Fantastic promo cover tied to this year’s Alan Ladd “Gatsby”…I mean the 1949 version. Credit: twentytwowords.com

With the advent of the Baz Luhrmann “Gatsby” movie, I summoned up all of my crotchetiness and decided not to see Leonardo light it up Jay-Z style, but rather to reread the Authorized Text in a paperback sitting right here between Faulkner (another Hollywood booze-drowned author) and Flaubert (Baz Luhrmann’s next subject). Have to say I loved Baz’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with the divine Clare Danes and great music, but 20 years later am feeling a bit more “get off my lawn.”

“His dream is gone.” And, after this chapter, so was “H”s aqua highlighter.

“Gatsby” is really just a long afternoon’s reading pleasure of foredoomed, beautiful attitudes and outfits: plus, as high schooler “H. Brown” pointed out maybe 15 years ago when she read the book, “irony.” Rereading it on the train, I was at first annoyed by her aqua highlighting and her rounded annotations, the letters marching up margins like dutiful bunny siblings in Beatrix Potter. But after a while I was able to bring myself back to the place of a kid taking on a Set Text for the first time, in a pre-Internet era when you were kind of on your own with the words. I remembered making these cipher-like shorthand comments like “Irony,” or “Description of Gatsby,” and thinking that I’d made a significant first step at analysis. Then came the realization that there were still many more words to write to fill out the scarecrow of my “irony” sentence, along with the nagging sense that irony was both less and more than the saddle I would try to throw athwart ol’ F. Scott’s burnished sentences.

Final page, on which H. Brown doggedly saw optimism, and Adrienne Rich found the title for her 1995 collection, “Dark Fields of the Republic”

The other nice thing about sharing a palimpsest-like version of Gatsby with “H. Brown” is a reminder of the community of readers. This is not something that comes across for me on an e-reader. When I read something on a Kindle and come across a passage that thousands have “annotated” before me–probably dropping rich assortments of links to their own stinkin’ literary blogs!–it is a micro-rating system, informing me that 954 people gave an instantaneous “thumbs up” to “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” So far I haven’t yet found any interest in what others have annotated, or in joining their e-highlighting. But on this final page of “Gatsby,” I felt more a part of the history of readers coming to the novel with their own histories and abilities. I can only imagine that “H. Brown,” now maybe in her early thirties, has become acquainted with how Americans say “One fine morning…” to themselves about the most impossible outcomes, and that the optimism she saw then is tempered by age and loss, though hopefully not lost.

And just above this penultimate paragraph, in which Fitzgerald switches from what Gatsby felt to what “we” Americans feel and yearn, is the beautiful evocation of the dark fields of the republic–rolling past the Eastern cities and along out to the sparse towns of Minnesota and points west. This passage gave Adrienne Rich the title for her 1995 collection, but her desire to look across the whole of America and its people is obviously a theme that runs through her work for many years before that. Reading this copy of “Gatsby” in parallel with H. Brown is a palpable reminder that enduring books convene readers across huge gaps in time, experience and self-understanding.

Amy rocks the Elaine Perlov rose t and the hotline phone in her back pocket while replanting perrennials

Grateful to spend a happy and peaceful Mother’s Day and Motherz Nite with Amy and girls yesterday, with my own mom and dad boldly exploring foreign climes. I think the most powerful M-day gift I was able to provide was the combination of fostering happy family time AND blissful alone time for Amy to totally kick back and bliss out. Actually, if you have been following the blog you know that last part was a fib. Amy used her alone time to write a curriculum and replant some flowers, because the path to peace leads through a well-managed garden.

More flowers. Some day I will know their names.

Probably Amy’s most distinctive contribution to our family culture is making the girls comfortable with regular sharing of good and bad moments of the day, as well as good aspects of each other. This is the kind of thing that might have seemed obvious or drippy to me before having kids…or before therapy. But I so treasure Amy’s ability to move on from the daily and hourly infurations of family life to guide us all in having these constructive conversations. We’re shoveling in neurosis-inducing influences with one hand, but thanks to Amy we are helping the girls articulate their mixed bag of feelings with the other. Needless to say, as the lone, introverted male, I also benefit hugely from her influence and tutelage.

Amy outside the House of Blues before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show…still in her Elaine Perlov t! Wear it in the garden then out on the town!

After what Amy described as “the best falafel I’ve ever eaten” at Jake’s Falafel Corner with the girls, we got a sitter and went to the House of Blues to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If you don’t know the YYYs you might want to immediately purchase It’s Blitz!, their album from 2009 that is one of my absolute favorites ever with nary a weak song (and awesome acoustic versions on the extended version). Their 2003 hit Maps was described by Dave Grohl as the Stairway to Heaven-level love song of the new generation, forever playable at roller rinks and middle school dances (but with a heck of a lot less bombast!). Without getting into the details of how awesome they are, or what a ravishing 7-foot Korean-Polish-American bombshell their lead singer is, in the spirit of Mother’s Day I will just point out some uncanny similarities between Karen O and Amy:

• Natural beauties that look great in any outfit
• Focus their creative energy on connecting and inspiring the people around them
• Liberal arts grads who aren’t afraid to jump up and down and look goofy
• Wear sneakers with anything

See if you can compare and contrast further in this performance. Happy Mother’s Day!

Thursday night I went to bed wondering if the release of the Boston Marathon bomber suspects’ photos would lead to some tips or arrests. When I woke up early Friday I saw a dozen texts from the MIT alert system on my phone, and realized that the first step on the bombers’ night and day of violence had been the apparently unprovoked murder of Sean Collier, an MIT Police officer, as he sat in his car next to the iconic Stata Center. I spent a gut-clenching day alone at home, eerily quiet and warm outside, waiting for Amy and the girls to return home from Vermont and to see what would happen in our locked-down city. The end of the chase–but just the end of the beginning of finding out why this happened–was in a boat in a Watertown backyard, about five miles from our house.

And now, you might expect to see speculation about how “the healing” will begin for the city. Interestingly, there were several headlines before the craziness and lockdown of Friday to the effect of, city seeks healing, Red Sox return will help healing, etc. In fact, Thursday night I went to a book talk by Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy at the fabulous Waban Library that was, in effect, a lay healing ceremony for shocked Bostonians.

Since Friday night, the discussion has been more about the potential impact of these attacks on daily life in the city (or country), the legal status of the suspect in custody, and continued concern for the four dead and many wounded resulting from the attacks. I’ve been relieved in a way at this “healing” hiatus, but I know that inevitably the city and country will move forward. The Marathon next year will be bigger than ever, and I’ll admit to getting a Boston Strong shirt myself as part of this tidal force pulling the living and those only terrified by this week, and not bereft, towards a hopeful future.

