my loins, took the first week of December off as vacation from work and tackled the job myself. 
     Now a week might seem like a lot for a closet, but I am, as my wife would point out, not accustomed to this kind of thing. I have to work slowly, methodically, to keep from screwing up, and then to fix the screw-ups I manage despite being careful.
     It took a day to clean the lathe and dust and to chip out obstructive strips of plaster with a hammer and cold chisel then clean some more. Then go to Home Depot and buy bead board, shelving, industrial glue and trim. Then I had to build an inner box to hold the bead board, the second day, and put the bead board up the third day, then paint it and glue the trim in. The whole thing actually took six days—I had to go downtown for a lunch one day—the same time it took God to create the world.
     But God has more experience with this sort of thing, supposedly.
     It came out fine; I wish I had thought to snap a photo of it beforehand, but setting forth on the project it did not strike me as being in the Realm of Endeavors One Writes Blog Posts About.
     My wife was suitably delighted—exclaiming "Perfect!" again and again. That was good. And I was oddly pleased to have spent a week's vacation building a linen closet. That said, I'd still have preferred a handyman do it while I relaxed. Were such people available outside of fiction, that is.

Gun control starts in your own house

     The 5th anniversary of the Sandy Hook slaughter caught me off guard Thursday. In recent years, I've pretty much stopped reacting to these ever-more-common tragedies. What's the point? Why bother? Nothing ever happens.

     But I was curious as to what I wrote in the wake of Sandy Hook, and came up with this. It stands up to the half decade test, and seems a concept seldom raised, and worth raising again. At least it's about something that can actually occur. 

     Enough, people are saying, again, this time in the wake of Friday's horrific school massacre in Connecticut.
     We have to DO something.
     Well yes, doing something would be nice. Though you have to pause a moment first to contemplate a belief system that requires 20 dead children before it snaps to attention.
     Give credit to advocates of gun rights. They know what they believe. They believed it Thursday. They believe it today.
     They put their money where their mouths are, their boots both on the ground and firmly on the necks of their representatives. They pull out their wallets and slap them on the table.
     Give them our grudging respect. No need of a slaughter to stir them to action. In fact, slaughter doesn't stir them at all, except to read aloud the script in their hand that says: "More guns."
     A few days before this happened, after the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanded that Illinois join the rest of the nation and craft a concealed carry law, I had an idea. My idea was: I gotta buy a gun. Not for protection - I live in Northbrook. I take Metra. The last time I felt myself physically threatened was . . . umm . . . never.
     But as a columnist, I thought it would be interesting to carry a gun around. As a stunt. Buy the gun, take the course, conceal and carry. See what happens.
     I floated this idea by my wife. Her eyes narrowed.
     "Not in my house," she said, severely. I explained what a sharp column it would be. Front-page stuff! It wouldn't be forever; I could sell the gun back. She didn't care a bleep what I had in mind: no gun. Period.
     Because guns are dangerous.
     To be honest, I felt thwarted. But I didn't push—we had months to figure this out. Then Friday happened. Twenty children shot down. As horrifying as it was, our fellow Americans buffed the horror to a hallucinatory sheen. The shootings are an Obama conspiracy to push gun control! This illustrates the urgent need to end gun-free zones! If only those teachers were armed . . .
     Shades of the offensive fantasy that — since I'm Jewish — gun nuts feel obligated to send to me, floating the notion that had only the Jews of Europe been armed before World War II then, golly, the Holocaust would never have happened.
     Pretty to think so.
     But the Polish Army was armed. The French Army was armed too. Didn't help them much. Guns have their uses, but if they were the magic totems of protection that gun advocates seem to believe they are, then we'd all live in a very, very safe country.
     And, obviously, we don't.
     There could have a been a police officers' convention at the Sandy Hook School and those kids would still be dead. Police officers, if you haven't noticed, are shot and killed too, despite their training, despite their guns.
     No, actually I think my wife nailed it, as she often does. "Not in my house." Is that not a manageable start? Before we talk about laws, before we fall to arguing over specifics, over magazine capacities and what makes an assault rifle, we need to address the panting American passion for weaponry and violence. Those zombies, you realize, are just a thin disguise to let you guiltlessly enjoy watching people shot.
      Until we address that, we'll do nothing — or, rather, continue doing nothing. The Connecticut killer got his guns from his mother, who owned them legally. And frankly I can't imagine a nation where any change could be embraced that might prevent that. There are many disturbed people. They all have mothers. If the blame rests anywhere — leaving forever open the question of whether insanity affects our right to hold this killer accountable — it has to lay with mom. She wasn't disturbed. She kept her guns — "for protection," natch — in such a manner that her troubled son could get hold of them. If she didn't know, who was supposed to know? If she couldn't stop him, how was the United States government supposed to stop him?
     I believe we have too many guns, yes. But I also believe that the National Rifle Association is a convenient bogeyman for lazy liberal consciences that need to see dozens of first-graders die before they rouse themselves, temporarily. Any one of a hundred Democratic plutocrats could match the NRA's spending tomorrow, and it wouldn't mean a thing. Not until we realize that most Americans don't want stricter gun laws — they want them to be more lax, or stay the same. We think all those Clint Eastwood movies are true, and we stockpile all these guns to keep us safe. Only they don't keep us safe. "Not in my house" — that's a start, a small but important step, and you don't need to hire lobbyists to make it work.
      —Originaly published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 17, 2012