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Blank Pages

notebook051610.jpgLet me ask you this: What is it about a nice, new, unwritten-in notebook? I mean: What is it that’s so attractive about the neat, pristine, unopened notebook? My leading theory, being one who thinks a lot about what I might scribble some day, what I might jot down when I grow up, is that all those empty, unspoiled pages represent possibility: Just think of what could be written there. Whole worlds.

I have lots of notebooks from over the years. A handful from long ago–big ones, small ones, steno books, tiny topbound spiral pads, full-sized college-ruled notebooks. Some of them contain actual sequential journal entries. More recent notebooks are filled with to-do lists, project notes, summaries of work hours, the occasional looking-out-the-airliner window notes. (I also have a small collection of reporter’s notebooks filled with a mostly unintelligible scrawl detailing interviews for past stories; reporter’s notebooks are in a separate category.

Most of these notebooks are humble and strictly utilitarian. I picked them up at drugstores and filled them up slowly over months or years. No big deal. However, during the last several years I came across mentions of Moleskine notebooks. Pricey and highly prized items. I think I bought some as Christmas presents a few years ago, and I got one for myself, too. It’s on my desk now, having temporarily found a place atop the surface clutter, within easy reach of my left hand. It’s got a hard black leather cover, lined cream-colored pages, a thin woven black ribbon to mark one’s place, and a black elastic band to hold it closed. But there’s something about this notebook: I’ve never made a mark in it. There’s something about it that seems too–what?–refined and important, maybe, for random jottings. I keep thinking the day will come when I’ll find the words that belong in that book, but so far it hasn’t happened.

Meantime, blank new notebooks maintain their odd attraction. I was reminded today of a Chicago-based design website I used to visit occasionally, coudal.com. Right there on the front page of the site is a come-on for a cool-looking line of mini-notebooks they’re peddling (called Field Notes) Wow! You can get a yearlong subscription to seasonally colored packs of these things, 24 little notebooks in all, for $129. I’m almost ready to go for that deal when the Moleskine comes to mind. OK–that’s one impulse buy I’m not making. For now, anyway.

[Later: One thing leading to another: Rhodia notebooks (they’re from France). Also: musical guest Traffic, with “Empty Pages.” And guess what? The National Stationery Show started today in New York.]

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Arnold’s Choice

We had a little bit of a debate the last few days at work (a public radio newsroom) about how much importance in our newscasts we should give Governor Schwarzenegger’s “May revise” — the adjustments to the state budget he first released in February. I took the position that since we all know that the situation is bad, that the revision would include some new, but predictable, cuts, and that the revision release itself amounts to little more than a political ritual, we shouldn’t waste a lot of time on the event. On the other hand, if we wanted to devote some resources to talking about the real impacts the state’s budget calamity have already had–effects on people and institutions, effects that might tell us something about where the state’s headed with the next round of cuts–that might be worth something to our listeners. My view didn’t sway anyone, and in the event, we wound up doing a smart and well-informed take on the story, though one that focuses almost entirely on the political chess game behind the budget.

As It happened, I was off work yesterday when the governor made his announcement. I caught just a snippet of it–but it was a provocative snippet. The governor appeared before the media, while outside the state Capitol protesters decried more cuts to programs to the poor and sick and to the state’s public schools. Solemnly, Schwarzenegger detaied his bad news and talked about how those around him had failed to heed his cals for budget reform. But one phrase stood out from the rest: “no choice.”

“I now have no choice,” the governor said, “but to stand here today and to call for the elimination of some very important programs.” In fact, Schwarzenegger called his decisions about cuts a “Sophie’s Choice.” He sounds tormented. How tormented? Here’s a glimpse, courtesy of The New York Times Magazine, from last year’s budget crisis (a.k.a., “Sophie’s Choice 2009”): “Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself ‘perfectly fine,’ despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. ‘Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,’ Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, ‘I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay back with a stogie.’ ”

“No choice”? Well, one of the governor’s fellow citizens begs to disagree.

You could step up, governor, and show a little moral leadership and talk about how to raise money while we’re in the crisis. Yes, I mean taxes, which many Californians pay without flinching as part of the cost of living here. Of course, you’ve never been one to tell the voters they might need to pay a little for some of the privileges they enjoy. When the last governor and Legislature reinstated a motor vehicle tax during a crisis, you chose to pander to the anti-taxers who threw a tantrum. That tax alone–which had been suspended during boom times with an explicit provision it could be reimposed if the state’s finances unraveled–would have prevented much of the budget crisis we’re facing today.