The Green Building at MIT with a black ribbon design honoring slain MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, on April 21, 2013. Photo: David Da He

But I feel so deeply for the families of those four people killed, and for those who will bear the physical scars of this attack, because the healing and unity that we collectively want after this attack are not really available to them. In a truly bizarre bit of synchronicity, I was reminded of this just this weekend, when my brother’s former fiancee came for a long-planned visit with her young daughter. For us, staying in close touch with her has been a very important part of our lives since losing Aaron. It has been a real blessing all around that we have maintained this connection, even as she has moved on to marry and have a child, and it is a tribute to her courage that she came up Saturday morning, a few hours after the all-clear released the city from its homes. It was wonderful to visit with her and connect her daughter to her “cousins.”

But it hurts to twist your heart back onto the should-have-been path of family visits with her and my missing brother. Even in what must be a best-case scenario, 12 years out from the loss (everyone basically healthy, material needs satisfied, all dug mostly from their psychological holes), this vital connection also plugs our fingers back into the outlet of raw emotion and longing that hasn’t let up at all in the intervening years. So when I think of the families of those lost this past week, I think of the incremental gap between their “healing”–may G-d grant it to them–and that of the city and country around them. The Globe has a good column today on just such an experience, that of the owner of a cafe in Back Bay who lost her daughter on 9/11. I hope that a year, five years out, they can find people who are willing to sit with them and talk about their missing loved ones, and simply focus on what this week and their loss has meant to them.

Boston Marathon runners in the 3:30 finish range wave to the camera at Km30/Mile 18 in Newton on April 15, 2013

I am really grateful to all those who thought to ask how I and my family are doing today, after the horrific and tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon finish line. Here are some answers:

• TERRIFIED: This was an awful flashback to 9/11, the London Tube bombings in 2005 (which I missed by an hour or so), Newtown, and the various other horrors we have faced in the past 12 years. Amy got a text from a friend asking when another friend running the Marathon had finished, and did we hear about explosions at the finish line? The first reports were of multiple devices, severed limbs on Boylston St. and a dozen people killed. It was a terrifying afternoon as the fog of war descended on the race course, far-flung areas of Boston (like the JFK Library) and throughout the area. Amy, my parents and I relived the awful moments of not knowing that we experienced on September 11th.

A Running Burger costume, discarded on Stuart St., is searched as police officers examine every stray article after the bombings. Ms. A. proudly counted a dozen people running in these things, and then they turn into suspicious packages. Photo: Matthew J. Lee/Boston Globe Staff

• INFURIATED: We were out on the course for hours with our kids and many other neighbors cheering on friends from the neighborhood who ran (just to name one example) to save their kid’s vision, or just to stay one step further ahead of encroaching time. It was amazing to see the number of people running for a cause or for an important person in their lives, and inspiring as always to see how dedication to each other has allowed the Hoyts to go so far beyond what their bodies / ages might suggest they’re capable of doing. And there is also the quirky side of the marathon, in which Ms. A. and I saw a dozen people go by with a hamburger outfit (one of which is sadly examined in the photo above as a suspicious package). Any day a terrorist bombs our city is a shocking, horrible tragedy, but to target this day in particular feels like a truly devilish act.
• RESOLVED: The Boston Marathon is not going out of business as a goal that people carry with them throughout their lives, or a thrilling example of competition and loving sacrifice that we who live here are privileged to witness each year. I can only imagine the fear that all of us, running or not, might feel next year along the course or in Back Bay, but I do not think it will turn many away, and many more may stand up in their place.
• RUNNING: I’ve been training for a half-marathon in a few weeks and just yesterday ran the peak pre-race run (12 miles). I’m up tomorrow before dawn to start the taper and to think about those who ran yesterday and those hurt by this brutal and ugly attack–plus my brother, who ran this course. Looking like an all-Fugazi mix. If you are motivated to do the same, you might take a look at #RunForBoston.

Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to us today.

The Green Building at MIT on the evening of April 15, 2013. Credit: Twitter user @tochtli_exe

David Ferry reads at the Waban Library Center in Newton, MA, on March 20, 2013 (delightfully, the works of Richard Wilbur and Sylvia Plath AND a Nancy Drew book are in the shelves behind him. Thanks Mr. Dewey!)

Last week I had the great privilege of seeing poet David Ferry read at the community-run Waban Library Center. This charming space is led in good part by the person the Boston Globe called its “volunteer coordinator, community liaison, and biggest cheerleader”: my mom! Another volunteer at the library, Marcia Karp, knows David Ferry from poetry circles and also read her work that evening.

In 2011 I attended a seminar at Amherst on James Merrill and David Ferry’s poetry, put on by my old advisor, David Sofield, plus visiting professor Richard Wilbur. At the time Ferry’s book Bewilderment was still in galley proofs, and he allowed the seminar group to read several works from it. Ferry won the National Book Award last year for Bewilderment, and it got a brilliant writeup in the New Yorker by Dan Chiasson, Amherst ’93. Chiasson in a way is Ferry’s successor as Amherst Poet Dudeman On Campus at Wellesley College, and graciously did an interview with me before the Amherst seminar.

Waban Library Center volunteer coordinator Alice Jacobs describes the library to guest poet David Ferry, March 20, 2013

Ferry is a poet and scholar of humbling talent, and a marvel of togetherness and productivity at 89. He is also a truly gracious man, which I am most struck by today in terms of his poems in Bewilderment that recall his late wife, the critic Anne Ferry. Ferry read his translation of the Aeneid, Book VI, a scene in which the souls of the unburied dead mill about on the banks of the Stygian marsh, waiting for a hundred years to be ferried across by Charon, that “longed-for crossing.” The next poem in the book is “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember,” which as Ferry said builds on the scene from the Aeneid, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem to a lost lover, “They flee from me,” in order to define his mourning in terms of being “dislanguaged.”

Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step were going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,
Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking.
I have been so dislanguaged by what happened
I cannot speak the words that somewhere you
Maybe were speaking to others where you went.
Maybe they talk together where they are,
Restlessly wandering, along the shore,
Waiting for a way to cross the river.

—”That Now are Wild and Do Not Remember,” from Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

I was so uplifted and haunted at the same time by Ferry’s movement between the erotic register of Wyatt’s poem and the agonizing suspension of the souls in the Aeneid. He is so at home in the formal possibilities of poetry that it is precisely at the “turn” of this near-sonnet that he utters such a powerful line on his own lack of any resolution: “I have been so dislanguaged by what happened.” On this day when the US Supreme Court is arguing the legal merits of recognizing marriages by same-sex couples, it seems fitting to honor this record of a long marriage, and see this evidence of how it is through such loving relationships that people (of all kinds, goes without saying) can come to define themselves at the most basic levels of language, identity and self-understanding.

