A box full of darkness

     "If you don't care about your writing," I tell aspiring writers, who, now that I think of it, I don't encounter much anymore, "then nobody does."
     What I mean by that is, you can't dog it, can't phone it in, can't half-ass your way to any kind of success. At least not in most cases. For every 6-year-old who finds internet fame and a book contract by posting their finger paint poetry online for a month, there are 100,000 other writers who must grind forward with all their might and not give up.
     That said, on rare occasions, a writer, if he or she is lucky, will encounter somebody else, a person not themselves, who also cares about their stuff. Best-selling authors are accustomed to this, no doubt, and come to expect lionization as a daily event, the general public tapping at their windows from dawn to dusk. Must be nice.
     But we mid-list authors, who sweat mightily just to find somebody to print our writing, have to catch at whatever passing shred of significance we may, cling to it, admire it, then use it to feed the guttering fire of our self-regard. Like recently spying my 2012 memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," and in abundance, at the Chicago Architectural Association bookstore on East Wacker Drive. Still in the game...
      I considered revealing myself to the clerk, maybe offering to sign the copies. Increase their value! But the clerks seemed pretty busy, ringing up books that customers actually wanted to buy, and there are so many ways an offer like that can go wrong. ("Oh no, you can't sign them, because that might complicate things when we return the books to the publisher to be ground into mulch...") I figured better to savor the situation and not muddle things.
      So timidity is a stumbling block, but professionalism can also get in the way of cheesy self-promotion. I really wanted to tuck a plug for tonight's talk, "A box full of darkness" at 7 p.m. at Northbrook Public Library, at the end of a column in the Sun-Times, where 50 times the amount of people might read it compared to here. But the moment never presented itself. Doing so would mean trimming the column by a few lines, and I could never bring myself to undercut whatever point I was trying to make merely to ballyhoo an appearance discussing my most recent book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery," written with Sara Bader. Should be proud or disappointed at that? I suppose a little of both.     

Rugby ‘makes football look for little babies’

The Chicago Lions women's rugby team, in black, playing the Minnesota Valkyries. 

     The Rugby World Cup is being played right now in Japan. You are forgiven if you didn’t know; rugby occupies one of the lower rungs of American sports consciousness, somewhere below soccer but above cricket.
     Rugby is also being played right now in Chicago, including a day-long celebration on the West Side last Saturday, as the Chicago Lions Charitable Association — the Lions have played rugby in Chicago since 1964 — unveiled its new J. Tyke Nollman Field at Chicago Hope Academy.
     The action began shortly after 8 a.m., with younger players — organized rugby starts at age 4 — gathering to practice on the special shock-absorbing artificial turf.
     Among them, Keandre Bates, 14, from West Garfield Park, who has played rugby for four years.
     “It’s a challenge at most times. Rugby is really tough,” said Bates. “It just makes football look for little babies. You have to pass backward.”
     “It’s the greatest game out there,” agreed Mike Inman, of North Center, who brought his son Sullivan, 10. “For somebody likes Sullivan, loves to be active, to be out there, tackle, and run, and do it all, this is a great sport for him. At this level they’re just kids running around being kids.”

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A rugby scrum is actually a carefully-structured event. 

When summer's end is nighing

       School begins before summer ends. So we typically sigh for the end of summer during the last days of August, when we are urged to stock up on rulers and pencils and back-to-school clothing. As if summer only exists for children, which in a sense it does, though adults appreciate the warmth and life and sense of possibility. My wife and I are members of the Chicago Botanic Garden, and while we do visit in February as well as July, let me assure you: July is better. 

