richardsblog

CUBA!

2012-01-07T13:29:00.007-05:00

I wanted to go to Cuba for the same reason that many Americans go there: we all heard/saw Buena Vista Social Club and were blown away by the music. But when we got there, during the last week of December, though there was music aplenty (some wonderful, most OK), the way that Havana imposed its presence on us was through its architecture.

I'm not qualified to write about recent Cuban political history -- or architecture, for that matter. But the enormous variety of styles, and the variation in the condition of the diverse buildings and neighborhoods, was so clearly evident that I can't resist.

Old-style buildings in Havana and its environs date back to the days when it was a Spanish colony, and even after it became an independent republic in the 19th century, Cubans continued to build in the Spanish mode, which is exemplified by the opulence and elegance of those few structures that have been restored and/or preserved, like the Hotel Sevilla --

-- and this monumental government edifice --

But most of Havana's streets -- particularly in Old Havana, the "autentico" neighborhood that draws tourists -- looks like this

Though some look like this:

It's clear from your first stroll that while most citizens are fighting the good fight against erosion and decay, it's not always winnable. In another half-century, if the regime doesn't change, and the island stays closed to U.S. trade and tourism, might not the whole city look like this?

What happened was that after the upper class left in a hurry in 1959, with only those assets they could carry, Castro gave their houses to the people -- who couldn't afford to keep them up. What the New Regime itself built has an inevitable Russian tinge to it: monumentally dull and highly politicized buildings:

So, in a way, Havana's architecture resembles its cars: there are stunning blasts from the past (the favorites seem to be Chevy Bel-Airs from 1955 to 57, like this one, which would cost about $70,000)

with a few brand-new Audis and Beamers mixed into a general population of clapped-out Ladas (the Soviet people's car, with none of the charm or engineering of the VW Beetle).

So: here is a city of two million people, part of it looking like Dresden after the fire-bombing, part of it a nondescript commercial and government metropolis, and part of it heartbreakingly beautiful. I leave you with an image of how some Cubans lived before Fidel & Co. --

and a more accurate picture of a city that's in which even the most modest attempts at beautification have to be seen through chain-link fences:

A 2031 LOVE STORY

2011-10-27T14:11:00.007-04:00

Back in the year 2011, twenty years ago, four children lived on a magical island called Utila, which looked like a whale swimming in a blue-green sea.

Maxim, who was four,

and Pai, who was eight months old,

were brother and sister.

Bine, who was four years old,

and Angus, who was two,

were also brother and sister.

All four of these children were friends and played together all the time, except that Pai, being so young, couldn’t talk to her friends, because she couldn’t talk at all. Still, she was part of the charmed circle, or rather rectangle, that these children formed. One thing they had in common was that each of them possessed stunning beauty, as you see. They were also very smart and very nice, which some people think is even more important than being beautiful.

Maxim and Bine, who were the same age, had been friends their whole life. In fact, they loved each other, and it seemed natural to them that when they grew up, they would get married and have smart, nice, beautiful children of their own, although they didn’t yet know how to have children.

But when they started going to school, another girl fell in love with Maxim.

and that made Bine worried and sad. She worried that Maxim would fall out of love with her and in love with the other girl, and that they wouldn’t be able to get married after all.

Maxim didn’t worry about things like that because he knew that he was a prince and Bine was a princess, and that someday he would build a house for her. Besides, he was a boy, and boys don’t worry about things; they just want to get through the day.

But Bine need not have worried. Even though he and his parents and his sister moved away from the magical island to a country across the ocean, Maxim went on loving Bine. Over the years, many other girls fell in love with him because he had the longest eyelashes of any boy they knew. And many other boys fell in love with Bine’s blond hair and brown eyes. When other people fell in love with Maxim and Bine, they would sometimes forget each other for a little while, but then Bine would remember that it was Maxim she really loved, and Maxim would remember that it was Bine he really loved. And last year, in 2030, they got married on the beach of the magical island of Utila.

But what of Angus and Pai? Pai moved away from the island with her parents and Maxim before she and Angus could become close friends, and she only remembered him from pictures of him that her parents showed her. But he remembered her very well, because he had fallen in love with her way back when they were very little.

And when her whole family came back to the island for the wedding of Bine and Maxim, she looked at the handsome young man whom Angus had grown up to be, and fell in love with him. And Angus looked at the beautiful young woman whom Pai had grown up to be, and fell in love with her all over again. For the next year, even though Pai had gone back to America, where she was attending a school called the New York University, she and Angus texted and twittered and e-mailed and telepathed and mind-locked every day, so it was almost as if they were together, except that they couldn’t touch, or go swimming, or eat lunch with each other. But they knew each other so well that they wanted to spend their whole lives together, and one year to the day after Bine and Maxim had gotten married on the beach, Pai and Angus got married on the beach, at the same spot, near the house of Amanda and John, the mother and father of Bine and Angus.

And Danielle and Benoit, the parents of Maxim and Pai, came to both of these weddings.

and so did the old, doddering grandparents of the four now-grown-up children, and everybody ate gooey cake and drank bubbly champagne. And they all lived happily ever after.

REVIEW OF "THE ART OF FIELDING," NEWSDAY, SEPT. 11, 2011

2011-09-11T11:35:00.002-04:00

Men in groups abound on the campus of Westish College, where Chad Harbach sets his brilliant, intensely readable first novel, The Art of Fielding. Its president, Guert Afflenlight, besides being a Melville scholar, is the author of a best-selling historical study of what is described as “the cult of male friendship in nineteenth-century America . . . boys’ clubs, whale boats, baseball teams.” The book’s own version of such a cult is the Westish Harpooners (fittingly, a baseball team named after men in whale boats), and the team’s interlocking friendships provide a context for Harbach’s main plot, the story of shortstop Henry Skrimshander’s obsessive struggle not only to become the finest infielder ever to play the game but to attain his “one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect” in all things.

Henry’s particular friends include Schwartz, the team’s catcher and spiritual leader, who is sleeping with President Affenlight’s daughter, Pella; Henry’s gay mulatto roommate Owen, who is sleeping with Affenlight himself; and the rest of his teammates, a spectrum of colorful and surprisingly individualized of young men. Hovering over Henry is the presiding spirit of one Aparicio (as in Luis) Rodriguez (as in A-Rod?), a former major-league shortstop whose Zen-like treatise, meta-titled The Art of Fielding, is his bible, as Moby-Dick is Affenlight’s. But the short, interwoven chapters devoted to these subsidiary stories all lead back to Henry’s quest for perfection.

That quest comes abruptly to a halt when Henry (like several real-life ballplayers – Steve Blass, Steve Sax, Chuck Knoblauch) develops a malady that’s something like writer’s block in an outdoor setting: Henry almost kills Owen with a wild throw and is suddenly plunged into a state of Prufrockian paralysis every time the ball comes his way. His future on the line, the stands filled with major-league scouts, he can effortlessly field any ground ball but he can’t bring himself to fire the ball to the first base. “You couldn’t plan it out beforehand,” he thinks. “You just had to let it go and see what happened.” Instead of letting go of the baseball, he lets go of himself: he quits the team, toys with suicide, stops eating, starts smoking dope, becomes reclusive and listlessly allows Pella to seduce him, thus estranging himself from Schwartz, and eventually from Owen and Pella too.

Harbach, whose knowledge of baseball is encyclopedic but never ponderous, resists the temptation to which many other baseball writers – Malamud, Roth, Kinsella -- have sucumbed: to write not a novel but a version of the core baseball myth, the game as a pastoral vision of America, in which the heroes and villains, the fictional stand-ins for the Babe and the Say-Hey Kid and Shoeless Joe, enact predestined roles. Instead, Harbach finds analogies in other literary genres: the epic, the picaresque, the coming-of-age story, the self-scrutinizing memoir. Along with Melville, whose footprints are everywhere, he invokes Homer, Eliot, Emerson and Whitman as guides, though never without ironically undercutting this technique; Affenlight reminds himself, and us, that dwelling on literature rather than life is a futile practice that turns us into jerks.

The Art of Fielding posesses a texture and resonance that will remind some readers of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer, but what could have been merely post-modern decoration genuinely enriches Harbach’s narrative. In the end, in an endearingly traditonal way, he subordinates the ironic commentaries and the mirroring influences to the tender, funny, poignant story of Henry’s travails and their unexpected resolution.

RULES OF THE ROAD

2011-08-13T16:41:00.004-04:00

THE RIGHT (LEFT) SIDE

It makes me crazy, as I drive or bike around the East End, to see so many walkers, runners, strollers, moms/nannies pushing baby carriages, sometimes two or three abreast, on the right side of narrow shoulderless tree-lined and therefore shadowy roads – Stony Hill Road in East Hampton comes to mind -- which is the wrong side of the road for them. Their backs are to the traffic. Often they’re on their cells; if not, they’re listening to their iPods, as I bear down on them. Often it’s twilight. Often they’re wearing dark clothing. Come on, people! Don’t you want at least a fighting chance at surviving an encounter with a motorist who is blinded by the sun or the darkness or fiddling with his own phone or music player?

When I come up on a hapless pedestrian, though I know it stamps me instantly as a curmudgeon who is to be either ignored or given the finger, occasionally I can't resist the urge to slow down and try to reason with the 16-year-old girl or the portly middle-aged fellow inches from my right fender. “Safer to run facing traffic!” I’ll yell through my lowered passenger-side window. The other day when I did this, a woman pushing a stroller gave me a thoughtful look, said “Thanks,” and, I watched her cross to the left side in my rear-view mirror. I was so happy, I almost ran down a runner a hundred feet further on.

INEXORABILITY

2011-08-02T22:29:00.002-04:00

What's on my mind today is Fate. To be specific, the fate of a single, nondescript brown moth that landed its bedraggled self on the steaming tennis court whose bench a friend and I were sitting on between games. No sooner had the moth touched down than, as if in some infernal Rube Goldberg device, a tennis ball detached itself from a lesson being given two courts away and trundled, slowly but very straight, toward us and the moth. And as its momentum expired, it homed in on the fragile creature and with on its final turn, like some fuzzy juggernaut, ran over it. It was sheer coincidence, of course, but the vector was so precise that it felt like something else. What would the last thought of the moth, had it been sentient, have been? Something like, "Of all the gin joints in all the wor--"

ROMEO AND JULIET IN AFGHANISTAN

2011-08-01T17:41:00.005-04:00

The Times headline read “Afghans Rage at Young Lovers; A Father Says Kill Them Both.”

The bare facts are these: two teenagers “of different ethnicities” –- Rafi (pictured above in his prison cell) is Tajik, Halima is Hazara (guaranteeing that a marriage between them would not have been arranged by their parents) -- tired of meeting in secret, obtained a car and eloped, heading for a courthouse where they intended to marry. They had driven only thirty feet when a group of men stopped them, pulled them into the road, and interrogated them: what right had they to appear in public together? “An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.”

Police arrived, and a riot ensued, in which one man was killed. The kids were spirited off to jail (undoubtdly the safest place for them), where they languish at present, awaiting trial. There is no indication that they had engaged in, or were engaged in, any activity more culpable or subversive than sitting companionably together in an automobile.

“Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” the 17-year-old Halima asks, from her prison cell.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps its because the narrative’s outlines conform so perfectly to those of Romeo and Juliet. That is, depending on how it ends, we might well have cause to describe this story as a tragedy. Except that, in Shakespeare’s play, only two characters display anything like the fanaticism that seems to characterize the Afghan social milieu -- Juliet’s hot-headed Tybalt (who indeed thinks Romeo should be put to death, by himself) and Juliet’s father, in a single scene in which he loses his temper volcanically. The deaths of the young protagonists come about because of a series of miscalculations and fatal coincidences: Romeo kills himself because he believes Juliet dead when she is in fact living, and Juliet kills herself when the Friar, who is by her side in the family mausoleum, is spooked and runs away. The parents, at the plays end, mourn their children and erect statues in memory of them.

But in the present case, the girl’s uncle visited her in prison to inform her that she had shamed the family, and that they would kill her once she was released. Her father stated, “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,”

What’s happening in Afghanistan seems to me less than tragic and worse than tragic. Tragedies are about heroic attempts to defeat overwhelming odds, in which the dignity and seriousness of the hero’s (or heroes’) downfall produces in us a complicated blend of admiration, sadness, and resignation. I don’t know about you, but all I can feel about this is rage and a sense that human culture and the bonds of family as we know them have somehow been suspended. There’s no dignity, no heroism, no sense of individual fate playing itself out. Two children are about to be crushed by an ideologically-driven machine, and there seems to be no way of stopping it. (Of course, the law is always a machine, blind and capable only of quantitative judgments; that’s why Cocteau titled is version of the Oedipus story La machine infernelle.) The genre that fits here is not tragedy but irony, whose point of view is such that it reduces human life to a meaningless shadow-play. Macbeth described human life as a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. The lives of Rafi and Halima, in their culture, apparently signify nothing. It’s not a tale told by an idiot; it’s a tale about idiots.

MINIMALIST THEATER

2011-07-21T13:09:00.002-04:00

As You Like It, the Public Theater, 2003

My last blog expressed my admiration for the Green Theatre Collective and their approach to performing theater. The “Green” in their title is not someone’s name; it’s part of their mission to make theatrical production environmentally friendly, to use up as few unsustainable resources as they can. This means taking a “minimalist” approach to theater, the most radical feature of which is: no stage. When Peter Quince, the director of Pyramis and Thisbe the play nestled nestled inside A Midsummer Night’s Dream) takes his band of rude mechanicals into the woods in search of a place to rehearse, he finds just the spot: “This green plot shall be our stage,” he tells them. There’s a metadramatic joke here, of course; the original audience had been watching the actors perform on a stage which they were forced to imagine as a wood; now, either they had to reimagine it as a stage, or simply stop imagining it altogether. The joke is lost, of course, if the stage has been transformed with fake grass and trees into a forest. GTC goes one step further: they perform the whole play on an actual green plot -- in the case of last week’s As You Like It, a lawn on a farm in Shelter Island.

They also employ no sets, no artificial light, vestigial costumes, and only seven actors for a play whose Dramatis Personae specifies 26 speaking parts. This may be, for them, largely a political and practical decision: they’re saving the earth and making do with what resources they can muster. I experience it more in esthetic terms. I’m a minimalist at heart; I hate lavishness. When I was 19, I saw Aida performed at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome with more pomp and circumstance than Kate and William’s wedding; there were live elephants on stage. I hated it. I was bored by the recent Tony-winning play War Horse, which as far as I was concerned was all chrome and no motor.

To make the overcoming of obstacles the dynamic of performing a play is not a new idea. Shakespeare would no doubt have welcomed kleig lights, rear projection, moveable sets and recorded sound effects, but he not only made do without them, he made the lack of them work for him. In the Prologue to Henry V, the Chorus disingenuously proclaims both the inadequacy of the project and its solution:

But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

Shakespeare and Company, in the Berkshires, specializes in small-cast Shakespeare; I saw them do Julius Caesar with five actors, and tour-de-force of doubling. And the Public Theater, in 2003, 21-year-old Bryce Dallas Howard and six even lesser-known actors did an amazing As You Like It, in which most of the problems were solved by tumbling and acrobatics: Ron Pisoni played both Orlando and his brother Oliver, and in a dialogue between them, switched characters by doing alternate back and forward somersaults, donning and doffing a hat in midair.

Movies, television and the modern theater can supply whatever is needed in the way of realism without taxing the audience's willing suspension of disbelief; in fact, that's the business that Pixar is in. The Dogma movement in film, which I find ridiculously rigid and tendentious in most respects, is at least an attempt to clear the clutter. But thank God for underfunded but undiscouraged theater companies that are proving, all over the world, that less is much more than more.

Tomorrow or the next day: minimalism in text.

SHAKESPEARE LIVES ON SHELTER ISLAND

2011-07-19T12:34:00.001-04:00

First there was Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, in Montauk, for whom I worked as dramaturg for the six best summers of my life -- As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew -- and which David Brandenburg has been trying to revive, so far without success. Then, when Josh Gladstone became the director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, I was able to work on Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Hamlet. The two experiences were very different: one outdoors and the other indoors, one all romantic comedies and the other the darkest tragedies. But in two ways they were alike: they exhibited artistry in the highest degree, and they lost money. So, for the past five years, there's been no Shakespeare east of Shinnecock -- no Bard in Bridgehampton, no Avon in Amagansett, no William in Wainscott, no . . . well, you get the idea.

So I've pined, and languished, and made occasional summer forays into New York to keep my Shakespeare jones mamageable. But this past weekend, as if in some kind of time warp, Shakespeare came back to me. A company called the Green Theatre Collective, very young, enthusiastic and talented, has been roaming the Northeast, performing for a night or two in unlikely venues. What makes their work eco-theatrical is their tiny footprint: they don't build sets, they don't use artificial lighting (and so perform at 5 PM), they wear street clothes, and there are very few of them: on Sunday, we watched seven talented actors bring As You Like It to life at Sylvester Manor, essentially a working farm with some cultural ambitions on Shelter Island, with only an sail-less windmill as a backdrop.

Part of the process of paring down involved cutting the text and doubling most of the parts, which is part of the fun: the aristocratic Rosalind was equally convincing both as the male Ganymede and as the sluttish Audrey, and the fearsome Charles the Wrestler, at court, morphed into a gentle elderly peasant in the Forest. Sarah Hankins, the director, deserves full credit for making the limitations into benefits. She omitted Jaques's tedious and unnecessary farewell speech at the end; instead, the audience's peripheral vision caught the melancholy fellow ambling sadly away from the festivities on stage, a sad and moving moment.

I talked to the company's executive director, Hal Fickett (who played Orlando; everyone wears several hats) about the logistics of the operation. In a way, it's very simple: like their itinerant sixteenth-century forbears, they roam the countryside, accepting what humble food and lodging they can promote, living by their wits and Shakespeare's. They're living proof that large ensembles, expensive machinery, and modern technology are almost beside the point. There's an argument in the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Theseus, defending the efforts of the amateurs who are presenting a play so tragic it's funny, so bad it's wonderful, by saying, about plays in general, "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." His bride Hippolyta replies, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs," and she's hit the bullseye: the more imaginative work the audience has to do, the more rewarding their experience will be. Lope de Vega, the great Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare's, described theater as merely "two boards and a passion," but as the Green Theatre Collective is proving, you don't even need boards if you have enough passion.

The company's website is http://www.greentheatrecollective.org/.

DOPPELGANGERS?

2011-07-10T16:44:00.004-04:00

He did it! Well, of course he did; it was only a matter of time. Some record-breaking performances are exciting because the question is whether the record will indeed be broken. Will someone on the PGA tour shoot a 58? Did Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, breaking Ruth’s season record, but in 8 more games? But it wasn’t a question of if Derek Jeter would get his 3000th hit but only when – and, given the season he’s been having, I dreaded the wait, the countdown. Remember when A-Rod was trying to hit that 600th home run, and kept not doing it? Get it over with, already.

As it turned out, in Jeter’s case, the wait was worth it. For a basically shy, closed-in, inarticulate person, judging from interviews, he has always had a flair for the dramatic: the “Flip Play” against Oakland in 2001, the catch he made against Boston diving into the stands and emerging with the ball and facial bruises are only two of the most famous examples. But five hits, the 3000th a shot into the left-field stands, the 3003rd a game-winning single!

But what makes him my favorite ballplayer, and the role model, the icon, the poster boy for the Great American Pastime, is not his operatic moments but what has come to be called his “work ethic”: no one in the game prepares more diligently and gives more of himself. In an age when great players like Manny Ramirez and Miguel Tejada (to name two egregious defenders) are known for loafing down to first after they’ve hit a ground ball to an infielder or are sure they’ve hit a home run, Jeter runs everything out. Maybe the infielder sees you busting down the line and makes a bad throw. Maybe your home run doesn’t quite make it and caroms off the wall and you end up at 2nd or even 3rd. When Jeter homered historically on July 9th, he put his head down and sprinted for first, and he didn’t slow to a jog until he’d rounded the bag, at which point the Rays’s first baseman literally took his hat off to him.

There was another, older ballplayer known for Jeter’s type of play, so much so that his nickname was “Charlie Hustle.” His real name was Pete Rose, but he might as well be called the Antichrist, if you judge him as organized baseball does. On and off the field, he was the antithesis of Jeter, a pugnacious wise guy who played rough (he broke a catcher’s shoulder in the All-Star Game by slamming into him at the plate) and bullied umpires; he was indicted for tax evasion; he was twice-divorced, the second time on uncontested grounds of adultery -- and he liked to gamble, which was his fatal weakness. After an amazing 22-year career as a player he became the manager of the Reds, the team he had played for. In 1989 he was accuseed of betting on them and permanently barred from baseball. That meant barred from the Hall of Fame, as well. Of course, betting against his team would have been a mortal sin, since, as manager, he could have easily rigged games by adjusting the line-up. But even betting that the Reds would win was unsavory – a sportswriter claimed that he never placed bets on nights when he named Mario Soto or Bill Gullickson as his starters.

Rose denied the charges until, in 2004, he wrote an autobiography in which he confessed to this sin. This only seemed to enrage the powers that be even more; he was accused of hypocrisy for waiting 15 years before coming clean. During those years, he lived a sqaulid life, even, at one point, sinking to professional wrestling.

Jeter’s accomplishment is not to be scoffed at. It takes talent consistently displayed over many years to amass 3,000 base hits. Only 26 other players have done it, and none of them Yankees – not Gehrig, not Ruth, not Mantle. The 3,000 hit club is one of the most exclusive in sports. Jeter will be a first-ballot unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame when he retires, and he deserves to be, not least because of all those base knocks.

But what bothers me is that the moment after they put the bat on the ball, Derek Jeter and Charlie Hustle looked a lot alike. If Jeter’s accomplishments on the field deserve to be celebrated both as athletic feats and paradigms of ethical behavior, how are Rose’s great moments invalidated by his private failings? What happens if we judge them both simply as ballplayers? Know how many hits Pete Rose, the Other, the Unmentionable, the living repudiation of all that baseball would like itself to be, ended up with? Four thousand, two hundred and sixty-five.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

2011-07-09T12:01:00.002-04:00

Age starts to catch up with almost everyone in their 40's, especially with their vision. You find yourself holding the menu farther and farther away, or squinting with one eye to make out blurry letters and figures, until you give in and buy a pair of reading glasses to correct your advancing far-sightedness.