Ten years ago today was the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq. I think if you’re reading this you probably agree in retrospect with Jim Fallows, one of the more prominent anti-invasion writers back in 2002, that the war would turn out to be false on its merits and ruinous, deadly and costly far beyond what was sold to the country and the world by our leaders. The saddest part of Fallows’ look back at Iraq over the past week has to be his conviction that we will not, in fact, learn anything from what happened, because of our leaders’ extraordinary avoidance of really seeing what went wrong and applying those lessons to current crises. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. Let me try to look back through my own very narrow lens.

For the 18 months between 9/11 and the start of the war, I was a high-functioning total mess. I was grieving for my brother while also trying to do my part as a new husband and father. Hating W and his minions, I still didn’t have it in me to be anti-war in any meaningful way. I was still inside the innermost concentric circle of my post-9/11 world, and couldn’t foresee (who did?) just how painful the rash misconduct of the war would be as an additional load on my conscience and the country’s, even though I had basically no personal impact from the war itself.

About a month after 9/11, these “NO MORE VICTIMS ANYWHERE” bumper stickers appeared all over Cambridge, and on quite a few cars too. It was part of a Green Party/Socialist Party/antiwar campaign. This one is right near my T stop and has survived the intervening years. At the time, I found this sentiment infuriating. I felt my own loss to be commandeered for the benefit of a basically anti-American political agenda that had no stake in seeking justice for my brother’s killers. While I didn’t feel any more at home with the American flag lapel-pin-wearing crowd, I felt a certain patriotic kinship there. Right after 9/11 I got an email from a former professor who tried to express, through the confusion of the time, her sympathy for me and my brother while also grappling with what she was certain was America’s imperialistic self-implication in everything that led up to the attacks. That was the place I felt the “no more victims” campaign was coming from, and I needed to go the opposite way. I’m not defending this self-centered perspective, just remembering it.

Well, guess what? The Statement of the Socialist Party Convention of October 12, 2001, which I have only read for the first time today, was 90% right in its perspective on the coming wars, and all the elite Washington figures calling for a preventive war were at best 90% wrong. “Recent events in New York and Washington used as an opportunity to further militarize U.S. society?” Check. “In our efforts to gain greater security in the future, it is essential that we defend our civil liberties.” Boy, I think about that every time I strip down for the TSA line.

And this whole following paragraph, especially the part about our arsenal and our ignoramus president and his cabal not preventing these attacks, rings very true:

The corporate controlled media has deliberately whipped up war hysteria. Dissident voices are marginalized, while the mass media present an endless series of commentators shrilly repeating the call for vengeance. We need an alternative media that can open the political discourse to those who challenge the established powers and call for peace not war. The recent tragedy has provided the administration and Congress with a further rationale to greatly increase military spending. Our security as Americans will not be secured by even more missiles and fighter planes. The United States already spends far more on arms than any other country. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were not prevented by our immense arsenal of weapons. We need to institute an immediate cut of 50% in the military budget, and we need to use the hundreds of billions of dollars thus saved for vital domestic social services and for humanitarian aid to those in less developed countries.

And it goes on, at some length, to describe how the turn towards war purposefully avoided grappling with issues of growing inequality and corporate domination, which of course built towards the Great Recession.

I never would have read this all the way through 12 years ago. But it’s precisely my lack of cultural identification with the people who were saying it–and being TOTALLY F#$%ING CORRECT–that kept me from realizing that I was far more in line, long-term, with my superficially “antagonistic” Socialist brothers and sisters than my superficially “supportive/competent” flag-waving xenophobic government and media. I cut myself some slack, but wish I had recovered more of a critical perspective and ability to speak out against the rush to war.

What have I learned?

• Try to listen outside my comfort zone.
• Don’t believe that any military action can be contained or can be as cheaply achieved as our leaders say it can be–even by drone, even by Obama.
• Keep writing. I may be writing about birthday cakes and mundane stuff, but I need to build up my chops to be a better advocate of the causes that matter.

The froster performs her secret ministry…

Adapted from Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”

A very happy Miss E. with her 5th birfday cake, mfd. by Amy

Since we’ve had kids, Amy has channeled some of her (vast) creative powers into making beautiful cakes to celebrate the girls’ birthdays (and our own). With her ability to craft amazingly representational images from her own delicious frosting (usually cream cheese, but sometimes just highfalutin’ sugar), Amy has made it possible for the girls to define a birthday theme (ponies, farm, mermaid, Robyn, etc.) that extends not only to decorations around the house but also to a lovingly crafted scene right there on the cake. Today, Miss E’s fifth birthday, was perhaps the most challenging cake of all, with three human figures (what would Shakespeare say of the pearlescent candies that were their eyes?), two unicorns, and a fully-rendered mountain range glittering with green sprinkle trees. Miss E was completely delighted, which made up entirely for the probably eight hours that Amy devoted to laying out the design on a piece of paper, cutting through the paper with a knife to “trace” the design on the base layer of frosting, and then working her frosting magic between 7-10AM this morning. This latter creative deadline burst, I should mention, happened during the first morning of the Bahá’i fast, about which more later, but it does sort of underscore the dedication.

A selection of Amy’s birthday cakes through the years, with this year’s equestrian princess in the center

As Amy collapsed just now after a long day of totally pushing it (between the cake making and the gymnastics birthday party were swim lessons for all three girls–and guess which fasting parent was in the girls’ locker room), we reflected on what it means that she has committed herself so intensely to expressing her artistry and love through cakes. Thinking in particular about how she feels when these things get eaten, Amy said it was a little bit like Native American sand painting, in terms of the form’s embrace of its own transient nature. We also referenced outsider art in terms of the inherently rough nature of attempting representationality in frosting. While birthday parties are soon forgotten, I do think the girls remember the love and effort that Amy has put into these cakes, particularly as they get older and are able to help with the design. Though their strength still lies in nipping little pieces of the cake before the party. When Miss E. had her first birthday, Amy made a bunny cake (left side of the montage, third down) and just before we drove to the party, we caught Miss M. nabbing the frosting off a whole edge of the cake. Amy always saves frosting for last-minute patching, but even at four, Miss M. knew the gravity of her crime and accepted not getting any of the cake at the party.

Five years with our amazing Miss E.

