It's easier to wear a red hat than to actually be great

Caroline Brennan speaks with Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Women and children make up more than 70 percent of the Syrian refugee population (photo by Sam Tarling)

     The first word Caroline Brennan learned in Arabic was iidhlal —"humiliation." She was visiting refugee camps in the Middle East.
     "Apologizing that they didn't have more to offer, which I would never expect," said Brennan, emergency communications director for Catholic Relief Services. "They say, 'This is who I am. Hospitality is part of my culture and you're a guest here in this place.' How people show themselves is a stunning thing. When you see it, against a backdrop of madness."
     I phoned her because I was curious how those in the refugee business are faring in the current political climate. We were talking about what refugees actually are like, as opposed to what frightened people who never met any imagine they are like.
     "It was in 2011, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon," said Brennan. "I was meeting this woman—the refugee camp was just a sea of women and children. She didn't have anything, a makeshift tent, pieced together. She was reaching into the air, wanting to offer something. I felt like she was reaching for tray of tea but into thin air. She ended up plucking a flower out of the ground, giving it to me. When you're talking about loss, they're not talking about a savings account. Not even a a home. A deeper sense of loss. She was telling their story. Everyone wants to tell you about the house they had, the number of rooms they had, the garden they had. It's so important to them that you understand: they had a life before; that this place they're in doesn't represent who they are."
     This place they're in doesn't represent who they are. There's a lot of that going around.

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The dark before the darkness

     Maybe we are making a mistake focusing on the president and what he does.
     Not that it isn't important. It is.
     And when each day—sometimes it seems each hour—brings some jaw-dropping breach, well, hard not to pull up a chair, lean in close, and gaze in horror at the endless train wreck loop.
     But at this point, it has to be a given. Each new development is a shock but not a surprise. He's lying to make himself seem more successful than he is. Over and over. That's what he does. That's what he's always done. He's locked in cathexis, in a trance with his own reflection, and wants to draw us into his fantasy world. So we're in a trance too.
     Trances are bad. What I find more interesting is not the president, but the millions of Americans who got behind him, voted for him, and are sticking with him, if not cheering then quietly supporting him.     
     They are. Have you ever heard of someone who supported Trump and is now having qualms? The tiniest reservation? A second thought? Ever read a quote along the lines of "Whoops..."? I find that something worthy of at least some of the holy-fuck-look-at-that attention lavished on the latest tweet. Because if the media is fact-checking for the benefit of those who are already aghast at Trump, they are just gilding the lily. We need to think about those who look at Trump's flailing first weeks in office and nod with approval.
    Maybe the reason we don't look at that is because his supporters are even more ominous than the man they are supporting. What if Trump is only the first of a series of Trumplike leaders to come?  It isn't as if we were fine before, or we'll be fine after, not that we can indulge in the luxury of even considering after. 
      Nine out of ten Republicans trust Donald Trump. Game, set, match. As long as those supporters are there, we'll never get to "after." Through blind party loyalty, economic desperation, fear, ignorance and what I calling "framing"—focusing on a very narrow part of the total picture—they're not only backing, they believe a demagogue who is opposed to much of what makes America a free democracy: the press, the courts, a non-political military, public education, NATO, science, social services, affordable healthcare...there's more, but you get the idea.
     When do these people wise up?
     And now the bad news:
     Never.
     They never wise up. I can't imagine it. If they could, how did they get to this point in the first place? I keep thinking of Stalin. Died in 1953. Pushed policies that caused mass starvation in the 1930s. Purged intellectuals. Killed maybe 10 million Russians. Made a pact with Hitler.
     His approval ratings today? Forty percent. Yes, some of that is due to Putin propaganda, trying to soften up the public, to stoke nostalgia for tyrants like himself. But still. You would not think it possible. Germany might have served up a Hitler, but at least they're not still swooning for him. In the main, except certain pockets of East Germany where they're working themselves up to try to get him back.