Since the whole population is aging, you'd think the people who design our products would be cognizant of this problem, but they're not -- largely, I think, because engineering is a young person's game. This is certainly true in the software business; those 23-year-old whiz-bangs don't think like the rest of us or see like the rest of us, which is why digital cameras, for example, come loaded with sub-sub-menus that are incomprehensible to laymen. I'd include a picture of mine if I could figure out how to point the front of the camera at the back of the camera, but you get the idea. At least the viewfinder has a diopter adjustment, so I can focus on what I'm focusing on. My wife's camera, which is newer, does away with the viewfinder altogether (people prefer, or are believed to prefer, screens, which suck power out of the battery like a weasel sucking eggs), and to use it, I have to don, of course, my reading glasses.

But let's stick with the vision thing. Above are two control panels, the top one from our brand-new Hamilton Beach toaster oven, the bottom one the detachable face of our after-market Miata AM-FM-CD player. Note the size of the words and numbers on the toaster oven, and their placement on the dials. Not only do I have to put on my specs to operate them, I have to stoop down until I'm on the same level as the thing, because otherwise the bottom portion of the temperature range (top dial) and the length of desired cooking time (bottom dial) are hidden from view.

As to the sound system, I think it speaks for itself. There are no fewer than 24 controls on the thing, most of them rocker switches with teensy-weensy numbers on them for mode, preset stations, and a host of other functions. At 60 miles per hour, do you really want to be crouching to peer down at your radio, trying to remember where the volume control is or what you have to press to skip a track on a CD?

I could multiply these examples by a hundred; these happened to be handy. There are exceptions. Thank you, Kindle, for letting me choose the type size of whatever I'm reading. And thank you iPad for letting me enlarge any portion of the screen just by pinching it. But I wouldn't accept an iPhone if you gave me one, and my iPod isn't much better.

By the way: if you're having trouble making out the details on the pictures above, you're proving my case.

JEFF NUNOKAWA AND THE FACEBOOK CONFESSIONAL

2011-07-02T12:00:00.001-04:00

Jeff Nunokawa

I’ve written two books in my life – my dissertation (which was carved up and published as four articles) in 1967, and Shakespeare’s Dilemmas, which was published in 1988 and got me promoted to full professor at Brooklyn College. Both were worthwhile projects; both were endless torture. I’m not suited to the format; I can’t hold the whole thing in my mind at one time. My late friend Richard Uviller was exasperated by my failure to write more books; he thought I had much to say, he admired my writing, he told me I was denying my destiny. Not so, I kept telling him. My destiny, in literary terms at least, takes a short-format form: I write articles.

He refused to accept that explanation: articles, even scholarly ones, are ephemera, he claimed – they exist only for a moment, and are then buried under an avalanche of more articles. Did Shakespeare write articles, he would ask?

Well, no, but Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and if I were a serious poet, so would I. I think the greatest poem written in English is Paradise Lost, which is ten thousand lines long, but of course the epic form is not for me. Fourteen lines seeems about right. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet that defended sonnets from the charge that they were too slight to matter; it begins,

    Scorn not the sonnet: Critic, you have frown’d,
    Mindless of its just honours; with this key
    Shakespeare unlock’d his heart; the melody
    Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound. . . .

The image of unlocking the heart points to the private, confessional nature of the sonnet; sonnets were sometimes writ small and folded into lockets, shown at the writer’s whim to whoever was deemed worthy. No less a personage than Elizabeth I indulged in this practice. I’m not a poet, though I write occasional verse, for birthday, wedding and anniversary toasts (see my birthday toast to Roger Sherman in the previous blog), but I can’t resist reprinting a poem I wrote while stuck in a subway tunnel one day years ago:

     They have no need of poetry,
     Those who should be moving shortly in the sooty tubes
     Beneath the river that surfaces at Times Square.
     No need of Strand's or Clampitt’s airy overviews
     That fresco the walls of buses,
     Short-haul limos awash in the city’s changing lights.
     No, those with tunnel vision
     Have more pressing concerns
     Than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
     They need to know
     Where to get their torn earlobes stitched
     How to avoid AIDS and its evil twin SIDA
     And most of all
     What steps to take
     When they can’t move
     And the lights go out.

But I’ve never followed up with more verse. If I did, it would probably be haiku; for me, as for Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the thrill of the short poem is the tension between getting something said despite the formal obstacles – in the latter case, 17 syllables, arranged in a 5-7-5 three-line pattern. Haiku can be sensuous and lyrical, or funny:

    Left the door open
        For the prophet Elijah –
    Now our cat is gone.   (from Haiku for Jews)

Technology is on my side, of course. Twitter mandates a limit of 140 words; most internet writing is stripped bare of grammar, punctuation and prolixity. (Not mine; I write in standard English and proofread every e-mail I send.)

But I just read a Talk of the Town piece in the July 4th New Yorker that opened a door for me. There’s a professor at Princeton named Jeff Nunowaka who writes a Facebook note every day – the count now exceeds 3000. Typically they begin with a short citation from one of his favorite authors – George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- followed by scholarly “meditations – half literary-critical, half confessional.”

Nunowaka has respectable conventional credentials; he’s published two books, one on Dickens and Eliot and the other on Wilde. But he now prefers the sociability of Facebook, and the fact that he can more easily connect with undergraduates there. When I read about his approach, I felt instantly empowered. I’ll never write another book or journal article, and the book and play reviews that have occupied me for the past few years do feel insubstantial; when I fritter an afternoon away on the golf course, I feel guilty. I’m very bad about contributing to this blog, because very few people read it (though it’s an endless loop: I don’t write because they don’t read, and they don’t read because I don’t write). But Facebook as a viable medium for actual writing! Nunowaka and I are already “friends”; I’m going to ask him if it’s all right to start contributing notes to my own page.

ON ROGER SHERMAN'S BIRTHDAY

2011-07-02T11:52:00.000-04:00

Well, our friend Roger, now you know
Firsthand the infamous Six-Oh.
It wasn't hard to get there, was it?
It doesn't feel that different, does it?
The only thing to fear is fear;
You're still the man you were last year.
And there are upsides to this fate:
You get the senior movie rate,
And modern medicine can aid
Those needing help to make the grade –
Prostheses come in every shape,
Supports for back, wrist, shoulder, nape.
Viagra, Rogaine, other pills
Now minister to many ills
That earlier were thought to be
The lot of oldsters such as we.
So buck up, Dude! Stiff upper lip!
If need be, go replace a hip!
A birthday's an excuse to party,
So let us drink a toast most hearty
To wisdom and accomplishment,
The films that help to pay the rent:
There’s danny meyer, Richard Rodgers,
Fast Eddie and his boyish codgers,
There’s calder and there’s chevrolet,
Plus more than we have time to say,
And one that hasn’t yet been seen:
an ode to israel’s cuisine.
To all the blessings that have flowed,
And to the fun that you’re still owed,
From those of us in the same fix,
Here's to another decades six!

NAME-DROPPING

2011-04-05T12:18:00.009-04:00

BUTLER LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The above photo depicts a building that personifies, for me, the seven miserable and all-but-wasted years I spent as a graduate student at Columbia – the aloofness, the indifference, the elitism, the self-satisfaction of an institution that seemingly went out of its way to frustrate, depress and impoverish me and my classmates (with the exception of those who had graduated from Columbia College, who got all the grants and TA jobs). Yes, I got a doctorate. Everything I learned, I taught myself.

But I digress. What I want to point out is something the low-res photo doesn’t clearly show: the frieze of names that runs around all four sides of the structure, just above the columns. That’s right, names. Apparently, Nicholas Murray Butler, past president of the university and the man for whom the library is named, thought it would be appropriate to proclaim the university’s intellectual stance by featuring 18 dead white European males as a kind of proclamation: this is who we are, this what we stand for:

HOMER HERODOTUS SOPHOCLES PLATO ARISTOTLE DEMOSTHENES CICERO VERGIL [sic] HORACE TACITUS ST. AUGUSTINE ST. THOMAS AQUINAS CERVANTES DANTE SHAKESPEARE MILTON VOLTAIRE GOETHE

The choices, I suppose, are predictable. One might question the inclusion of Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Tacitus on the grounds of relevance and popularity, but it’s pretty much a syllabus of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, everything that the decanonization movement despised. No women, no non-Westerners, no persons of color (well, a case has been made that St. Augustine was the exception to both of the previous categories), only one candidate chosen from the last four centuries of human intellectual endeavor. But what interests me more than who is up there is the endeavor itself: to simply list their names. There's an incantatory feeling about it; you don’t have to read or study what they wrote, just recite the iconic monikers, and you've been somehow Improved.

Interestingly, the 92^nd Street Y adopted the same approach when it decorated the Kauffman Concert Hall, which dates from the same period (1930), with a similar frieze:

SHAKESPEARE DANTE ISAIAH JEFFERSON WASHINGTON DAVID MOSES
BEETHOVEN LINCOLN MAIMONIDES

The differences are more compelling than the overlap. It's as if this upstart institution, founded by upwardly-mobile Jews in a then unfashionable part of the city, felt compelled to demonstrate its twin loyalties: Hebraic tradition and lore are coupled with a declaration of loyalty to the history of the country that took them in. The grandchildren of Emma Lazarus’s “wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shore” had gained a cultural foothold, and were acknowledging their debt to its hosts, even as they asserted the equality of its own tradition. Shakespeare, Dante and Beethoven are just filler -- default cultural markers, as it were.

But again, a kind of magic is at work, just as it is on 116^th Street: the sheer power of the names itself is presumed to do part of the work that is usually ascribed to rigorous thought and study . It will improve us merely to saunter across campus or take a seat in the auditorium; we don’t actually have to enter the library or listen to a concert to be uplifted by Tradition.

Ben Jonson, in his wonderful play Epicoene, features a pompous fool named Sir John Daw (= jackdaw, a clamorous bird) who takes the same approach to learning:

CLERIMONT: What do you think of the poets, sir John?
DAW: Not worthy to be named for authors. Homer, an old tedious,
prolix ass, talks of curriers, and chines of beef. Virgil of
dunging of land, and bees. Horace, of I know not what.
CLERIMONT: I think so.
DAW: And so Pindarus, Lycophron, Anacreon, Catullus, Seneca the
tragedian, Lucan, Propertius, Tibullus, Martial, Juvenal,
Ausonius, Statius, Politian, Valerius Flaccus, and the rest--
CLERIMONT: What a sack full of their names he has got!
DAUPHINE: And how he pours them out!

Jonson’s name appears neither on Butler or at Kauffman. Wonder why?

CARRISHKEIT

2011-03-04T10:11:00.002-05:00

I need to buy a new car -- or do I? Our 2003 VW Passat, the best car we've ever owned, has 117,000 miles on it, and things are going wrong: mysterious warning lights on the dash, like "Check Brake Pads," which the dealer's service department told us had appeared not because our brake pads were faulty, but only because they weren't made by VW, and, more alarmingly, "Check Engine," which usually means that the catalytic converter is failing and that the car won't pass inspection unless we spend thousands of dollars fixing it.

And yet . . . it runs like a dream. It's totally comfortable; in fact, I bought it because its driver's seat had so many possible configurations that I no longer have to stop, get out and stretch after an hour at the wheel. It has all-wheel drive, a necessity in the winter for our long, steep driveway, but it still gets 26 mpg on the highway, and its 6-cylinder engine, coupled to an automatic transition with manual passing gear, is smooth, quiet and powerful. And I love its bells and whistles: memory buttons that adjusts the seats and mirrors for each of us when it's pushed; a computer under the speedometer that can tell you how long you've been driving, how far you've gone, how many miles till you run out of gas, what your current gas mileage is, and the sex of your unborn child.

It looks a little stodgy and old-fashioned, though, and parking it in the city has covered it with scrapes and dings, so for the past year I've found myself looking at other cars. I'll be driving the Passat down Hands Creek Road and a brand-new Subaru Outback or Acura RDX comes sailing past, and I'll be filled with carlust. And here's the thing: I feel guilty. As if I were married to the Passat but surreptitiously checking out younger, hotter women. Shopping for a trophy wife. I know what you Freudians are thinking: that this is really about Nancy, not the car. That's utter bullshit. I look at other women all the time (they're lined up outside my office every morning) and never feel any guilt at all.

Nancy and I have gone so far as to test-drive that new Subaru, and in many ways it's terrific: roomier, better gas mileage, more ground clearance (we got stuck in our own parking area in January when the snow was over the Passat's bumper), and a jaunty style. But will I be happy with the 4-cylinder engine, which is a little buzzy and doesn't have quite enough oomph? Will I be able to adjust the front seat to cradle me in the manner to which I've become accustomed? And do I want to nick the piggy bank to the tune of $30K+ when I might get a year or two more out of the Passat?

Old Faithful Young Honey

I stay up nights worrying about these questions. It feels like a life-altering decision, though it never has before; we've bought six new cars in the past 25 years, and nary a panic attack have I had. Maybe my OCD is kicking in. The salesman at Riverhead Subaru calls every couple of days, and I keep putting him off with lame excuses. Someone, please, tell me what to do!

NARRISHKEIT

2011-03-04T09:46:00.004-05:00

“Narrishkeit” means “foolishness” Yiddish (from the German “narr,” as in “narrenschiffe,” ship of fools) – not quite “folly,” like investing with Madoff, but more the kind of idiosyncratic nuttiness of which everybody has a few choice examples. One that Nancy and I share is the way we play Scrabble.

From the beginnings of our relationship (back in what I think of as the early modern era), we’ve both enjoyed games, but there’s always been a problem. When we were engaged, I tried to learn bridge, which Nancy had played in college; we had another couple as partners, a tyro and an old hand, and the whole thing was a disaster. I’m a terrible card player and couldn't learn the game, and the other couple broke up over the acrimony and general fecklessness it engendered in them. Nancy and I tried chess, but she was carrying around a lot of emotional baggage: her father was the senior champion of the state of Michigan, who delighted in thumping his eldest daughter, and playing with me brought those repressed memories back with a vengeance. Whatever we tried, ego intruded and bruised feelings ensued – except when we played Boggle with Danielle who, from the age of 17, has kicked both our butts every time. (Not because of her enormous vocabulary; more because a big part of the game involves spatial relations, seeing various combinations, at which she excels).

But lately, Nancy and I have been playing Scrabble. Well, not Scrabble – a variant called Lexulous, which is offered on Facebook. The difference is that there are eight letters instead of seven and – most important – no challenges; if you make a word that’s not in the game’s “dictionary” (I use the term derisively and loosely), it doesn’t accept it and you can recant and make another word.

Where does the foolishness come in? We could easily set up the Scrabble board and play face to face, but it works better for us to play online. So Nancy sits downstairs in the living room on her Powerbook and I sit at my desk upstairs on my iMac, and when one of us has moved, he or she shouts, “OKAY!” Talk about the machines turning us into machines! But because there’s no eye-contact, no audible grumbling, no muttered imprecations, there are no hard feelings. And we’re about equal in skill, so games are usually decided by who gets the good letters – the right combination of high-powered consonants and vowels.

What’s next? Computer tennis? Virtual sex? Stay tuned.

CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER

2011-02-05T12:21:00.002-05:00

I love living in East Hampton -- or at least I did until this winter. In the 30 years since we bought our first house, there have been snowfalls, some of them major, but nothing like what's been happening here. In the past month, we've been plowed twice, and still, when we arrived on Wednesday night (after a 45-minute dig-out from our parking space in the city), we got stuck at the top of our driveway and had to call AAA the next morning. The freezing rain is worse than the snow; first it melts the surface of what's already there (the base is almost two feet thick); then it turns to slush. It's like
Groundhog Day -- nine storms in five weeks, dig out and watch the new snow obliterate your everything you've just finished clearing.

When we bought our house, we never gave a thought to the fact that our driveway was 100 feet long and at a fairly steep angle. For that past two months, that's been the central fact of our lives; all our travel decisions are based on it.

For the first time, I'm considering Plan B: quit teaching and spend the winters in a warm, sunny clime. We'll give the Northeast one more winter, but if it's anything like this one, very possibly, we're outta here.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING OF?

2011-01-25T14:13:00.008-05:00

MAXIM. I MEAN MAX. OR IS IT MAXINE?

King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, seeks his death. Of course, so does Regan, Daughter #2, but I can better understand Goneril’s point of view. What were the monarch and his queen thinking when they named their first-born after a venereal disease? (Yes, the word was current as far back as 1547.)

I’m attuned to this topic because I don’t particularly care for my own name. I think the two rhyming syllables – Richard Horwich – sit awkwardly on the tongue and in the ear. Nothing to be done about "Horwich," which I heard a lot about when I was in school: "I love to go to Dick's house because of the whore which is there." And there's that other problem, but of course, how were my parents to know that “Dick” would acquire its present colloquial meaning, obliterating its history as simply a name to the point where, when I wrote to one of my editors, his magazine's e-mail filter would send my messages to the Trash unless I signed them “Diq.” My Aussie friend with genteel sensibilities changed it to Ricky (another bad choice). For the first ten years of my life my parents called me Dickie, which I hated, and which I still hear sometimes from people Who Knew Me When -- though that has a kind of charm. My friends the Dicksteins told me several years ago that their daughter thought one of the benefits of marrying was that it would free her from their family name. She got her wish.

My daughter Danielle will, on or about March 12^th, deliver into the world a baby girl whose name will be . . . nobody knows, and the expectant parents have gone from telling me it’s none of my business to asking for suggestions. Anything in Shakespeare? I mentioned to her that the Bard had a fondness for dactylic female names, so that she could, belatedly join that '90s fad that spawned an illegitimate verse form known as the Double Dactyl; the kid could be Perdita Bellenoue, Beatrice Bellenoue, Rosalind Bellenoue, Viola Bellenoue, Cressida Bellenoue, Helena Bellenoue (but not, of course, Goneril Bellenoue) -- though double dactyls or anything rhetorically doubled, for that matter, smacks of gimmickry. They’re naming a person after all, not looking for a catchy book title. They called their now-three-year-old son "Maxim," partly because my son-in-law is French, and, oddly, because he and Danielle were under the impression that “Maxim” couldn’t be shortened to a nickname (they don’t like nicknames). If they ever move back to the States, they’ll find out how wrong they were. When he’s here on visits, people either mispronounce the French "Maxim" as the English "maxim" or just resort to the inevitable and to my mind perfectly OK “Max.” (Hey, if they name the little girl Minerva, their kids could be Max and Min – isn’t that cute?) Almost as cute as the scholar Sacvan Berkovitch being named for two executed anarchists, or the lawyer I met in Grand Rapids whose mother had been reading Gone With the Wind while she was pregnant and who has gone through life with “Rhett Pinsky” on his business card.

What prompts this reflection on parental naming sins is that there’s a girl on the roster of my Spring course with what at first seems a perfectly serviceable name, which I'll disguise except for the initials – let’s call her Andrea S. Smith. I guess her Mom never envisioned that monogram on the towels. NYU assigns e-mail addresses to its students by the following algorithm: initials of first, middle and last names followed by a number. So this kid is stuck with ass000@nyu.edu. What must high school have been like for her?

There are a lot of ways for parents to screw up children. Conferring a name that you haven’t tested out loud, or thought much about, or is appropriate to a toddler but terrible for an adult, is such an easy way to do it, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen even more often.

LAW-ABIDING CRIMINALS

2011-01-18T13:18:00.003-05:00

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana was quoted in the Times ("A Clamor for Gun Limits, but Few Expect Real Changes" by Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer) as asserting, “I maintain that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens makes communities safer, not less safe.” That’s what the NRA keeps telling us. But "law abiding citizens" is not a fixed and stable category. Jared Loughner was a law-abiding citizen (albeit a troubled one) who had never committed a felony until he bought a pistol and shot a Congresswoman and a score of bystanders. In Mike Pence's version of a perfect world, the victims in Tucson would have protected themselves by unholstering their own weapons and executed Lougner summarily. But none of them was armed. The vast majority of Americans reject, in principle and in practice, vigilante justice.

THE HORWICH/BELLENOUE 2010 NEWSLETTER!

2010-12-25T16:11:00.002-05:00

No, that’s not this year’s beachwear in the Hamptons, but it is de rigeur in the Sahara. We spent two terrific weeks in Morocco last March, on a walking tour that covered Casablanca (there are as many Rick’s Cafés there as there are Original Ray’s Pizza parlors in New York), Fez, Ourzazate, Marrakesh, the Atlas mountains and of course, the desert (spent a night in a tent, and Dick got to jam on drums with the Berbers). We made lifelong friends whose names we have already forgotten – or never knew, like this guy.

Other trips: the annual pilgrimage to Utila, the gem of the Caribbean, to visit to the kids, where we participated in a variety of activities above and below the water – diving, picnicking on Water Key, drinking with 30-somethings in ramshackle bars. Nice to trade New York taxis for water taxis for a few weeks each year, though the drivers are, if anything, even more reckless:

And of course, like many little boys, Maxim is fascinated by airplanes, and has a large collection of model and toy aircraft. Not too many 3-year-olds, however, get to fly real ones:

Then there was Las Vegas in November, where DEMA – the SCUBA convention that Benoit attends every year – was held, and where we spent a lot of time gawking like the tourists we were at the Strip. Here’s Maxim (who loves hotels) contemplating Steve Wynn’s latest from the monorail. . . .

. . . and even more fun, having room-service breakfast with Papa.

(Nancy made a video of the Las Vegas sojourn which can be viewed on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps1st8tjtZQ)

The big news, though, is that Danielle is expecting a daughter next March. She and Ben have a name picked out but they won’t tell us. And, as if another baby wasn’t enough life-change for one year, they’re building a house, which has been said by many of their friends (who hope to freeload meals) to be the nicest on the island:. As you can see below, it’s almost finished. It will have a thoughtfully-designed soundproof room for grandparents, though we don’t know why the door locks from the outside. Here’s an aerial view:

Danielle puts the finishing touches to the porch:

Everything else remains pretty much the same: Nancy is still potting, and enjoying a certain vogue among fanciers of bowl and vase; Dick is still teaching at NYU, and just has finished one of his most satisfying semesters ever. In short, life is good. Plans for 2011 include a trip to Utila in March for the birth of our granddaughter and a possible African sojourn next winter.

So, from all of us to all of you, here’s to a great 2011!

Nancy, Dick, Danielle,Benoit and

UH, WANDA, ABOUT YOUR CHAIRS. . . .

2010-12-18T16:28:00.003-05:00

Some years ago, my godmother Wanda gave me and Nancy a pair of antique chairs she had no further use for. (That was always her rationale for gift-giving; her high-school graduation present to Danielle was a used Rolex that was appraised at $400 and cost $500 to recondition.)

These chairs, spindly and often mended, were never my favorite pieces of furniture, but we needed them in our NY apartment, so that's where they ended up -- until last night. Our friend Michael Rosenthal (pictured above) came to dinner, to cheer up Nancy (who was on crutches due to a bunionectomy she had just endured) and me (who had just lost 12 straight games of squash to him). We were eating Chinese takeout. I was sitting in one of Wanda's Chairs. I leaned back slightly and with a startling report, the horizontal strut across the back splintered and dropped to the floor.