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is not just my goofball reference to Amy staying up to all hours to get these cakes frosted. The poem is a reflection on the poet’s own past and his hopes for his baby, sleeping next to him, wordlessly filling the interstices of every moment of his thoughts:

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!

As a midnight blogger, this is a nice way after bedtime to consider calmly the wonderful filling-up of one’s life that children enact every day. Our five years with Miss E. have been a true blessing, as she has always been a vibrant force of love, independence and hilarity in our lives and those of “the sisters,” as she describes her elders. Just a recent example of how she is wise and funny beyond her years…Amy was struggling valiantly to get the three slowpokes out the door on time one morning, and told Miss M. what she would do if M. continued to make like a conscientious objector to tooth brushing. Miss E. said, “Not very Bahá’i” in a sort of tsk-tsk way. Way to internalize the teachings, girl! We love you and are proud of you.

Comrades in attendance: 25

Junior Comrades: 3 (ages 11, 10, 8)

Original Amherst ’91/’92 in the house who were there in January 1989: 4 (hint: Grateful Dead “Touch of Gray”: includes bonus father who introduced the whole concept)

Menu:
Pickled peppers
Chopped chicken liver with braised onions and schmaltz
Stuffed cabbage
Unbelievably good latkes
Hulking slabs of derma (pictured to left of above image)
“Mush steaks” (strip steaks with garlic mushed into them)
Veal
Salmon
Potatoes (Yiddish for “wholly superfluous”)
Rugelach
Egg creams

Floors up from the Chelsea streets where we chilled apres-fress: 7 (but felt much higher: thanks in absentia to Tam)

Lucky dudes to have Amy still love them even after eating like this: one

People who discovered their true animal identity on the way home: at least this guy

Last weekend we drove down to NYC for one of the major events in our secular calendar: the annual Amherst dinner at Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side. This was the epochal XXVth dinner, about which a separate post is forthcoming. But even in a short visit we enjoyed so many other bounties of food and friendship in NYC. Plus, some young whippersnapper pointed out to me that in iOS 6.0 your iPhone can take cool panorama photos (be sure to click through to see them full size). Put them together and you’ve got a delightful visit and great self-entertainment options–kids with phones!

These first two shots are from DeRoberti’s, an extreme old-school joint on 1st Ave near the more famous Veniero’s. DeRoberti’s rocks the same tin ceiling and tile walls that were good enough in the late 1890s, and are good enough now. We met up with our old friend Elaine and her husband Jeff, and it was just awesome to hang out, have a few thousand quality calories, and have the place pretty much to ourselves for the kids to ogle the pastries. Elaine and I are both late adopters of being into fitness, and there’s nothing like half-marathon training and delicious coffee and pastry (she abstained! swear to G-d!) to justify each other.

I guess the true mark of a pastry’s impact is whether it turns up in one’s eating fantasies for days afterwards. This cannoli-topped cake seems to have done the job given this post from Elaine on FB today, five days after initial exposure:

I thought of a good house-warming gift! The theme is faux & real 
ricotta. For the real, I purchase the cannoli cake!! YES!!!
http://on.fb.me/WxDg8c For the faux, I make tofu-spinach "ricotta" 
lasagne minis in a silicone muffin pan, and that's part of the 
gift too. Along with the recipe. http://on.fb.me/TKlqQQ

This is a wonderful exercise in public management of fantasy combined with an undercurrent of “vegan-curious” cooking behavior, all suggesting a perfectly healthy alignment of mind, body and spirit.

After a refreshing late-morning snack at DeRoberti’s, we returned to our friends’ house in Queens (another Jewish-Baha’i family…we’re everywhere!) and dropped off our younger set for a happy afternoon of play. Then, without taking a second to reconsider doing this a few hours before Sammy’s, we went with mature Ms. A. and our friend Eric to Kabab Cafe in the Egyptian part of Astoria, Queens. Amy and I went here maybe 12 years ago with some of the same food obsessives that got us into Sammy’s trouble. The place is a true hole in the wall with maybe 15 seats. No menu. Ali, the chef and owner, comes over and banters with you and tells you what’s up. If you’re not going big guns for the lamb sweetbreads etc., but instead just want to top off before your annual food orgy that night, you can get a simple avocado salad (the avocados are presented whole but also mushed up with wonderful spices) and a mezze platter with light, tender falafel, foul (pronounced like “fool,” fool), baba ganoush, and pretty much everything else a boy could want. It is one of those NY places where all the races and nations of the world converge to eat the best foul available, and a food person can fantasize about a coming Age of Aquarius that starts when people of irreconcilable differences look up with the same expression of tearful delight from a mezze plate and realize that we are all brothers and sisters. We were sitting right in front of a 100-year-old map showing the settlement of said races and nations in the City of New York (Frenchies were in what is now Koreatown), which kind of brought home this same melting-pot-full-of-stew aspiration.

Next up: Sammy’s!

Monday was certainly a day for notable oratory through the ages: Obama’s second Inaugural, 50th anniversary of King’s March on Washington + the MLK holiday, 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. And, next up, the 44-year-old Cuban-Spanish-American gay poet, Richard Blanco! No jitters, man…just read the poem you managed to write in the last few weeks for perhaps the largest live audience ever to hear a poem read aloud.

As more illustrious commenters than I have noted, Blanco’s poem makes effective use of an expansive, encompassing Whitmanian approach, using the “oneness” of the day, the light, and other elements of the landscape to reference the breadth of American experiences, while bringing these together in a common experience of life. He weaves together his parents’ immigrant sacrifices, (somewhat overly) newsy/political references to Newtown and 9/11, and sensual evocations of American language and the physical sensations of life and work.

If you’re the Guardian, then you point out that even a child knows America isn’t the only place that has a sun, light, etc…but you would say that, wouldn’t you? Everyone seems to agree that Blanco struck a pretty darn good balance between the public-poetry mission of the Inauguration and the more rigorous artistic standards we might want to apply to poetry in its normally less-public sphere.

Hi, I’m not a hot Latino Robert Pinsky, but I played one at the Second Obama Inaugural

Beyond this “Winners/Losers” snap analysis of the poem’s success, reading the poem gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn about his story as the only Inaugural poet to be…wait for it…a licensed Professional Engineer! (Please read this early news article on Blanco, and his path from engineering to poetry, that manages to include the phrase “turn for the verse” in the title.) Blanco put himself through an MFA night school program at FIU in Miami while already working as a civil engineer and designing, among other things, improvements to Sunset Drive that he addressed in his only previous occasional poem, “Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008.” I’m sure that Whitman would have found a lot to admire in a poet-engineer who happens to be a smokin’ dude with a lion tattoo and a white Miata (in his younger days at least…now that he is a middle-aged man living in Maine I imagine him driving a Forester “LL Bean Edition”).