So, there are choices, governor. Pretending there are none simply avoids responsibility for finding a way through the mess we’re in.

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In Theory, I Hate TV

I see a note from my sister on Facebook: “I HATE CABLE TV.” In theory, I’m with her. The cruelest part of getting more channels than you can count is the joke whose punchline we all know: Now you get to watch 500 channels of garbage.

Why then, do I have a satellite dish installer on the roof right now, replacing our old DirecTV dish with a brand-new dish that will enable us to receive a high-definition signal? I think it’s got to be more complicated than we want to see the garbage more clearly.

sLet me catalog the reasons.

–Curiosity: I’ve wanted to see whether HD television really is better–especially for the Tour de France in July.

–Weakness: I know that changing to HD isn’t going to improve the quality of the programming. I know it’s probably not worth whatever extra amount DirecTV will charge us. But we’ve been talking about getting new service for awhile and now I’m just giving in.

–Distractability: I’m as willing as anyone to slough off my chores and responsibilities in favor of a nice “Seinfeld” episode. (Do I still read? That seems to be the culturally correct alternative to watching the tube–as opposed to gardening, cooking, paying the bills, or going to work. Yes, I try to, though sometimes it takes me forever to get through stuff. Right now I’m reading two nonfiction works: a biography of John Brown and a first-person account of Robert Falcon Scott’s last Antarctic expedition.)

–Keeping in Touch with the People: Here’s a self-justification that often pops up in my brain: “I work in the media, so I need to know what’s going on out there with the culture and with media consumers.” That’s partly true; but only partly. If this were really an exercise in keeping current with popular tastes and the concerns and fascinations of my fellow citizens, I’d be watching a lot more “American Idol,” and I’d regularly check in with the crowd-baiters on Fox News. (In practice, I find about 15 minutes of “Idol” fulfills my annual requirement, and I’m so enraged and depressed by Fox News that the only way I can deal with its spew is the occasional Glen Beck deconstruction on “The Daily Show.” Speaking of “The Daily Show,” though, and “The Colbert Report”–I find I can live without them. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC? Turns out I don’t like left-directed pandering any more than I can stand the right-directed ravings on Fox.)

–The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Well, maybe it’s time for me to come out. It turns out I actually like television. I think there’s plenty of inventive storytelling on the tube. Some of it can be deep, compelling, and memorable. -“Lonesome Dove,” anyone? Or “Band of Brothers”? “The Wire”? “Deadwood”? (I could go on.) A lot of the programming is superficial beyond a catchy gimmick–“24.” Some shows are based on formula and gimmicky, but work the formulas and gimmicks well: the whole “CSI” and “Law and Order” franchises. But the point is: on occasion, there’s real content out there that is–I hope this doesn’t set off a sacrilege alarm anywhere–on the same level of all the popular entertainments of the past, from “The Iliad” to “King Lear” to “Wuthering Heights”–that we have been taught to think of as classics.

Enough said on that. The dish guy is still on the roof.

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Still Here Somewhere

Memo to my small but faithful group of readers (and to myself): I haven't abandoned the blog. But I am distracted by some other things and haven't managed to write anything fit to post for a full week. The 2,000-some posts I have managed to write over the past six-some years—the good, bad, and indifferent ones—would seem to testify that I haven't gone too many weeks without putting something up here. But there you have it. I'll be back soon.

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A Death in the Backlands

At some point in life, it occurs to you that personal preferences aside, you’re not really immortal. People close to you die. You might have a close call or two yourself. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking about dying, even on a sunny, beautiful day when, for you, death seems far, far away. On a couple of occasions, I’ve even given voice to this feeling out loud. Getting ready for a long bike ride in chancy weather that made me nervous, I remember saying to a couple other riders, “If something happens to me out there and I don’t make it back, I’ll have gone out doing something I love.”

I’m thinking about that because a Berkeley friend sent me a note yesterday about a widely known and loved Northern California cyclist died of an apparent heart attack last weekend during a ride up the northern slopes of Mount Hamilton.The rider was Tom Milton, and he happened to be just my age, 56; I did not happen to know him. He was in the middle of a 200-mile event called the Devil Mountain Double, one of the toughest rides in these parts. It’s obvious from accounts of riders who saw him on his bike that day or during any one of his previous rides, that he loved cycling.

