Please, no photos. You didn’t see me here.

The road trip thru Hoboken to Baltimore to see Amy’s family, and for me to have an awesome run+CrossFit morning with friends, was all pretty cool. But from that base camp we (third-person dragging-Amy-along tense) had big plans to attend my 25th high school reunion in Reston and, oh by the way, cheat on over to Wu’s Garden Restaurant, which I ate at with my family about 300 times growing up and was recently praised by Mr. Momofuku himself as being the best joint in the DC area. While it may be technically possible to stay straight at Wu’s, that would mean no Kung Pao Chicken (or Kung Pao any other mammal that happens to get into the kitchen, according to unnamed critics), and really, what would be the point of that?

From top left: Kung Pao Chicken, Moo Shi Pork, chow foon, and General Tso’s chix

My ever-accommodating classmate Sarita agreed to accommodate my perverse request. We had two of my core dishes from growing up, the Kung Pao Chicken and Moo Shi Pork, plus a chow foon and a General Tso’s that someone not down with the Wu ordered. It was not quite the exhilarating/heart-congealing experience that I remembered from days of yore, but boy was it good. And what better way to make a good impression at Reunion than loading up Wu-style beforehand?

Reunion itself was basically good. Down from 200+ (out of 600) classmates five years ago to about 70 this year–one of the organizers put this down to the economy, plus Facebook letting people know what’s up with enough people that you just don’t need to turn up at reunions. There were at least a couple of people who I wasn’t already in touch with that were great to see in their evolved but not much changed middle-aged selves. The statement someone made from the 10th reunion basically held true: for those who had been so much cooler/jockier/hotter than me in high school, it was hard to recognize people because they were being so nice. And because it just doesn’t matter now.

Ishmael surveys the basket of biscuits and muffins with a proprietary gaze

This morning we freshened up with my man Ishmael and family at the Florida Avenue Grill, an amazing old-time Southern-style diner in DC. If I were true to the spirit of the place I would have had the fried pork chop with heavenly grits and two eggs like my buddy. Or the “half-smoke” (pork and beef sausage) like his lovely wife. But the biscuits are the real highlight for me–best I’ve had since a coma-inducing meal outside Roanoke 18 years ago. You can probably tell from the photo that they’ve been through the butter-misting station a few times and have an amazing crispness on the outside, remaining tender and buttery on the inside, or perhaps floury is a better description since it is mostly butter. Don’t mess with the original.

Amy and girls inside Luca Brasi’s underneath a fake pergola, which E referred to as a sukkah

We made our way down to Baltimore today with a lunch stop in Hoboken, my home during the 90s. When Amy and I were courting and she lived in Boston, having amazing Italian subs in Hoboken took the edge off her long Peter Pan bus ride to see me. Was it when we ate a Sweet Marie sub from Luca Brasi’s on the campus of Stevens Tech, overlooking Manhattan, that we Really Knew for the first time?

M. tucks into her order of mashed potatoes (??!?) while I eat a Sweet Marie

In case you didn’t know, the Sweet Marie is perhaps the least vegan-cheatin’ option at Luca Brasi’s Italian deli at the corner of 1st and Park in Hoboken, on the same block as my former shul and two blocks from my last apartment–I had it good! The Sweet Marie is scrumptious homemade “muzz” with sun-dried tomatoes and arugula. It’s been about eight years since I last had one and it (all) went down just as blissfully as in the old days.

A. with her new BFFL, the meatball sub

M. went for the whose-child-is-this-really choice of a side order of muzz and a container of mashed potatoes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! A. and E. went traditional with a meatball sub. They couldn’t finish and Amy and I were forced to help them out. This is all part of my philosophy around vegan cheating: don’t eat a chicken nugget, but cheat rarely and with quality. An added bonus is that I now have a much greater appreciation for a serious meatball.

We cheated on over to my old stomping ground, the City Hall Bakery, to maybe pick up a crumb cake Danish. But it turns out this regular old bakery is now the subject of some kind of reality show. Cake Boss–heard of it? Anyway without showing Hoboken ID you have to wait in line outside to get served.

City Hall, where Police and Parking don’t talk

Being in the vicinity of City Hall reminded me of the first week I moved to town. I had been living across the street from a synagogue in Highland Park and got a little complacent about auto security. I noticed right away that just about everyone had a Club on their steering wheel and thought I ought to get one too. Within days, while I thought about Club color choices, my car was stolen off Garden St. (in fact right outside the middle school). I reported it blah blah, got the Club for whatever car was coming next, and then, two weeks later, walked by the very same block my car was stolen from to find it sitting there with a bunch of parking tickets on the window. When I brought up the idea that maybe Parking Enforcement might have figured out this was the car reported stolen, the response was an eloquent “Whaddaya??”

Just down the block from Luca Brasi’s is another former stopping point from my lapsarian life in Hoboken. The First St. Deli is just a joint where every so often I would go in on my way to teach at Rutgers to pick up an egg and cheese sandwich, gobbling it down on Route 1 and 9 going down to New Brunswick and thinking about how to work in eggs to the day’s discussion. The title of this blog is a shout out to Junot Diaz, the Rutgers grad and MIT professor who just won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant timed to the release of his new collection, This Is How You Lose Her. One thing I’ve picked up from reading Diaz and hearing him talk about his work is how you need to always be getting more disciplined with yourself. The daily, weekly and monthly routine is essential to defining a space for success as a writer, or as a parent or as anything else that is pretty much free-form and life-long. The egg-sandwich-on-the-lap while driving approach to curriculum prep (not that that was the only way I did it, mind you) is just a reminder of how far I was from being locked in on effective teaching. Mostly eggless, I continue to try to get better.