A. E. Housman

       But summer ends for adults too, at 2:50 a.m. Central Time on Monday, Sept. 23. And for grown-ups, the opening gong of winter can bear an extra element of regret. There is a lovely poem by A.E. Housman, "When summer's end is nighing"—an unfortunate word, "nigh," redolent of the preciousness that poets have rightly banished, replaced by bodily fluids. 
     But to be expected. Housman was late 19th century Oxford don, seemingly a "dried up husk of a man," in Alan Bennett's words, huffing on the dying spark of a youthful, unreciprocated flame. A prig and something of a fraud—he lionized the dead in war but complained when Cambridge took in wounded soldiers. When the philosopher Wittegenstein, feeling the indisputable call of nature, rapped on Housman's door and asked to use the loo, the poet replied "Certainly not." 
     Still, he could be bracingly direct. "The faintest of all human passions," he wrote, "is love of truth." Practically ripped from the headlines, as is his observation that men "think in fits and starts."
      The poem is out of copyright, so I can print the whole thing without guilt, which is more than I can say about reading it:

      When summer's end is nighing
         And skies are evening cloud,
      I must on changes and fortune
         And all the feats I vowed
         When I was young and proud.

      The weathercock at sunset
          Would lose the slanted ray,
       And I would climb the beacon
          That looked to Wales away
          And saw the last of day.

      From hill and cloud and heaven
         The hues of evening died.
      Night welled through lane and hollow
         And hushed the countryside.
         But I had youth and pride.

      And I with earth and nightfall
           In converse high would stand,
       Late, till the west was ashen
           And darkness hard at hand
           And the eye lost the land.

        The year might age, and cloudy
            The lessening day might close.
        But air of other summers
             Breathed from beyond the snows.
             and I had hope of those.

        They came and were and are not
           And come no more anew;
         And all the years and seasons
            That ever can ensue
            Must now be worse and few.

          So here's an end of roaming
             On eves when autumn nights:
          The ear too fondly listens
              For summer's parting sights,
              And then the heart replies.

     A bit treacly perhaps, but to the point.
     Speaking of which, I'm giving a talk entitled "Box Full of Darkness," a line filched from Mary Oliver, at the Northbrook Public Library, 1201 Cedar Lane, this Tuesday.  It begins at 7 p.m., lasts about an hour and admission is free. The subject is poetry and recovery from addiction, and I'll sign copies of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," the book on the subject I wrote with Sara Bader. 
     Though if you plan to go—and I hope you do, I'd feel stupid standing there alone, talking to myself—the library asks that you pre-register here.

And another thing ...

Destin, Florida anti-circumcision protestor. (Photo by Robert Angone)

     I had a lot of fun putting Wheaton College over my knee yesterday. But when I was done, after finishing the first draft, the column was 1100 words long. One important point got cut out reducing it to the print-friendly 719. I lost professor Larycia Hawkins, the political science professor forced out of Wheaton College in 2015 for wearing a headscarf in solidarity with Muslims threatened by the rise in poisonous rhetoric. In retrospect, I wish I had kept her and cut Wheaton scuttling health insurance for its students, lest one girl use it to buy contraception, since the Hawkins case spoke to the school's trademark stifling of free speech and religious immorality even more than health care did. 
    Ah well, not every choice is the best one.
    And I also lost the thread on how The Bean will be cluttered if we let one in religious fanatic, we let in them all.  Plus freedom of speech never means freedom of speech everywhere at any time. I wrote, then cut:

     The sidewalks of the city are not enough. Chicago doesn't have enough corners, apparently. With 99.99 percent of the metropolis at their feet, of course they'd must come here, where so many lambs aggregate. The question is, how many flock there in order to be endure a religious lecture, and the answer is: none of them.
     The ability to control when and where rights are expressed is inherent to running a city. You may not preach the gospel in the Gehry bandshell—also public space—during a CSO concert, you may not read the Constitution in the middle of Michigan Avenue during rush hour.

    Abandoned as too much of a digression was a passage where I pointed out that just as people pushing for school prayer can only conceive their prayer being allowed, and forget that opening the door also welcomes in a confusion of prayer mats, beads, rituals, prayer times, sacrifices so that nobody learns long addition. 
      Thank goodness Eric Zorn had my back, and expressed it perfectly in his take, the same day on the same subject:

     “Irritation or annoyance of some opinionated minority is unavoidable in public spaces and is never enough to prohibit someone from exercising their First Amendment rights both to express and to hear ideas wonderful and ridiculous,” said a letter to the city from John Mauck, an attorney for the students.
     “Visitors at The Bean who want to enjoy the reflection of Chicago’s skyline will not miss it because they turn their heads for a few seconds,” Mauck wrote.
     No, but their enjoyment of their visit to The Bean stands to be dramatically impaired if the immediately surrounding area becomes a boisterous daily forum for competing religious, political and social activists ululating for attention.      And that’s what a total victory for the students here might do.