     These are dark times. And while I don't agree with Rahm Emanuel's over-flip assessment that Democrats should "take a chill pill"—what a contemptuous expression to come out of a contemptuous man's piehole—I do believe that this is only the start. If I thought this moment right now is as bad as it gets, I'd have a big Trump Party, because this so far is feeble. Some travelers inconvenienced—not to diminish the pain of others, which is always temptingly easy. But not the Inquisition either. And a lot of incompetents, zealots and haters named to his cabinet. Scary, but just a start. My sense is, these first disorienting weeks are only the dip after the long climb up the hill on a roller coaster. A feint, before the true plunge begins.
    

Souvenirs of falling stars

     The timing could not have been better.
     A week after the Field Museum unveiled its new interactive meteorite display, a green fireball went streaking across the night sky above Sheyboygan, being captured on a number of squad car dash cams.
     Well, maybe a little better.

Philipp Heck

    
    "One could hit the Field Museum," mused Philipp R. Heck, a little wistfully. "A small one. Then it could be the Field Meteorite."
     Heck is the museum's Robert A. Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteorites and Polar Studies. If you're wondering about the connection between rocks from the sky and global ice caps, ponder the challenge of trying to find the meteorite that fell to earth Monday morning. It landed in a spray of debris in Lake Michigan. "If the lake were frozen, I might be out there right now looking for it," said Heck, holding a satellite photo map he received that morning from NASA showing the meteorite's "strewn field," the area where pieces might fall. A region of maybe 50 square miles where you would have to comb the lake bottom, 150 feet down, looking for rocks the size of peanuts.
     Or you could go to the South Pole—as Heck has, helping the Indian government develop its meteorite research program—where the shifting glacial ice has a way of consolidating meteorites and offering them up.

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You can't judge a cover by its book

    

     Okay, this is funny.
     Well, it might not be funny to you. But it's funny to me, or was this morning, and I'm sitting here at the end of a day, wondering if I can convey the funniness of this thing to you. 
     Certainly not in the big, laugh-out-loud and shake your head amusement to which I received the news. You kinda have to be me. 
     Which I wouldn't wish upon anyone.
     Oh heck, let's give it a try. You can't decry Trump every day.
     Actually you can, and probably should. But lots of people are and, well, no need for me to reproduce their efforts. I'm not the chorus. I figure, you can learn of the latest jaw-dropping wonderment, read a few Talmudic commentaries on it. Then come here, at least today, for a palate-cleansing sorbet.
     Where was I? Ah yes, funny....
      Books are joint efforts. That goes against the whole solitary writer myth but, so be it. You start with an author, true. But then there is an agent, and an editor, if you're lucky. All have things to say. Oh sure, you can ignore them, but then nobody reads your book and it doesn't matter how good it is. 
     So others are involved. More editors. Maybe a publisher. At a university press, there are academic readers—three, in the case of my latest book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, written with a co-author, Phaidon editor Sara Bader. 
    The challenge of collaboration is you have to consider what the other person thinks. I remember, early on, telling myself, "You know, it isn't much of a collaboration if you never listen to anything she says." So I did, buoyed by the realization that Sara was right. She was often right. But not always. Sometimes I was right and, mirabile dictu, she would yield to me. 
    So Sara and I, working together on the book for ... gee ... nearly five years.

I felt I had seen the shade of brown on the left before....