But “One Today” reminded me not so much of Whitman but of Whitman’s descendant, Adrienne Rich. In particular, Blanco’s effort to evoke America’s people and geography, summoning a shared constellation/landscape that we are invited to map and name for ourselves, draws powerfully on Rich’s 1991 masterwork “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” As I wrote last year after Rich’s death, “Atlas” offers a magisterial sense of hope and possibility, even in such a world (or country) full of pain and injustice. And I happen to know that in the early 90s, just after “Atlas” came out, Blanco was in a course on Contemporary Poetry that looked at Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jorge Luis Borges (fun Latin American take on contemporary poetry! FIU represent!). So the odds are that Blanco opened up “Atlas” during his formative years as a poet seeking to represent America and his immigrant parents, and read these opening lines:

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something
--a woman's voice, a man's voice or
voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast
past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires
THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes
dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand
in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,
Malathion in the throat, communion,
the hospital at the edge of the fields,
prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,
the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching
planes dusting rows of pickers.

An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton, 1991), p. 3

Blanco’s mission in the Inauguration was not to frame his vision of the country in such pointed or political terms, but he sure seems to have been grounded in Rich’s late-20th-century use of the Whitman toolbox. I like to imagine Blanco reading Rich’s passionate commitment to evoking “others” that make up America, and her beautiful and wrenching language of communion that links together the migrant workers, the fruit, the poison that keeps the fruit “fresh,” and the nurse who witnesses the true origin and price of this American bounty.

Blanco’s father, he writes in “One Today,” “[cut] sugarcane / so my brother and I could have books and shoes,” while Rich’s father was the first Jewish doctor tenured at Johns Hopkins. There is so much to think about and compare in these two poets’ wrestlings with their fathers, America, gay identity and what it means to think of your country…but it’s past my bedtime. Despite Rich’s famous rejection of public honors from our previous Democratic President, I hope that there is something of Rich’s spirit in all of us that feels a special pride in Blanco’s Inaugural poem, not just on its poetic merits but for celebrating the poetic lineage from which it emerges.

Back, you fiends! My word of the year is “Chimichanga!”

This time of year, Amy draws upon her vast reserves of positive emotional energy to rise above how pale and exhausted we look and lead her women’s gathering posse through various start-your-year-right exercises. By the time we realize it is spring somewhere else, the group will be armed with a vision board and a Word of the Year to hold up like Sting against the orcs that plague the year’s cave tunnels.The impact that Amy has had on this group over ten years is at the level of a shamaness or a powerful anti-depressant, so I have taken a Fake It Till You Make It approach to thinking about these activities. Something must be very right here!

The vision board exercise is actually helpful in getting out onto the page all of the dimensions of your life that need attention. Amy and I find ourselves periodically subject to a willful not-seeing when it comes to the piles of stuff temporarily stacked for months at a time in various places around the house, or the serious monthly conversations about budgets and careers that are missing from the post-bedtime calendar. It’s still early enough in the year that we might yet at least see what it is we need to address.

These past few weeks I’ve enjoyed a flood of beautiful writing in The Awl on how it is we come to grips with not having an answer to everything. Not exactly advice to let go of trying, but to recognize that we as adults are all in the same boat in our inability to get it all right at all times: a realization which (optimistically) could help us all get along better.

At the same time, I’ve been reading application essays to my graduate program at MIT. One of the essays asks candidates to talk about how they dealt with a setback, and the range of responses has been an interesting window into how people frame themselves for the MIT audience. Some of these responses are deeply, surprisingly personal: losses of parents, spouses, careers for people still in their 20s. A few of those who disclose these traumas are able to spin them as somehow helping point their way towards MIT; for a few others, who may be outstanding engineering graduates and leaders of people, but are not as polished as some who have been in the application rat-race all their lives, the losses are still raw. The dichotomy between these earnest efforts to talk about the worst traumas in life and the other essay responses–about why you want to work in manufacturing, for example–points to the challenge of talking seriously about loss/failure in the context of an application package that seeks to prove you are a future Chief Operating Officer

Ironically, MIT is a bastion of “fail fast,” a watchword in the entrepreneurship “space” (I love using that word, which sadly has nothing to do with the return of Vejur to the Solar System). The idea of “fail fast” is that a good entrepreneur will egolessly recognize when their brilliant idea, sunk costs, and many weeks of all-nighters have come to naught and will cut the cord to move onto the next great thing. But this ideal coexists at MIT with a long history of student suicides: people who arrive never having failed at anything, and, confronted with a campus full of people smarter than them, can’t figure out what their lives are worth. Perhaps it is those who can survive this shock to a youthful genius’ ego and keep going that are best suited to joining the fast-fail entrepreneurial elite.

Elizabeth Bishop

For the prospective MBAs who describe themselves as people for whom “failure is not an option,” and indeed for all of us at this season, our old friend Elizabeth Bishop has some great advice that keeps growing on me. What I love about this poem is that she talks about increasingly profound losses–from car keys to home countries and her beloved–with a kind of studied off-handednesss. This casual grace is all the more striking given that she conveys it through a really challenging form (the villanelle). Most of the students I’ve gotten to know are at a place in their lives where the art of losing is quite distant–though parallel–to the science of failing fast. For them and all of us, let’s hope the scorecard for this New Year’s resolutions is not a disaster.

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen 
Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. 
All rights reserved.

Yesterday I got the chance to chat with Jim Fallows, who I’ve followed at The Atlantic for years and who just came out with both a great article on manufacturing coming back from China to the US and a book, China Airborne, on how China’s development of its aircraft/airline industry provides a lens into the overall passion/craziness/possibility of China’s development. He was giving a talk at MIT’s Center for International Studies in the beautiful new Media Lab building overlooking the Charles River. I was delighted that he agreed to meet with me and my boss to talk about manufacturing, China and Japan a few minutes before his talk. My dad also joined us for the talk.

Fallows is a long-time Atlantic writer (and past editor) and has an interest in America’s engagement (cultural and economic) with East Asia that is remarkably apposite for my program at MIT. In the late 80s he spent a few years in Japan, writing two books that challenged the fearful/blindered Western take on Japan and Korea’s rise. This was just at the time that MIT authors wrote the Made in America study on regaining economic and manufacturing advantage (from Japan, implicitly), and when MIT teamed up with major US industrial firms to create  Leaders for Manufacturing, as my program was then known. Since then, the US got a bit of its economic/manufacturing mojo back, even continuing its increasing technological edge and productivity through the Great Recession. But then as now, Americans are preoccupied with fears of US eclipse and dominance by an East Asian juggernaut.