     Well said. Protest used to be about information and entreaty—you were telling the public about a situation and urging them to act. Now a lot of public action, like our political realm, is about manifesting power, showing what you can do—you carry your gun into the store because you can, or think you can. You bully and harangue strangers because, well, that's what you do. Of course they don't like when the afflicted push back. Nobody cries like a bully.

Chicago prays: Let us not be Bible-thumped

     The line snaking through the deafening, dripping bowels of Union Station, waiting to squeeze up the stairs to Madison Street, can take an eternity. When you finally break the surface, into light and air, one more hurdle awaits: the permanent pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses hoping to break you on their rack of literature.
     No biggie. Sidestep them and be on your way. But they are also the opening salvo in the constant barrage of admonition and entreaty that is the price of walking downtown.
     On Madison Street you’ll likely encounter a mendicant or two on cardboard, blessing you for whatever funds you contribute to their meth addiction. And if you’re really unlucky, Joe Scheidler and the entire Pro-Life Action League will be waiting across the bridge, human easels for their five-foot-tall color posters of the diced up fetuses of women they wouldn’t bother to spit on in person.
     That’s life in the big city. Window shopping on Michigan Avenue? Dare make eye contact with a well-scrubbed millennial holding a clipboard and they will bound over, flash you a Colgate smile, asking some inane question — “Do you like animals?” — while snaking a hand into your pockets, metaphorically.
      Finished? I’ve barely begun. State Street is the home of gaunt, Elmer-Gantry-style preachers screaming into blown-out loudspeakers about the fiery pit that awaits cigarette smokers and sodomites. All December much of Daley Plaza becomes a jostling religious anti-science fair, with little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay close by Muslims brandishing their star and crescent and the brutalist steel menorah of the Chabadniks, a decoration Albert Speer might have used at the Nuremberg rallies had the Nazis, you know, been into that kind of thing. Worst of all, the flimsy, anemic glowing red “A” of atheism, a physical manifestation of their feebleness relative to the Biblical passion of the Godstruck. 

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And you think YOU go through changes...

 

     "Do you want to see some interesting mushrooms?" my friend Rory said, or words to that effect, over the weekend in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

      I admitted that I did, and followed him into a field of wildflowers—black-eyed Susans, mostly—just off the road to where we were staying.
     The mushrooms were interesting indeed. A big, golf ball-size yellow one, mottled, somewhat resembling Jupiter, and then a similarly colored, but differently configured mushroom shaped like a small pancake.
      I dutifully took photos of both.
      The obvious question then became: what kind of mushrooms are these?
       I figured the internet machine would be of help. I plugged in "Mushroom Identifier," and then clicked on the promising "Mushroom Identification Help" from something called Mushroom World.
       It offered pages of paired photos of types of mushrooms, none of which looked like my mushrooms. The next step was a Google Image search, but that didn't find a mate either.    

      There were a number of Mushroom Identification apps on the iPhone, but they not only wanted money upfront, but expected me to sign up for a subscription, as if ID'ing mushrooms were to be an ongoing concern. Which I do not expect; really, I was just curious about these two. 

     So I plugged in "Yellow Mushroom Upper Peninsula Michigan." The first hit was "Michigan Species List (159)." I assumed "159" to be the number of species described. As luck would have it—it's better to be lucky than good—my mushroom was number three, "Observation 25037: Amanita muscaria var. guessowii Veselý." It included four photos, one looking similar to my first spherical mushroom atop the blog, the other three of a pancaked mushroom. 

      In a note taken 10 years ago, Sept, 8, 2009, the observer, Jon Reck, wrote: " The three bottom photos are from the same mushroom as the top one, 24 hours later. (But you probably knew that anyway)."