Elizabeth Warren, a great American story: she transcended her floppy-tied youth to achieve great things

Tonight I did some phone banking for Elizabeth Warren, who you may know is in a very tight race against incumbent U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. In a very deep-blue state, so blue that Mitt Romney has to distance himself furiously from his tenure as our governor, Brown is working his effective “reasonable man” and down-home pickup truck driver persona to try and convince Democrats that he’s more their guy than Elizabeth Warren. As a registered Independent, Amy gets mailers from Brown bragging about the bills he joined Obama in passing. And I admit that Warren has a bit of a cloistered-in-Cambridge air about her sometimes, and has not helped herself with this Native American ancestry business, and is maybe more of a national progressive dreamboat than the ideal fit for MA-SEN. (Hysterical New Yorker cartoon this week with politicians in baseball outfits says “Warren started her career in the Indians organization.”) But you know what? Warren did some great stuff starting the Federal consumer advocacy organization and isn’t afraid to talk smack about Republican extremism and Ayn Rand BS. She is smart and independent-minded, unlike the pathetic hack Democratic candidates who lost to Romney for Governor and Brown for Senator. And Scott Brown gets NO PASS for being pseudo-moderate: he caucuses with Republicans and gets a vote on Supreme Court Justices.

Proving yet again that the Amherst Class of 1991, especially that even more awesome group that lived in the now-demolished James Hall, is full of people conducting Lives of Consequence, I found myself at the phone bank with my James ’91 neighbor Stephanie. She said she was nervous before making the calls, and her husband said, “Just imagine you’re Sarah Miller, walking the mean streets of Reno for Obama: you have to get out there and get the information your candidate needs!” And that was enough to buck her up and get her dialing for “Strongly Warren” or “Strongly Brown” voters.

I never thought of myself as a political junkie but in recent years I’ve turned into that guy who waits anxiously for Nate Silver to update his 538 blog (now part of the NY Times), with its geeky noodling over polls, and hits refresh multiple times during the day on political blogs like Talking Points Memo. And tonight the dingy surroundings reminded me of when I first worked for a campaign back in high school, when Democratic tomato can John Milliken took on now-32-year (!) incumbent Frank Wolf (R) in the VA-10 district. Milliken got just 40% but I reconnected with a girl I knew in elementary school who agreed to go on what became my first date ever. That’s the passion that phone banking can create, people! By the way, props to Wolf for supporting oppressed Baha’is in Iran.

But actually the two actual conversations I had tonight were a very helpful reminder of the weird world of “high-information voting” I inhabit, and how different it is from most people’s lives and struggles. I talked to one lady who basically was just waking up to the fact that an election was coming up and said I was pretty much the first information she’d received about the campaign or either candidate. Wow. And then another lady talked plaintively about how worried she was about a Mass. teacher’s pension fund policy that somehow precludes her getting full Social Security pension coverage in case something happens to her husband. From my perspective, that has nothing to do with a U. S. Senate campaign, but it was a reminder that I have the luxury of worrying about a whole range of policy topics that don’t put me at immediate risk of my health or livelihood. For this lady, who wakes up every day worrying about the real possibility of losing her safety net, anyone from the President and Senate on down should tell her how they can help her out with her Mass. state policy problem. For sure, it won’t be Brown that looks to throw the teacher’s union a lifeline. I’ll be making more of these calls as I begin to heed Samuel L. Jackson’s advice to complacent 2008 Obama supporters.

These are what Jews traditionally call the Days of Awe, the ten days between Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur when we contemplate the year that is passed, consider how we hope to be “inscribed” in the book of the year that is to come, and make amends to those whom we have upset or worse in the past year. Rosh Hashonah is full of hopes for a sweet new year and its celebration with apples and honey has spread throughout our household, so that the girls can hardly imagine eating apples without honey at any time. But a central moment in the Rosh Hashonah liturgy is the chanting of a very foreboding prayer, the Unetaneh Tokef. In this prayer the congregation declares itself in judgment by G-d and recounts both potential boons and a litany of horrible ways in which some might suffer and die in the year to come, which can be tempered–not avoided–by repentance, prayer and charity.

This litany of possible fates foretold has become very hard to take since my brother’s death, which happened in a way that could have been included in this primal list. But beyond the personal impact for me and my family, I have noticed over the past few years that, at least in our Reform shul, a lot of work is going on to frame the Unetaneh Tokef in less starkly prophetic terms. Without knowing a whole lot about anything, I suspect this is happening more broadly. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who blogs as the Velveteen Rabbi (love it), wrote of the Unetaneh Tokef in terms of the metaphorical work it does to remind of us G-d’s utter abstraction from human existence:

Ultimately, this prayer reminds us, God is “beyond explanation;” this set of metaphors is one way to approach that unknowable reality, but in the end it’s just a human construct, as all of our words for God are.

With something of this perspective perhaps in mind, this year our rabbi preceded the prayer by describing it as the most challenging part of our liturgy, and urged us to think of it in the broader context of our collective effort of repentance and hope for redemption over the Days of Awe. Then the prayer was chanted in Hebrew, but not read aloud afterwards in English. I can’t recall if this has always been our practice, but I do wonder if the greater cushioning of this section of the liturgy reflects a post-September 11 consciousness in our community. Or maybe it reflects the general impulse within Reform Judaism to see ways in which even the most unyielding parts of the liturgy are in dialogue with our desire for tikkun olam, repairing the world, which is based not on an assumption  of a messianic upending of our human world but, instead, on our unrelenting efforts to make it better in our lives and for the next generations.