I know the road he was riding. It combines the pain of a long, steep grind with exhilarating views over the ridges, canyons and valleys of a lonely backland. Condors would look at home there, and slow as the climb can be, the road gains altitude so quickly you have a sense of soaring. You can read about Tom here–an eyewitness account–or here–a series of tributes from fellow long-distance riders.

Is there a take-away? We’ll all have our own. Mine might be to embrace a little more readily the large and small joys that life affords us without worrying so much about what’s not perfect in a situation. I also agree with one of the commenters at those links, though, who suggests we all ought to know CPR.

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Obituary Notebook

Obit in the news: Before I went to Chicago last week, Kate mentioned an obituary she'd heard or seen: Meinhardt Raabe, 94, the man who played the Munchkin coroner in "The Wizard of Oz." Kate being Kate, she dug out a three-year-old story she'd saved from The New York Times: "He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead." Dan Barry wrote the article, which begins, " Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can’t get out of his head." It's a playful and poignant piece that reveals a remarkable life that would have otherwise gone unremarked. (One final link: The Times included an audio slideshow of Barry's visit with Raabe.)

Irish funnies: I recently became contentious with a family member who failed to instantly comprehend what I meant when I used the term "Irish funnies." What I meant was "newspaper obituaries." I assumed–in error, as usual–that the reference was transparent. The Irish relish misfortune and loss the way the less soulful might anticipate "The Katzenjammer Kids" (a strip that, shockingly, is still being produced). So when most people are turning to "Boondocks" or "Doonesbury" or "South Park" or whatever's on the comics page now (please tell me "Nancy" is gone; and "Cathy," too), a certain Hibernian-tinged demographic is flipping straight to the death notices. My sister Ann knows a retired Chicago Irish priest who occasionally reads the obits with a ruler at hand. "Look at that," he'll say when he spots an ostentatiously lengthy notice. "Six inches! Good for them!"

When I was in Chicago, Ann was going through the Irish funnies when she encountered a name she knew: John T. Fitzgerald, Jr. One of my mom's first cousins, whom everyone knew as Jack. He was the last of his generation of the South Side Hogan/Fitzgerald clan she came from. We weren't close, and I didn't know much about him. His obituary doesn't help much and reads like it was written by a stranger. It omits his age and the names of any family members. It says he had been "preceded in death by many brothers and sisters" (from what I heard growing up, he had two brothers and one sister). It described him as "a kind uncle to many." The only specific detail: he graduated from Leo High School, on Chicago's South Side, in 1936 and belonged to the alumni association. He was to be buried down at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on the far South Side. Plenty of other Fitzes and Hogans there (and O'Malleys and Morans, too, from the other side of Mom's family).

Come to think of it, I do remember a couple of things I heard about him and his life. Some of it's best left unsaid. Here's one remarkable particular I can relate, though: He worked well into his 80s as a helper and bus-person at an Italian restaurant somewhere on Chicago's Southwest Side. He was a small, slight guy, and I remember having an image of him lugging tomato-sauce-stained dishes. He didn't do it because he needed the money, from what I heard. He did it just to have something to do.

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Announcement from Station Management

If you haven't noticed, this isn't the Grand Central Station of the Web (or Victoria Station, in either London or Bombay, or Tokyo Station; neither does it resemble the grand rail terminals of Paris, Barcelona, or Istanbul). Nevertheless, folks do show up here from time to time, and some even leave comments. Probably because of its out-of-the-way status, the site has only rarely drawn comment spammers. In the past, most of the spam comments that showed up were robotic and dumb–consisting, for instance, of a couple dozen identical links to a "Meet Former Hot Hot Soviet Ladies" site in Belarus. Those are easy to spot.

More recently, they've gotten sneakier and show up with more frequency, perhaps containing comments that you might be fooled into thinking for a second or two are related to the posts to which they're attached (though just as often the remarks seem to be crafted by slow-witted Third World telemarketers trying out freshly acquired English skills: "your blog brings a lot to work I'm doing now in the post
Univesidad I want to thank for that information which is provided here.
I also thank the people who contribute their comments on this blog.
great job").

In the past few days, notes have appeared from "House of Troy Piano Lamps," "generic propecia," and from "commenters" with sexually explicit names. It's a relatively minor nuisance, and I mark each and every one as spam and hope that the Typepad regulators can corral the offenders (not holding my breath for that). I'm also enabling comment moderation, meaning that I'll look at each comment before it's posted instead of trying to clean up after the fact).