I couldn't meet Nancy's gaze for some time, though Michael's laughter was clearly audible. But instead of justifiably reproaching my famous clumsiness, Nancy laughed too. "Oh, well," she said. "I never loved that chair."

Twenty minutes later, Nancy labored to her feet and seized her crutches. For the first time, they failed her; she toppled backward. Michael sprang catlike to his feet, caught her, and they both sat heavily on Wanda's Other Chair. Crack! The whole back snapped off. Michael was aghast, but we reassured him: what good was one chair of a matched set? And anyway, he was clearly the agent of fate. I shlepped the remains of both to the basement, leaving the staff to deal with them, and somehow, it felt as if a burden had been lifted from us.

WIE GEHT ES, PASSAT?

2010-12-18T16:18:00.003-05:00

My grandmother Yetta came to Saskatchewan from Odessa over a hundred years ago, speaking not a word of (what the Canadians call) English. She eventually learned English, imperfectly, a rough-and-ready, heavily accented speech that enabled her communicate with the taciturn farmers who were her neighbors and later on, when she and my grandfather retired to Vancouver, the more cosmopolitan types whom she encountered. But as she aged, her English left her. She remembered her Russian perfectly, but at the end, she could neither speak to nor understand her children or grandchildren.

Similarly, my Volkswagen was born in Germany and emigrated to this country in 2003. At the time, its various displays spoke English flawlessly. But lately, as it's aging, the same process that made my bubbi revert to her native tongue seems to be taking place. It's a European car now. The readout above was in Fahrenheit until last week,

VEGAS

2010-11-25T12:45:00.001-05:00

Danielle, Maxim, and Maxim's new friend

What happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas. We met up with our kids and grandkid there (Benoit had a DEMA convention to attend), and though I summoned my most imperious scorn for the occasion, it wasn’t half bad. Since we were last there (23 years ago), big changes – the old, tacky town of run-down ex-luxury hotels has been razed and rebuilt, and the new places – the Bellagio, with its fake Eiffel Tower, Wynn and its new neighbor Encore, Bally’s – are monumental in scale and opulent in amenities. The people are still pretty tacky, though, especially those poor souls who sit all day in front of slots, endlessly pulling the lever with no hope in their eyes. We did very little gambling. The hotel gave us $30 in free chips, just to get us hooked; Nancy put them all on Even at the roulette table; 16 came up; she took her winnings and walked away.

The food was a revelation. We ate at a Thai restaurant called Lotus of Siam, which we learned about from the Times article heralding the opening of its sister eatery in New York, and it was, as promised, the best Thai food we’d ever encountered – in fact, some of the best food we’d ever encountered. And Sen of Japan was as good as it gets, too: wonderful, inventive sushi at a third the price of Nobu. The reason we went so heavily Asian is that Danielle, living as she does in Honduras, goes without for months at a time, and being pregnant, she has cravings we’re only too happy to satisfy.

And there was a terrific golf course across the street from out hotel, where I played three successive days. I think the whole city must be economically depressed; resort golf at only $80 a pop is almost unheard of. So, all in all, one of the best family vacations ever --- even if, unlike our better-connected friends the Patells, we did have to fly coach.

Craftsmanship

2010-11-16T12:12:00.000-05:00

My friend Deborah challenged me to revive my blog by posting every day for a month. I won't be able to do that (we'll be computerless in Vegas later this week), but le't see how close I can come.

Last night was Nancy's birthday, and we went with the aforementioned Deborah and husband Cyrus to Tom Collichio's much-touted Craft. Daughter Danielle ate there a couple of years ago and raved. But it seems Craft has strayed from its original concept -- create-your-own-meals by huddling with someone who functions as a sous-chef -- and now offers, simply, an a la carte menu, which is another way of saying very expensive food. What's new and different about choosing an app, a main course, and sides? The short ribs were terrific, but at $38 the portion was a bit skimpy, and needed to be fleshed out with cippolini onions and roast potatoes, each about $11. Things start to add up, and though the ingredients are top-quality and the preparation faultless, we left feeling a little empty, both in the stomach and wallet departments. .

"PAUL DICKINSON: NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP" EH STAR, JUNE 17th, 2010

2010-06-20T11:36:00.005-04:00

Standing next to the ninth green at Montauk Downs State Park, I squint to make out Paul Dickinson, one of the club’s assistant pros, preparing to tee off a quarter of a mile away. Paul makes an apparently effortless, perfectly balanced swing. I don’t see the ball until it lands in the fairway, almost 300 yards from the tee. When he reaches it, he hits an iron shot so high it appears to have escaped earth’s gravitational field; finally, it decides to land seven feet from the pin. Paul brushes in his birdie putt.

No big deal; he’s been making birdies here most of his life. Golf ran in his family: “When I was a kid, my dad bought me little golf clubs, and I’d hit a whiffle ball around the house,” he says. Born in Montauk to a clan that goes back four generations (his grandparents owned Deep Hollow Ranch and managed Third House), he and his folks moved to Texas when he was eight, but he came back to Montauk every summer.. After playing college golf, he tried to turn pro, but the game didn’t always come easily; at one point, he felt like the marginal golfer who famously said, “I’m not good enough to make it, but I’m too good to quit.” Paul tried other, more conventional jobs, but the pull of golf always brought him back and he was highly motivated by his late brother, stricken by cerebral palsy, who inspired him to make the most of his talent. Now, at 33, he’s playing better than ever. He credits much of his recent success to Michael Hebron -- part swing coach, part sports psychologist – who teaches at Smithtown Landing CC.

Nine holes is all Paul has time for on this day; he’s a busy man. He typically rises at 4 A.M. and puts in some computer time related to become a head club pro – a fallback position in case Plan A (becoming a professional golfer) doesn’t pan out. By 6:30, he’s working on his game at the club, followed by giving lessons from 8 to 4, aand a lunchtime workout with his trainer. After his last lesson, he’ll play some a few holes, have dinner with his wife Nicole and two young sons – “I try to separate my golf from my time with my family,” he says – and he may even go back to the course to practice until it’s too dark. Most nights, he’s in bed by eight o’clock. He has virtually no social life aside from widely-spaced restaurant dinners with Nicole. When does go out, he told me, ruefully, “People I know give me a hard time – ‘You haven’t been around in two years!’”

Nicole is “more than supportive” of this grinding regimen, as is Kevin Smith, head professional at Montauk Downs, who allows Paul a flexible schedule. One great round will get him into this year’s U.S. Open, the second of golf’s four “majors,” to be held at world-famous Pebble Beach. Paul won the local qualifying round at Noyac in Sag Harbor last month, shooting a 67, and there are spots waiting for four to eight of the 120 entrants at the 36-holes-in-one-day sectional qualifier, in New Jersey this month.

But Paul’s long-term goal is to become a member of the PGA Tour itself. He has friends who have made it and are doing well, like Zach Johnson (who won the Colonial Invitation on May 30^th), so he has an idea what the ambience and level of play up there are like. His ultimate ambition, he says, is to win a PGA tour event, not just for the million-plus-dollar purse but because that’s the crowning achievement of any golfer’s career.

Whatever his success in qualifying for the Open, he’ll play several events this summer, and the cost of travel, plus the entry fees, adds up. Since Paul is, in addition to being a prodigy, a patient and talented teacher and one of the most personable guys around, he has a big rooting section at Montauk Downs, and lots of people buy tickets in fund-raising raffle there. Paul’s quest is very special to the Downs community, because it would validate the local golfer community who play at what is, according to Paul, a “spectacular” golf course – long, hard, and in beautiful condition, in a class, says Kevin Smith, with the great local-area private clubs like Atlantic, The Bridge, Maidstone, and National. If Paul Dickinson makes it to Pebble Beach, you’ll hear the cheers all the way from Montauk to the Shinnecock Canal.

DRIVING THE BOAT

2010-06-14T16:56:00.004-04:00

How often have I bitched and moaned about Utila, where Danielle lives -- its inaccessibility, its lack of cultural diversions, its removal from the civilized way of life available to children who grow up in New York, as I did and Danielle did. How often have I disapproved of Maxim's lack of access to the museums, the plays, the concerts, the private schools?

On the other hand . . . neither Danielle nor I got to drive the boat when we were three years old.

ARF!

2010-05-14T16:55:00.006-04:00

Grading term papers is a chore, but once in a while you come across goodies like this, from the pile sitting on my desk:

“In Sonnet 116, [Shakespeare] ruminates on love that 'is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.' In this instance, the nature of love seems to accept both extremes of the dog. As its tone wavers from violent to doleful, the bark (or the blind groping for love) is not measurable in the traditional sense, but the moon serves as a captive audience that manages to absorb each discrete sentiment that the bark emotes.”

It reminded me of all the other moments like it – the student at Brooklyn College who confused “burrow” with “burro” (I told him he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground); the other BC undergrad who wrote that “Oedipus fell through his tragic floor” (I think the borough’s accent was to blame), the kid who described himself and his girlfriend as “shits that pass in the night.” There was another student who began a freshman essay with “I was born of poor but Jewish parents,” which is not exactly a blooper, but wonderful in its own way.

"CITY ISLAND"

2010-05-10T11:02:00.006-04:00

The other night, I went with my friends Jim and Carol (Nancy was in Florida) to see City Island, which seemed to us the best of a pretty bad selection of movies playing in East Hampton. The summer silly season has begun early this year, and local theaters were showing films like Babies, Iron Man 2 and Furry Vengeance. We settled on City Island despite the lukewarm critical response it engendered. Owen Gleiberman in EW gave City Island a grade of C+, disparaging “the quirky parade of family contrivances that fill out the movie."

We loved it. Those contrivances (which all hinge on family members telling lies about who they are) are what make the movie as much fun as it was. Carol said it was Shakespearean, and she’s absolutely right: the plot hinges on disguises, hidden identities, fantastic lies, and the unexpected consequences of them. Vince, the husband-father, is living a double life: he’s a prison guard but he secretly wants to be an actor, and he’s been taking acting lessons – a shameful activity in his particular cultural milieu – which leads his wife (Juliana Margulies with a Bronx accent, several rungs down the social ladder from her role in “The Good Wife”) to suppose he’s having an affair. In addition, Vince has reconnected with a grown illegitimate son who’s imprisoned where he works and moved him into the family manse, admitting that the kid is a convicted felon but concealing the family relationship. Add to this mix a daughter who’s supposed to be a college student but is really a stripper and a teenage son with a fat-lady fetish, and the lies start to take on lives of their own, all culminating – in the best Shakespearean tradition – in an orgy of truth-telling that almost magically solves every problem and leaves the family not only intact but cleansed by its ordeal. So it’s a very funny comedy with a romantic ending. If I were pitching the film in a story conference, I’d tell the studio heads that it’s The Comedy of Errors meets The Winter’s Tale (and of course they'd turn it down, which is why I'm not in the movie business).

And adding to its charm is the setting. City Island itself is (again in the best Shakespearean manner) a never-never land; despite the fact that it actually exists (Nancy and I years ago used to frequent Sammy’s Fish Box for its excellent clams), it’s an improbable place – a little New England fishing village stuck onto the Bronx. It seems made-up, like Illyria or Prospero’s island, which is why the improbabilities of the story work just fine.

An added benefit: as is not the case with Shakespeare's more outré locales, Jim and Carol and Nancy and I made a date to go there and scarf down some sea food some fine summer night. Nancy's seeing the film this afternoon by herself to bone up for this final exam.

A TALE OF TWO STADII

2010-04-17T10:55:00.009-04:00

If only I were writing this post about the Mets' new home, I could have titled it "A Tale of Two Citis" -- but that's life. But to the point: a lot has been written about the new Yankee Stadium (the soullessness, the corporate rapacity), and there's a lot of nostalgia floating around Bomberland for the old place. The other day, Nancy and I took the 4 train to see the team perform on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and as the train slowed for the 161 St. station, we were somewhat aghast by what looks like Dresden or Nagasaki but is in fact the remains of old homestead.

But look what awaited us only a few hundred yards to the north: how could anyone find fault with this vista, particularly since the myth that no one can afford the seats from which this picture was taken is just that, a myth. We paid a total of $60 for them on Stubhub, and if we hadn't requested e-mail delivery, it would have been $10 less. The fact that the Yanks got routed seemed almost incidental.

THE ROAD TO MOROCCO

2010-03-29T16:49:00.008-04:00

Nancy and I spent two weeks touring Morocco in March. These are a few of the 1,028,391 pictures we took.

THESE PICTURES (AND THOSE ON THE BLOG THAT FOLLOWS) MAY GIVE YOU SOME IDEA WHY, SINCE WE GOT BACK, EVERYTHING LOOKS, SOUNDS, SMELLS AND TASTES A LITTLE BLAND.

MORE MOROCCO

2010-03-29T16:35:00.006-04:00

MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG

2010-02-13T17:13:00.006-05:00

Nancy's mother, Beulah Wasserman, died four years ago; her father, Joe, followed his wife of 65 years into the great beyond in 2008. They lived a rich, happy life, and their family and countless friends mourned their passings, grieved for an appropriate length of time, but then, as we must, moved on.

All but the IRS, which went into a state of total denial. Having been duly informed of their deaths by Nancy, who as the eldest daughter took on the task of dealing with the estate and related matters, the IRS decided to stonewall. Letters addressed to Buelah and Joe Wasserman appeared regularly, demanding information -- why had they not filed tax returns? Had they changed domiciles? -- and making veiled threats: you are liable to penalties if you do not etc. etc.

Nancy dutifully replied to each missive, explaining in language that any child could grasp that the taxpayers in question were deceased. Last month, another letter arrived (by this time the IRS seemed to believe that B & J had cunningly taken refuge in East Hampton with us) that said, essentially, Prove it! Send us the death certificates! We'll send them back when we're convinced they're genuine.

So I scanned the death certificates and Nancy mailed them off to Washington. Today, an envelope arrived from the IRS with the certificates in them. It was addressed to Beulah and Joseph Wasserman.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

2010-02-09T10:45:00.005-05:00

Last night, Nancy and I went to a play reading at the Player's Club (founded by Edwin Booth in the late 19th century, and looks every day of it). The play was called "Mortal Terror," and its subject was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a malcontent named Guy Fawkes tried unsuccessfully to blow up Parliament and everyone in it, including King James and the rest of the Royal Family.

I went partly because I knew that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights Ben Jonson and John Marston were characters in it -- though they had no connection with the Plot, they figure prominently in the plot, Shakespeare to the point of having a clandestine affair with Queen Anne. But primarily I was there to renew my acquaintance with the playwright, Robert Brustein, who had been my advisor at Columbia during my first year of grad school and for whom I had written a thesis on the Modern French Theater. The proseminar on drama that he taught changed my life; it was my first experience with the academic side of theater, and it both scared me a little and thrilled me. If I'd never met Bob, I doubt I'd have finished graduate school and become a professor.

This was in the 60s. Bob, though he's now in his 80's, is still straight-backed, with all his hair and a brain in perfect working order. He's actually as handsome now (see picture) as he was then. Having not seen him for decades, I was sure he wouldn't have any idea who I was, but he remembered me -- the name and the thesis were familiar to him, though we haven't seen each other once during all those intervening years, which he spent at Yale Drama School and then at Harvard, running the American Repertory Theater, which he founded.

We don't often get a chance to make connections over that span of time. It telescoped virtually my whole adult life to a vanishing point; suddenly I was 22 again, and he the Young Turk of the Columbia English department. Before Columbia, he had taught at Vassar, and his charisma was such (I have this on good authority) that Jane Fonda, then an undergrad, got up an hour early to apply makeup before showing up in Bob's class. He was a little intimidating in those days, but now we met almost as equals, and he couldn't have been warmer; he seemed to be getting as much of a kick out of our reunion as I was. So here's to you and your new play, Bob -- may we all age as gracefully as you have.

LIKE A MILDEW'D EAR: A TALE OF TWO CITYSCAPES

2010-01-27T11:17:00.008-05:00

Driving down Park Avenue at dusk yesterday, stopped at a red light, I had Hamlet on my mind -- specifically the scene in Gertrude's bedchamber, in which Hamlet forces his mother to confront two pictures -- his father and her present husband -- in which his villainous uncle comes off far worse:

Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself. . . .
This was your husband. Look you now, what follows:
Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

The light turned green, and I looked forward, down the avenue to its vanishing point -- which used to be the graceful silhouette of the Grand Central building, but is now the shapeless colossus of the Met Life Building just to the south, which (as one architecture critic said when it was built as the Pan Am Building in 1963), is wedged into the space it occupies like a fat lady trying to get through a narrow doorway.

So, like Hamlet, I superimposed the pictures of past and present, and came to the much the same conclusion: Park Avenue, whose terminus used to be as graceful as the Champs Elysee leading into the Arc de Triomphe, now simply hits a brick wall, so to speak. Lever House and the Seagrams Building, which had brought some architectural distinction to the famous boulevard, has been decisively trumped -- and not by the Donald, who later accelerated the process. The Pan Am / Met Life usurper, like Claudius, has irreversibly blasted its wholesome brother.

WEST SIDE STORY

2010-01-07T11:32:00.008-05:00

I’ve lived in many New York apartment buildings – I think the total is up to ten – but none of them more wonderfully situated than 2 West 67th, to which my parents moved when I was about 13, and which was my home away from home during prep school and college. Aside from fronting on Central Park, our building had the advantage of being situated directly across the street from the storied, landmarked 1 West 67th, better known as the Hotel des Artistes, built in 1916 as an artist’s cooperative (all the south-facing windows are double-height) and home, during its illustrious history, to Child Hassam, Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward, Norman Rockwell and Howard Chandler Christie who, in lieu of paying rent, executed the murals that graced the restaurant that, until last year, graced the main floor, the Café des Artistes. What he painted was a series of panels featuring naked woodland nymphs gamboling about a Grecian landscape, and I believe that the elderly woman who could be seen almost every afternoon during the 60's sipping an aperitif under one of the larger panels was the model he had used for all the figures 50 years earlier.

I’d never been inside any of the apartments until last night, when a very well-connected woman in Nancy’s pottery class threw a birthday party for a friend, the centerpiece of which was a piano recital by the composer Philip Glass, who filled the huge, stunning apartment with his own piano works. Sipping champagne as the music rolled in lushly around me, I marveled at the architectural details – the 25-foot ceiling, the kitschy second-floor balcony – and that wonderful mix of West Siders that no other neighborhood can boast, the multiracial academic/intellectual/bohemians of a certain age, leavened by a sprinkling of young men and women whose collective coolness was easily a match for lower Manhattan, a few toddlers, and an enormous cat who prowled among us as we listened.

My people, I realized. I’ve lived on the East Side for 40 years now, and such a gathering would never have taken place on Park Avenue. Money on the East Side is stodgy; everyone wears a suit, and it would have been a charity event to be endured. Money on the West Side has style; everyone wears what they want, and it was a musical event to be cherished. I’m so glad, after all these years, finally to have found my way into a building in the same class, culturally and architecturally, with the Dakota and the
Osborne.

"UP IN THE AIR" AND "PRECIOUS"

2010-01-01T13:14:00.008-05:00

On New Year's Eve, Nancy and I stayed home and watched DVDs. I'd like to pretend that we turned down invitations to all sorts of glamorous parties because it's a long-standing tradition with us to view It Happened One Night every December 31st, but such was not the case. We went to a friend's house for a drink at 7, and were home by 9.

The friend's daughter, however, is a member of the Motion Picture Academy, and she offered to lend us "screeners" of two possible Best Picture contenders, Up in the Air and Precious (whose full title, annoyingly, no doubt for legal reasons, is actually Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire). We took and watched them both.

Disclaimer: Stop reading here if you haven't seen, and want to see, either or both of them, because I'm going to have to tell you a little about them to make my point.

On the surface, no two films could be less alike. Up in the Air is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who has no life and likes it that way; he travels 300 days a year for his soul-destroying job (he works for a company that fires people for other companies), and he hates the days he's not travelling. The element in which he lives is the world of business class, airport lounges, car rentals, and hotels, all of which he enjoys mightily because his huge total of amassed frequent-flyer miles entitles him to upgrades in every department. He has no friends; he's estranged from his family; the only women in his life are one-night stands he meets on the road, and his only ambition is to become only the seventh person to achieve 10-million-mile status on American Airlines.

Precious is about a depressed 16-year-old black girl who lives in Harlem and faces a future so bleak it's painful to contemplate. She has a child with Down's Syndrome and is pregnant with another, both fathered by . . . her own father. She lives with her satanic mother, who abuses her emotionally and physically, screaming at her to give up school and go on Welfare, as she, the mother, has. And, though she fantasizes about herself as a celebrity, she's startlingly obese. At school, Precious is doing all right in math but she can't read the simplest of sentences. The second pregnancy causes her to be expelled, and just as she's settling into an alternative school, she discovers that her father has given her AIDS.

I had been looking forward to Up in the Air because it sounded like a breezy, sexy comic recreation for grown-ups. I had little interest in Precious because it sounded like something worse than tragic -- the inexorable downward spiral of someone whose life is insupportably awful and who never expected or had a shot at anything else. Wrong on both counts. What makes the films similar is that both Ryan and Precious blossom as the narratives unfold. Ryan reconnects with his family, saving his sister's wedding; he mentors his young assistant, who manages to teach him a thing or two about what's wrong with the business they're in; he meets a woman in an airport bar who turns out to be smart, funny, and interesting enough for him to abandon their transient relationship (meeting in hotels whenever their business travels intersect). He takes her along to the sister's wedding, and the relationship develops depth and human texture.

Precious, too, comes to life. Monosyllabic throughout the first half of the picture, she's taken under the wing of an extraordinary teacher at her new school, and she begins to read and write and talk out loud. This sounds like a lot of inspirational-teacher movies you've already seen, like Dangerous Minds, but it's not; such is the brilliance of Gabourey Sidibe and her mostly anonymous supporting cast that everything looks, sounds, and feels almost unbearably real. She rescues herself from her mother, moves into a halfway house, finds the courage to live with her disease, and at the end of the movie is well on her way to her GED and a life with some dignity and the promise of rewards in it.

Ryan is not so lucky. Breaking a cardinal rule, he surprises his new-found ladyfriend at home, and discovers she's married with children. He learns that one of the countless people he's fired on the job has committed suicide, and his career breaks into a thousand little pieces. Achieving his 10-million-mile status, he finds himself indifferent. The assistant goes off to a real job in San Francisco; the girlfriend says she's still up for intermittent escapist sex but nothing more; what passes for his home is a studio apartment in Omaha, where the movie leaves him contemplating the bleakest future imaginable.