A few days before Rosh Hashonah, I went to Shabbat evening prayers to say yahrzeit for Aaron: the recitation of the mourner’s kaddish prayer on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. This has become the ritual that might be the most intense connection with his loss that I experience in the whole year, and I look forward to it with dread based on past experience. This year was not as brutal as last year’s tenth anniversary, and I am grateful to have the support of my rabbis and of those at the shul who know my story. But I was struck, as ever, by the many overlapping life-cycle moments that take place in the shul at any given time: mourners, new babies and converts being celebrated, Bar/Bat Mitzvah kids with braces glinting, and others who simply want to welcome the bride of the Sabbath. I wrote a poem about this experience of mourning observance on the eve of Rosh Hashonah and the recitation of the Unetaneh Tokef. As ever, it is, in manufacturing terms, WIP (work in progress), and your comments are welcome, especially if you can point to places that were not clear, were unconvincing, or made you reread. That’s a poet’s Unetaneh Tokef right there in terms of readers’ fates.

—–

Ringing In

 

On the last Shabbat before the new year

I braced in the last row of the sanctuary,

Waiting to greet the bride

And mourn my brother.

 

At the front of the room a family

Leaned together and clasped hands,

Their happy milestone plowed together

With bar mitzvahs and me this night.

 

But as the ark opened, the rabbi’s mic

Picked up the clinks and glissades

Of the Torah undressed of its

Crowns and regalia,

 

And sent back to my corner

The noise of a box of cymbals,

Thrown down steep stairs

To crash open the door

 

Of a past year, written but

Never sealed—the last clanging edge

Wedging the doorframe wide,

A book’s worn binding struck open

 

To where it says some you love

May die by beasts, by water or fire,

The old expedients whose names

Choke beneath the song of this new year.

 

September 2012

 

Copyright © Josh Jacobs 2012

Me with Aaron at Mile 17 of the 1998 (?) Boston Marathon, on Washington St. in Newton, MA

This year’s remembrance of my brother Aaron on September 11th has been free, thankfully, of the national focus on the terrorist attacks that attended last year’s tenth anniversary. I don’t know what “everyone” is thinking about because I try to avoid the news for the few days on either side of the anniversary. But I could not help thinking about Aaron in the context of my triathlon training all summer and race this past weekend. Aaron ran the Boston Marathon in 1998, finishing in about 3:48. I drove him out to the start in Hopkinton and recall thinking that it took a pretty long time to get out there on the interstate, let alone to run all the way back.

When I started training for the triathlon, I thought of it as primarily a challenge to myself to get more fit and continue to rebound from surgery earlier this year. I realized along the way that I also wanted to echo (however faintly) Aaron’s achievement, and to continue to honor the way he lived his life as best I can. I was also glad for the race, which fell on September 8th, to provide a positive focus for me and my family to counterbalance somewhat the dreadful buildup of anxiety and memories that starts for us each August.

Thinking along these lines, I recently looked again at A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”. Its thesis is that the athlete who achieves fame and dies early–while still known to himself and others as the star–does well by outrunning the fading glory of athletic (and all mortal) achievements:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

For me the main point here is not so much about athletic accomplishment, but about youth and the opportunity to develop your identity as you grow older. Neither Aaron nor I were ever celebrated as athletes, but did sports as just one aspect of our identities. For him the marathon was not the grand fulfillment of an obsession, but a realignment of his life towards physical pursuits and away from the sedentary intensity of his job. The marathon complete, I don’t think he had set his sights on other big physical challenges, but surely could have taken them on in due time.

As I get further away from the shock of Aaron’s loss, and go through more and more of my central experiences in life without him, I find myself pulled somewhat reluctantly away from the attachment to painful absence that I felt in earlier years. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., which with singularly Victorian length and eloquence mourns a friend’s untimely death, evokes for me the wretchedness I felt then, contemplating yet another beautiful sunrise or (even) early married life and fatherhood–all wonderful blessings, built on what seemed at times a “blank” foundation:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.  (VII)

But I no longer feel an inherent effacement of my own life, or of the world, because of Aaron’s absence. I feel instead the sweep of the rich, lived adult experience I have enjoyed since our lives together were snapped off at 32 and 27, and how cruel it is for Aaron that he could not find his own path into adulthood. My opportunity to take on my own limitations and fears and complete the triathlon–as part of the longer-scale ups and downs of working to keep my health–seems such a privilege to me as I contemplate Aaron’s foreshortened life, in which his marathon becomes now a kind of capstone achievement instead of what should have been the first of many, varied, self-defined triumphs.

‘100’ (from 0 to 100 years in 150 seconds) from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

I came across this beautiful video recently in which Dutch people ages 0 to 100 state their ages to the camera. The guy aged 27 reminds me a bit of Aaron: he has an open, cheerful expression, looking as though he knows something about life but is still waiting to be surprised by much more to come. He is also so very young. Seeing the experiences written in the faces of the 73 people after him in the film brought home to me how much Aaron has missed. And how much I miss him.

——–

I wrote this poem last year at this time–my first complete poem about Aaron’s loss. I had big plans then to try and write more poetry in this new phase of my writing life, and perhaps seek publication. But while a bit more poetry has emerged, the vague idea I had of getting published — perhaps even as some journal’s seasonal poem in the early September issue — seems now both far-fetched and distasteful. Plus it remains a work in progress, though still the best I can do for now. I welcome your comments.

How They Got Down

 

The roof deck held the jet-packs, and the teams

Of passing strangers ran the checklist, strapped

 

And counted down from ten. Each stairwell had

Da Vinci helicopters, rigged from cloth

 

And wood to spiral down like maple seeds.

Some broke the glass to pull out sets of wings,

 

Hides and feathers prepped to glide. All came down,

A thousand arcs that slowed to land upon

 

A grid-deck mezzanine above the street.