That is all. We know you have the choice of other blogs, and we appreciated your continued patronage. Enjoy the rest of your trip.

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Friday Night Light

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We’ve ridden the ferry most Friday nights all winter long. We make those trips in the dark. Now the spring is pulling the daylight further and further into the evening, rolling the darkness back a minute or two every night. Right now, getting on the boat at 8 or so, we see a twilight show, with the harbor lit up in the dusk, but with the light going fast. The picture above? One of the stern running lights on the ferry; I was pointing my camera at it to trick the light sensor into giving me a faster shutter speed for something I wanted to shoot on the water (no–the camera is sort of broken and I can’t set the shutter speed manually). The light looked good in the viewfinder, so I shot it, too.

And it’s late–late Friday, early Saturday. I’m looking out at a world full of small kindnesses, and I try to take not one for granted, though I always do; and at a world full of deep loss, sadness, and hurt, far and near, that I can’t do nearly enough to ease. That light in the viewfinder–to some other eye, a light across the water of a deepening evening–strikes me as a comforting, maybe even hopeful, sign.

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Changes of Venue

Flew to Chicago yesterday for a quick springtime check-in with the family. It was good flying weather, at least at 39,000 feet, and I was surprised on our descent across southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois how green it is already. The trees have already leafed out, and the forests are rolling canopies of translucent green.

At one point on the flight yesterday, I started thinking about the last time I was here, and the time before that, and the time before that–all the ping-ponging I’ve done on family visits, work trips, and other adventures. I’ve often thought about trying to remember and write down every airplane trip I’ve taken, just to get a sense of how often and how far I’ve gone. That thought came to me again on the flight yesterday while I was standing at the rear of the plane, stretching my legs. I thought I’d go back to my seat, pull out a notebook, and write down all those flights. I’d do it and have it done with. But when I went and sat down, I discovered I didn’t have a pen, and I went back to the book I’m reading.

Today, I started to try to list all the flights, 37 years’ worth, starting with the first time I flew, with my friends Gerry and Dan, on the beginning leg of our trip to Ireland. I still remember the exhilaration of leaving the runway and how the first banking turn felt like a roller-coaster ride; I actually whooped as we took off.

So that’s Flight Number One. And Flight Number Two was memorable because the airline we’d taken to Ireland, TWA, had gone on strike and we had to get back to Chicago on Aer Lingus a couple days before Christmas. Gerry and I (Dan had returned home earlier) were determined to surprise everyone at home, so we took trains from O’Hare to the south suburbs. Then we did what we’d been doing for a good three months: put on our backpacks and started walking the two or three miles to our homes. It was snowy and dark, and a half-mile before I got home, my brother John and his then-girlfriend drove past me on their way to the nearby drive-in theater. They rolled past, then stopped, then turned around and drove me to the house. That’s a whole other story.

Listing all the flights? You can see the problem already. Remembering one reveals a little thread of memory. When you tug on it, a whole skein of other memories follows. In the summer of 1982, a trip to Chicago involved a 17-inning Cubs game called because of darkness–that’s worth a whole chapter in the travelogue. In the summer of 1988, John and I wound up at the Antietam battlefield with my son Eamon and could barely tear ourselves away though I had a family engagement awaiting me in New Jersey.

And of course, when you start listing flights, you start remembering the trips that included an overland leg: like the time I started hitch-hiking from Chicago to Berkeley on the day after Christmas and somehow made it in just over 48 hours (no mystery: a guy headed to Oakland stopped for me near the Continental Divide in Grants, New Mexico and delivered me to the front door of my friends’ house).

I think the reason that list has never been undertaken before is that there’s no end to it once you start.

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Sky Sunday, Sky Monday

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The shot above is from the very top of Buena Vista Avenue in the Berkeley Hills (elevation 1,000 feet or so). When we got a break in the storm Sunday, The Dog and I walked up there from our place–two miles up, two miles back. (And it wasn’t much of a break, now that I look at this again–to the right you can see rain moving across the bay.) The street’s aptly named–the views all the way up are beautiful.

Then Monday, we took an after-work walk up to King Middle School. The clouds were still clearing out from the storm, but the rain was well over. One of the best parts of the winter and early spring here are the skies, which get somewhat more predictable as we move into the summer low-overcast season (although even then, we get freakish displays of the fog crowding into the bay and cascading over the ridges; still amazing to see).

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