My Need for Ritual

I don’t suppose I am much different from a good many people in my need for order and ritual in my life.  I do tend, as I have talked about in these blogs before, toward a slight OCD.  Nothing major, I don’t wash my hand obsessively, or have to skip cracks in the sidewalk (although I do wash my hands a lot and if possible I do skip the sidewalk cracks--who doesn’t?).  But I do like to know what is happening before it happens, and, as I’ve gotten older, I have lost most of my desire for spontaneity.  A little planning--okay, a lot of planning--is a good thing.

I get up at 6:00 every morning.  People, especially young people, don’t understand why I get up at a certain time when I’m retired and can sleep as late as I want.  But I like to keep regular hours and I find that I get more done in the mornings than later, so up early it is.  I check my e-mail, shower, and then head to Starbucks (yes, I wrote an earlier blog blasting what I called Starbucks’ zombies and now I am one) for morning coffee, two cups, no more no less, a banana, and, against my doctor’s orders, a pastry.  At 10:30 I join my friend Roger for whatever shopping we might want to do; or, if nothing is needed, we go for coffee, cup number 3.  After lunch I usually take a nap, 30 to 45 minutes, followed by coffee number 4 here at home.  If I get up from the nap in time, I watch Jeopardy!, just to be reminded how much I don’t know.  I’ll use the afternoon for housecleaning, studying for class, watching movies, or reading.  Don’t call or knock on my door between 5:30 and 6:00 as I’m watching my 16 minutes of evening news and 14 minutes of commercials.  Later, I may watch a little TV, catch another episode of Downton Abbey, or read.  I have a bowl of cereal around 10:00, catch the weather, shower (yes, again), and head to bed.

And Jake, my cat, is also a lover of ritual.  When I get up in the morning she expects, and always gets, her morning treats.  When I nap she usually naps with me.  Before bed she expects her 1/3 can of wet food, and will let me know if I’m running late (she hates opera night).  She gets brushed before my evening shower and is there waiting--demanding--that I not forget.  Then we have this snuggling ritual before falling asleep.

Leave the unpremeditated life to the young; I want my life planned, organized, and ritualized.

Mom and the Murder of Crows

The other night I watched a fascinating PBS special on crows, the ubiquitous and surprisingly intelligent bird everyone recognizes.*  Among a number of interesting facts, I learned that the crow is a tool-maker--only they are a step beyond the apes: not only do they make tools out of sticks, they make them with a hook on the end to retrieve items they need.  They mate for life and they have communities with shared duties, like feeding the young.  They can recognize human faces; and most astonishingly, they can teach their young to fear the same face.

But their problem solving abilities are far more complex than, until recently, scientists had reckoned.  The video included an experiment where a crow, if he wanted to fetch a tasty chunk of meat, had to use a long stick to pull it from a tube; but the long stick was in another cage and they had to use a shorter stick to first pull the long stick within reach before they could use the long stick to reach the meat.  Quickly done.  And then they moved the experiment to a third problem-solving level: they hung the shorter stick on a piece of string from a bar above the other two cages.  After hopping around a bit, the crow flew to the bar, used his beak and feet to pull up the string with the short stick, detached the stick from the string, carried it down to the cage with the long stick, used it to pull the long stick out, and then took the long stick over and inched the meat to within reach.  It was amazing to watch.

Then there was something even more startling: crows apparently have a concept of death.  They had video and there are records of crows gathering in the treetops over the body of a fallen comrade (I use that term on purpose).  They sat without making a sound for about ten minutes and then flew silently away.  That revelation gave me chills.  What else don’t we know?  And what don’t we know about the intelligence and emotional life of so many animals?

All that brought to mind my mother’s failed attempts to kill a murder of crows (a flock of crows is called a murder, as in a herd of cows, a colon of ants, a battery of barracudas, and a murder of crows).  We lived on a farm and crows were constantly in the garden, eating seeds, vegetables, sprouts, and just about anything else--crows are omnivores.  She tried scarecrows, a misnomer if ever there was one; they perched on them to better see the goodies in the garden.  She spent box after box of 4-10 gauge shotgun shells in a vain attempt to kill even a single crow; she had heard that by hanging the body of a crow near the garden, they would stay away.  She never got a one.  She claimed, and now I believe her, that they knew the exact range of the 4-10.  She would fire and miss.  She would move ten feet closer to them and they would fly ten feet away.  It was uncanny.  And for Mom, infuriating.  ‘Possums weren’t so lucky.  She hated them too as they would kill chickens in the henhouse for the fun of it, or so she claimed.  But then ’possums are about as intelligent as this stapler here on my desk.  She slaughtered them right and left.  Crows?  Nary a one.

She would have loved this video as she later, once the farm had been sold, became an avid birdwatcher.  Although I doubt if she ever grew to like crows; they would steal seeds from her favorite bird feeders!