At any moment they might disembark—

 

Each day the stanchions holding them secure

Let fall a fading phrase, or joke, to wrench

 

Me into smiles, ready again to hear

His part among the chorus of escapes.

I emerge from the surf, tuxedo under my wetsuit

Yesterday I finished my first triathlon. The Hyannis Sprint Triathlon II, to be precise–“sprint” meaning something you just dash off before starting the real business of your day. Actually it was a big mental and physical challenge to get ready for the race, particularly jumping into the surf to do the swim part (1/4 mile) before the 10 mile bike and 3.5 mile run legs.

I took swim lessons for the first time in about 30 years, from a great instructor at MIT who happens to be a triathlete herself. She managed to convey the basics of freestyle (and breast stroke) technique that have evolved since the mid-1970s, and between her help and the James “Dorky” Bond wetsuit the swim phase went so much better than I had thought/feared it would.

Biking very sloooowly past the beautiful Cape beach grass

Then the bike phase. I spent the first mile or so marveling at just how much seawater had managed to get inside my head and was now flowing all over me (thus the title of this post: don’t knock the Neti Pot until you’ve tried the full immersion version!). Then I cruised along, head held high–actually, way too high, in what could in no way be described as an “aero” position–riding my banana-seat bike with a kickstand on the very same roads as $5000 dudemonger machines.

In case you run into me again on the course–and yes, that’s right, I’ll be back–here are my little rules for who is allowed to pass me during the bike leg:

• Anyone older than me (age is written on their back right calf): they must be a total badass to pass me
• Anyone younger than me: obviously they must be more fit
• Anyone whose bike requires a special truck-mounted pump to inflate its tires
• Anyone huffing loudly and rhythmically, as though faking orgasm or yogic satori
• Anyone wearing a unitard: surely letting them pass me is the least I can do to help them cope?
• The guy driving a flatbed truck loaded with Spot-a-Pots

Anyone else, you best think twice before you step to the Joshinator.

As a first-timer they waived the penalty for wearing nonmatching tri shorts and tri tops

Happily during the run leg I was able to pass some of these very same people who had so boldly crushed me on the bike course. I took particular satisfaction in passing the person who had written on her leg not her age but ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ , which in the Sikh tradition means roughly “There is one god” or “Eat my dust, worm boy.” (Apologies to Sarah M. for any blasphemy there.) But beyond these earthly competitive instincts, I was psyched that I was able to keep a running pace as fast or faster than my training pace.

It was a great culmination to a summer structured by the training tips I got from a book called the 12-Week Triathlete. I was proud to join the ranks of the many other triathlon people from my age group. And having my family there, on September 8th, was a wonderfully positive way to celebrate life together during a difficult season for us all.

Foundational texts for life, or the literary genre that dare not speak its name? The camera flash on Dragonquest is unwittingly symbolic of the book’s impact on my fifth-grade self. Credit: nerdybookclub.wordpress.com

This year I’ve made it halfway through two novels by esteemed literary authors that both manage to make Japanese death cults holed up in mountain fastnesses a central aspect of their plots. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas dude), and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, whose work I know mostly from stories in the New Yorker. How I stopped reading 1Q84 was actually kind of funny…my Minuteman Library e-book loan expired and it up and vanished from my Kindle. Modern times! With 1K Autumns I just sort of lost the ganas to keep going.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR LATE-ARRIVING LITERATURE FANS:] In 1K Autumns, the death cult in the mountains is devoted to hooking up the priests with unsuspecting women–shipped up the mountain by their families under the auspices of the regional priest-lord–to give birth to babies who are then sacrificed to fulfill some hideous BS religious injunction, but whose deaths are masked by a very long-term campaign of writing false letters home by the children as they supposedly grow up happily elsewhere. In 1Q84, the death cult is more directly allusive to Aum Shinrikyo as well as good ‘ol Oceania of Orwell’s 1984, with a super-power-having “Leader” figure who was just getting into the good stuff when my loan ran out and the bits of literature were slurped back into the ether.

Without getting into the depths of my ignorance about Japanese history or literature, I was struck by two globe-bestriding writer dudes happening to end up with this shared plot element in novels appearing more or less simultaneously. Both authors’ approaches to (postmodern) fiction invest the death cults with realistic, horrifying aspects, while at the same time stirring them into the general mix of plot, language and character that evoke broader questions about the nature of narrative, how that relates to society, etc. But you could do that with comic books or baseball too…why death cults? Why Japan?

Backing up a bit, Amy is running her women’s gathering tonight on the topic of favorite books. This morning she was asking me about the books that have had the biggest impact on my life, on how I think, that I have most enjoyed. And maybe because I knew she was putting the list together for a group that I (perhaps unjustly) don’t imagine has much truck with scifi/fantasy, I neglected to mention that, in fact, the books I have most enjoyed this past year include a gorge-a-thon of the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, my sixth reading of China Miéville’s The Scar, and Stephenson’s Reamde (though it might not crack my top five of his works). And at the same time, I found myself stopping Richard Ford’s Canada about 2/3 through, though I think he is one of the world’s best writers and he has answered two different fan letters from me.

Do other people who have pretensions of or careers in literature also feel this same shyness about acknowledging one’s genre-lovin’ “base” self alongside one’s “higher” literary interests? Of late there are some examples of serious literary authors (Michael Chabon, and of course Junot Diaz, who makes amazing use of Tolkein and general D&D-style lore in Oscar Wao) refusing to divide themselves entirely as fans or writers between LITratoore and scifi. But these guys can do whatever they want…it is something else, maybe, for a private citizen to have one’s best books of the year lists be dominated by fantasy.