So what begins as a feelgood movie turns out to be a downer, a story of a clever, resourceful, sympathetic man who loses his way in a life that has become a trackless wasteland from which he'll never emerge. And the movie that looks to be a heartbreaker is instead that rarest of beasts, a heartwarmer for adults, a story of someone who seems doomed but who will survive and if not thrive, at least cope. So in the end, they are, indeed, very different films, except in two ways: they have the same narrative structure, if not ending, and they're two of the best movies of 2009.

THE 2009 HORWICH/BELLENOUE FAMILY NEWSLETTER!

2009-12-27T10:54:00.015-05:00

Danielle and Maxim share a quiet moment at the beach on Utila

Hello, friends, colleagues and well-wishers! Thank you to those of you who were organized enough to send out your cards and letters before Christmas; we now reciprocate as best we can.

2009, as it was for everyone, was an up-and-down year for the Horwich and Bellenoue families -- more up than down. Maxim learned how to walk, is beginning to talk, and is shedding his diapers. And it was a year of family reunions. Benoit, Danielle and Maxim made a long-awaited trip to France to visit Ben's family in Paris, Orleans and Montpellier -- Danielle says she met 38 relatives of all descriptions, and her conversational French improved dramatically. Here are Ben

and Maxim in the garden behind his sister Agnes's house in the Parisian suburb of Houilles. And we all met in Orlando last month where, at Animal Planet, Disney presented a wide-eyed little boy with tigers, zebras, rhinos and gibbons. Nancy and Dick visited Utila once; Danielle, Ben and Maxim made several trips to the States.

Dick revealed to the world his secret life as a playwright. He has written perhaps the most uncommercial play in history: its title is The Merchant of Venice, Act Six, and its audience needs to be on speaking terms with the Shakespeare play to which it is a sequel, which rules out about 95% of potential playgoers. Nonetheless, it received a professional reading during the spring at The Naked Stage, an East End group that supports dramatic activities out here. In the picture below, Dick is reading stage directions; the actors are Melissa Hermann, Molly McKenna, Josh Perl and Joe Brondo. The next step would be a workshop; if anyone knows a small theater group that's looking for material, please have them get in touch!

Nancy is continuing to grow as a potter and has had several shows (with accompanying sales) this year: first, as a member of the Clay Art Guild in Water Mill and also as a student at the West Side Y in Manhattan. She is setting up a pottery workshop in our basement but also will continue her lessons with master potters Nancy Robbins in Sag Harbor and Outi Putkonen in New York City. "Learning something new at my age is a wonderful thing. Making money while doing it is miraculous." Here she is at a sale of her wares in Water Mill; above are adorable Smurfy bud vases of her creation.

And finally, we peripatetic Horwiches have moved from our tiny pied a terre on First Avenue and 100th Street to a larger, brighter, and infinitely more convenient apartment at 108 East 96th St. (10128 is the Zip), between Lexington and Park, handy to Central Park and the subway and buses.

All in all, as the song goes, it's been a very good year. And we wish everyone the same for 2010.

Love,

Nancy, Dick, Danielle, Benoit & Maxim

SNOW DAY

2009-12-22T14:09:00.005-05:00

The picture above of our back porch will give you an idea of how hard East Hampton got slammed by the blizzard last Sunday. NYC got 12”; the deepest snow measured in Suffolk County was 26”, but I think we got closer to thirty. I foolishly left the car in the garage overnight, instead of doing what my more experienced neighbors did, which was to park it at the bottom of the driveway facing out. Much easier to clear snow off the car than shovel a 100-foot driveway. It didn’t really matter, though, because the town hadn’t gotten around to plowing the street when we had to leave on Monday. I had thought briefly about leaving Saturday morning to beat the storm, but the people who did that hit a wall of white coming at them, and at least one had to abandon her car in Nassau Country.

So there we were, on Monday morning. I had to give my final exam at 2:00 on Waverly Place. The jitneys were running, but how to get into town? We ended up floundering down the driveway and along our road to a bigger road that had been plowed. Then we stuck out our thumbs. Twenty minutes before the jitney was due to leave, a taxi – one from a company I hadn’t called – stopped for us. There were three people in it, all going to the jitney, so we were saved.

But what about that blizzard itself? Some of the forecasters were calling it a 50-year-storm, not so much because of its intensity as because it occurred (technically) before winter had even begun. The usual pattern where we live is chilly Decembers, frigid Januaries, and lots of snow in February and early March.

I believe this storm was a manifestation of global warming. Wherever the warmth is (and it ain’t here), it makes for more volatile weather all over the world -- more or less rain than usual, hotter or colder than normal. I’d love it if New York’s climate was changed into Atlanta’s overnight, but maybe we're going to become Montreal South. Last summer, June and July were like April – cool and damp. When summer did come, in August, it lasted for three blistering weeks and then it got cool again. It also seems to me that the past few years have gotten windier, though this is purely a subjective impression garnered on area golf courses.

After the relative fiasco of the conference in Copenhagen, I’m more convinced than ever that there’s no solution. The sundry nations of this world – controlled as they are by governments driven by self-interest and short term political and economic gains – are not going to lower emissions. It’s estimated that the world’s power usage will rise 50% in the next twenty years, and windmills aren't the answer. I’ve flipflopped on nuclear power; there will inevitably be accidents like Three Mile Island, but the benefits of all that clean energy outweigh them.

Rather than spend the trillions necessary to change the climate, why don’t we spend billions preparing for the worst? Holland, centuries ago, didn’t try to lower sea level. Instead, they built dykes to raise land level. That may not work for the Seychelles, but then, nothing will. Global warming, within my grandson’s lifetime, will make uninhabitable all of the tropical and most of the subtropical parts of the earth. It will correspondingly make habitable – by which I mean arable, comfortable, viable -- places like Murmansk, Hudson’s Bay, and the Cape of Good Hope. More people die in today’s world from extreme cold than from extreme heat; there will be enormous dislocations but the result, globally, won’t be all bad.

Or else it will. There’s a fair chance we’ll pollute and poison this planet until human life can’t inhabit it any more. Is that a bad thing? Yes, for human life; no for Mother Earth. Ecologically-minded people who worry about what we’re doing to the planet would be better off worrying about themselves. Some time after the last human dies, after the last V-8 runs out of fuel, after the last coal-fired power planet shuts down, Earth will start to heal itself. It may take a thousand years or a million, but eventually, it will be Eden again. Everything will be green. The polar ice caps will have re-frozen. The snow pack on Mount Kilimanjaro will have returned. The coral reefs will teem with fish. There will be isolated traces of mankind's existence, but no archaeologists to study them.

THE SEASONED TRAVELER

2009-12-17T13:52:00.006-05:00

Puerto Madrynn, Argentina, is probably the northernmost outpost of Patagonia on the Atlantic side of South America, and justifiably popular, therefore, with tourists, which is what we were three years ago. Memorable are the fauna, particularly the sea lions and penguins. Unmemorable is the food. I reproduce below -- word for word -- the menu of one of the most popular eateries in town, which I just came across leafing through old travel brochures. We stuck to steak; can't go wrong with that in Argentina.

Shell fishes to the Milanese with three sauce

Variety of shellfishes to the pickle

Muffled up in flour meat in lemon and olive oil with capers and parmesan cheese

Cold meat brawn with Russian salad

Unrine ham with palmettos

Unrine ham with melon

Bird mayonnaise

LIBERAL FEELGOOD MOVIE OF THE YEAR

2009-12-16T10:56:00.003-05:00

Nancy and I went with friends to see Clint Eastwood's Invictus the other night. It wasn't my first choice; no political movie ever is. But two of my favorite actors were in it -- Matt Damon and the inestimable Morgan Freeman, than whom no one on stage or screen has more effortless gravitas.

In case you've missed the hype and glowing reviews, Invictus concerns the successful efforts of Nelson Mandela to win black South Africans' hearts and minds away from soccer to the national rugby team, the Springboks, which had always symbolized for them the white Afikaaner nation that had oppressed them for so long. Mandela had two tasks to accomplish: first, to make a losing, dysfunctional team competitive on the world stage, and second, to convince black citizens that it was their team as well as their white counterparts.

I didn't hate the film. I was simply bored out of my skull. The film takes its title from an 1875 poem by the justifiably obscure Ernest William Henley, which is to poetry what Invictus is to film -- a collection of noble sentiments. "I am the captain of my fate, / I am the master of my soul," it proclaims, and the film's writers take their cue from that approach to discourse. Throughout, Mandela speaks only in political phrases, laying out his case not only through public addresses but to his staff and friends as well. To his aides, he says things like, " This is the time to build our nation" and "How do we inspire ourselves to greatness, when nothing less will do?" Damon is the Springboks' inspirational leader, Mandela's counterpart in the locker room, whose version of polspeak is the relentless pep talks he gives over and over: "We need to become more than just a rugby team," he tells us. He has a girlfriend with whom he won't have sex because he wants to save his anger for the field, and that's the only potentially personal relationship in the movie, Winnie Mandela (Mandela's estranged wife) having been conveniently dropped down the memory hole.

The actors sleepwalk through these roles; neither is given any recognizable human emotion to portray. What's left is a series of recurrent motifs: Mandela greeting by name and shaking the hands of overawed white rugby players; the stilted, suspicious gibes of his mixed-race security detail slowly turning into comradely banter; and scenes from the rugby matches -- largely incomprehensible to American audiences who don't quite know what happens when thirty large men in shorts huddle in a snorting, straining "scrum" and the ball mysteriously pops free and is picked up by a member of one team or the other. Just how the Springboks went from last to first in the standings would have made a good story (though it would have turned Invictus into just another sports movie, along the lines of Any Given Sunday, which takes its football seriously). Eastwood seems to think it believable that it happened just because Mandela convinced Damon who convinced the team that it would be a good thing to win every game they played. Not only do we have to watch all the huffing and puffing, we have to listen to the entire South African national anthem, which is as tedious as listening to anthems always is.

As the credits rolled at the end, half the people in the theater rose and applauded. What they were applauding was not the filmmaking, I think, so much as the PC sentiments portrayed. In the movie's limited context, South Africa's race problem had been solved, decades of hatred and resentment wiped away by men of good will who had been brought together by the towering figure of compassion and good sense that Mandela represented. (Tomorrow, December 17th, happens to be The Day of the Vow, still joyously celebrated by white Afrikaaners as the anniversary of the slaughter of 3,000 Zulus back in 1838.) In reality, I think, Mandela is indeed a larger-than-life figure, one of history's most admirable and effective political leaders -- like Gandhi. And in fact, this film reminded me a lot of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, another interminable, dry, lifeless hommage to a fascinating man reduced to a figurehead and a symbol.

Interestingly, in conversations with people who've claimed to have enjoyed Invictus, I've been able to change their minds about it by asking whether they really enjoyed the performances, individual scenes, cinematic moments and the like. "Well, actually," more than a couple of them have said, "I can't think of anything. I guess it was a little long." Yes, but it was saying all the right things. Duty required us to appreciate Eastwood's high-mindedness, and to reciprocate by approving his PC sentiments. But I hope he'll go back to making films like Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. Both of them, like Invictus, were about heroes. But they were also about people.

TIGER, TIGER, BURNING NOT SO BRIGHTLY

2009-12-05T12:00:00.003-05:00

Everyone expects me to blog about Tiger, just because I used to write about golf. But this isn't golf, it's adultery -- and it takes a strange form.

When the story first broke, I thought it was just another case of a star athlete giving in to one of the main perks of the job, the hordes of groupies who wait for them outside the arena, stadium or course to make sure their nights aren't lonely. Wilt Chamberlain bragged in his autobiography that he'd slept with 20,000 women during his career -- kind of gives new meaning to the term "dunking," doesn't it? I used to know a flight attendant who worked Yankee charters and who told me that one of the ballplayers (a name you'd recognize) was hitting on her during a flight and she asked him whether he was married. "Well, yeah," he is supposed to have replied, "but I'm not a fanatic about it."

But this is different. The whole story hasn't surfaced yet, but it's clear that Tiger wasn't engaging in serial one-night stands. He was actually having affairs with two other women -- leaving cell-phone records of multiple calls stretching back over a two-year period. Was his marriage to Elin (pictured above) rocky from the start? Why did he get married, anyway? To have kids whom he'd see very little of until he retired, by which time they'd be out of college?

"I'm human," he finally told the press, after the monumental PR screwup of the initial revelation. But that's just it. Before this, he didn't seem exactly human. No one on the PGA tour came off as more driven, more disciplined. He's remade his golf swing twice in eight years; it wasn't broke, but he fixed it anyway. And people want to see (or hear) what's behind the facade; there are half a dozen YouTubes of him farting during last year's Buck Open.

But lust seems a different matter. Except it doesn't seem to be lust, or only lust. He must need something from Ms. Grubb and Ms. Uchitel that Elin isn't giving him, whether it be companionship, understanding, or what the French call nostalgie de la boue -- an urge to wallow in dark places. In a piece dated today, December 6th, Carly Crawford in the Sunday Herald Sun said that at least in the case of Rachel Uchitel, "She was the only one he loved - he told her he loved her. He tells them it's their secret. He makes them feel special. You don't talk (publicly) after that." So maybe it is just that familiar athlete's habit of ringing up scores, after all.

It will be interesting, at all events, to see how this plays out. More interesting than Tiger's doings have been so far.

THE TRAVEL GODS COME THROUGH FOR US

2009-12-01T11:48:00.005-05:00

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and Nancy and I are starting to think about our annual pilgrimage to Utila, a tiny island off the coast of Honduras, where Danielle, Ben and Maxim live.

Utila has both its charms (it is a Caribbean resort, after all, with world-class diving) and its drawbacks (aside from the diving, there are no recreational facilities, and the beaches and restaurants are nothing to twitter home about). All that is pretty much beside the point – seeing our kids is Prioritas Uno. But getting there is something of a hassle.

Though it’s only (!) about 2000 miles away as the crow flies, we haven’t yet found a crow willing to take us there. So the usual routine is to fly to Miami, then to San Pedro Sula (Honduras’ second-largest city), then to La Ceiba (a smaller city on the coast), and then negotiate the last 20 miles to the island itself either by charter or ferry. If everything is on schedule, this takes about sixteen hours; if not, maybe 24. The trip is like recapitulating the history of air travel in reverse: you start out on a 767 and end up on a single-engine four-seat Cessna 172, manufactured sometime during the Ford administration.

A couple of years ago, we tried a different tactic. There’s a somewhat larger island only a few miles away from Utila called Roatan, on which there’s an international airport. It’s possible to fly Continental from NY to Houston to Roatan fairly quickly and easily. The catch is that there’s only one flight a week, going and coming, and you still have to get from Roatan to Utila, which ain’t easy: there are no boats (abortive attempts to run a ferry have all failed, despite the fact that there are always prospective passengers), so you’re back to flying. Anyway, we thought we’d give it a shot: we chartered a Cessna (the air taxi of choice down there) to meet our plane from the States and everything worked perfectly: we were on time into Roatan on a beautiful sunny day, the charter was waiting for us, and a smooth half an hour later we were hugging our family as we stood on the short, pitted tarmac that passes for Utila’s landing strip.

The problem was the return ten days later. Though the rainy season had ended, no one had told the clouds that were massing over the island. Rain started falling early in the morning, and by the time we reached the Utila “airport,” the half-mile-long runway was soggy, its potholes full of water. To make matters worse, there was another couple ahead of us; the Cessna would have to pick them up, turn around in Roatan and come back. When we saw it land, bouncing and splashing, we knew that would never happen. Though the pilot said he’d try his best to return, they barely got airborne, and we mentally kissed them goodbye. We had two hours to make our flight from Roatan to Houston; the next one was the following week.

Baffled, we shrugged at each other as the rain got stronger. We were joined by a girl in her 20’s carrying a large backpack; we asked her what her travel plans were, but she was vague. As we stood there, debating what to do, we heard the sound of engines. Plural. Not the lawn-mower putt-putt of the Cessna, but something more powerful. Out of the clouds appeared a small twin-engine airliner. It landed with no difficulty and taxied over the shed in which we were standing,. On its tail was emblazoned “CENTRAL AMERICAN AIRLINES.” Ben, who’s lived there for fifteen years, shrugged in bewilderment. Central American flies only between Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and San Pedro Sula, its other big city. “That’s my ride,” announced the girl with the backpack, and strode toward the plane, whose passenger door had been opened by a man in a the sort of purser’s uniform that reminded me of Pan-Am clipper days.

I followed her, splashing through the puddles, and as she boarded the plane, I asked the purser, heart in mouth, where he was going. “Roatan,” he replied. “Will you take us?” I demanded. He looked me up and down, chewed his lip, and finally answered, “Only if you pay in cash.” “How much?” “Fifty dollars each,” he said decisively, as if to forestall any bargaining on my part.

I would have paid five hundred. I stuffed bills into his hand, Nancy and I kissed the kids goodbye and hurriedly boarded. There were about 12 rows of seats, and only three passengers -– Nancy, myself, and the backpacker. As we taxied to the end of the runway, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. Now it gets weird. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in barely accented English. “Welcome to Central American Airways Flight Six, from Utila to Roatan. Today we will be flying at an altitude of nine hundred feet, and our estimated flight time is fourteen minutes. Sit back, relax, and have a pleasant journey.” The sense of disconnect was surreal – we were essentially being rescued, but here were all the amenities of “real” air travel,

Fourteen minutes later we landed in Roatan, an hour early for our flight to Houston.
I was profoundly grateful for the travel assist, and entertained by the theatrical veneer of professionalism, which you never get when you fly on Sosa or Copa, the legitimate airlines in that part of the world. Danielle says I should take a lesson from what happened: that some solution to a travel problem always comes along, so I shouldn’t sweat these things as I do. But I think this year, we’ll go back to the longer but somewhat more predictable four-leg version of the journey.

LIFE WITH DAUGHTER

2009-11-28T13:52:00.009-05:00

I'm in a nostalgic mood. Rooting around the computer, I came across these vignettes.

1987:

"Give it back," I said to my eleven-year-old daughter.

"You got a problem?" she said, widening her eyes. "Is there a problem, Mister?"

I laughed. I loved it when she did shtick for me. She was only eleven years old, but she had a nicely developed sense of irony. She had been watching Wheel of Fortune in our bedroom when I came home, emptying my pockets onto the top of the old mahogany dresser; Danielle had hopped off the bed, lifted my wallet, and disappeared down the hall into her room with it. Taking things that belonged to adults was one of her favorite numbers; a couple of weeks earlier, she had filched a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her friend Camilla's father's sport jacket while he was driving them back from a weekend in the country. "He shouldn't smoke," she explained to us.

"I kind of think that's his call, don't you?" I had said to her.

"I probably saved his life," she had answered. "Anyway, Camilla told me to do it."

**********************************************************************

1990:

Danielle is in a playful mood. She flops down next to me on Nancy's and my bed in East Hampton, where I’m watching the news, and snatches the remote control out of my hand. She tunes the television to MTV and slips the remote control under her butt. Then she expels air noisily through loose lips, the way a tired horse does. “How would you spell that?” she asks me. “Me and Lee and Kiki were trying to figure it out.”

“How about ‘P-T-P-T-P-T-P-T’?”

“We came up with ‘P-F-F-F-F-F,’ I don’t know why,” she says. She wheels around, facing away from the television. She puts her feet on the wall and grabs the phone, dragging it off the bedside table. It lands on the floor with a crash.

“PLEASE don’t stretch the cord out, like you did with your own phone,” I tell her.

She gives me “P-F-F-F-F-F” again, spraying my face with saliva. “Do you want me to tell you about me and Kiki’s most disgusting saliva fight?” she asks, her face lighting up at the memory. Without pausing for an answer, she launches into it. “We’re hanging out at her apartment, her mom’s around somewhere but we’re really all alone, and there’s this bowl of M & Ms, so I put a bunch of them in my mouth, and suddenly there’s Kiki giving me this Zerber on my bare arm.”
“What’s a Zerber?” I ask.

She makes a wry face at my ignorance. “A putzel,” she says, borrowing a Yiddish term from her grandparents. “So I turn around and I spit this huge soggy mass of chewed-up M & M’s right in her hair. So we both put more M & Ms in our mouths, and we’re chewing them frantically, and she’s got all these chocolate and peanuts dripping off her head. But then her mom came in. Too bad!”

Nancy comes out of the bathroom in her robe, turns off the television set and announces that she wants to go to bed. Danielle’s expression changes to wild alarm. “Nooo!” she says. She flips onto her stomach and spreadeagles herself, grabbing each corner of the mattress with a hand and digging her feet under the bottom of the mattress. She is wearing a pair of my cast-off boxer shorts and a huge ripped tee shirt that says FRANKIE SAY . . . Arm the Unemployed on it. Her long hair is wild, hanging over her face. How big she’s gotten this year! Smooth and muscular, her skin glossy; at fourteen, she is all girl, a little too much so for comfort sometimes, given her penchant for loose, skimpy clothing and sudden, animated motion.

“Let’s go, Danielle. Uppy-uppy,” says Nancy.

“I want to sleep in here with you,” says Danielle over her shoulder, mischief turning the corners of her mouth up. “It’s cold in my room.” She’s right about that; we’ve just arrived an hour before from the city to a house whose thermostat has been set at 45 degrees, and the heat hasn’t really come up yet. The only warm place is her mother’s side of the bed, with its electric mattress pad.

“Then put some clothes on,” says Nancy. “I’m cold too, and I want to get under the covers. Let’s stop before someone ends up in tears.”

But Danielle can’t stop. She lets go of the bed, grabs the top blanket and wraps herself up in it like a mummy, then starts rocking back and forth, making crooning noises. She is lying across the bed, so Nancy can’t get in. There is a riding crop lying on the dresser and I grab it and start making light, exploratory probes with it. Knowing that she’s protected by the folds of the blanket, I locate what is probably her behind and flick the end of the crop across it. “Ow!” comes her muffled voice from the depths of the blanket -- not a real exclamation, just a flat statement. Her helplessness challenges me, so I flick the whip against her again, a little harder this time. “OW!” she screams, and suddenly she is writhing free of the blanket, tears flying from her eyes as she flicks her hair away from her face. She gives me a scalding look and stomps out of her room and across the hall. She slams the door of her room behind her. I look at Nancy helplessly.

“Sometimes she just has to have a fight,” she says.

“Yeah, but I did hit her,” I answered. “It really was my fault.”

“Oh, it was your fault, all right,” says Nancy.

OCCASIONAL VERSE

2009-10-16T12:57:00.002-04:00

Like a lot of other people, over the years I've written poems for special occasions -- chiefly birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. Lest they be lost to posterity, I thought I'd better get them out there. (The dates have been omitted to protect those who are now aged and infirm.)