*http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/full-episode/5977/

Me and the Granny Cart

About the only thing I miss about not having a car is the ability to drag large quantities of groceries home from the store.  Instead, I have to make multiple trips to the store carrying only what I can lug on my arms.  A possible solution is the wheeled cart, commonly called the “granny cart.”  And therein lies the problem: old people use these carts, and I’m not . . .  I don’t want . . .  Okay, it’s a matter of pure pride: I don’t want to be one of those old people dragging a cart wherever they go.

Silliness, I know.  And in this part of town, it’s not just old people who use these carts, since many young people also don’t have cars.  But who notices a 20-something with a granny cart?  But were I to use one, people would be offering me their seats on the train and passing to the other side of the street as I neared.  I’m not ready for that.

But a solution has presented itself: a stylish Trader Joe’s granny cart!  It’s colorful, useful, and light; and since the logo is clearly obvious, I can show that I’m trendy and cool and environmentally conscious. . . if still old.  My friend Roger got one and I’ve used it a few times.  Really a good way to go, I think: I’ll still have a granny cart, but I won’t look like a granny.

But life is never easy: I headed to Trader Joe’s to get one (only $12.95, too) and they are out!  And as far as anyone knows, they are not restocking them.  Damn, damn, damn . . .  I  may as well get a granny cart, put on a shawl, grab a cane, and head to the store.

Book Report

No, not that kind of book report.  This is my annual report on my reading from the previous year.  And it’s a depressing report: total books read last year, a mere 37.  2011 was 31 and 2010 was 46; but 2009 was 60. That’s as long as I’ve been keeping records.  The big question for me is why the totals have dropped so dramatically from 2009?

I am ahead of the average American reader.  The Pew Research Center jut published their findings on reading in America.  It’s called “The Rise of E-reading.”* Here’s a summary of the results:
Americans 18 and older read on average 17 books each year. 19% say they don’t read any books at all. Only 5% say they read more than 50.
Fewer Americans are reading books now than in 1978.
64% of respondents said they find the books they read from recommendations from family members, friends, or co-workers.
The average reader of e-books read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months; the average non-e-book consumer read an average of 15.

I’m well ahead of the average (I also read e-books but just include them in my total with print books), but I’m way behind where I think I should be.  Why is that?

It’s entirely possible that my list of books read is not accurate; I could easily have forgotten to record some.  But I don’t think that would be many.  I also read a lot of magazines: The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Opera News, Smithsonian Magazine, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and, occasionally, The Atlantic.   I also read a number of articles each day from The New York Times.  Then there are the articles that friends forward, for example articles from The Wall Street Journal, sent by my Libertarian friend Phil.  All that magazine and newspaper reading takes time away from books.  I do include the books I’ve been reading for my classes at the University of Chicago, but those are often stretched out over a number of weeks; and I don’t include the books we only read selections from.  Another factor is quite simply that I no longer have the ability to concentrate like I used to; I sit for a while and my knees start to ache or my back begins to hurt; in other words: old age is interfering with my reading.  And then there are movies and TV;  Netflix is not a friend to readers.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I certainly plan on reading more.  37 books a year?  Not acceptable.

*http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/the-rise-of-e-reading/

The Lady in White

Today, if my math hasn’t failed me, would be Emily Dickinson’s 182 birthday.  She has been a favorite poet of mine since I first studied her as an undergraduate.  And as a teacher, I spent, perhaps, too much class time on her poems.  I had my favorites, and we had to cover some of the famous ones--“Because I could not stop for death” for example--and I have little doubt that I overdid Dickinson.  I usually showed the video of Julie Harris’s Tony Award winning performance in The Belle of Amherst, a video I still have and still watch occasionally.

In March of 1993 I had just covered Dickinson in class when my mom died.  It was a very difficult time, of course, but I was greatly heartened when one of my favorite classes gave me the gift of one of my most loved Dickinson poems beautifully mounted and framed; I still have it, treasure it, and have it displayed prominently in my apartment:

                       318

I'll tell you how the Sun rose --
A Ribbon at a time --
The Steeples swam in Amethyst --
The news, like Squirrels, ran --
The Hills untied their Bonnets --
The Bobolinks -- begun --
Then I said softly to myself --
"That must have been the Sun"!
But how he set -- I know not --
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while --
Till when they reached the other side,
A Dominie in Gray --
Put gently up the evening Bars --
And led the flock away --

Dickinson’s influence on poets is enormous, and I recently ran across a poem that I think reflects that influence.  Not stylistically, of course, but in matters of the heart--and in coming to terms with the loss of someone dear--I think this modern poem by Andrea Cohen is a direct descendant of the poetry of The Lady in White, Emily Dickinson:

The Committee Weights In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says.  Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