The roar of crickets in Metro West Boston has been amazing lately

Walking home tonight (later than usual, Amy and girls at sheep farm in VT) after getting off the trolley was like tunneling through a cloud of cricket and frog calls. I think even with partial low-frequency hearing loss I wasn’t missing anything (thanks, cricket tenors!) and the sensation of surround sound was beyond anything yet achieved by Disney. I was reminded that when we lived outside Lisbon, where there weren’t any crickets or other night sounds audible over constant dog barking, the girls played a Highlights game online that had a cricket soundtrack and it really brought me back to life in the East Coast USA. I was grateful to walk home in low humidity and with no acorns underfoot. There is probably some anthropogenic climate change reason why their absence at this stage in August is bad, but for me acorns signal all the melancholy of fall and I can stand to have them hold off for a week or two more.

Like many other people in my age bracket, it seems, I am training for my first triathlon in a few weeks on Cape Cod. Some big pluses this summer from the training have included some very effective swim lessons, the first since I was about ten; working out much more regularly than I would have without the fear of the event looming; and (for the reader in Brasil who may not have seen me recently) honing my Vegan Adonis form like a big ‘ol tempeh shawarma turning on a lathe in the gyro truck. There is also the general mood smoothing that comes from working out and being more fit: but, as someone who has tended to prioritize reading and indoor creativity over the outdoors and working out, I wonder if the serenity blah blah of fitness is in fact complementary to the excitement/fulfillment of successfully pushing through creative blocks and getting that kind of work done. Could it be (putting his toe into the ocean of actually committing to athletic training) that working out in any semi-serious way is a siren song, diverting the mind/body/spirit’s energies from creative commitments?

That is probably BS. But what the whole vegan switch, tri training, AND modest reawakening of writing this past year have pointed to for me is that middle age might be the time when you have to adopt a life-as-training approach. The idea is that it is only through adopting rigorous schedules, tradeoffs against other activities, and setting deadlines etc. that one can stave off the real physical decline and looming psychological menaces that come with this time of life. So why don’t we all just start charting our every moment against calories expended, miles run, poems started, cubic meters of quinoa consumed?

I’ll stay in this cage long enough to look cute, but I’m not actually captive and will emerge before you finish that couplet

I know this isn’t spilling any secrets but I think that kids and parenting pose serious obstacles to this sort of self-imposed (and, indeed, self-gratifying) training. Maybe it’s our koala parenting style (as opposed to Tiger Parenting) but I definitely find the emotional swings, unpredictable awakenings after bedtime, and fears about the heat death of the planet and its impact on college education tend to carve out disproportionate space in my head. The oldest one is grateful for the times we’ve been able to do writing together, but in general she is finely attuned to the moment when I turn my attention inward (to possible creative inspiration) or outward (to sit down and write) in a way that diverts that limited attention from her. Same with the others–this is all logical and evolutionarily correct behavior. [NB I recently read the two great comic novel memoirs by Alison Bechdel, who did the Dykes to Watch Out For comix. In Fun Home particularly, she talks about how her mother’s escape into her music and dramatic pursuits was, painfully to her children, her greatest joy in a disturbed married life. I thought these two books were fabulous and not just because the second one, Are You My Mother?, features an appearance in comic form of Adrienne Rich.]

Look at the time! It’s 11:41PM EST and once again (Amy does this too) I am greedily slurping up potential writing time that rightfully belongs to the sleep component of my training regimen. When I think about righteously waking up at 4AM to write, like the manically productive and doomed Sylvia Plath pounding out Ariel before her kids woke up, I’m reminded that the real writers do actually make major sacrifices of time, health and personal interaction in order to commit themselves to the demon Muse. How does that pursuit combine with the race to get healthier physically before we get (or feel) deader? Reprobate late-night would-be artists want to know.

L to R: Hope Solo, Athleta model

Amy and I have been married for eleven years this week. We met in college back in September 1987, and I actually tried to ask her out (or something…not sure I could have been so articulate) within the week, but Amy gracefully deferred having me pop the question for over a decade. I am amazingly grateful that fate and the good ‘ol Class Notes brought our paths back together again. Amy is the main reason I’m sitting here today as a basically happy and healthy person, and has become a vital member of my family and circle of friends. She is an indefatigably loving, caring and fun mom, whose comfort and attention are the absolute foundation of our girls’ own lives and no doubt will lead them on to future happiness.

Getting excellent family signal thanks to Amy

This year’s key reasons to admire and love Amy include:

Amy introduces E. to the good cop/bad cop principle of group facilitation

She is not resting on her laurels: Well, not resting at all really, but Amy is driven to figure out how to take the next big step in her professional career as we start to look ahead to all the girls being in school. Amy has always had a genius for convening people, creating content and facilitating discussions around challenging topics in the domains (broadly speaking) of parenting, ethics/values, and spirituality. I admire how she is taking on the work of redefinition (of self, career, and to some extent how the whole family works) that goes along with carving out a different path than she had as a classroom teacher. There are probably twenty people who have relied significantly on Amy’s friendship and counsel to get through big challenges this year, so the market has already spoken when it comes to Amy’s success in her future job/consulting gig.

Amy and I with her magnificent challahs at Miss E’s star turn as Shabbat helper

She supports my alternative lifestyle: When I flipped the switch last year and went from the guy who would fly to Buffalo just to eat wings to vegan guy, Amy did not check to see if I was out of warranty, but actually jumped in pretty enthusiastically to get some new cookbooks and gear up to embrace the Great Seitan. Many people over the years have assumed that because Amy is so nice she must be a vegetarian, but this truly is an extra step motivated by love. Happily I have adopted a Cafeteria Catholic approach to give a pass to anything that Amy bakes, regardless of dairy content, which helps preserve our collective enjoyment of the many deliciousnesses that she and her 50-pound bag of King Arthur Flour come up with.