To Nancy, on her birthday

A lady turning thirty-seven
Deserves a little piece of heaven --
A gift, perhaps, that costs as much as
If she were a queen or duchess,
Or, at the least, a birthday luncheon
That’s fit for goddesses to munch on.
But best-laid plans of men or mice
Sometimes with fate will cut no ice;
Because my knee my weight won’t lift,
I couldn’t shop for any gift,
And cause Danielle last night went whoopsie
No birthday outing for my Poopsie.
Still, I can pen these lines to say
To wife and mom, Happy Birthday!

To Harry Wise, on his birthday

Ode: To the Late Harry Wise

It might be on the squash court
Or at a restaurant;
It might be at the tennis club
Or any local haunt.
If you’re a friend of Heshy’s,
Just try this on for size
You’ll spend some time there waiting for
The Late Harry Wise.

He’s booked a court for seven;
My watch says twenty past.
I’ve stretched and warmed up three times, now;
My temper’s slipping fast.
It’s 7:27;
Blood pressure on the rise --
Another piece of gamesmanship
By the Late Harry Wise.

I’ve hit upon a scheme I think
Might really be a winner:
Reserve a table -- nine o’clock --
When we go out to dinner.
Then tell him it’s for half-past eight.
“Eight-thirty sharp,” he sighs.
Who shows up at 9:45?
The Late Harry Wise.

A vision of the future dim
This morning came to me:
A doleful group of mourners
Standing funerarily.
The grieving widow, all the kids,
Each dabbing at their eyes.
Who’s late for his own funeral?
The Late Harry Wise.

But now, before that fateful day --
O many years before --
Your friends are gathered round to say
We wish you many more.
I hope you’re at the table for
This poetic surprise,
But I’ll start without you if you’re late:
Happy Birthday, Harry Wise.

For Mary Freeman, on her Fiftieth

Mary at 50

Write a birthday poem that's funny
Says the note from Rappaport.
"Relevant" -- right on the money
(Just be sure to keep it short)
In a vein that's light and airy,
Something altogether nifty
To cheer up our good friend Mary
Who is closing in on fifty.

Fifty, you say Mary's turning?
Cannot be! No way, Jose´!
Though it seems we've known her always,
We just met her yesterday.
She's that young Cornell alumna
Lives off Lex on Ninety-fourth,
In a nice old roomy brownstone
Just a little too far north.

Taking courses toward her Masters',
Has a house at Lido Beach,
Has a husband who's a lawyer,
Has a daughter who's a peach.
Now a second peachy daughter,
Now a son, and now another --
Her career's on the back burner,
Mary's now a full-time mother!

Years are passing, bringing with 'em
Lots of joys and lots of debt;
They could use a private income
(Harvey now is with Korvette).
All that private school tuition,
Orthodonture, doctors' bills,
Even from the pediatrician --
Korvette's future's looking ill.

All at once we're in the eighties,
Harvey's building a hotel.
Mary's now in private practice,
Prospects rosy, life is swell.
But her kids are leaving home now,
And her friends are turning gray.
Time is passing much too quickly!
It's September -- where is May?

Yet it's not a time for panic.
Mary Freeman's here to show
How to pay with grace and beauty
Debts we all to Time do owe.
As our poem at last closes,
This is what it wants to say:
You're not getting older, Mary,
Simply better, every day!

For David and Jan Gordon, on their wedding day

David and Jan

Some loves last for now and ever,
Liz and Darcy, always true.
Some are sort of now or never --
Capulet and Montague.
But for you, all sunny weather,
Not a quarrel, not a rift.
May your happy days together
Last as long as does this gift.

For De Witt Snodgrass, who has just sent me his book of poems titled "Mexican Dance Suite" (mine is in the same meter)

To De Snodgrass

I’m in love with your Mexican Dance Suite --
It’s a metrical, technical neat feat!
Let me add, though I’ve no urge to repeat,
It was fun from beginning to end.

And of course it was beautifully printed;
On typography, you’ve never stinted.
It’s a rare mix of arts, newly minted --
I’m honored to call you my friend.

Oh, but what will you do for an encore?
Say which popular forms will you next score?
Rap, rock, folk, heavy metal, or all four?
A poetic, synthetical blend!

I can’t wait to find out what you’ll do next.
Please, De, send me posthaste any new text.
I assure you, if not I’ll be sore vexed --
Now I’ll just say so long until then.

Dialogue with Danielle (literally; she wrote the first one, I the second, when she was in high school)

SHE:
You [my Socrates
Reflecting mirrored . . . moon]
Look here from afar;
I [the apprentice
Changing form of playdough]
Ride the falling star.

I:
I [your old man
inordinately fond of Q & A]
smile toward the mountains as
You [once apprentice, now disciple]
ride the flubber like an astronaut into the thinning air.
Falling stars burn out young, but rising ones
are hard to catch. Better just to listen as
they sing into space.

A Sonnet to Josh Gladstone and Kate Mueth, on the occasion of their marriage

To Josh and Kate, not one impediment
Would we admit. Their love’s too true for that.
Their wedding cup contains no sediment,
No sweat-mark stains the band of their love’s hat.
Despite the nepotistic state of mind
Involved in casting the director’s squeeze
As female lead in Summer ‘99
They handled all the challenges with ease.
So yet another HSF romance
Has blossomed here along with Heather/Dave,
Dave/Amy, and the others in love’s trance --
Gladstone and Mueth are fast each other’s slave.
They’ll bear it out e’en to the edge of doom,
But I, I find, have now run out of room.

SIGNAGE REVISITED

2009-10-15T14:34:00.005-04:00

Suppose you were following my directions to our house in East Hampton, and I had told you to stay on Stephen Hands Path until it dead-ended. You're on that road and you come to a fork at which sits this sign. Which way do you steer?

Wrong.

Despite the clear indication that you should bear left, Stephen Hands Path is to the right.

I realize that I've been preoccupied by signs lately; this is my third blog on them. The first dealt with the inexplicable grammar of a New York City parking sign, and the second with a threatening billboard posted by the Southampton Police Department showing a cop aiming a radar gun as if it were a Glock.

Of course, all English teachers are interested in signs; we're trained as semioticians (semiotics is the study of signs; same root as in "semaphore"). But road signs are more than just a subset for me; they constitute an index to how much a local government prizes its citizens.

New York State spent a lot of money over the past few years on large, elaborate message boards displayed on its parkways and highways, designed to inform motorists on traffic conditions ahead. Virtually all of them have stopped working. The one on the southbound Cross Island Parkway, which lets you know whether the Long Island Expressway or the Northern State Parkway is moving better, has never worked. Now there are signs only a year old on the parkways that are supposed to give you the time in minutes to a particular destination depending on which of several routes you take, and only one in ten seems to be in operation.

In East Hampton, main thoroughfares are labeled at every intersection, I guess to reassure you that you're still on the same road you've been on (which comes in handy if you take the left fork on Stephen Hands). But only about half the cross streets are identified. What's that about? Is the reasoning that anyone who would want to go to McGurk Street already knows where it is? On Memorial Day weekend, the roads are like a demolition derby, as renters try to figure out where they are and how to get where they're going -- making U-turns, swerving toward and then away from intersections, screeching to sudden stops. The locals have no patience at all for these tenderfeet (who, of course, support the local economy single-handed); they tailgate them, leaning on their horns, laughing all the way.

I guess it's a lost cause in this economy; no one is going to undertake an ambitious program of studying and replacing all the signs on all the roads in the state. So my tip of the month is, buy stock in GPS; it's becoming indispensable.

MY PROBLEM WITH ISRAEL

2009-09-17T23:12:00.008-04:00

I'm a secular Jew. But my father's family wasn't secular. My grandfather was a founder of the Zionist movement, and my father, who was fluent in Hebrew, lent his support to the Irgun in 1948. So, in my half-assed way (never been there, never planted a tree), I've always wanted Israel to flourish, and for Palestinians to abandon their insane insistence that it disappear. But the Palestinian in the picture doesn't conform to my mental image of Hamas fanaticism. She looks like a defenseless old lady with troubles of her own who's resigned to being bullied by an Israeli thug with nothing better to do than test her patience. It's always bothered me when Europeans (particularly Brits, because I'm an Anglophile) side with the Palestinians, as when Vanessa Redgrave made her famous remark about "Zionist hoodlums"at the Academy Awards, as when British universities recently tried to shut Israeli professors out from international scholarly discourse. But if this picture shows us what it's like to be a Palestinian on the West Bank, I begin to comprehend the urge to lob a few rockets at Israeli settlements. Why is the guy walking around with a glass of wine in the middle of the day, anyway? Getting wasted? Or looking for a target of opportunity?

REVIEW OF THE LIVING ROOM AT MAIDSTONE, E.H. STAR

2009-09-15T16:21:00.003-04:00

The inn formerly known as the Maidstone Arms has pruned a couple of its limbs and re-opened simply as Maidstone; the dining room has metapmorphosed into The Living Room. Change is obviously the order of the day. On a recent weeknight, four of us investigated chef James Carpenter's take on "New American with a Scandinavian twist." The Maidstone's website is proud to claim the restaurant's inclusion in the "slow food" movement, which is not a warning about the service but a commitment to everything that "fast food" is not -- they use locally grown produce, they smoke their own Norwegian salmon, they use sustainable ingredients like the salmon caviar that appears in several dishes, and there are eco-friendly touches like filtered water in place of the bottled stuff.

The restaurant is a little on the tight side, the tables slightly too small for the freight they have to bear, the servers forced to slalom through the spaces between them. But our waitperson was attentive, friendly and knowledgeable; when we asked a question about the food that she couldn't answer, she went back to the kitchen and got the information from the chef. We did have to ask (just once) for bread and for our second glass of wine to be poured, but on the whole the waitstaff coped well with their full house. The sound in the room was bright but never approached the kind of eardrum-puncturing din that some other restaurants register and even promote.

The wine list is weighted toward American wines, many of them local, with an excellent selection in the $30-50 range. We started with an old favorite, Wolffer's crisp and fruity rosé, which we drank with the appetizers, and then moved on to an excellent Castellare Chianti Classico, neither of which broke the bank. At those prices, it makes more sense to order by the bottle than pay double digits for a glass. There are some more formidable European vintages as well, for those who require them, of course; that's where a restaurant's profit is.

It's in the appetizers too, all but one in the two-figure range. We passed on the spinach soup garnished with a hard-boiled egg filled with caviar, though it sounded interesting, and opted for four from the menu, all of which were winners. We had a roasted beet salad with Valencia oranges and fennel, the sweetness of the beets offset by a little wedge of Camembert sitting on top. Then came Swedish råraka, tiny potato pancakes like Mother's, only better, garnished with crème freche and salmon roe, though $18 for four silver-dollar-sized cakes seemed excessive. This was followed by a dish that promised some drama: tarte flambé with Norwegian smoked salmon and crème freche (also $18); we were a little disappointed to find that it was essentially just a pizza, "flamed" in the kitchen, not at the table, but a couple of bites of its thin, tender crust, the creamy, salmony topping baked in, mollified us. Everyone's favorite app, though, was the fava bean ravioli in tomato bacon broth, the ravioli itself, perfectly tender, surrounding its fragrant filling, a relative bargain at $16.

But the main courses proved to be the weakest part of the menu. Only one -- the roasted rack of lamb with basil-infused crust, at $34 -- pleased all our (admittedly carnivorous) palates -- the lamb full of flavor but not gamy, and cooked precisely as specified. We dutifully ordered the vegetable Napoleon (the cheapest entrée on the menu at $24) so as not to shortchange our vegetarian readers, and while there were things to like about it, particularly the garnish of fresh figs that kept it awake, it was just a plateful of vegetables -- carrots, asparagus, several different roots -- in no particular arrangement. And though they were fresh and tasty, all of us would have preferred them to have been cooked a little longer, though we recognized that the crunch in the carrots was a purposeful choice by the chef, not a miscalculation. The pan-roasted halibut (a pricey $32) similarly suffered from uninspired presentation -- asparagus, carrots, cauliflower purée and a nicely browned, moist piece of fish sharing the plate like neighbors who are not quite friends. Finally, we opted for a piece of Scandinavian whimsy: "Veal Oscar" ($36), named for King Oscar II of Sweden, a 19th-century ruler who apparently enjoyed surf and turf. In The Living Room's interpretation, a tender, flavorful piece of sauteéd veal shared space with a shelled lobster claw and a smattering of sauce Bearnaise. Traditionally, it's made with flecks of crabmeat, which might have promoted better integration of the meat and seafood; as it was (here we go again), the ingredients, though individually delicious and well-prepared, didn't really meld into a coherent whole. Maybe we'd all have been happier with the special of pan-seared diver sea scallops, or the Flat Iron steak (that's from the steer's shoulder, also known as Top Blade, which, along with hangar and skirt steaks, is vying these days with the Porterhouse and shell cuts so beloved by steak-house frequenters), at $38.

At this point, we were neither unhappy nor thrilled, but the best was yet to come. Laura Donnelly, the Star's main reviewer and food columnist, doubles as The Living Room's pastry chef, and she's an inspired baker. Out came her creations, one better than the next -- the Catapano Farm sweet goat cheese tart (not too sweet, nor too tart); the Chocolate Trio (chocolate hazelnut tart, mocha mousse and chocolate mandarin sorbet, a dissertation on the variety of chocolate's tastes and textures), a raspberry and peach crisp with ginger streusal and homemade ice cream that left us gasping with delight. We also ordered a selection of ice creams and sorbets and wished we hadn't, not because they weren't excellent (the Mandarin orange sorbet piercingly flavorful), but because it meant foregoing the warm lemon pudding cake with blueberry compote. The ice creams are $6; the other desserts $9 and worth it.

The Living Room is top-tier East Hampton dining, in the company of 1770 House, Nick & Toni's and Della Femina and the stunning newcomer, Rugosa. Like those restaurants, it takes food seriously, and like them, it's not cheap; we managed to spend $100 a person (though that, of course, bought an appetizer, an entrée, a dessert and half a bottle of wine, more than any of us would normally order). At this time, unlike the other restaurants mentioned, The Living Room does not offer a prix fixe menu. On our next visit, I think we'll choose our main courses more carefully, or possibly forego them in favor of two apps. We'll resist the temptation to order every dessert on the menu. And we'll give thanks that the new chef in town is good enough to keep everyone else on their toes.

UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

2009-09-11T12:54:00.002-04:00

"You lie!" The ejaculation by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) during the President's speech to Congress was accompanied, on screen, by looks of alarm and distaste on the faces of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi that suggested someone had farted. And the whole affair (including Wilson's totally disingenuous apology) has provoked a national debate on civility, or the lack thereof, in the discourse of American politics.

Rudeness is nothing new in the halls of government. Threats of violence and actual incidients of fisticuffs and caning and even duels to the death used to be common occurrences on Capitol Hill, and more recently, insult and invective have become the common currency of campaign rhetoric, to the point where no one is really surprised to hear Obama identified oxymoronically both as a socialist and a Nazi.

My Knee-Jerk Liberal response is to deplore the vulgarizing and cheapening of language and behavior, and to blame it largely on the Republicans -- well, on the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, for whom hate speech is ofen a prelude to hate crimes (killing abortion doctors, for example). Sarah Palin announces that if Obama has his way, elderly citizens will be executed by "death squads"; Conservative talk-show hosts rile up the faithful to the point where a 9-mm sidearm seems an appropriate accessory for Americans attending a town meeting to discuss something as seemingly innocuous as the way to improve the delivery of health care. Democrats never behaved this way, I tell myself.

But it occurs to me that if they had -- if, while George II was making his bogus case for invading Iraq, cherry-picking or fabricating intelligence to support the laughable claims of cached WMDs aimed at Israel and the U.S., someone like Senator Hillary Clinton had risen during debate and in ringing tones told the President, "You lie," perhaps the slippery slope to war might have provided some traction to those (like Obama) who didn't believe Bush's claims but were, or felt, powerless to dispute them.

Bush, more than any other American president, tried (aided and abetted by Dick Cheney) to turn the office into an absolute monarchy -- to destroy the checks and balances on his power by neutering Congress, co-opting the CIA, and turning the Supreme Court (which, after all, installed him in the White House by skewing the results of the 2000 election) into an arm of the administration. But as the power of the President grew -- as he proclaimed himself not bound by Congressional limits on executive privilege, for example -- respect for him and for the office eroded. In 2003, Bush's opponents felt themselves were paralyzed by their respect for the office, if not the man. In 2009, Rex Rammel, an Idaho gubernatorial candidate, says he'd buy a license to hunt Obama and then claims he was only joking because "Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tages in Washington, D.C."

So, though it sickens me to hear people saying out loud and for attribution what was unthinkable before the New Millenium, I can't help wishing the process had begun ten years ago -- say, during the election campaign of 1999-2000. Al Gore is probably the last person one can imagine indulging in sicko verbal mudslinging, but there might have been other Democrats out there with poor impulse control and inventive vocabularies (Michael Moore comes to mind) who could have taught America just how lame, how unfit for the presidency, how untrustworthy and fundamentally dishonest George W. Bush was. And just maybe, if people of influence hadn't yeilded to the inhibitions that all civilized people used to share, we wouldn't be asking ourselves every day how we got into the twin messes of a disastrous war and a failed economy.

EAST HAMPTON STAR REVIEW OF "THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, UNABRIDGED" AND "SYLVIA"

2009-08-23T10:31:00.002-04:00

At the Mulford Barn Repertory Theater in East Hampton, on alternate evenings on August, three buffoons are trashing the greatest playwright who ever lived. Don't miss it!

Actually, it's three brilliant comic actors performing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged -- a show invented by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in England and London's longest-running comedy ever. The premise is that rather than waste one's time sitting through 37 three-hour performances of tedious old-fashioned plays, who wouldn't jump at the chance to get the whole thing over with in just 87 hectic minutes? And so Lydia Franco-Hodges, Joseph De Sane and Gordon Gray take us for a roller-coaster ride through Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, all of the comedies (rolled into one), and of course Hamlet, which gets special treatment in Act II.

I promise to try not to reveal too many of the gags, bits, or pieces of shtick that make up this hilarious evening. There's a lot of improvisation on the part of the actors, and a lot of audience participation as well. Some of the humor is fairly crude and raunchy in spots, but nothing that your kids don't hear every day in middle school; the nine-year-old girl sitting next to me was in such convulsions of laughter that I feared for her health. Nor is any knowledge of Shakespeare a prerequisite for enjoying the show, unless that little girl was an unusually precocious graduate student in theater history. In fact, the show isn't only about Shakespeare; it's also a parody of modern American culture -- of our movies and TV program, the music on our iPods, our zany pop psychology and theories of self-improvement, and of theater and performance itself, particularly the narcissism, self-promotion and sense of entitlement that acting often promotes.

The Complete Works is, from beginning to end, pure farce, which is rather rare these days, now that Monty Python is gone. Many of the jokes are verbal (you'd be amazed how funny Macbeth becomes simply because it's performed with authentic Scottish accents), but most of it is good, old-fashioned physical slapstick: pratfalls, barfing, Keystone Kops-style chases, cross-dressing (wait till you see six-foot-four-inch Gordon Gray as Ophelia drowning herself). You'd swear there were at least six or seven actors leaping, prancing, fainting, dying, and mugging on the stage, in the field behind it (visible because the back doors slide open), on a ladder at the back of the house, or in your lap.

The glue that holds this inspired mess together is Kate Mueth, the director, who is reprising her triumphant production of last summer, with the same cast. Mueth knows theater and Shakespeare intimately, as do her players. It's their familarity with the real thing that makes their satire of it so dead-on. Mueth played Miranda in The Tempest at the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival; Franco-Hodges was an amazing Hermione in The Winter's Tale, and DeSane appeared in both Hamlet and Julius Caesar on the stage of the John Drew, so they come by their acting chops honestly where the Bard is concerned. There's a moment in the Barn when Gordon Gray stops spoofing and does one of Hamlet's soliloquies seriously, and the audience, shifting gears instantly, was very moved. For the most part, Mueth wisely keeps her hands off her actors, letting them dig for their own comic moments, and the result is a short, speed-of-light laugh-a-second roller coaster ride that will leave you gasping.

On the nights when Complete Works is dark, the same actors, plus Tina Jones, perform A.R. Gurney's 1995 comedy Sylvia, which is equally worthy of your attention. Sylvia is in some ways typical Gurney -- the funny, bittersweet trials and tribulations of middle-aged middle-class empty-nesters casting about for some new meaning in their lives -- except for the fact that Greg, the husband (Joe De Sane) deals with his midlife crisis by acquiring not a Porsche but a pet. Hiding out in Central Park one afternoon from his meaningless job, he picks up (or is picked up by) a golden retriever/poodle (Jones), and it's love at first sight -- though a problematic sort of love. Sylvia, good dog that she is, worships her new owner, but Greg's passion for her passeth all understanding. His wife and his job fade into annoying distractions as he begins to live for and through his dog.

The play's continuing joke, and it's a good one, is in the perfectly calibrated performance of Tina Jones as Sylvia. Dressed in sweater, jeans and knee pads (she spends a suitable amount of time on all fours), she makes a cuddly, adorable canine, but her rapport with her owner includes the ability to hold long, intense conversations with him about subjects of interest to her: cats, kibble, the well-endowed males at the dog run. Her heart-to-hearts with Greg are partly an extension of the rapport that dog owners and their pets share, carried to extremes, but as the play goes on Greg loses his grasp of the line between a beloved family pet and a new love interest. Wife Kate, a potentially thankless role into which Lydia Franco-Hodges breathes life, predictably comes to see Sylvia as a rival, and wages a relentless campaign to save her marriage by banishing her to the pound. At first, Greg's love affair with Sylvia (which never, thank God, crosses the line between petting and you-know-what) seems harmless and Kate curmudgeonly; by Act 2, when he's quit his job and is thinking of leaving Kate and moving into a studio with Sylvia, we realize there's some real pathology working itself out. In the play's most hilarious scene, Gordon Gray, as an ambiguously-gendered cross-dressing Viennese therapist, tries to make Greg own up to his obsession, and ends up counseling Kate to divorce her husband and shoot the dog. But all ends well; no animals are harmed during the performance of the play.