Books to Movies

When I was teaching, my policy was to not show movies of books.  There were two exceptions, which I’ll get to in a minute, but in my classroom we didn’t watch movies based on the works of literature we were studying in class.  Plays, especially Shakespeare, of course, even, rarely, an opera, and certainly musical theater pieces (my students loved Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods).  But no movies from books.  My theory--my philosophy--on the subject was simple: we were studying literature, and I felt it was important for students to respond to and remember the book, not the movie.  I’m not naive enough to know that many students resorted, in the early years, to Cliff Notes, and, later, to SparkNotes.com.  And no doubt some watched movie versions of books rather than read them.  I couldn’t stop it and didn’t really try, although I would make pop quizzes based on events or descriptions not covered in the summary guides.  A good example of this was that dreadful film version of The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore.  If a student, in his essays, began to talk about hot tub scenes and Indian raids, I knew he or she had watched the movie and not read the book.  But generally, I felt like it was their loss, and I didn’t make a big deal of it.  If I couldn’t encourage a student to read and enjoy a work of literature, then the failure was mine more than theirs.

What brought all this back was watching last week the new movie of Life of Pi.  It’s a fine film and I encourage you to see it.  Visually, it’s stunning.  And, for a movie, it’s relatively true to the novel.  There were some added scenes and several scenes I looked forward to seeing that weren’t there.  But over all, not a bad job.  And it works well in 3-D.  But were I teaching the book would I show it?  Not on your tintype!  Especially now, with reading apparently on the decline, it’s even more important for English teachers to stress reading.  Even if it’s on a Kindle, which is how I read Life of Pi the second time.  It’s the reading that counts.

The exceptions to my rule?  First was To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s such a superior film that I felt that showing it to students (9th grade, usually) would only encourage more reading.  It helped that students generally loved Mockingbird and would often read it without much pushing.  The other exception: laziness of my part.  I don’t actually remember doing this, but I’m sure back in my early days of teaching, I dragged out a movie when I needed a paper-grading break or just a break from facing the little darlings.  Like I say, I don’t remember doing this; but I know me well enough to know I almost surely did.  Hey, I never promised perfection.

Three Days in November

If you know me or if you read these blogs enough, you know that I love Chicago.  One of the main reasons is the sheer number of cultural events that are offered.  I know of no place that offers as many as Chicago does--outside of New York City.  Three days earlier this month are indicative of at least one reason why I never tire of Chicago.

On Thursday, November 8, my friend Roger and I went to the “Newberry 125” exhibit at the Newberry Library.  This library has more than 1.5 million books, 5 million pages of manuscripts, and 500,000 historic maps.  And for their 125th year anniversary they brought out 125 of their most impressive items for display, many not often seen.  I can hardly list them all here, but some of the ones that most impressed me were a first edition of Montagne's Essais, a first edition of Candide, a Shakespeare First Folio (I had never seen one of these legendary books in person!), a first edition of Don Quixote, a pair of Anna Pavlova's dance slippers, a Mozart manuscript from when he was 9, mostly in his handwriting, the rest by his father, the first Bible in America--written in the Native-American language of Massachusett, a 1700/1715 version of the Popul Vuh, a Thomas Jefferson letter, and a number of beautiful maps, some with very odd versions of how we know the landscape looks.  It was a remarkable chance to see these extraordinary items.  I felt lucky and honored to be in their presence.

On Friday Roger and I went to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  This was my birthday gift to him.  They did three works: Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, William Walton’s Violin Concerto, and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.  The Walton piece was new to me and I found the music quite beautiful; it didn’t hurt that it was performed by the wonderful Gil Shaham, who was fun to watch: he was all over the front of the stage, playing to the audience, then the concert master, and then practically under the conductor’s nose (Charles Dutoit, by the way).  The CSO is one of the world’s leading orchestras, and this performance made it clear why that is the case.  If those concerts weren’t so darned expensive, I would go to more.

Saturday I doubled up on events.  Starting around noon was the live in HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of their new production of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest.  These live broadcasts are not quite the same as being in NYC at the Met, but they are as close as I can usually get--and they are very good.  They offer superb visual and sound quality coupled with the excitement of a live performance.  Since I’ve been to the Met I can picture the house.  This is a modern opera, premiered in 2007, and the music was sometimes startling and often beautiful, the staging was daring, and the singing excellent.  And it was conducted by the composer himself.

Then that evening it was off to the DePaul Concert Hall to hear the DePaul Symphony perform Mahler’s 9th Symphony.  This was another work I had not heard before, so that was a treat.  Perhaps the orchestra suffered a bit, in my view, from my having heard the CSO the day before, but it was still a fine evening, especially the last movement, perhaps the most haunting and deeply sad music I have ever heard.  Mahler may have known he was near death when he wrote it (scholars argue about such things), but it was his last completed symphony, and there is little doubt the music aches with a premonition of death.  Herbert von Karajan said this about the 9th:  “It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”  And after some initial rough moments in the performance, by the fourth movement the DePaul Symphony had a firm grip and there was absolute silence in the hall: no coughing or squirming; and there was a long pause at the end before the applause and standing ovation came.

All my days here aren’t so busy, although they could be.  But there’s enough going on that I never run out of things to do; in fact, I run out of money before I run out of events.