M’s cake inspired by Robyn. I think Amy is like Robyn working in frosting rather than pop music.

Do you want me to spell out “King Arthur” or just draw the bag>

She is the hardest-working mom in show business: The birthday cakes are just the highlight reel moments, but underlying that is the hourly, daily and weekly cadence of Amy’s constant attention to what the girls are eating, wearing, studying, and feeling. Oy, the feelings! Much respect to the woman who can give so much and keep a sense of perspective and balance, most of the time.

We still have a great time together: Submerged as we are in the lightly sparkling waters of Lake Girlhood, it is hard to find time to spend together. But in those fleeting moments while making lunches, or perhaps an hour side by side pecking away at our laptops late at night, we still make each other laugh and have grown with each other through life’s changes.

So to celebrate Amy, here is a poem I wrote for her way back after Miss A. was born when we were still entertaining notions of having four kids. It is told from the perspective of four kids at different ages, each talking about Amy as a mom. I have to say it has turned out to be pretty accurate so far, leaving aside the kid character’s identities.

Walter Lewin concludes his lecture, as viewed in the overflow space in 32-123 with sunlight streaming in from above

On Friday I got to sit in on the final special lecture by MIT Physics Prof. Walter Lewin in a series of lay person’s talks he taped for Japanese NHK TV. As I noted in my last post (which was read and corrected by Prof. Lewin himself in a remarkably benign bolt from the heavens) after seeing the first lecture in the series, Lewin is a video legend, his introductory physics lectures having been seen through MIT’s Open CourseWare by millions of people worldwide. Seeing him in person, surrounded by actual MIT people who understand what the symbols in the (few) equations mean, has been an inspiring connection to the intellectual and educational mainspring of the Institute where I’ve managed to work for nine years.

Lewin’s final talk was on The Birth and Death of Stars, and talked about the life of Sol-like stars and the very different and more dramatic lives of larger stars as they may become supernovae, white dwarfs and neutron stars. If I’m not mistaken, Lewin illustrated the unbelievable density of neutron stars by saying that a teaspoon-full would weigh 500 million tons. He also said that the neutron star remnant at the core of the Crab Nebula revolved thirty times per second. Finally he illustrated how in an x-ray binary star system (wonderfully referred to elsewhere as “cataclysmic variable” stars) a Sol-like “donor” star is paired with an “accretor” star (white dwarf or neutron) that pulls the mass of the donor into an accretion disk around itself.

Beyond his exposition of these facts with great verve and an assumption that his audience could share his own amazement and wonder (which was correct!), I was struck by Lewin’s attention to the human dimension of science. First he talked about the graduate student, Jocelyn Bell,  who made the actual observations in the late 1960s that confirmed the existence of pulsars. While her (male) supervisor won the Nobel Prize for the discovery, she did not share it, and Lewin described this injustice as a black mark on the Swedish Academy that can never be undone.

And after talking about x-ray binary stars, Lewin concluded by saying, “For some lucky stars there is life after death, provided they find a suitable companion. It is my wish that you find during life–not after death–the right companion, radiate, and be happy.” It was a beautiful benediction for the thousands of students Lewin has taught in person, and the now tens of millions that he will reach via MIT OCW and Japanese TV.

Why we write, by Junot Diaz: not because we are so awesome but because we have to in order to save our lives

As noted in our last Poetry Corner segment, I’ve been inspired — in part by writing this blog, and by the surprising number of people besides my immediate family who read and respond to it — to get back into writing poetry.

Last spring two actual writer friends spurred me into doing some things I wasn’t sure would ever happen again: write seriously for an audience, and say something about how I and my family have experienced the loss of my brother Aaron. The first effect of the piece that came out in The Awl was to make me realize that this blog was an important channel and prompt for my writing, which has also turned  out to be a way to connect my life to friends and family in unexpected ways.

The second opening that happened after that piece came out was to start writing poetry again, even taking on the subject of Aaron’s death. I did manage to start that around the time of the tenth anniversary of September 11th and it felt like a breakthrough. But it has taken me until now to start another poem on the topic–more attributable to the darn kids and job etc., not writer’s block–to which I sat down this week with some eagerness and a feeling of potential ideas to build upon, much like I had when I was writing all the time, half a life ago.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the confessional: sitting down to write squarely about Aaron, I found myself grounding the poem in lines about the girls instead, a topic that like all the others has been sorely underrepresented this past decade (though I don’t feel too bad, having devoted countless family blog/FB hours to their every boingy curl). And I also find myself, perhaps inspired by admiring Dan Chiasson’s work, being drawn towards a tone that is a bit more flippant and given to wordplay than probably suits the theme. Though surely Aaron would just say, go for it, you big fuddy-duddy. I feel like I have a big backlog of potential themes, styles, and inspirations to deal with, which is a great problem to have.

So for all the actual writers (and readers) out there, some questions:

• When awakening from an extended period of not writing (or not writing in the serious way one once did)–during which time one nonetheless has had an active life of the mind, personality growth, rich life experiences, blah blah–is it normal to find that one’s old and previously productive habits of writing no longer seem adequate?
• I’ve tried diving into Tennyson’s In Memoriam and while it does kick more ass than I realized as a young punk (codifying a new stanzaic form, just to name one quality) I would love a recommendation for contemporary poetry that incorporates memorial while not being given over to it entirely.
• What is the typical review time for the poetry associate editor at a place you might send your stuff to, perhaps via some helping hand?