Fallows’ take on this is grounded in a rich, humane sense of China’s many contradictions, based on his three years living there with his linguist wife Deborah, which built his view of China both as a true rising leader among nations and an assemblage of contradictory and conflicting interests that can’t possibly be viewed as one monolithic threat (or pretender). In his talk at MIT, he mentioned the Gold Rush atmosphere in China today that makes it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for journalists to find stories that reflect the country’s rapid change.

The basic framework he laid out for the coming years is the country’s process of political change, which he saw as a true contradiction: the system has to change, because the people want to evolve and the country’s society and institutions cannot progress without political change; and, the system cannot change, because of the vested interests, corruption, and fearfulness and insecurity that (it may puzzle Americans to discover) still characterize many Chinese officials’ reactions to events. His summary: “take China seriously without being afraid of it.”

Fallows, James Bond-like, surveys the Boston skyline while working to suppress the forces of Bad Beer

Enough of the serious talk…what does Jim Fallows really think about the crises of our day, the “think piece” Chevron ads in the Atlantic, and the latest accessories for iPads? I shouldn’t say–I have to save something for my Teen Beat tell-all–but, OK, he is just as genially interested and polymathically broad in his expertise in person as he comes across in his blog. In chatting with him and my boss Don, it was interesting to hear his perception that China did not now, and might not soon, challenge the US with any peer-competitive major companies the way Japan did in the 80s with Mitsubishi, Toyota and Sony. His new piece on manufacturing’s return (somewhat) from China to the US talks about an artisanal maker of iPad cases in San Francisco, DODOcase, and at one point he took out his iPad encased in the bamboo faux-book case to demonstrate something. He had mapped out his talk using a fishbone-style mind map diagram tool, and seeing this elegantly stark digital document within the retro, real materials of the case gave Fallows the sort of cyberpunk wizard aura I remember from early William Gibson characters.

All in all, it was a great moment of leveraging my unlikely identify as a spokesperson for MIT’s leading manufacturing graduate programto meet an author I admire and see the interesting parallels in his own engagement with Asia over the past few decades with our own program’s evolution. Next time with beer.

From the Amanda Palmer tour. Credit: Instagram user Owl_Soup

Every seven years, Amy and I rise from our suburban lethargy and go to a rock concert. Last night we saw Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra at The Paradise, on the last night of their US tour.

Our consensus was: amazing performance (2 1/2 hours), both Amanda Palmer and band (including horns and strings!) totally committed to what they are doing, but not something we really know well enough to blow our heads open as it seemed to do for most others in the crowd.

Amanda Palmer at the legendary First Avenue club (home of Prince!) in Minneapolis. Credit: Instagram user Fotodog

I can’t really say much about the music that will be helpful. You should check out her “Theater is Evil” album (click link for free album stream), on which my favorite tracks are “Do it with a Rockstar” and “Want it Back.” She started out in Dresden Dolls, which you might know for their Cabaret-punk hit “Coin-Operated Boy” of about 2004. I’m not linking to any videos because they are all deeply NSFW.

What’s interesting is how I came to know about her: Twitter. I think it happened when I somehow saw her commentary earlier this year on Lana del Rey. She was apparently blown away by “Video Games” (which I love too) and then maybe didn’t like the rest of the Born to Die disc, but still dwelled at length on Video Games and did a few covers. I got to be interested in Amanda Palmer’s musings on Twitter and on the Kickstarter project she had going to fund what became her current album. And, as part of my project to live large and get me and Amy out of the burbs monthly, I got us tickets in June for the show last night.

From left: Josh, random hot Amanda Palmer groupie

This makes two artists I like a lot that I’ve heard about because of tweets on some random subject. The first was Robyn, last year, who I heard about because of a tweet by a defense/security writer. Amanda Palmer has quite an intense social media presence–just recently she happened to send a tweet about whether people had insurance or not, and it exploded into a discussion that went way beyond her own devoted followers. The fact that I heard about her (in her new incarnation), heard about the show, and became at least a bystander to this intense community of people following/loving/hating her–all through Twitter–is kind of cool. I am glad to be not quite too old to be able to ride part of this wave.

Last night was Erev (night before–little Jewish humor for ya) the Birth of Baha’u’llah. Baha’u’llah was the founding figure of the Baha’i Faith, which Amy has been part of since her 20s, and since the faith started in what’s now Iran most of the Baha’i folks in our local community are Iranian exiles. There is no clergy in the faith, and so worship happens in community gatherings at people’s homes (or a center in a bigger city), centered on readings and prayers. I’ve spent a fair share of time looking contemplatively at the weave of Persian carpets listening to prayers chanted in Farsi. This would be kind of like a Japanese person marrying into a Jewish family and paging through a Marc Chagall siddur at Passover every year, taking in the vibe and wondering what it’s all really about.

An ecumenical spread: from left: Persian candy-cookies, “Hajjibullin” (sic), Amy’s cupcakes

The vibe is recent immigrants, having left Iran for work or study or with urgency, many of whom have achieved professional success and comfort in the US, and all of whom are grateful for the religious liberty that is denied them by the Iranian regime. But there is always the saudades of the emigrant for home, plus sadness over what is happening to Baha’is in Iran. The Baha’is in Newton were glad to be able to celebrate the birth of Baha’u’llah with some special grub that someone had brought back from Iran. I’ll just quote without comment the explanation of the round cookies above: “A Muslim person who has been on the Hajj to Mecca is called Hajji. The baker who invented these cookies must have been a Hajji, and these cookies look sort of like nuts, so they are called Hajjibullin (sic), or Hajji’s Nuts. But I guess when they translate the name into English they use a different word.” It’s true: there is no other way to describe the taste except as Hajji’s Nuts!

A Baha’i nine-pointed star pendant for those serving in the US Armed Forces

Baha’is are forbidden from combat, but they do serve in the US Armed Forces in noncombatant roles. The juxtaposition of the Baha’i holiday and Veterans Day made me grateful that our armed forces, while full of their own troubles, have at times been able to push US society forward in some aspects of equality of opportunity. Not that this is a good standard of comparison, but suffice to say you don’t find too many Iranian Jews or Baha’is in the Revolutionary Guard.

Miss A. and a friend demonstrate the sheer happiness and sense of virtuous giving that comes from buying a Hostess Cupcake at the bake sale. They are kind of slumming here since we mostly were selling home made cupcakes and cookies.