    Our editor, John Tryneski, also had input. The original subtitle was "A literary guide to recovery." That was a bit, well proscriptive, John felt. How about "A literary companion to recovery." Yes! Sara and I both immediately realized. "Companion" is such a friendly word. "Guide" implied more of an-our-way-or-the-highway direction than we intended.
     As the book neared completion, more people got involved. A proofreader, a copyeditor, an indexer. The design team and of course publicists. Which lead to the one true great crisis of the book: the cover. No other way to describe it. A full-blown, gloves-off battle. We rejected the first interior design and then rejected the first two covers. "It looks like the inside of a baby's diaper" is how I put it, in my less-than-tactful fashion. The thing peaked exactly a year ago, as luck would have it, when Edie and I were vacationing in Desert Hot Springs. You ever see a guy sitting by the pool at some lovely palm-treed resort, some unhappy schmuck on the phone, endlessly, twitching a muscle in his jaw, oblivious to the beauty around him. That guy was me. I hated being him,, but the moment called for it. 
    The eventual cover was the product of attrition more than anything else. Sara and I basically got tired of fighting over the cover and surrendered. The one with the blue inks splots would have to do. Sara was more grief-stricken than I but, as her partner, I felt her pain. 
     So today, Monday, this morning, the University of Chicago Press informed me — with an admirable restraint, I felt — that the American Association of University Presses had its annual Book and Jacket Show in New York City at the end of January. Over 500 book jackets were entered, and our book cover was one of the select few that won, displaying as they did the "very best examples from this pool of excellent design." Our cover, the cover we were both ready to slit our wrists in a warm bath over, would be part of a traveling exhibit on the most beautiful covers of the year, starting at the AAUP convention in Austin this June, then touring college campuses and book fairs and libraries for the next ... year and a half.
    Of course.  Of course it is. Why did we not see this? To my credit, I was immediately abashed. My buffoon suit came back from the cleaners and I, nodding at the perfect rightness of the moment, slipped it on, sheepishly extending hearty congratulations to all involved, and filed the event away in my bulging humility folder.

     I suppose I could dig in, and point out that contests are not the Platinum Bar of Truth either. Some group in New York threw a bunch of covers against the wall and ours stuck. Doesn't change anything... 

    But that doesn't sound right. Having to always be right is the mark of the amateur, as our nation is discovering. Sometimes you are wrong, which is why this collaboration thing is so helpful. Being a professional means listening to other professionals, weighing their views, and sometimes going with them, and sometimes standing your ground. The trick is to know when to do each, when to fight, when to yield. When the people you are dealing with are experts in an area where you are not an expert—say design—best sometimes to step back and let them win the day. Which, I must observe, we did. Eventually.  

     And to be honest, at this point it doesn't matter. With the book in its 5th printing, and selling like hotcakes, the cover really just keeps the pages together.  As I told Sara, with the over-confidence needed to write anything in the first place, "The book will have lots of covers." That might be hubris, but what the hell. It's too late to change now.

     Not laughing out loud yet? Oh crap. Time to pull out the big guns. See the bottle of Dave's Coffee Syrup atop the blog? Wondering why it's there? At the beginning of the book design process, the press asked me what I thought the cover should look like. A neighbor with a summer place in Rhode Island had brought the bottle back to us as a present, and I thought it very fine looking: clean, retro and that great shade of orange. I sent them a photograph of the Dave's Coffee Syrup bottle, explaining that our book should look like this. And I would have been ecstatic had they taken my advice. Instead they discreetly ignored it. Were they right? Was I? Hard to tell.

J.S.G. Boggs, clever craftsman of currency, is dead

 

     Chicago has played a role in the arts. Poetry, of course, ever since a teenage Charlie Sandburg took $1.50 earned on a milk truck in Galesburg and came here to check out the city's big shoulders. Music certainly, from Louis Armstrong coming up from New Orleans to the Rolling Stones cutting an album at Chess Records on South Michigan Avenue in 1964.
     The visual arts? Not so much. The School of the Art Institute draws talent — Grant Wood comes to mind, or Ivan Albright. In the 1960s, a casual group formed around the school sometimes referred to as the Chicago Imagists: Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum and top dog Ed Paschke, a source of civic pride, with his walk-up studio on Howard Street with its garish lucha libre masks and Swedish postcards. Though I suppose Paschke's student, Jeff Koons, he of metal balloon dog fame, eclipsed them all, though that could just be now. Lasting fame or passing popularity? Hard to tell.