The tear in the elbow mouths mute accusations of lapsed Thorn-Proof Dressing upkeep

Gentlemen: if in the course of your summer routine you find yourself spending some time at home without your better half and children–who remain in some delightful holiday locale while you return to your daily toil–a particularly appropriate way to pass a summer’s evening is to apply Barbour Thorn-Proof Dressing to one’s coat.

What better way to celebrate the season, whilst mindfully preparing for November’s tofu-pup hunt season in unremittingly foul weather, than to lovingly recondition this most loyal of garments? Indeed, why should gamekeepers and valets have all the fun? No task could be more simple, nor more rewarding in its execution. Follow the straightforward guidelines below for superior results every time.

1. Prepare your materials. You will need a salver of ice-cold water, a naturally harvested sponge, a thin cotton cloth (itself naturally harvested from a garment celebrating long-ago athletic triumphs against Little Three opponents), a small pot of boiling water, gutta-percha gloves, a hair-dryer, and of course a tin of Barbour Thorn-Proof Dressing. If you do not have a dedicated space for storing and maintaining your Barbour coats, take care not to attempt this procedure on shag carpeting or a squash court as excess wax may damage the finish.

2. Sponge down the entire waxed surface of the coat with the ice water. Pockets should be emptied and any residual snacks found therein can be eaten straightaway. Because it’s summer!

3. Place the tin of Barbour Thorn-Proof Dressing–but do not immerse it–in boiling water in a rustic hot pot that you keep just for this occasion in your Barbour shed. The intent is to gently melt the dressing to allow it to be spread across the coat. Failing that, you can lower the tin into a regular saucepan of boiling water on your electric stovetop. If you do accidentally immerse the tin, which may at this juncture start to appear rather smaller than those pictured in the Barbour Company’s instructional videos, on no account should you bellow f-bombs and subsequently splay out molten Thorn-Proof Dressing on your stovetop as though intending to rip off its control knobs Brazilian Wax-style.

4. Donning your gutta-percha gloves, dab your cotton cloth strip into the pool of wax collecting on the floor in front of the stove until you have absorbed a goodly amount. Placing the coat on some newspapers outside, briskly but smoothly apply the molten wax evenly across every waxed surface of the coat. Under some conditions, the wax may gather together thickly upon some areas of the coat like the ice packs crushing the boats of the Shackleton Expedition, leaving other areas only lightly glazed with what you must have faith is a sufficient amount of Thorn-Proof Dressing.

5. Working in full view of your neighbors, apply every last semi-molten drop of Thorn-Proof Dressing to the coat’s surface, attempting to maintain at least a plausible spectrum of Covered to Rubbed Slightly But Maybe Not Entirely Covered to Thorn-Piercing Depth across the coat’s various hills and crevices.

6. Go get the hair dryer, ensuring that you walk within the same set of waxy footprints between your stove and the back yard in order to minimize spillage. Blow hot air across the Thorn-Proof Dressing on the coat in order to diffuse it evenly and restore a factory finish. Or, blow hot air across the islands, eddies, and occasional hardened plugs of Thorn-Proof Dressing in order to diffuse it as well as you can and produce an entirely novel finish, resembling the striations of the hide of an animal that might be hunted by proper Barbour-coat-wearing gentry.

7. Hang the coat in open air in order to let the Thorn-Proof Dressing dry and to use this new hide pattern to intimidate the chipmunks and other prey animals that might otherwise dive into your composter and get all the good bits. You might consider just leaving the coat in this place year-round for that purpose.

Now sit back (but not on the waxy part of the floor) with a well-deserved beverage and salute your self-reliance. Next in the series: Vegan Taxidermy.

Today I got to sit in on a sort of lay person’s greatest-hits lecture by Walter Lewin, whose physics lectures have become an improbable YouTube hit and a mainstay of MIT Open CourseWare, the free website where MIT publishes course materials and videos of almost all its courses. Japanese NHK TV has commissioned him to give eight lectures this summer on the basics of physics for broadcast later this year. Anyone in Boston for the next month should come by on Mondays and Fridays.

Lewin on stage in front of his surprisingly approachable formulas. Note the old-school chalkboards. Pendulum is stage left.

Lewin is Dutch and has become the world-renowned leader of some very meticulously planned lectures that highlight his riding on a pendulum to demonstrate the formula predicting its period remains constant regardless of the mass of the pendulum ball. He also stands with his back to a wall, pendulum on his chin, and releases it to prove that the conservation of energy will save him from having the pendulum swing back and blast his face off. Another highlight was when he measured two undergrads to demonstrate that people are different lengths when measured horizontally and vertically. One of them was named Tiffany, and when he asked her name so he could write the data on the board, he said, “Too difficult” and entered her info as “person.” Maybe Gretchen? Yetta?

You can see some of the highlights in the MIT promo video below. Suffice to say that it is great to be at a place where a 76-year-old man, perfectly clad in a blue work shirt, green cords, and Birkenstocks, can get a huge round of applause for riding a pendulum to demonstrate laws of physics.

Is it snack time yet?

Summer is icumen in, and we’ve been singin’ cuckoo all week long! Like a couple who have their noses to the grindstone for decades while raising children and then find themselves in an empty nest taking a new, frank appraisal of each other, so too have we and the girls faced the first week of summer as a crucible wherein the souls and the RIGHTS TO BE THE BOSS OF EVERYONE of parents and kids are tried.

I for one am keenly aware of how precious the hours and afternoons are that I get to spend with the family on sunny summer days, given that the rest of my existence is measured out with Powerpoint spoons. So it grieves me to piss it away in heated debate over who did a sassy face, and (worse) who hates whom.