As an act of service for the holiday and for her Peacemakers class, Amy organized a bake sale at a local playground. The children in her class chose to raise money to benefit people in NY/NJ still recovering from the storm. On any other mid-November afternoon it would have been a hellish mock-prison camp exercise for the girls to have them cavorting in high-40s and light rain on the fall-safe squishy playground surface. But today it was 70 and sunny, and the group sold out, earning [a decent amount].

Last night I saw a talk by a young Iranian-Canadian photographer named Kiana Hayeri (notably in the same room where I saw a talk last month on the future of the aircraft carrier. That’s MIT, baby!)

“Mona,” before and after. Credit: Kiana Hayeri

Her work is focused on how young people in Iran define themselves–specifically their images and appearances–in the context of the country’s oppressive regime with its “morality police” and real police. She earned the trust of enough young women to be able to photograph them before and after their elaborate make-up and head-covering rituals. The side by side photos, as well as a short movie of one woman’s ritual, strike me and Amy mostly because the women are so much more provocative / sexualized in appearance “after” than in the privacy of their homes. The title of one of her projects, “Your Veil is a Battleground,” plays on the 1989 feminist artist Barbara Kruger’s well-known “Your Body is a Battleground.”

They see me rollin/They hatin/They tryin catch me ridin dirty. Credit: Kiana Hayeri

At the talk Hayeri described a run-in she had with the ladies of the morality police, who pulled her over from the sidewalk for wearing leggings instead of pants. Luckily for her she was able to find a relative to bring some officially acceptable modest pants to the morality police station. Hayeri showed side by side photos of herself before and after this incident, and the difference between “immoral” before and “moral” after is barely perceptible.

“Dena,” before and after. Credit: Kiana Hayeri

As one of the Iranian people in the audience pointed out, even the ladies of the morality police pay a lot of attention to their makeup and appearance.

Hayeri’s next project is photographing the network of underground art and cultural spaces that people have put together in Tehran and elsewhere around Iran. Her work gives the tantalizing hint of the common interests and connections Americans might form with Iranians once they get out from under their brutal political/religious regime.

Me and O on Election Night at the Hard Rock in Lisbon

During the 2008 campaign I was living in Portugal and spent way too much time on the beautiful train ride along the Tagus River peering into the inch-square screen of my Blackberry, reading Andrew Sullivan and TPM and other bloggers’ accounts of that amazing season. I made calls into Pennsylvania and Virginia, including one election eve call to an older African-American man in Newport News who said he was going to ride his bike over to the synagogue to cast his ballot for Obama (that’s America, baby!). And when they called it at around 5AM local time, I totally lost it. It was such a catharsis after the shame and fury of the Bush years, and seemed to promise a new era for the country.

Nate Silver, statistics dude, “America’s Boyfriend”

I’m still totally behind Obama this time around, but with what Jim Fallows calls the marriage-vs.-first date awareness of his goods and bads rather than starry-eyed hopefulness. This Presidential election has been all about Nate Silver for me: what does the data say about the results of campaigning, not how do we all feel about it. Well, I guess I still tuned into Andrew Sullivan, who after the first debate chronicled one man’s descent into the O-byss in somewhat alarming fashion. I had to turn the dude off for a while.

But I also took a tip from a friend who is a fellow Obamanaut, but had also gotten out to work for local candidates. I worked for the Elizabeth Warren Senate campaign and found a very different connection to her message, which grabbed a lot of Boston-area people in a kind of unrepentant, “f@#k yeah, we are Massachusetts liberals and Scott Brown is NOT OUR REGULAR GUY” way. I made calls and on Election Day was a poll observer, watching my precinct neighbors check in to vote, ages 18 to 87. The idea was to update likely Warren voter lists in real time to allow efficient get out the vote efforts throughout the day. In the end, it was probably overkill (but good database development for the next time), as Warren won handily on an amazing night for female Senate candidates. Living in a blue state, it felt good to work on a campaign on the neighborhood level rather than just hoping to convince New Hampshire voters to grace my candidate with their favour.

His Seitanic Majesty

And now the election is over. We’ll see if evidence of the continued, dramatic transformation of the electorate can make a dent in psycho Republican obstructionism in Congress this time around. I’d like to think that these Ohio Romney supporters will wake up to realize that Obama’s second term does not, in fact, promise an America turned into a “bleak hellscape.” But, not to freak them out further, I did make what I’d have to say was truly a Great Seitan just a few days before the election. I boiled up the flour with some choice organic kelp and other gloop, made a vegan but unspeakably rich sauce, whipped up some creamed spinach and mashed spuds, and the Lady Seitan made her badass roasted veg (for our school’s progressive dinner). This was from the Candle 79 cookbook, by the chefs at a terrific NY vegan restaurant. I’m not saying this was a Seitanic ritual heralding an end-times scouring of meat from our diets, but if that’s the way you want to take it, I can’t stop you.

A is straight edge and proud

Tonight the stars aligned for Miss A. to go with me to her first real show: Niki and The Dove, my latest Swedish electronic fave (Robyn definitely the gateway drug here), playing an all-ages show as 8PM opener for some other Swedish band I hadn’t heard of (Miike Snow). My first show was with Larry R. and his dad and my dad in a box at the old Capital Center to see Van Halen supporting their Diver Down album. Memorable scene: David Lee Roth wearing chaps and nothing else. Great father-son moment there. By comparison this show was appropriately girl-friendly, early, and dedicated more to spirit animals and faux-tribalism (but charming in a Swedish way) than to sweaty men singing about what we like to call inappropriate topics.

Niki and The Dove are two Swedes in their late 20s, a girl singer and a keyboard guy. She sounds like a sweet woodland creature when greeting the crowd in English, but has a convincing electronica-soul voice on many tracks of their Instinct album. I’ve really enjoyed starting some pre-dawn runs listening to Tomorrow and Drummer (see video above). But there is also a certain Stevie Nicks-like shamaness flakiness to them that can get a bit cloying, especially on earbuds. Live, the bass really helped these tracks. Malin is a good dancer (as A pointed out, an important part of being a performer!) even in the short stage allowed an opening act.

Let’s have no more of that tween moshing, aight?

All in all a very satisfying evening with my semi-grownup daughter and a band that I like very early in their growth cycle. Though not bound for Robyn-like superstardom, maybe we will actually be able to say we saw them when…

The classic board game Carrier War! Photo: boardgamegeek.com (yes!)