      Most artists dwell in oblivion, and even those who are quite well-known can still be hardly known at all to most folk. When I heard J.S.G. Boggs was dead, I felt sad, but then I had read Lawrence Weschler's 1999 profile of Boggs in The New Yorker, and was impressed by not only his artistry but by the schtick — whoops, the concept — behind his art. The local media ignored his passing, even though Boggs' art was sparked in Chicago in 1984.
     Boggs was in town for the Art Expo at Navy Pier. At a diner, he ordered coffee and a doughnut. He began doodling a numeral "1" on a napkin, then embellishing it into a dollar bill.
     His waitress, impressed, offered to buy the drawing — offering $20, then $50 Boggs later claimed.     Instead Boggs offered her the napkin in payment for his 90-cent tab. She accepted, giving a dime in change.
     And so a career was born. Boggs would earn money by drawing it. He drew exact replicas of dollars, pounds, francs, the currency of whatever country he happened to be in.
     He didn't just draw banknotes and sell them, but developed a routine based on that first Chicago transaction. He would offer one of his bills in exchange for merchandise or a service. If it was accepted, he would get a receipt and the proper change, which he sold to collectors. It was the collectors' task to use the receipt to track down the owner of the drawing and buy it. It would then be framed as an assemblage—the drawing, the receipt, the change, a still-life lesson about the value of money.
     "In a madcap Socratic fashion Boggs is raising all sorts of truly fundamental questions," Weschler wrote. "What, precisely, is it that we value in art, or, for that matter, in money? How do we value one in terms of the other? Indeed, how do we place a value on anything at all?"
     Boggs fame spread after he was charged with forgery in Great Britain, Australia and the United States. The trials became part of the mystique, the gifted artist confounding thick-witted government. Given that the notes were blank on one side, and contained all sorts of fanciful elements, even a "moron in a hurry" wouldn't be deceived, his British lawyer argued, successfully.
     "He was an amazing trickster, a vivid, vivid character, and a consummate transgressor," Weschler told Artnet News. "He was just short of being a con man, but no more than anyone in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance, which of course, was his whole point."
     Though young artists who equate success with happiness should note that Boggs had problems with drugs, and was found dead in a Tampa hotel room Jan. 23 at age 62.
     I paused before sharing Boggs' story, aware that most readers would have never heard of Boggs before and probably never will again. I considered G.K. Chesterton's timeless quip that "journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." That always sounds negative, but it needn't be so. Better late than never.

Unexpected benefits of the Trump Era #4: Canada in Glory

    I wrote this last weekend, and it went up briefly in the wee hours of Monday morning. Then I woke up, heard about the slaughter at a Quebec City mosque, immediately feared it was in bad taste and took it down. Saturday, I saw Nicholas Kristof had declared Canada the leader of the free world, and figured it is safe to float this out there as well.  Because even the attack is a reminder of their advantage over us: Canada has its haters too. It just doesn't put them in positions of executive power. Nor does it seize upon acts of terrorism to undermine their democracy.