In the original production, the role of Sylvia was created by Sarah Jessica Parker, and her success in it probably had a lot to do with her being cast in her next project, a TV show called . . . oh, yes, Sex and the City. So Tina Jones has some big Blahniks to fill, and she has the paws to do it. Her doggy mannerisms -- the scratching, the prancing, the tail-wagging -- are dead on, but at the same time you're always aware (or at least I was) that she's a babe, and that when she stands up on her hind legs and slobbers all over Greg's face, or lies on her back so he can tickle her belly, there's something else going on besides human-animal bonding. (Sylvia's language is often R-rated, as well; maybe you should leave the nine-year-old home for this one.) In addition to the therapist, Gordon Gray plays a female friend of Kate's (he's the company's specialist in female impersonation) and the macho Tom, owner of the virile beast who deflowers Sylvia behind a bush in the park, and, as in Complete Works, the audience starts to laugh whenever he steps onto the stage. Joe De Sane makes Greg both a little geeky and very human, and Franco-Hodges manages the difficult feat of transforming herself from annoying to sympathetic with grace and humor.

So Mulford Barn Rep takes both ends of this double-header. It's not often that a concentration of talent like this company is so readily available. Summer stock in most places is an endless parade of Noel Coward minus the crackle of wit and old musicals minus the true voices. The East Hampton Historical Society (which administers Mulford Farm and parents Mulford Barn Rep) and Ms. Mueth deserve our thanks and our applause, and I'm sure both Shakespeare's ghost and PETA will be pleased as well.

MEAN STREETS?

2009-08-17T14:14:00.002-04:00

Ten years ago, I was teaching an introductory composition course a branch of the City University of New York, which pretty much epitomizes urban public higher education. The student body was composed largely of immigrants or the children of immigrants: Russians whose families ran importing businesses in Brighton Beach, Koreans whose parents owned vegetable markets on Atlantic Avenue, black and Latino kids from tough ghetto neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, almost all of them the first members of their families to attend college. In English 1, when I asked them to write about their lives, what I often got was narratives of crime, with which, usually as victims but sometimes as perpetrators, they claimed to live on intimate terms. This was early in the Giuliani administration, before felony rates in New York began to decline dramatically, and the city’s parks, streets, tunnels and minority neighborhoods were still synonymous to most of America, and indeed the world, with lawlessness and peril. I think my kids wanted to impress me with the grittiness of their lives -- the crack houses, the drive-by shootings, the muggings and beatings that seemed to be woven into the fabrics of their young lives. And often I was at least semi-convinced, even by Jimmy Wang (not his real name) who wrote plausibly of his on-going attempt to resign from the Ghost Shadows, a Chinatown mob whose activities closely resembled those detailed on The Sopranos and who, he claimed, were determined to kill him rather than let him secede.

Most of the other students in the class accepted the law of the jungle with resignation and equanimity. The way of the world was opportunism, competition, the strong preying on the weak; human life was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short; they couldn’t imagine a place where that wasn’t the rule. I could, however, having owned a small second home in Springs for twenty years. On an impulse, I typed up and distributed to the class three items from the Star’s police log for the current week, and asked them to compare them to three typical crime stories from the Post or the News and then to write an essay about what they felt they could conclude about the differences between Brooklyn and East Hampton based solely on this evidence.

The New York newspaper stories they came up with were predictably horrific: a child slain by a stray bullet, someone pushed by a stranger under the wheels of a subway train, the Abner Louima torture case which was then in the headlines. These played off nicely against the items from the Star, which I had chosen with some care. The first reported that after the girlfriend of a Springs man had left him, her mother had repeatedly telephoned him, “threatening and yelling.” The second recorded the fact that for-sale signs kept disappearing from a property on Fairlawn Drive in Montauk. The third read, in its entirety,

An Egypt Lane resident called police Saturday afternoon to turn in a group of boys playing football on the lawn in front of Hook Mill. They were not breaking any law, however, and police declined to interrupt the game.

The results were illuminating. Some of the students had heard of the Hamptons, but only as a playground for the rich and celebrated; they never imagined that ordinary life went on there, and certainly not life as ordinary as the police log suggested. The were baffled both by the innocuousness of criminal activity on Eastern Long Island and by the fact that anyone would take the time to read about such trivial events. In the classroom discussion that followed the assignment, some accused me of having manufactured the news -- of foisting on them an imaginary Utopia of middle-class white homeowners living lives of stultifying if harmonious security. If the events had actually happened, they were cause for scorn: you call that “crime”? Hector, both outraged and amused, couldn’t get over the wimpiness of a grown man calling the cops because an old lady had yelled at him over the phone. “What is point of taking for-sale sign?” demanded Sergei. “Is prank? Act of revenge? Why not blow up car or set fire to house?” And as to the touch-football caper, the whole class, even the girls, threw up their hands and rolled their eyes. Boys who broke no windows, trespassed on no one’s property, set off no fireworks, stole nothing, sassed no one, merely whiled away an afternoon throwing a football around -- and some guy dials 911? What lesson, asked Jamal, were those kids being taught? If they got rousted for playing sports, what happened when they did things that were really fun, like hanging out in parks and parking lots all night, smoking weed and listening to rap?

I was forced to admit that I had to an extent misrepresented East Hampton, by deliberately not choosing reports of higher crimes and misdemeanors (though in truth, the worst offenses recorded that week were two obscene phone calls made to identical twins and a license plate stolen and found the next day by the side of the road). Yes, I confessed, from time to time bad stuff happened out there -- murder, arson, theft -- as it did everywhere else, but no one was going to nickname the Town Police Department “Fort Apache,” like that fabled besieged precinct in the Bronx. And I assured them that East Hampton was not a fantasy oasis of peace and amity, but closer to the norm of American life, which was at that time still lived more in small towns than urban jungles.

I no longer teach at Brooklyn College, so I can’t really judge how the perceptions of its students about their city and human behavior have changed, and what they would make of the Star’s crime beat these days, which features (along with occasional horrific stories like the murder of a wife by her husband) reports of growing ethnic friction on the East End, which make it sound a lot more like the world in which my students lived. And the more perceptive of them might point to the corresponding gentrification of some of those tough New York neighborhoods -- Harlem and Red Hook and even Midwood, where the college is located. Midwood in the 1960’s was largely a middle-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood; its public high school graduates went to the nation’s top colleges. Then began “white flight,” and by the 70’s it had become a black ghetto; I remember a number of gun incidents at Midwood High, and it wasn’t safe to park your car on the street even in daytime. Now Midwood is being re-colonized by white middle-class home buyers who can’t afford Manhattan, and there are animosities between these newcomers and the people they’re displacing.

What does it all add up to? That two communities which ten years ago seemed like polar opposites are becoming more and more alike -- the sleepy hamlet not so sleepy, the mean streets not so mean -- so that ten years from now, if the trend continues, only topography and architecture will distinguish them? The immigration debate is as alive here as it is there; will Springs become the new Crown Heights? I don’t know what it all means, but it occurs to me that I might have planted a seed by assigning that paper: maybe Jimmy Wang decided that East Hampton might be a good place to start over, change his name, open a plant nursery or landscaping business.

EAST HAMPTON STAR REVIEW OF "THE GLASS MENAGERIE"

2009-07-20T17:31:00.003-04:00

The newly-refurbished John Drew Theater at Guild Hall is presenting Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie as its first full-scale production. And judging from the enthusiasm of the opening-night audience, both the play itself and its star, Amy Irving, were inspired choices.

It's possible that The Glass Menagerie was not the play, or even the kind of play, that Williams was trying to write. He thought of it as daringly experimental theater -- what he refers to (and even has one of the characters refer to) as a "memory play," at the opposite extreme from the "the straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice cubes." Of course, straight realistic plays were and are the backbone of commercial theater (unless the theater is south of Houston Street in Manhattan), and aside from some faintly surreal and metadramatic touches in the lighting, music, use of a projection screen and on-stage narration, what Williams wrote was pretty much a slice of dysfunctional family life, set in a generic urban tenement neighborhood of St. Louis in the years just before World War II.

The Glass Menagerie introduces us to Amanda Wingfield and her two grown children -- Laura, the shy, ethereal daughter who walks with a limp and lives not in the rough and ready world outside the flat but in the ethereal realm of her delicate collection of glass figurines (the menagerie of the title), and her brother Tom, who supports them by working at a dismal job he despises, chafing under his mother's nagging and pretentions, spending hours each night at "the movies" (movie theaters that serve drinks, apparently), and dreaming of escaping to a life of adventure, like the runaway father and husband whose picture sits on a table in the living room. Amanda, too, lives in a dreamworld, the Mississippi delta of her girlhood, with its plantations and servants and lemonade served on the veranda where she made vivacious conversation with multiple beaux.

The Wingfields' desperation is palpable, especially Tom's, but it is tempered by the fact that the play is narrated by Tom from a future years later -- which is partly why Williams (and Tom himself) refer to it as a "memory play." Whatever lies in store for these people has already happened; Tom has escaped to the Merchant Marine, abandoning Amanda and Laura to their unspecified fate. Thus, everything that transpires on stage, however sad, acquires a patina of nostalgic recollection. The plot, such as it is, concerns Amanda's plan for her and Laura's survival: Laura, unable even to learn basic secretarial skills, must, in Amanda's view, find a genteel swain who will marry her and support both of them. This provokes in Amanda herself a constant reverie featuring honeysuckle trees, porch swings, and particularly that memorable day (it's a memory play for her, too) on which no fewer than seventeen "gentleman callers" came to call. Amanda describes these stalwarts in detail -- their brilliant marriages, the romantic duels they fought, and above all, the fortunes they made or inherited. But though they came to call, none of them stayed; Amanda fell for and married a penniless romantic wanderer who left her and the children high and dry in the alien world of gritty urban poverty (brilliantly suggested by Beowulf Borrit's half-realistic, half-dreamlike set) in which her memories and values now seem absurd and high-falutin'.

All of this works beautifully on the John Drew stage, thanks to director Harris Yulin's decision not to indulge the play's dreamy potential but to keep things moving smartly along. Sad though the story is, the acting is forthright and bold, and there are even some laughs along the way. Ebon Moss-Bachrach does a fine job with the difficult, somewhat underwritten role of Tom, half Mama's Boy and half adventurer; he is particularly good at the narrative monologues which stud his part, to which he brings a nicely sardonic edge. Laura's collection of little glass animals may have been meant to symbolize her fragility, but Tom seems fragile too -- a young man going nowhere, unable to leave and confront his destiny and equally unable to stay. Louisa Krause's Laura isn't too shy to establish a forceful and convincing presence onstage, and John Behlmann, the Gentleman Caller whom Tom recruits as a possible suitor for his sister, is just as Tom introduces him: a high-school hero struggling to cope with the cold, indifferent adult world.

But this is Amy Irving's show, and she gives a wonderful performance on many levels. You can see why she drives Tom crazy with her southern belle shtick -- she'll drive you crazy, too, with her voice alternating between stridency and melliflousness and her inability to keep her fussy hands off the lives of her children. But there's another side to her. Williams said, "There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at," and Irving is the first Amanda who ever made me feel the latter as strongly as the former.

Amy Irving's performance is reason enough to see this show, but it's more than just a star turn. The Glass Menagerie calls for ensemble acting supported by carefully calibrated setting, lighting and music, and that's what's it get here. This is the play that made Tennessee Williams famous, and you're unlikely to find a production of it anywhere that's as good as the one that graces the John Drew's stage.

___________________________________________________

Richard Horwich lives in East Hampton and teaches English at New York University. He was for several years the dramaturg of the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ACT SIX

2009-07-13T11:20:00.003-04:00

My secret life has been pretty much exposed: for the past two years I've been writing a play. Its working title is The Merchant of Venice, Act Six, which gives you some idea of both its content and, if you know me at all, how it dovetails with the rest of my life.

And I guess the title is self-explanatory: it picks up the action of Shakespeare's Merchant where Act 5 leaves it. But isn't that the end of the play, you ask? Well, yes, but Shakespeare's comedies are famous for their irresolution; there are always more questions than answers. That's why, back in the 1930s, the sub-genre of "problem comedies" was invented -- to describe plays in which the happy ending is problematic. The most famous examples are Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, but Merchant finds its way into the category by virtue of the fact that the three marriages that end it are each made at least as much for money as for love. So I thought it would be interesting to look at the three couples (plus poor Antonio, who at the end of the play is rich but single) a year later, and see what accommodations they've made.

The problem with my own problem play is that I couldn't have written a less commercial piece of theater if I'd set out to do it. Unless my audience is fairly familiar with Shakespeare's work, they'll have no idea what the questions to which I'm supplying answers are. So I've brought in a technological solution. I've set my play in the present, in order to make it possible for a huge TV monitor to dominate the set, and on this screen, periodically, excerpts from Shakespeare's Merchant appear, to introduce and provide exposition for my own scenes.

Whether this will work or not remains to be seen. The first half of MV6 was given a reading last March by The Naked Stage at Guild Hall in East Hampton, as part of an evening devoted to airing the work of new local playwrights. It was extremely helpful to me to watch and listen to an audience watch and listen to my play, and to hear their comments afterwards; I've spent the last couple of months revising. And of course, it was a thrill to hear my words spoken by real live actors -- Molly McKenna as Portia, Josh Perl as Bassanio, Melissa Herman as Jessica and Joseph Brodo as Lorenzo. I read the stage directions.

Where do we go from here? I've been sending the script to people who might be able to arrange for a reading or a workshop in New York. If there is an audience for this play, that's where it is -- the issues of both my and Shakespeare's take on Renaissance Venice have a lot to do with Jewish questions, and an audience already interested in intermarriage, dietary laws and circumcision would be of enormous help. Whatever the outcome, though, it's been fun to make a text rather than just interpret one.

REVIEW OF "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" IN EAST HAMPTON STAR, JUNE 11, 2009

2009-06-14T13:47:00.002-04:00

Review of Are You Kidding Me? The Story of Rocco Mediate's Extraordinary Battle with Tiger Woods at the U.S. Open by Rocco Mediate and John Feinstein. Little, Brown, 2009.

Rocco Mediate is a pudgy, forty-six-year-old professional golfer with a chronically bad back, a middle-of-the-pack guy who, despite winning five tournaments and earning a respectable $14 million on the PGA tour, was anything but a household name. With sportswriter John Feinstein, Mediate has written a book about the high point of his career and indeed, his life, which was not a famous victory but a stirring loss -- coming in second by the narrowest of margins in last year's U.S. Open to the world's best player and the biggest name of all, Tiger Woods.

In the golf world, it was an epic story, even a tragic one (though more Californian than Greek): bathed in brilliant sunshine and surrounded by cameras, a likeable but all-too-human fellow finds himself in combat with a god and is destroyed, but not before he inspires us with his courage and heroism. Rocco, though, doesn't see it as a defeat. In this autobiography of the Everyman who became, for a few days in June, America's sweetheart, it's not whether you won or lost but how you played the game – which was the spin the media put on it. Rocco wasn't invented by television, but the tube played a huge part in fashioning his image. In his on-course interviews during and after the tournament, he came across as bubbly and outgoing, "a loose and easy motormouth" as he puts it, and golfing America took him to its heart. An anti-elitist bias was obviously working for him: Rocco, of humble blue-collar origins, has nothing to do with the snooty country-club mystique. Johnny Miller, the TV analyst for the tournament, got into trouble when he said that Mediate looked more like "the guy who cleans Tiger's swimming pool" than the guy who was contending for the Open title (a remark that offended not only pool cleaners but, less explicably, Italian-Americans across the country.) Everyone could identify with Rocco's giddy pleasure at being just where and what he was, a man testing the boundaries of what had previously seemed impossible, who was able to savor the moment without the dry mouth and sweaty palms that make so many of Tiger's opponents choke, gasp, and give up. It's axiomatic that having Woods as a playing partner in a tournament makes other players worse; it seemed, during the one-on-one Monday playoff round, that Tiger was making Rocco better -- until the 19th hole when, in sudden death, Rocco faltered and Tiger, as he always seems to, prevailed.

The section of the book that is devoted to a day-by-day and, toward the end, a hole-by-hole and even shot-by-shot account of what happened on the course is an exciting read, even for those whose interest in golf is minimal. John Feinstein, who is given equal author's billing with Mediate, has written many acclaimed books about golf and other sports, including the classic A Good Walk Spoiled and Caddy For Life, a moving account of the bond between the great Tom Watson and his doomed caddy Bruce Edwards as Edwards lost his battle with ALS. Feinstein knows how to capture golf's quirky, maddening beauty and drama, and he tells a story vividly and economically.

But the first half of the book, which details the thirty years in Rocco's life that led up to his moment in the sun, makes for some problems. The loveable Rocco we saw on television in 2008 is not quite the Rocco who grew up rudderless and clueless, who lucked into golf with talent to spare but without the work ethic that Tiger brought to the game. Rocco struggled for many years with back problems that sometimes made it impossible for him to play for months on end, and he acknowledges that his aversion to working out, plus the 60 pounds that he gained over the years, exacerbated them. He married and fathered three sons, but as the book goes on, Linda and the boys gradually fade away, until it becomes clear that he's pretty much walked out on them. Rocco, for all his openness, seems as self-centered as, say, A-Rod; it's often All About Him. Sitting around his hotel room during the Open, Rocco's caddy, who's feeling sick, says he's going out for some water, and clueless Rocco says, "I don't need any water."

Eventually, another woman enters the picture -- Cindi, the personal trainer who did what all the surgeons and doctors couldn't do: trace the source of Rocco's back problems to a tilted pelvis and design a regimen that made him, for the first time in 20 years, pain-free. There was obviously more going on between them than a client-provider relationship: most people don't notice whether or not their trainers possess "the kind of smile that lights up a room." Yet just how close they were is left ambiguous. She flew to tournaments regularly, and "She did become my best friend very quickly," he says. It’s pretty clear that they were sharing hotel rooms by the time the 2008 Open rolled around. Were they lovers? "The simplest answer [to the media's questions about Cindi's role] was that she was his physical therapist," we're told, but the more complicated answer is left to the reader's imagination. Toward the end of the book, in passing, we learn that Linda and Rocco have divorced, and Linda is quoted, poignantly, to the effect that though she wanted Rocco to do well in the Open, "I couldn't help but feel that none of us were there with him -- on Father's Day. That part was tough." Cindi was with Rocco the whole time, despite the fact (never mentioned in the book) that she was and presumably still is married to someone else.

And of course, there's another story about the 2008 Open that Mediate and Feinstein aren't particularly interested in telling: Tiger's Tale. Woods was playing not only with a torn ACL in his left knee but a stress fracture of the leg itself; he had surgery immediately afterwards, and it was his last tournament until the spring of 2009. Mediate and Feinstein, understandably, don't dwell on the extent of the injury; they admit that Tiger was limping and that there was a current of anxiety among the television executives that he would have to withdraw, but what doesn't come through in the book is what we viewers saw every time Tiger took a full swing with his driver: the awesome torque produced as he rotated around his left knee made him stagger and clench his teeth in pain, but he still managed not only to keep the ball in the fairway but to outdrive Rocco by 40 yards.

"Nice guys finish last," Leo Durocher famously said, but there's a big difference between last and second in the U.S. Open ($810,000 in prize money, for one thing) and Rocco gave Woods all he could handle. Tiger called it his greatest victory ever, and, we're told, "In a sense, it was Rocco's greatest victory too." But like every successful sportsman, Rocco wants badly to win every time he tees it up. It's true that "people who knew nothing or almost nothing about golf now knew his name," but those people have short memories, and eventually, the name Rocco Mediate will slide from celebrity status to that of an answer to a trivia question: who was runner-up to Tiger Woods in the 2008 U.S. Open?

It's an answer, though, that the golf world, if not the general public, will remember for a long time to come, thanks in part to the ubiquity of television but in no small way to Are You Kidding Me? What Rocco did on five days last June defined the tournament, the course, and both Woods and himself, adding to Tiger’s legend and building a niche, small but permanent, for the man who described himself oxymoronically but accurately as a "second-tier star."

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

2008-12-25T16:59:00.003-05:00

Isn't Bangkok known for its Draconian law enforcement? Isn't that where they put drug smugglers to death, or at least throw them into jail for life? (Go see the wonderful, scary movie Brokedown Palace, in which Kate Beckinsale and Claire Dane run afoul of the Thai authorities.) I guess that image must be hurting the tourist industry, if the cops are turning themselves into emoticons on motorcycles.

And now check out the approach recently put into play by the resort town of Southampton, on the East End of Long Island:

"Strictly Enforced" is putting it mildly, judging from the picture on this enormous billboard -- one of two flanking Route 27. That cop isn't taking a radar reading of someone's speed; he's in full combat crouch, pointing what can only appear to be a weapon at anyone foolhardy enough not to heed his warning.

The odd thing is that these signs appear on a stretch of road newly widened from two to four lanes -- where the original speed limit was 40, and where the speed limits to the east and west are, respectively, 45 and 55.

New York City adorns its cop cars with the acronym CPR, which stands for "Courtesy, Pride, Respect" -- it's not clear whether that's what they're supposed to be showing the public or whether that's what they're asking for, but a respectable goal either way, if in practice not likely to be attained. But South Hampton might as well stencil RAMBO on its units, if the menacing figure on the billboard is to be taken as a promise of a threat.

So, Officer, don't shoot! I promise to slow down. And consider putting a Smiley Face on that billboard, if you don't want to scare away next summer's beachgoers.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

2008-09-26T15:53:00.004-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, another in a long line of Meaningless Baseball Records was set when Derek Jeter passed Lou Gehrig in the non-category of Most Hits at Yankee Stadium. Never mind that Jeter still trails Gehrig in total career hits by over a hundred; the press, the fans, and even the players unleashed a chorus of hosannas that made the Bronx shake.

Of course, this is Yankee Stadium’s swan song, and any opportunity to heap encomia on the venerable arena (it opened in 1923, the first three-tiered ball park and the first to call itself a “stadium”) was not to be shunned. But from Queens, where Shea Stadium is also scheduled for demolition, nothing. Who has the most hits in Mets’ history? Does anyone know or care? It happens to be Ed Kranepool, who has probably never been mentioned in the same sentence with Jeter or the Iron Horse.

That’s part of the Yankee Stadium “mystique” that even visiting players acknowledge, the echo of baseball history that they experience either as a paralyzing burden or a spur to greatness. It’s much more than just a baseball park, of course. Three Popes have celebrated mass there; Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Graziano all fought title bouts there; and both the New York Yankees and Giants football teams played there as well. But it never worked as a football stadium. The gridiron sat awkwardly in its peculiar dimensions, and nobody (I’m speaking from memory here) had a great view. It was indeed the House That Ruth Built, or at least, that was built for him: after the Yanks stole him from the Red Sox, flush with cash, they tailored their new home to his peculiar strengths. The result was as lopsided a baseball field as has ever been seen: the Babe was a dead-pull left-handed hitter, and the right-field stands stood only 295 feet from the plate – a pop fly by Ruthian standards. By contrast, left-center was an enormous poke – over 490 to deepest left center – and perhaps righty Joe DiMaggio’s career home-run stats are as impressive as Ruth’s when that’s taken into account. Fans used to entertain themselves in the off-season by speculating on what trading Joe D for lefty Ted Williams would have meant: Joe would have been bouncing balls off and swatting them over the Green Monster at Fenway, and Williams could have picked up where Ruth left off.