In a funny counterpoint to sitting in Monday on His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s seminar on stewarding our global resources, today I was able to sneak out to a lunchtime seminar on The Future of the Aircraft Carrier at the MIT Security Studies Program. Now, if you’re reading this (Mom and Dad) and wondering, Does Josh actually have a job? I can only say that I am fortunate to have an employer that values work-life balance and to have a brief lull between peak work weeks. No, for real, I partake in the intellectual smorgasborg that is MIT as part of my immersion in a dynamic faculty/staff/student ecosystem that rewards (if only tacitly, not in terms of actual professional development points) general awareness of the Institute’s multiverse. K?

While some may regard my devotion to Adrienne Rich and spending most of my career in the People’s Republic of Cambridge (not to mention veganism!) as sure signs of a pacifist hair-shirt outlook, in fact I grew up just as fascinated by war as the next lad. I fondly remember the aircraft carrier exhibit at the Air and Space Museum growing up, which may be updated now but still apparently has a bosun’s whistle piercing the air, and the Zeroes and Corsairs and other planes that were part of it. And I’ve been very interested in China’s efforts to become a carrier power at sea–punctuated just this week by “touch-and-go” operations of a land-based fighter plane on their Ukrainian-built carrier Liaoning–as part of their efforts to sort of become a responsible global power while sort of not. [If you also find this compelling please read Jim Fallows’ new book on aviation as a lens for China’s growth, China Airborne, and tell me how it is.] So this was a happy opportunity.

Comparison of different carrier sizes: from top, pre-WWII USS Langley, WWII US Essex class, Nimitz class (with 747 outline superimposed), proposed Queen Elizabeth (UK), proposed Russian carrier. Credit: Prof. Robert Rubel, USNWC

The seminar was by Prof. Robert “Barney” Rubel (Barney Rubble–get it?), the Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in beautiful Newport, RI. Rubel has the air of the salty 30-year carrier pilot vet he is, and doesn’t mind saying he likes ’em big when it comes to carriers, citing the disproportionate advantage the 100,000-ton Nimitz class carriers have over smaller ships in terms of “what we can throw off the front end.” He alluded to the irresistible appeal of carriers by quoting a colleague: “Don’t ever let a US President on a carrier, or he’ll let the Navy build as many as they want.” But the seminar was primarily about the arc of the carrier’s role, from initially (in the pre-WWII era) being the eyes of the fleet, to its current status as geopolitical icon and center of the fleet, to perhaps a future role as something other than top banana.

Without getting into all the details, Rubel defended vigorously the carrier’s unique ability to serve as a floating airfield–for example, providing the only operational tactical air power for the first few weeks of Gulf War I–while also noting that politicians and Naval leaders often break rules of naval disposition of forces (like not getting tied down to a land position) in order to wave the big stick of a carrier group, and that the threats to carriers of land-based missiles are now getting cheaper and more reliable. He suggested that carriers basically should never go into the Persian Gulf or the Straits of Hormuz and risk attack by small boats. The most interesting trend is towards switching out all or part of the manned tactical aircraft that now fly from carriers in favor of long-distance UAVs and/or advanced missiles. The carrier would then remain a sovereign (in every sense) airfield but regain flexibility, the ability to stand off further from shore/targets, etc.

Retro-uniformed Chinese naval officers aboard the aircraft carrier Liaoning during its formal entry into service on Sept. 25, 2012

Rubel closed by talking about how the mission of the US and allied navies is to protect the global system of commerce, travel and communications, and that carrier operations and whether or not to build them should be seen in light of that mission. Interestingly, he said that he often travels to China and that he and his colleagues keep pushing the PLAN (Chinese navy) to build carriers–better that than invest in more surface-based missiles that the Chinese 2nd Artillery can use to blast US ships in a hypothetical conflict about/near Taiwan. But the real reason they push China towards a carrier is as part of a broader campaign to get them to embrace their responsibilities as a global power to join in the defense of the global system of which they are an essential part. The Chinese development of their carrier, in parallel with/in opposition to the “Asian pivot” of US military forces, will be one interesting lens through which to observe how much the Chinese take on a role of globally-minded superpower. And for kids, a 1/350 scale model is now available!

I loved this event listing: “Saturday: Parent’s Weekend. Monday: Dalai Lama.” It reminds me of when Jane’s Addiction played a small hockey rink in Fitchburg, MA, and they had one of those old white letters on black felt signboards that said “Tuesday: Junior Figure Practice. Wednesday: Janes Addiction. Thursday: Peewee Practice.”

For reasons I don’t quite understand, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has long had an association with MIT. The Dalai Lama has visited MIT several times, and despite MIT’s many dealings with China, there is even a Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT (its URL resists provocation and is just thecenter.mit.edu). I must admit I’ve seen “Free Tibet” bumperstickers on many more occasions than I have actually devoted time to learning about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. I did see the Beastie Boys’ Tibetan Freedom concert in 1997 but did not actually learn a lot, despite MCA’s best efforts. So when I had the chance to volunteer as an usher at today’s seminar at MIT with the Dalai Lama, I thought it would be a good way to check it out.

MIT Prof. Penny Chisholm talks with the Dalai Lama about geoengineering. The slide depicts results of a pilot effort in the Pacific to seed phytoplankton with iron to stimulate photosynthesis. Chisholm said this is a bad idea.

The session was organized as two sets of panel discussions, where MIT faculty and other experts presented on issues related to climate change, global healthcare, and various ethical and political issues related to the environment. The Dalai Lama was a discussant, invited to give his perspective on the various talks. My favorite of the talks was by Civil and Environmental Engineering Prof. Penny Chisholm, who is an expert on photosynthesis by plankton and also a noted children’s science author. Chisholm was presenting on geoengineering–things like seeding the sky with clouds or putting mirrors in space in order to engineer a solution to climate change. She basically said that this is a bad idea because it diminishes the urgency people/society feel to address climate change fundamentals, and because the global climate system is very complex, such that full deployment of something that looks good in a small-scale experiment can ever really be predictable. And once you start major fertilization of the oceans with iron or launch orbital sun-deflecting mirrors, it’s not reversible.

The Dalai Lama’s response to this was interesting. I don’t know that I fully understood his reply but he seemed to say, in effect, because we must take the long view of addressing climate change we should actually consider some limited forms of geoengineering. Even when Chisholm replied saying, “We have to be careful,” the Dalai Lama came back to her urging more boldness.

For me the event felt like a welcome but slightly strained offering by preeminent figures in the world of Science, Engineering and Business to a preeminent figure from a different dimension. At MIT there is a significant emphasis on the power of “human factors” (a collaborative ethos, an entrepreneurial ecosystem, a platform for sharing ideas and ways to make that effective) to accelerate/broaden change that starts with technology. So having the Dalai Lama engage in dialogue with these folks is consistent. I guess that the Dalai Lama’s insights in this instance were more confirming rather than eye-opening.