     On the positive side of all this. Consider our friends in Canada, who have always chafed in the shadow of the larger, more powerful and more significant nation to their south. Whatever they did or said, America always had done or said it first, louder, bigger, better, bolder.
    Now that extends to soiling our nest in the fashion that Ernest Hemingway once used to describe bankruptcy—gradually then all at once. Twenty years of slowly undermining truth and degrading each other as traitors then, boom, we wake up one morning and we've elected a brittle and angry pathological liar and buffoon as our president. 
    In his first week in office, he was giving the finger to our Mexican allies with one hand while slamming the front door to 134 million Muslims with the other. America has gone full bore, balls flapping, off the rails and into the ditch, where it sits upside down in a shallow muddy creek, engine howling, wheels spinning uselessly. 
     Only 207 weeks left to go...
     To their eternal credit, Canada didn't gloat, didn't rub our faces in it, not directly. Just kept on being the smart, decent human beings they have always been, which is in a sense an even worse reproach. Just the existence of Canada has become a wrenching indictment of the United States. 
     While our bold former ideals gaze scowling down at them from their marble plinths, our legislators are busily wiping the ass of an egomaniac. Lawmakers who were entrenched ideologues a few weeks ago tossing their core beliefs into the Bonfire of His Vanities, all out of terror of being the subject of a tweet.
     While there you are, jaws set in determination not to be us, offering comfort at the world, saying "Hey all you good immigrant folk stranded across the world by America's insane, abrupt and bigoted lurch in customs law: come live in Canada! The safe and friendly home of refugees. We lift the Coleman lantern beside the frosty door. Oh, and by the way. All that stuff that American pretends to be? We actually are those things. Sure, we have our kooks too —Bonjour les séparatistes québécois!—but they aren't going to shoot you and frankly, since having their heads handed to them at the polls in 2014, they've been off somewhere licking their wounds. We didn't give them the reins of power, not like some nations do."
     Well, maybe you ground it in a little. What with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, young, handsome, not at all orange, who waved in 39,000 Syrian refugees just after he was elected—about triple the number the U.S. could bring itself to tolerate—declaring Canada to be the haven of the world, welcoming the displaced families that Americans are just too pants-wetting terrified to allow into our once-mighty country, lest they try to fertilize their lawns with the ammonium nitrate that our own home-grown fundamentalist terrorists need to make bombs. 
    O Canada. You always wanted to be a greater, stronger, more respected nation than the United States. And now you are. We're still more populous, but give it time. If California secedes, out of pure embarrassment, we'll lose 40 million people right there. Plus the strain of living in a topsy-turvy funhouse mirror world where the idea of there being a verifiable truth is spat upon. Can a people die of shame? We'll see.  Or maybe we won't have to. Maybe we'll end up in Steve Bannon's gulag, for the crime of attempting to exercise freedoms we thought we had but—presto chango!—have no longer. 
    Still, it must be a hollow victory. You sometimes feel the same trickle of cold dread, the same nauseous can-this-really-be-happening? disbelief that hits half of America every morning the second our eyes snap open. (The other half of Americans wake up thinking, "Mmmm, waffles!") In our defense, it's not just us. The world is going crazy—the Philippines elected a murderous madman who promised, once in office, to start killing people, and did just that, and they love him for it. Britain pulled the pin on Brexit in June and stands staring, stupidly, at the grenade, waiting for the "boom!" Prime Minister Theresa May was just here, holding Donald Trump's hand, literally, because, heck, they need to be somebody's steady girlfriend, and with all of Europe freshly jilted and plotting vengeance, there's slim pickings left. Over in France, the National Front might not come to power in May, Then again, it might.   
    Back to your good old Uncle Sam. The truth is, America always had its share of failures, of times when it fell short of our ideals. But never intentionally, never as an official matter of national policy designed to make regular American folks feel less scared about all the stuff they obviously feel scared about. And in such a ham-handed, pissing-in-the-wind fashion.  
     You can't grow avocados or distill tequila up there, can you? Because at the rate we're going, well, the usual sources of those and many other products just won't be rumbling to our stores the way we used to. Tim Horton's and Canadian Club, no offense, it just ain't the same.  
      Though who are we to poke fun at you, or at anybody? The old Soviet Union was such a figure of ridicule, hooted at and mocked for claiming to have invented the telephone, for believing all the bald lies their tyrants forced down their throats. And now we're on the receiving end having raised up the King of Lies and put him in the Oval Office. We'll be dealing with him for four or eight years or forever, depending on just much we let him get away with. On the plus side, we're protesting in huge numbers. On the minus, we have to.
      It's like all the swagger we ever had was sucked out of our body and swallowed up into the grotesque human form of one bottle blond demagogue.  A Japanese monster movie creature who rose dripping from New York Harbor, absorbed America's pride and used it as energy. Which might be yet another unexpected benefit of all this because, to be honest, looking at it in our new leader, swagger doesn't seem the positive value it used to be. In fact, it's downright repellent. No wonder you hate us so much. Or did, before we became an object of pity. I can't speak for the entire country as a whole—there's already one guy too many claiming to do that. But I promise you Canada, if we ever get out of this mess, if we ever crawl out of the noxious sewer of nationalism, lies and bumbling folly we fell into with a sickening splash on Nov. 8, we're going to be a whole lot better a friend, neighbor, country. You see it already forming, in the brave resistance to his crazy edicts. How this turns out, well, who can say? But your good example is a comfort to us. Sincerely. Thanks for you being you, and apologies for us being us. We're working on changing that.