My first memory of Yankee Stadium (the old one, mind you, not the 1975 make-over) was sitting next to my father, watching a DiMaggio line drive split the outfielders for a double during his last season, 1951, against Boston. Later in the same game, Ted Williams defeated the Yanks’ defensive shift (pretty much the same as the one used against Giambi these days) by scorching the ball just inside the unguarded left-field foul line; I could see him laughing as he stood on second base, though Dad had to explain to me the subtleties of his gambit. Another vivid memory is of a game that my high-school baseball coach took the team to, in which Mickey Mantle, in the ninth inning, hit a two-hopper to the shortstop that lifted him off his feet and literally knocked him on his ass. Mantle, sensing an infield hit, turned on the speed and ten feet from the bag went down as if shot. To stunned silence, he curled into a ball and tumbled over and over, clutching his thigh. The play ended the game, with the Yankees losing, and the crowd filed out in silence, like mourners leaving the funeral chapel. That quadriceps pull was one in a long line of leg injuries that cost Mantle his speed and stability, and the chance to become the greatest outfielder in history.

Over the following decades, perversely, I seem to have attended more games at the stadium when the Yankees had lousy teams than when they were on top. In the early 60’s, all my friends were baseball crazed and we went all the time (with a student ID, it cost no more than a movie), and we got to watch Howard and Boyer and Kubek and a team that was always in contention. But after I was married, though I successfully made my wife a baseball fan, the roster had turned over: the big bopper of the early 70s was Curt Blefary (who?), and his supporting cast included the likes of Horace Clarke, Stan Bahnsen and Jerry Kelley. I remember us arriving there on a promotional day when anyone under 14 got in free. Nancy was 22, but we thought she could pass; she put her hair in a pony tail and untucked her blouse, bought one seat, and made it past the ticket-taker before a security guard gave her the fish-eye and sent us back to the box office. But we kept going to games, though the stadium was literally disintegrating around us: one night (it was a playoff game), a light mist was falling, and we thought we’d be OK because we were in the lower deck protected by the mezzanine, but the water was channeling down the rusting girders over us and splattering on our heads like a cold shower until we gave up and left in the fifth.

Still, win or lose, the park itself – particularly in the daytime – had grace and majesty, a dependable thrill whenever I emerged from the ramp into the sun and saw that distinctive columned façade and that extraordinary curve (is there a mathematical name for it?) that enclosed two-thirds of the field. Anyone could have thought up Shea – just draw a circle, stick a diamond in it, and fill it with seats. Some of the newer parks like Camden Yards and Jacobs Field, at least on TV, look inviting and stylish. But none of them has the charisma of the ballpark in the Bronx.

Dave Anderson asked, in the Times last week, what’s the big deal about the Stadium closing? It’s not as if the team is moving to Los Angeles; they’ll be at the same subway stop, a few hundred yards away, in a new Yankee Stadium that will closely resemble the old one. Granted, Dave. But the idiosyncrasies will be gone. No more Monument Park right there on the field of play (everyone has seen film of Bobby Murcer trying to wedge himself between two stone slabs as he chases down a ball); no men’s rooms with long troughs for urinals; no more wooden seats, painted blue, with just the right curve for the spine. Instead, diminished capacity because of the sky boxes, huge price increases, and of course a very iffy team in the midst of a difficult transition. No longer will a rookie outfielder trot to his position in the first inning thinking, “I’m standing where Babe Ruth stood.” Instead, it will be more like “Right this minute, I might be the best right fielder who ever played here.”

Further reading: Harvey Frommer, Remembering Yankee Stadium: An Oral and Narrative History of ‘The House That Ruth Built.’

DOWN AND OUT AT THE EDGEWOOD SCHOOL

2008-05-24T12:01:00.009-04:00

Who else would carry the following baggage around for almost half a century?

If you have no interest in baseball, stop reading here. If you're an obsessive fan, or a former ballplayer, you might find this interesting.

Have you ever heard baseball announcers refer to someone as a "five-tool player?" That means he can run, catch, throw, hit for average and hit for power. There are very few five-tool players, even in the major leagues: Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki, Albert Pujols, Vladimir Guerrero and a few others. When I played high-school baseball, I was a two-tool player: I could make the scoop at first base, I could inside-out the ball to right field (.319 senior year), but I couldn't run worth a damn, I had no power, and (at last I arrive at my subject) I couldn't throw.

First basemen don't have to throw often, which is why I was positioned there. But whenever I did have to make a throw (usually to second or home, which is a short, easy toss), the ball would leave my hand looking good but then sort of . . . die. It seemed to lose its way, its will to live. It would slow down, sink, and swerve to the right -- every time. I worked on my throwing obsessively, but nothing ever changed, and I took this as simply more evidence that I had little athletic ability.

But that turns out not to have been the case. For some reason, when I gripped the ball to throw it, I placed my fingers along the seams, like so:

That, I learned decades later, is what pitchers call a "two-seamer." It's designed to do just what my throws did -- lose velocity and break down and to the right. If I had gripped the ball ACROSS the seams (what pitchers call a "four-seamer"), like so --

-- it would have flown straighter, harder and truer.

What rankles me is that my coach, Bob Kondracki, had been a professional ballplayer -- a pitcher! -- in the high minors. Coach Kondracki was a genial, laid-back sort of guy, not too bright, but willing to tell us endless funny stories about life in the Class AA, sort of like the movie Bull Durham. This man watched me bounce throws in the dirt for three years, shaking his head each time, and never once thought to examine the way I held the baseball. It was only when I was in my 40s, playing catch with a friend (still using my old first-baseman's glove and a ball hit by Stan Musial in batting practice at Shea back in the 60s), that I experimentally discovered the amazing results of gripping the ball across the seams.

Today, this could not happen. Kids are drilled obsessively in fundamentals from Little League on, and they're adepts by age 10; they have all the techniques and nuances of style down pat. Every peewee in America, stepping up to the plate, calls time by extending his back hand, palm out, to the umpire while he digs in, just like Derek Jeter.

I'm fundamentally opposed to Little League, with its uniforms, its competitiveness, its jealous, ranting parents and beleaguered coaches. What happened to playing the game for fun? But Coach Kondracki, what happened to coaching?

THE SEMIOTICS OF PARKING

2008-05-08T15:46:00.006-04:00

NO STANDING
EXCEPT
COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC
METERED PARKING
3 HOUR LIMIT
8AM – 7PM
EXCEPT SUNDAY
<----------------->

So read the parking sign on First Avenue in the 30’s. It was five in the afternoon, and I’d been circling the neighborhood for twenty minutes, and immediately beneath the sign was a space, meter and all.

But this was New York, and the sign was an unreliable signifier. Ever notice the complete absence of punctuation and lower-case letters from street signs, so that one must guess where sentences end and begin, based on nothing but hunch and whatever devious clues can be gleaned from line breaks?

So it is not enough to read according to the rules of English grammar. One must also commit what in my circles is known as the Intentional Fallacy, which holds that reading a text in order to discover what its author intended it to mean – as opposed to what it actually means – is improper. For how can we know what was in the mind of, say, Shakespeare, who has been dead for 400 years, or some anonymous toiler in the local DOT office, who may well have received an inferior education, deficient in instruction in the techniques of expository prose, but who is nonetheless charged with the responsibility for wording communications such as this one. Or who may be a dropout from grad school in English, who knows exactly what he’s doing.

Thus my reading of the sign had to depend upon my reading of the signer and his purpose, which might have been to make clear what the parking regulations are or, alternatively, to boost revenues by tricking motorists into parking where they should not through verbal ambiguity and Jesuitical equivocation.

My default guess is always that the intention of the Traffic Department is to thwart, bully, and extort, and I’ve always been right so far. I knew that if I parked in that spot I’d get a ticket that would cost me $110.

And yet . . . by my reading, the sign said it was legal to park there. It makes two separate statements, I believe. The first says that only commercial traffic may stand in the area governed by the sign; all private vehicles must keep moving, at all times on all days. "Standing" means something different from "parking": it's parking plus, moving your car to the curb but not leaving it. The second statement is about parking (that is, locking your car and leaving it at the curb). The implied period after the sentence “No standing except commercial traffic” makes that statement complete and self-contained. The following statement – a paraphrase of which would read, “Metered parking is available to all for up to three hours between 8 AM and 7 PM, except on Sunday, when anyone may park for any duration without paying,” is not dependent on the early statement about who may stand and who may not, either grammatically or logically. It was 5 PM; it was a Monday; therefore, I was entitled to park at the meter if I paid for two hours, after which I need not pay until the next morning at 8 AM.

As I pondered lonely as a cloud, I noticed a cop car idling at a pump at the end of the block. I pulled up next to him, rolled down my window, and said, “Excuse me, officer, is it legal for me to park here?” The exemplar of New York’s Finest to whom I spoke, a burly man with, appropriately, a five o’clock shadow, looked at me as if I were being a wise guy. “Didja read the sign?” he asked? “Yes, I did,” I replied. “Then you know ya can’t park.”

For a moment, I thought of engaging him in earnest discussion. Then I asked myself what happens to people who come off as elitist and condescending to cops, and I nodded briskly, rolled up the window, and drove slowly up the avenue, looking for the nearest garage.

FAREWELL TO SCRABBLE

2008-04-12T14:54:00.003-04:00

"All words labeled as a part of speech (including those listed of foreign origin, and as archaic, obsolete, colloquial, slang, etc.) are permitted with the exception of the following: words always capitalized, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes standing alone, words requiring a hyphen or an apostrophe."

Those are the rules of Scrabble, perhaps the best board game ever invented, which has been around since the Great Depression and is now, as far as I’m concerned, over. I joined Facebook (under a pseudonym) solely because I wanted to play Scrabble on line, but whether I play another person or a computer (on a related cite called Scrabulous.com), I’m done in by those insidious Scrabble dictionaries (of which there are several) – lists of “words” (no definitions) that go by such names as Sowpods (how’s that for a word?) or TWL (Tournament Word List), that exist solely to help people cheat at Scrabble, and are the courts of last resort at Scrabble tournaments all over the world. Both were originally based on the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but clearly they’ve been corrupted: I have no idea under whose authority we’re meant to accept words like the following, which the computer on Scrabulous used against me in three games I played this morning: qadi, jun, azon, hooty, enuf, sheal and worst of all dogvanes, which earned a 50-point bonus as a seven-letter word. A check of the Oxford English Dictionary turned up none of these. It played spue (which I accept, along with the OED, as a variation of spew), but it refused to allow me to play spuer, which would have allowed me to connect to a triple. Fortunately, I had a d on my next turn, and played spued – for some reason, that passed muster.

What has happened, naturally enough, is that Scrabble enthusiasts have taken to memorizing lists of nonsensical neologisms. Sowpods includes a convenient list of two-letter words (invaluable for hooking your own word onto, so you can access a triple-word score) that includes ae (which is not a word but a diphthong), bi (a prefix), es, et, fe, mm, mu, pe, xu and za.

So what’s the point? I lost two out of my three games, and the computer’s biggest scores in each game came on words-that-are-not-words. And so corrupted have I become that in a game with my friend Ellen, I added a g to baron and made barong, a non-word that I found in SOWPODS and that gave me many points. It would have done her no good to challenge; it’s not in any dictionary of the English language, but is on Scrabble word lists. I was sickened by my perfidy.

So, I guess it’s back to checkers. Too bad. You had a great run, Scrabble, but, as Stephen Crane's Scratchy Wilson said to the sheriff, speaking of the passing of the West, “I expect it’s all off now.”

BOB BOCHROCH

2008-02-29T17:19:00.004-05:00

My old friend Bob Bochroch died last week. This is the obit I wrote for him in The East Hampton Star.

ROBERT BOCHROCH, 75

Robert Bochroch, of Northwest Woods, East Hampton, died of heart failure at the hospice in Southampton Hospital on February 28th.

After graduating from Lafayette College, Mr. Bochroch entered the Signal Corps and served overseas in the Korean War. He would further his education in later life, attending writing courses at Columbia and reading literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

A stint with CBS Radio in Philadelphia led to a 25-year career as an account executive with WABC-TV, during which he divided his time between New York and East Hampton.

Mr. Bochroch -- Bob to his countless friends -- conducted a life-long love affair with the automobile. Early in his life, he raced sports cars at Lime Rock, Sebring, and Watkins Glen, and in 1970 became President of the Bridgehampton Racing Group, which was dedicated to reviving the Bridgehampton Race Track. His passion for the open road culminated in 1984, when he and his close friend Bob Sinclair, driving a turbocharged Saab Aero prototype, finished seventh out of 76 entrants in the grueling 8800-mile-long race known as One Lap of America. He was justifiably proud of the fact that they collected only one speeding ticket as they circumnavigated the country.

Bob also loved to travel, particularly to countries known for their cuisine. His wife’s career at TWA enabled him to take more than 20 trips to France, dining in three-star restaurants and acquiring the knowledge and sophistication that made him an extraordinary cook. Perhaps the first East End resident to install a Garland restaurant range in his home, he gave famous dinner parties at which his geniality, wit, and wonderful food endeared him to his friends. His kitchen was his theater. Sipping aperitifs and slathering home-made terrine de veau on crusty bread while sitting at the bar that framed his workspace, his guests could chat with him while he put the finishing touches on his classic boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin.

He was first married to Patricia Suransky, the mother of his three children – Robert A. Bochroch of Philadelphia, Lisa (Mrs. Frederick Erikson) of Williamsport, and Susan (Mrs. Robert Ratcliffe) of East Hampton. He is also survived by his second wife, Mary Joyce, whom he married in 1971, and with whom he raised his daughters locally, and by his grandsons, Frederick and Patrick Erikson.

Friends and family will participate in a celebration of Mr. Bochroch’s rich life at 1:00 P.M. on March 8th, at his home. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a contribution to the East Hampton Day Care Center (PO Box 63) or to Meals on Wheels (33 Newtown Lane).

TIMES-TOSSING

2008-02-24T12:56:00.004-05:00

One of my most cherished routines takes place every morning. Nancy and I invariably rise at the same moment, and if we’re in East Hampton, what follows next is a ritual as unvarying as a Kabuki play. I go downstairs and into the kitchen, take out two small glasses, pour orange juice into them and then head for the front door. Nancy follows me, and makes eight cups of coffee in the Krups as I head down the steps, down the path, down the driveway, retrieve the Times, and repeat my journey in reverse. Sometimes, if it’s cold or rainy or snowy, I have to throw on a pair of sweats and a parka and real shoes, but mostly, I venture out in bathrobe and LL Bean mocs.

Re-entering the house, I make a beeline for My Chair, which is an oversized copy of the iconic Eames chair. So tyrannically do I assert my claim of possession that no one else (least of all Nancy) would dream of sitting on it, any more than a courtier, or even a wife, would have thought to perch casually on Henry VIII’s throne. I drop the Times on the ottoman, go into the kitchen, and we busy ourselves pouring coffee (Nancy’s black with sugar in one of her own mugs; mine with a drop of half-and-half, in a thermal cup). Nancy carries hers to a large, comfortable club chair facing mine; I set mine down on the little table next to the Eames, perhaps accompanied by a schmeck of something sweet, strip the wrapper off the Times, separate the first section from the rest and throw Nancy the Metro.

This business of throwing newspapers across the room has evolved over the five-year period in which we've lived in this house. At first, when it came time to trade sections, I would rise, carry what I had finished over to her, pick up what she had for me, and seat myself again, but there are always five or six sections, which is a lot of tedious messengering, and one day I simply flung Business at her. I did this with a wristy, backhand motion, as one would toss a Frisbee, and to my surprise, it sailed across the room – some twenty feet – and landed gently, intact, face-up, in her lap. That was beginner’s luck, of course, but what began as a whim became, with practice, a surprisingly effective method of delivery; now, hardly noticing that we’re doing it, we trade sections without ever leaving our respective chairs, the only sounds the occasional clinking of cup on coaster and the susurration of newsprint flapping through the air. Sometimes a section goes awry, separating or diving to the side or falling short, and the receiver hisses disapprovingly: “Error on the throw!” Surprisingly often, however, it works fine. Heavy sections are easier to throw accurately than light ones, but after years of practice, both of us can manage even something as flimsy as Getaways.

No one until now has known of, let alone witnessed, this strange marital game. It occurred to me, though, that many couples who are blessed with large living rooms must have developed routines similar or perhaps quite different to this one. So let me hear from you, fellow Times-Tossers! Maybe we can get a team together and qualify for the Beijing Olympics!

CURRENT PIXIMS

2008-02-18T12:52:00.006-05:00

I'm the most inattentive blogger; not only can I not keep up with my own life, I can't keep up with my family's. And in the case of Maxim, of course, change is the order of each and every day. He just turned 5 months old, and looks nothing like he did when he was a child. So here are a few shots -- some from Christmas, when Nancy and I were in Utila, and some sent to us last week by Danielle.

Have I mentioned that D, B and M are coming to East Hampton for the month of June? One of the treats in store for Maxim will be meeting his cohort; so many of Danielle's friends in the States have just had or are about to have babies, we may be able to form a softball team. . . .

GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY

2008-01-10T16:44:00.000-05:00

We left the island of Utila, where our daughter and her family live, on January 5th -- not without divine intervention.

In an attempt to shorten the long and arduous trek, we opted for the 3-leg route instead of the usual 4, even though it cost twice as much: from Newark to Houston to Roatan (a larger neighboring island with an international airport) to Utila, the last jump via chartered plane. No problem going there, in perfect weather; the Cessna 172 (4 seats and a single engine, about the size of a lawnmower’s) covered the 20 miles expeditiously. I monitored its progress via the instruments from the co-pilot’s seat: altitude 900 feet, airspeed 80 mph.

But going home was a different story: rain pelting, wind blowing. We got to what passes for an airstrip on Utila, a cracked and rutted length of pavement about 400 yards long, at eleven A.M. and to our surprise, there was the Cessna. The bad news was that the airport in Roatan was closed, and there was another couple ahead of us. The flight from Roatan to Houston was due to take off at 2 PM, and flew only once a week.

We cooled our already damp heels. Another passenger arrived, a young woman with, it seemed to me, much too much luggage to fit in the Cessna. At 11, the Roatan airport opened and the Cessna pilot, after carefully inspecting the runway, which was full of puddles, pronounced his intention to fly. He loaded up the other couple and told us he’d be back for the three of us in an hour. We watched as the tiny plane lurched and splashed its way down the runway, struggling to become airborne, and narrowly cleared the trees at the end.

The rain intensified. The puddles became ponds. We abandoned hope of the Cessna’s return. But all at once, much too soon, we heard engines in the sky. A large twin-engine plane, painted a snazzy blue, with the words “Central American Airways” stenciled on its tail, landed smoothly and taxied to the shed where Nancy and I and the young woman waited. “I guess this is for me,” said she. As the purser (!) opened the compartment door, I saw that there was not a single passenger aboard. “Where are you going?” I asked him.

“Roatan,” he said.

“Will you take us?” I queried.

The answer was not a foregone conclusion. He pondered the matter. His piercing gaze sought my own. “Only,” he said, “if you pay cash!”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars. Each!”

We struck the bargain, boarded, and were in Roatan fourteen minutes later. The Cessna was still on the ground; we explained what had happened to its pilot, and he gave us his blessing. The couple he had ferried over earlier were standing on line to pay their airport departure tax; the double-take they gave when they saw us was worthy of a Mack Sennett comedy. “How . . . how. . . ?” They had landed only ten minutes earlier.

We made our flight to Houston with an hour to spare. When I got back to New York, I googled Central American Airways, my new best friends. What came up was a company located in Louisville that charters fancy jets. I consulted lists of all the airlines in Central America, in the Western Hemisphere, in the world. Nada. I can only conclude that some tiny part of my atheistic soul was praying for deliverance, and the prayer was answered. Thank you, CAA – whoever you are.

MAXIM IS HERE!

2007-10-06T12:56:00.000-04:00

What is the point, I ask myself, of creating a blog and not posting anything on it for four months? Well, things keep coming up, especially in the last month or so, in which Nancy and I almost lost a daughter and did become grandparents.

As most of my readers know, Danielle’s pregnancy was complicated. I won’t go into the gynecology of it, but her OB had explained months ago that she would have to move from the island of Utila, where she and Benoit live, to La Ceiba, on the coast, where the hospital is, and that she would have to have the baby by C-section a couple of weeks before the due date – all this to forestall her going into labor, which would be very dangerous.

So wouldn’t you know that on September 16th, the week before the move to the mainland, around dinnertime, the placenta ruptured and the trouble started. Fortunately, their next-door-neighbor Phil and his girlfriend were home and their cooperation enlisted. Even more fortunately, the water was dead calm. They piled into Reefer Madness, the boat Ben had been keeping fueled and ready at the dock steps from their door, and with Ben and Phil navigating, and the girlfriend holding on to Danielle, they made it across the channel and into the waiting ambulance in a little more than an hour – record time, and fortunately so, for Danielle had lost two units of blood. The OB was waiting (in a dinner dress and heels), the C-section performed, and Maxim David Bellenoue came into the world.

And almost left it. Maxim was five weeks premature, and despite having received steroids in the womb, his lungs weren’t sufficiently developed to cope with earth’s atmosphere. Nor was the hospital sufficiently advanced to cope with Maxim; there was no neo-natal ICU, no pediatricians who specialized in his condition, and the tubes inserted into his lungs to pump air enriched with oxygen weren’t doing the job. He developed pneumothorax -- both lungs were punctured and partially collapsed. After a week of this, the baby clinging to life, the parents asking what more the doctors could do and being told that they should pray – an ultimatum: Max’s only chance was to be taken by private ambulance to the big hospital in San Pedro Sula, a hundred miles away over mountain roads. No one gave him much chance of surviving the journey. Danielle (fresh from surgery, and not the typical C-section but a procedure of greater magnitude) sat in the front, going quietly nuts with no way of communicating with Ben, who was in back with the baby and the staff.

But survive Max did, and now safely ensconced in a well-staffed ICU, attended by great doctors, he began to make his recovery. The holes in his lungs repaired themselves, the fluid was suctioned out, breast milk was added to his diet, and each day he got stronger. Nancy and I spoke to Danielle several times a day, and could chart the baby’s progress by the tone of her voice, as her anxiety gradually left her and was replaced by relief and the dawning thrill of motherhood.