     I did not know that anyway. Though now, having found out the name, I was saddled with a new question: Why do spherical mushrooms open? (This curiosity thing can be hell sometimes, a junkie scramble from one puzzle to the next).
     I had a guess—the mushroom mutates in order to drop spores—but a guess is not a certainty.

     So I shot off an email to the Field Museum—I once went on a field trip to Indiana with their mushroom expert, years ago, in the few minutes I was the newspaper's environment reporter. Do they still have one, I asked, and can he answer a basic mushroom question? 

    Waiting, I dug into Jon Reck. Who posts photos of mushrooms for the edification of others?

     "I’m a printer," writes Reck on his mushroom hunter page. "I live in the country on a small lake with my wife and two dogs. Have two grown sons. Enjoy photography and computers. Have always been fascinated by the ever-expanding extremes of the very small and large."

     A few hours passed. I put in a call to the Field to prod them. The Amanita Muscaria is both hallucinogenic and poisonous, which would at first seem to be mutually exclusive qualities. But the toxins are water soluble, and can be drained off, leaving you with, well, whatever hallucinogenic thrill this particular mushroom provides.

     The name "muscaria," by the way, is from Latin musca, meaning "a fly." The common name of the mushroom is the Fly Agaric; it would be used in European countries as an insecticide: crumbled in saucers of milk, the milk would absorb enough poison to the kill flies that drank it. 
    Toward end of day, the museum got back to me.

    "Why does it go from that shape?" said Wyatt Gaswick, a mushroom expert at the Field Museum. "When it's in its spherical shape the gills are just developing.  They're protected by a little membrane that rips away. It expands once it gets older, exposes it to the air so mature spores can drop out, catch the breeze and get from point A to point B."
     Turns out I had guessed correctly. Gaswick confirmed that my seat-of-the-pants identification was also correct. While I had him on the phone, I had to ask: How are mushrooms faring in the face of our climate crisis?
    "It's difficult to tell for fungi in general, because so much basic knowledge—how many species? Their identity?—so much basic research remains undone, it's hard to see patterns. Mushrooms are responding to climate change. Things are starting to fruit in the fall and spring. They should come up in the fall."
    "Fruit" by the way, is the term of art for mushrooms popping up, and quite descriptive of what we are looking at. 
     "Like an apple is the temporary reproductive part of a tree," Gaswick said, "a mushroom is the temporary reproductive part of fungus," the bulk of which remains underground. 
    All told, I was glad Rory called me over.

     

Booby trap killing echoes textbook case

     As a homeowner, you can put a 12-foot-tall fence around your property and top it with coils of razor-sharp concertina wire. The law will make no trouble for you, provided there aren’t zoning regulations regarding fence height.
     But if inside the fence you dig a moat, and line it with spikes, so that anybody brash enough to go over the top of your fence might be impaled, you could set yourself up for serious jail time.
     Why? Anybody? C’mon folks, you’ve got to do these readings.
     Katko v. Briney, a classic legal case on the tip of the tongue of anybody who ever went to law school or who, like me, typed his wife’s law school papers.
     On a July day in 1967, Marvin E. Katko broke into an unoccupied Iowa farmhouse, where the owners, tired of such break-ins, had set a shot-gun on an iron bed frame with the trigger wired to the door and the muzzle pointed toward it.
     The booby trap worked, the shotgun firing into Katko’s legs. The injured intruder sued the farmhouse owners, Edward and Bertha Briney.
     “Did Defendants employ a reasonable means of preventing the unlawful entry of trespassers on their property?” asks the CaseBriefs web site.
     The Iowa Supreme Court said no, concluding, “the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights in property.”
     It awarded Katko $30,000 in damages. The Brineys had to sell 2/3 of the land on their farm to pay it.
     Alas, William Wasmund did not go to law school, nor type his wife’s papers, apparently. Nor did the Downstate man pause to ask himself whether rigging a 12-gauge shotgun to the door of a shed on his property was a good idea.

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