"I didn't want to seem fantastic"

     Even though I've met Saul Bellow—been to his house, in fact when he lived in Hyde Park in the late 1980s—I'd never read anything he'd written, beyond mastering the parts of Herzog that take place at the Division Street Russian Baths, for purposes of my Chicago book. He seemed ... I don't know ... very 1970s, a Jewish John Updike.
     I did read James Atlas' biography, which confirmed my disinclination toward Bellow, as a self-obsessed cocksman who was lousy to his friend, Sydney J. Harris. The take away from the book was, a year after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bellow was despondent because he couldn't win it again. Why bother with a guy like that? 
     But my older boy Ross read The Adventures of Augie March and decided that my not having done so was a reason to tweak me. For years. Eventually I cracked, and a few weeks ago opened the book. 
     It's interesting. Not in a plot sense—not a lot happens in the nearly 600 pages that follow its famous opening line. "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city..." a line that Ross liked to quote, I now suspect, because it was true for him but not for me. The Chicago part. I am also an American, but Cleveland-born, which just doesn't sound the same.
     Augie is a feckless lad, attractive to women, and drifts from one relationship to another, in the 1930s and 1940s. Bellow was proud he didn't write a word of it in Chicago, but in various foreign enclaves, and it shows, an odd, internationalism, which grates with the image of city life through the kitchen transom in the book. 
    It did have a certain density, a lived physicality, that made me understand why people prize it so. 
    What struck me most was the book as an artifact of its time, as something published in 1953. There is a hideous abortion odyssey of humiliation for the most interesting female character, Mimi, that I'll have to save as illegal abortions come closer to reality across this country.
    And one exchange in the oddest part of the book -- a protracted journey with Thea, a rich gal who fell hopelessly in love with Augie because, well, that's what people do. They go off to Mexico to ... wait for it ... train eagles to hunt iguanas. It's an endless digression, one where, despite a cameo by Trotsky, I found interest in an unexpected place. Notice the word being bandied about in this passage, during one of the couple's wincingly-realistic fights:

     "We're not talking about the same thing. Not the love. It's the other thing you're so fantastic about."
    "Me—so fantastic?" she said with dry mouth and laid her hand over her breast."
     "Well, how can you think you're not—the eagle, the other things, the snakes, hunting every day?"
    It gave her another hurt.
    "What, were you just being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?"

     For as long as I remember, "fantastic" is a slightly more stilted form of "wonderful" or, to quote the online dictionary, "extraordinarily good or attractive." A synonym for "great." 
      But here it is obviously something negative. After batting about another word with a much more commonly-known shift in meaning -- "queer"— as in "Loving you, that wasn't at all queer to me. But now you start to seem queer." she ends with. "Why didn't you say how you felt? You could have told me. I didn't want to seem fantastic to you."
    It seemed so odd to see "fantastic" as a bad thing.
    "Fantast" or "phantast" is from the Greek, φαντα, "an ostentatious person, a boaster," someone concocting lies. Samuel Johnson starts the definition of "fantastick" in his great 1755 dictionary with "1. Irrational, bred only in the imagination" and touches upon unreality, unsteadiness and "having the nature of phantoms."
     Two hundred years later, in my 1978 Oxford English Dictionary, "fantastic" has hardly changed. The first definition is "existing only in imagination, proceeding merely from imagination, fabulous, imaginary, unreal" much closer to how we think of "fantasy" 
    My 1942 Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms, a useful resource parsing shades of meaning, places "fantastic" squarely in Bellow's world: "extravagantly fanciful or queer and hence incapable of belief, or, sometimes, approval." 
      "Fantastic" can be seen as taking a similar journey to "terrific" which, if you remember your zeppelin history, meant, according to the same Webster's, "by its size, appearance, potency, or the like, fitted or intended to inspire terror." which is the meaning WLS' Herb Morrison intended when he described the exploding Hindenberg as "a terrific thing, ladies and gentlemen." 
     And at that we had better wind it up, lest this turn into an awful post, which at one point would have meant it was "full of awe," and now would just mean "it's bad."