Dan and Ben were living, by this time, in a two-bedroom apartment owned by the hospital, right across the street. On October 1st, Nancy flew down there and moved in with them. On the 4th, Maxim was discharged from the hospital and moved in as well. He’s still being seen daily by the pediatricians, being taught how to expel phlegm from his lungs, but he’s breathing, nursing, and solving simple quadratic equations by himself. Either next Monday, the 8th, or on Wednesday, the Bellenoue-Horwich entourage will make its way to Utila (whether by air or by van and ferry remains to be decided). To all of you who have showered us with your good wishes, baby presents, and requests for details, thank you! As soon as Nancy is able to send me the pictures she’s been assiduously snapping, I’ll post them on this site.

A final note: being Jewish only on my parents’ side, I don’t have an actual God to pray to, but I did cut some deals with the universe when things looked dark. One of the minor concessions was, OK, the Yankees can lose every game in the playoffs if Maxim starts breathing on his own. At this writing, the Yanks are down 2-1 to the Indians, a team they beat eight straight times in the regular season. And through some glitch, the Mets seem to have gotten roped in as well. So, it’s all my fault. Sue me.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

2007-06-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

Now that Al Gore is slimming down for a possible run at the White House, I’ve been thinking about the crucial plank in his platform (not that it’s possible to forget about for more than a few minutes at a time). About a year ago, Jim Hansen reviewed a number of books about global warming (“The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006) and concluded that the problem could be neatly solved in the same way that two earlier ecological threats, the potent pesticide DDT and the noxious propellant CFC, were neutralized. Each turned out to be replaceable without severe dislocation, and the ease with which we accepted their replacements has given Hansen what seems to me a false hope for the coming battle.

For oil is part of our national mythology and identity, in the way that CFCs and DDT were not. We never idolized Redi-whip as we do the lights of the Las Vegas strip; no one gathered around the TV to watch bugs die the way Nascar fans do for the Talladega 500. The consortium of government and business interests that is locked into Big Oil is far broader and deeper than the pesticide and CFC lobbies. And it’s going to be a lot harder to find substitutes that work and that are acceptable to all the interest groups on play. Hansen glosses over the possibilities in a single sentence: “In the interim [before new technology is invented and implemented] new electricity requirements should be met by the use of renewable energies such as wind power as well as by nuclear power and other sources that do not produce C02.” That complacent formulation ignores the facts that wind turbines in numbers sufficient to satisfy our voracious appetites for heat and light would probably suck North America halfway across the Atlantic, and that nuclear power has been irrevocably demonized by the political left, from whom we would naturally look for leadership in the struggle against oil and coal. I had a ringside seat at the successful ten-year battle against the Long Island Lighting Company’s attempt to bring its Shoreham reactor on line, and it was a lesson in the law of unintended consequences: the protesters who rejoiced when the power company spent billions on a plant that never opened went home to find the costs folded into astronomical monthly bills, and now depend even more heavily than before on a dwindling supply of electricity generated by fossil fuels.

And speaking of unintended consequences and demonization: over a million African children die each year from malaria, which could be controlled -- indeed, all but eradicated -- by the judicious use of DDT, the best mosquitocide ever invented. Perhaps a more apt analogy for ending our addiction to oil is our battle with addiction to tobacco, which shows us that the only way to end an addiction, unfortunately, is not to throttle it back but to cut it out altogether. But no first-world country will ever wean itself from oil completely, and an America that tries to “cut down” -- in which liberals learn to get along with nukes and conservatives embrace Priuses and buy bicycles -- seems less like a viable vision of the future than a hallucination.

The East Hampton Star, June 14th, 2007

2007-06-15T09:42:00.001-04:00

DICK AND NANCY in ROATAN, HONDURAS, 2004

2007-06-07T14:03:00.000-04:00

MEA CULPA (and some thoughts about A-Rod and Iraq

2007-06-03T12:29:00.000-04:00

MEA CULPA: What is the point of telling all your friends about your new blog if you don’t post anything on it for two weeks? I plead overwork, congenital laziness, the spectacular golf weather in the Hamptons.

Alex Rodriguez has had either a good or a bad week, depending on your point of view. First he caused an enormous brouhaha in baseball circles by calling something out as he ran to third base behind the Toronto infielder who was about to catch a pop fly that would have ended the ending. The infielder backed off, dropped the ball, and the Yanks scored three more runs.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have an opinion on the ethics of what A-Rod did – even non-fans. So many questions factor into it: did he yell “Mine,” as the Blue Jays claim, or just “Huh!” as he asserts. Was it a rules infraction (no, as it turns out) or just “bush league,” one of those unspoken prohibitions, an example of bad sportsmanship and advantage-taking (especially since the poor guy who dropped the ball was a rookie, playing his first game in the Bigs).

But that controversy was, if anything, heightened the next day when the Post featured pictures of the Yankee star (who is married) escorting an anonymous blonde to a Toronto strip club after the game.

I have two responses to all this. The play: in hockey or basketball, yelling something to confuse opponents is an accepted part of the game. At the other end of the spectrum, in golf, even clearing your throat while an opponent putts is so not-done that you’d find yourself ostracized at any level of the sport. In baseball itself, some kinds of deception are condoned, as even A-Rod’s detractors point out: on a line drive to the outfield, the shortstop pantomimes fielding a grounder to force the runner on first to slide into second, to keep him from taking third, a play that has been known to result in injuries. And the aforesaid runner, in order to break up a double play, is taught to go after the fielder, not the base; Mike Lowell of Boston, about to be tagged out by Robbie Cano, leveled a block worthy of a linebacker, putting Cano on his seat (though miraculously, he got the throw off in time). As to A-Rod’s extra-marital high-jinks, does it come as news to us that pro athletes on the road enjoy casual sex as one of their many perks? A flight attendant once confided to me that on a charter flight (she wouldn’t tell me what sport or even which team), one of the ballplayers was hitting on her, and when she pointed out that he was wearing a wedding ring, he said, “Well, yeah, I’m married, but I’m not a fanatic about it.” So the issue here seems to be the ethics of sleazy tabloids who have not, in the past, followed athletes around road towns with cameras, recording their preferred modes of winding down after games.

But the larger question that all this leads me to is, why are we (most Americans) more preoccupied with A-Rod and Lindsay Lohan and Brittany and Brangelina than we are with Iraq? Why, as it seems, does everybody have a strong opinion about what goes on on the baseball fields and bars of America, but hardly anyone, even Presidential candidates, speaks with forthright conviction about when and how we should extricate ourselves from Baghdad?

The answer is that baseball practices, adultery, and substance abuse are well-understood. The rules of baseball are known and finite; the conventions of behavior have been established over the course of a century; most male and many female Americans have played baseball or softball, so we’re all operating in a known field of discourse. You never hear it said of baseball, as it is said daily of Iraq, that it is a “quagmire,” a “black hole,” a “no-win situation, a “zero-sum game.” In Iraq, we’re passengers strapped into uncomfortable seats in the economy section of a plane flown by blind pilots. There seems no way to land, no way to turn around, no way even to communicate with those willful fools at the controls behind the locked cockpit door. And a kind of fatalism has set in. Waiting for the Bush administration to end in order for change to occur is an option one hears proposed in casual conversation – in other words, let’s table it. There are no precedents – certainly not Viet Nam: when we left Nam, that country prospered, the rest of the region stayed pretty much the same, and there were none of the long-term consequences that seem sure to ensue whether we leave Iraq or stay, build up or draw down: genocide (granted, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge remained open for business, but they were never on our agenda), the further polarization of radical Islam and the diminishing secular Middle East, a huge increase in anti-American and anti-Western feeling and the concomitant terrorism that such sentiments might bring with it.

Compared to these thickets, what happens on a baseball diamond or a strip club or even a highway on which a revved-up Lohan or a Paris Hilton is demolishing the speed limit seem familiar, manageable, and entertaining, a welcome distraction from thinking those dark thoughts about a world that is wobbling on its axis. I don’t think the American pre-occupation with celebrity, then, is shallow and mindless. I think it’s an escape hatch, a survival mechanism, an attempt – probably a doomed one – to hold onto our collective sanity. Nero fiddling while Rome burns? Maybe he was looking for distraction too.

BETTER NANCY REAGAN THAN ME

2007-05-18T14:18:00.001-04:00

By chance, I came across an amazing video clip on YouTube this morning,* and it brought back a vivid first-hand memory, dating back to 1986, to which my fervent response was, and is: Better Nancy Reagan than me.

That was actually my second thought as I watched the First Lady's chair tip backward off the dais in the East Room, depositing her in the flowerpots. My first thought was that something incomparably more awful had happened. After all, the President was there as well, delivering some graceful concluding remarks to the two hundred of us privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz's White House recital; his presence, along with the Secret Service, the Marine Guards, the press, inevitably lends a kind of supercharge to the aura of any room he inhabits. So that sudden flurry, the chair toppling, the involuntary gasp from the crowd, the people rushing forward all conjured up a sense of waking nightmare, even fifteen years before 9/11: can something awful be happening? Here? Now?

But the next instant, Mrs. Reagan had bounced up unhurt, and she and the President were quipping away as if they'd rehearsed the whole thing. "I told you, only if I'm not getting any laughs," he said, and got a big laugh. And smiling, unflustered, unwrinkled, not breathing hard, not flushed, without a stammer, Nancy tossed off a bon mot of her own -- "I guess I livened things up" -- and resumed her seat (her chair having been moved, in the interim, a good two feet from the treacherous edge of the platform). Horowitz locked his left arm around her waist and kept it there until the President had finished his speech, and then, smiling and chatting, the Reagans and the Horowitzes trooped nonchalantly out of the room, leaving the rest of us to buzz.

"I saw it coming," said my wife. "She had on a tight skirt, and she was tugging it down, and the chair was inching at every tug." And that became the Official Version, as reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times the next day. But everyone else had his or her own version, some little detail that non one else had noticed, some explanation, some point of view. It was like Rashomon; no one of us could quite take in the totality of the event we'd just witnessed. It was a leveling experience, though; it restored the democratic balance between the celebrity musicians and politicians, who'd never seen anything like it in all their visits to the White House, and the nobodies (like us) who had lucked into an invitation and were there for the first time. Now, everybody had something to talk about, and if you had had a better sight line than a symphony conductor or a newsweekly publisher, he wanted to know what your angle was.

My wife and I were there because fate kindly arranged, forty years ago, that my family and the Horowitzes should become friends. We've had the good fortune to hear him play many times -- once, several years ago, in Washington, when we came down the morning of the recital and went home as soon as it was over. Could anything be more special than listening to the greatest living pianist? What would those Russians who froze all night waiting for a ticket, whose tears streamed down their faces as he played, answer? But such is the human capacity to become inured to blessings that this time, it was the Presidential overtones that set our hearts to beating a little faster.

In some ways, we felt very privileged: just telling the cab driver, "The White House, please -- Visitors' entrance," gave me a charge, though as it turned out, he couldn't find the Visitors' entrance, having been misdirected by a D.C. cop, and we had to walk a quarter of a mile from where we were let off. Next time we'll get a limo, we told each other. But sweeping past the crowds of tourists toward the portico, the heart-stopping moment when the guard holding the Guest List couldn't seem to find our names, showing the requisite identification (our social security numbers having been provided weeks before), all reminded us that this was a special day, a time to soak up the memories and impressions for our daughter and our friends in New York.

But it's a nerve-racking business, in some ways, going to the White House. The identification, the metal detector, the handbag search were more than a little sobering; this wasn't a routine social or cultural occasion in any way. If I had a sense of being a witness to history on a very small scale, I had a complementary sense that my role was to remain invisible, on my best behavior, while history unfolded. One doesn't go wandering around the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, thumbing through books and opening closet doors; if you have to the go the bathroom, a Marine major escorts you. Remember being an adolescent, worrying about developing a pimple before the dance, about buying the wrong corsage, or saying the wrong thing, or not being able to say anything at all? My wife was nervous too; an hour before, in the hotel room, trying on and discarding innumerable pairs of pantyhose, she was worried she'd faint if she didn't eat something. Not since my wedding, when I was sure that during the ceremony my knees would lock, pitching me forward onto the rabbi's feet, have I fretted so about keeping countenance. What if I started coughing while Horowitz were playing? Belched? Sneezed on someone's tie? Had some kind of fit? None of these things was likely, but I could imagine it, everyone slowly turning around and looking at me with an expression of incredulity on their faces.

That was just the expression on the face of the Leader of the Free World when his wife did her back flip into the geraniums. The kind of thing that would surely mortify you if it ever really happened actually did happen -- in the middle of the President's speech -- and to the President's wife! But that, of course, made all the difference. If I'd fallen off my chair, I doubt whether the Chief Executive and I would have shrugged the incident off together with a little exchange of impromptu humor. Nancy Reagan belonged up there; she was in her own home, surrounded by her own guests (though I imagine she'd not met a third of them), and her aplomb undoubtedly stemmed, in part, from her sense of security: if I want to steal the stage from my husband by taking a pratfall while he maunders on, by God, I'll do it! And of course, all those years of social training, of discipline, of learning how to carry off difficult moments with tact, diplomacy, just the right gesture or remark -- they had prepared her superbly for a really juicy example of what the Reader's Digest would probably call My Most Embarrassing Moment. If it had been me, I'd never have appeared in public again; five minutes later, at the reception, she was laughing about it as if she actually found it funny! I loved her at that moment. By a process of Darwinian selection, the one person in the room who could survive accident, or practical joke, or trick of fate, and actually triumph over it, was the person it happened to. Confirmed atheist though I am, I thought, there is a God. Better -- much, much better -- Mrs. Reagan than me.

*Check out the video yourself. It’s hard to find on YouTube’s website, but you can Google “Horowitz at the Reagan White House” and play it right from the fifth listing on the page.

AN AMERICAN LIFE

2007-05-18T13:08:00.000-04:00

I've been taking a break from Shakespeare since NYU let out, revisiting some classic American stories -- among them the one by Stephen Crane from which I gleaned the quotation attached to Danielle's and Ben's wedding announcement, and also that mother lode of American myth-making, The Great Gatsby. And I came across the following obituary, which in many ways is a retelling of Fitzgerald's story, all except for the ending.

Frank Parker, U.S. Tennis Champion, 81
by Richard Goldstein (The New York Times, July 25th, 1997)

Frank Parker, a product of a poor Milwaukee family who was discovered by his mentor while working as a ball boy and who rose to win the United States Nationals singles tennis title twice, died last Thursday. He was 81. . . .

At the age of 10, Franciszek Patkowski was hitting discarded tennis balls at the Milwaukee Town Club where he worked -- turning over all but a nickel of his $2 weekly pay to his widowed mother, Ann -- when he caught the eye of the club coach, Mercer Beasley.

Mr. Beasley taught the youngster the game, taking him along to New Orleans for intensive coaching when the Beasley family moved there.

At 15, Mr. Patkowski was crowned national boys’ champion, at 16 he became national junior champion, and at 17 he won the national clay-court championship.

When Mr. Beasley became the tennis coach at Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey, his protégé enrolled there, then went on to Princeton. He changed his name to Frank Parker, perhaps because tournament officials had trouble pronouncing the name Franciszek Patkowski.

In 1938, Mr. Beasley’s tutoring of Mr. Parker ended. That is when Mr. Beasley’s wife, Audrey, divorced him and married Mr. Parker, then 22 and her junior by about 20 years. She became his adviser and trainer and also tailored his tennis wardrobe.

“They remained the best of friends,” [Parker’s nephew] said of Mr. Parker’s later relationship with Mr. Beasley. “When he won a tournament, he got a congratulatory wire.”

. . . He played briefly as a pro, barnstorming with [Pancho] Gonzales, [Jack] Kramer and Bobby Riggs. After retiring, he was a sales manager for a box company.

STUFF HAPPENS

2007-05-18T13:06:00.000-04:00

“Everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” wrote Mark Twain. Ah, those were the days. Twain’s irony must certainly be lost on the legions of world citizens who demand -- and most persuasively -- that steps be taken to reverse global warming before we all become victims to its manifold threats: bigger and more frequent tropical storms, the melting of glaciers and concomitant rise in sea levels, soaring ambient temperatures that will transform New York into Calcutta and Calcutta into hell.

I don’t dispute the Annapurna of evidence for global warming. Even if we take the longest possible view, under which global warming is part of a natural cycle of heating up and cooling off that the earth periodically goes through, the human race has a strong vested interest in prolonging the cold snap that’s coming to an end; after all, another natural cycle with which we’re familiar is the evolutionary one, in which species appear, become dominant, and then decline and fall because they’re unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

But I do confess to a certain nostalgia for the days when not every looming disaster was someone’s fault, representing a remedy overlooked or ignored. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger got his face turned into hamburger in a motorcycle accident last year, and strident voices were immediately raised: it’s his fault for irresponsibly ignoring the helmet option; it’s the fault of Pennsylvania for not mandating helmets; it’s the Steelers’ fault for not limiting his transportation choices to something tamer, like roller skates; it’s the fault of the driver of the car with which he collided, who apparently received death threats. The term “accident” has almost lost its meaning here in the early third millennium. The explanation that events take place randomly has come to seem disingenuous and self-serving -- best example being Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “Stuff happens,” which apparently argues that that the carnage and chaos in Iraq are independent of the fact that we sent an army of destruction there unaccompanied by anyone who knew how to preserve the infrastructure or restore order.

In other areas besides the political and military, though, we can see a similar logic of victimization at work. I’m not the first to point out that in third-millennium America, if someone dies, someone else must be to blame: the doctors who pronounced the cancer ineradicable, the HMO’s that refused to sponsor experimental treatments, even the patient, who did not assist in his own cure by adopting a posture of optimistic and resolute fortitude. A child falls off the monkey bars in the playground: sue the city. A woman spills hot coffee in her lap: sue McDonald’s. You choose a humungous SUV over a Prius, even though you know its gas tank will cost a hundred bucks to fill: throw your congressman out of office if he won’t lobby for using up our emergency reserve fund.

My concern is hardly the root causes of all these ills; some of them are surely preventable, others not. What I want to point out is that the weather is no longer the last bastion of irresponsibility as far as mortals are concerned. When the rains fell for two solid weeks last May, I noticed that many of my friends and neighbors didn’t resort to Mark Twain’s stoicism; instead, they pointed the finger. See, see, what did we tell you? Global warming means more volatile weather; get used to it. Every cold snap, every heat spell, every blizzard and drought is now exorcised from its customary category as (take your pick, depending on your spiritual orientation) an act of God or stuff that happens. We no longer have the luxury of simply wallowing in self-pity when the weather doesn’t cooperate with our plans or our esthetic; to our pouting is now added guilt. The beaches of both coasts will be under water before we know it, and IT’S ALL OUR FAULT; we’re being justly punished for our excesses.

WEDDING PICTURE

2007-05-14T10:55:00.000-04:00

Danielle and Ben on their wedding day -- May 9th, 2007.

Epithalamion

2007-05-12T17:54:00.000-04:00

Yes, it has happened, at last! That's rice they're being pelted with, and a marriage license in Danielle's hand! Look how intrepid Benoit looks, leading her into the wilderness of a new life (or is it more like Adam leading Eve out of Eden?).

Nancy and I are thrilled and happy, even if we couldn't be present for the ceremony (in which, by the way, everyone was barefoot, even the mayor of Utila).

Of course some relevant epigraph must appear. I'm going to abandon Shakespeare for the moment, and go with something non-standard but choice.

“If you ain’t got a gun, why ain’t you got a gun?” Scratchy sneered. “Been to Sunday-school?”
“I ain’t got a gun because I’ve just come from San Anton’ with my wife. I’m married,” said Potter. “And if I’d thought there was going to be any galoots like you prowling around when I brought my wife home, I’d had a gun, and don’t you forget it.”
“Married!” said Scratchy, not at all comprehending. Seemingly for the first time, he saw the drooping, drowning woman at the other man’s side. “No!” He was like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world. He moved a pace backward, and his arm, with the revolver, dropped to his side. “Is this the lady? he asked.”
“Yes; this is the lady,” answered Potter.
There was another period of silence.
“Well,” said Wilson at last, slowly, “I s’pose it’s all off now.”
“It’s all off if you say so, Scratchy. You know I didn’t make the trouble.” Potter lifted his valise.
“Well, I ‘low it’s off, Jack,” said Wilson. He was looking at the ground. “Married!” He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains. He picked up his starboard revolver, and, placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away. His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand."

-- Stephen Crane, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"

"Flubber" by Danielle Horwich (age 6)

2007-05-11T14:09:00.001-04:00

Make something.
Break it down, fall down, say Well,
Let's go back to bed.
Take a balloon.
Take it.
Blow it up.
Take ten more or all you can get
And go outside.
Place them in the car.
Take anything that you can blow up in the car
Start the motor and
Float
away.

My retirement announcement from Brooklyn College

2007-05-11T14:02:00.000-04:00

And it came to pass that my heart was heavy, and I knew not the remedy. So I said unto the Lord, “Lord, my joy is gone from me. For I no longer wish to do battle with the Philistines in the Land of Brooklyn whereto, lo, these thirty years, have I sojourned. And the College that lieth in the Land of Brooklyn hath offered me an early-retirement incentive, and I am sorely tempted, Lord, to accept this bounty. But also, I am afraid, for to some, retirement is a blessing, but to others, it is a curse. And I know not what to do. Lord, send me a sign.” But the Lord spake not.

And on the next day in the College that lieth in the Land of Brooklyn, the Pharaoh of the Department of English calleth me into his chamber. And the Pharaoh sayeth unto me, “Lo, Horwich, thy disciples have fallen away from thee, and I hereby cancelleth thy Shakespeare elective for insufficient enrollment. And in its stead, I give thee this choice: thou mayst teach English 1: Fundamentals of Composition, or, if thou wilt, thou mayst teach English 0.4: Fundamentals of Composition (Remedial). How chooseth thou?”

And the Pharaoh’s words were like a black cloud sweeping over a starry sky, and I knew despair, for teaching Fundamentals of Composition is as eating thistles, but teaching Fundamentals of Composition (Remedial) is as eating thistles with tares. And then at once, a thought came unto me: that this was the sign from God for which I had prayed. And my heart leapt up, and I accepted the early retirement incentive, effective January 30th, 1998. And my household rejoiceth, and all our hearts are full.

Poety in Motion?

2007-05-11T13:58:00.000-04:00

They have no need of poetry,
Those who should be moving shortly in the sooty tubes
Beneath the river that surfaces at Times Square.
No need of Strand's or Clampitt’s airy overviews
That fresco the walls of buses,
Short-haul limos awash in the city’s changing lights.
No, those with tunnel vision
Have more pressing concerns
Than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
They need to know
Where to get their torn earlobes stitched
How to avoid AIDS and its evil twin SIDA
And most of all
What steps to take
When they can’t move
And the lights go out.