With the onset of summer, and the heightened passions it brings, our tendency to mistake boxes and other random objects for permanent bookshelves/storage surfaces has been abloom with design possibilities! Just check out these examples of how easy and fun it can be to transform a humdrum garage into a powerful expressive framework for contemporary life:

From the Tar Pits of Boston, two different species found in the same stratum from the Summer of 2012

Let’s start with this primordial statement about Summer in New England. We have a box fan purchased a few weeks ago when it looked like we might be in for a “scachah” of a summah. Here it sits in the garage, tilted on its side as if to say “just another step or two, guys, and I’ll be oscillating dutifully.” But trapped in the oozing sands of Summer Time, the box fan remains a foot shy of the threshold–its place in the household unrealized–while on top of it just for a second sits a backpack full of beach toys. Thanks, box fan, for keeping the faith that someday we’ll call on your powers and in the meantime keeping that bag of beach rings just a bit closer to hand.

The rich ecosystem of the garage is perfect for gardening

The garden is doing great with the rain we’ve been having. After the massive snow two winters ago swept away many of our little stake lamps around our driveway and walk, Amy went and got a box of new ones at Costco. And soon they will take root in our front yard, as though we had sprinkled seeds from the Frontgate catalog to see high-tech McMansion gadgetry spring up to adorn the property. But until then, Amy’s gardening clogs have found a home. I will take it upon myself to express in iambic tetrameter some witty, Richard Wilbur-like commentary on how the daily tromping out to tend to aphids and mulch overrides (o’ersteps?) modern efforts to zap it all away. The world is too much with us, people.

So much is draped/Upon a black wheelbarrow

Finally, I think this is my favorite little installation. Our neighbor kindly lent us his wheelbarrow after we got a big pile of mulch delivered. But given its tempting upright position, the wheelbarrow soon found itself encumbered by a beach towel. And what’s worse, the little lime-green lad who lets the world know that PRECIOUS DARLINGS ARE PLAYING SO SLOW TO A HALT YOU BIG GOONS has snuggled up to him, as if to say, “the rude dignity of your outdoor life was left on the other side of that garage door, pardner. Can I offer you a juicebox? Seaweed snack, mmmhmm?”

I cannot tarry…our midnight cleanup efforts are starting in three…two…zzzzzz

Pepitas, baby!

Tonight I started what you might think is the most librul activity possible in this fair country…a vegan cooking class right in the People’s Republic of Cambridge! Of course Harvard Sq., PRC isn’t what it used to be, what with chain stores and hyper-expensive cupcakes despoiling the once-grungy landscape, but in the spirit of ideology-neutral healthy choices, there I was.

The instructor, Holly, actually ‘fessed up to being a former “veg” who couldn’t resist the midnight oink and came back to pigivorism. But she had some great recipes to jolt us out of the tofu doldrums, pronounced seitan like the Great Satan just like skeptical Ms. A at home, and after a bit of expostulating on RDAs and whatnot we got down to business (in the same kitchen at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education where I took a Thai class in 2001 and became (faux-modest shrug) perhaps the best Pad Thai cook my family has ever met).

Pasta with grilled cauliflower and green olives

The recipe that I worked on with a partner was a whole wheat pasta with sautéed cauliflower and a kind of tapenade-like sauce with green olive, parsley, red pepper flakes and lemon juice. Some of the key takeaways were: use a mammoth anti-personnel cast-iron pan if you have one; get the cauliflower good and caramelized before adding the salt because (chemistry alert) the salt’s effect on the water in the cauliflower will prevent browning; use plenty of the pasta water to steam the c’flower some more after browning; use a ton of green olives to fight through/brighten up the mass of pasta.

Tofu and asparagus/broccolini underway

This dish was probably a B or B+, but a couple of the other dishes we made were really good, especially a quinoa with grilled tofu, braised greens, roasted cherry tomatoes and a little pesto.

Next up, vegan burgers in the shape of Ralph Nader that you can prepare in advance and keep in the freezer.

With all the family get-togethers and class reunions over the past year or so, I keep running into people who say, “Josh, how’s the poetry going?” To which, for most of the past 12 years or so, I have answered: slowly or not at all.

I started writing poetry in high school, enough so that several of my early works survive in friends’ basements and are gleefully hauled up now and then to rub my face in the adolescentness of it all. I wrote a group of poems for my undergraduate thesis at Amherst College with two globe-bestriding dudes for advisors: Mary Jo Salter and David Sofield. It was a wonderful year of feeling ideas for poems come pretty freely, with nothing to stop me from scribbling down the first lines that came to me and wrangling quite a few actual poems into shape. In grad school, I kept it going somewhat but immersing myself in Adrienne Rich’s work both made my own feel that much more limited, and also challenged me in terms of the typical themes and tone of my own writing.

Then life intervened in ways both tragic and awesome, and I have had very limited writing for the past 10 years or so, with the exception of a few Amy- and girls-inspired poems that probably fit into the “Occasional Pieces” section of my future collected works. Last summer, I was gearing up to attend a poetry workshop at Amherst and got it into my head to get in touch with Dan Chiasson (Amherst ’93), who is an actual Young Poet to watch out for. He did a little interview with me, and in the process of reading his work as well as that of James Merrill and David Ferry for the workshop, I was inspired to write again in a new way: in fact, taking on The Topic for the first time in ten years. That particular piece isn’t ready to share yet, but just having a self-prescribed agenda of poems I’m working on feels great.

An ever-patient Josh holds up Miss M., our superhero, butterfly, blithe spirit

Like so many other aspects of mid-life existence, getting back into poetry means setting up some semblance of routine, discipline, regularity. Like Philip Roth, who writes standing up basically all day every day, I, too, have established a routine, in which I berate myself at least monthly for not writing more. The latest writing episode was actually on a plane to China, freed from email and FB’s siren calls. But today I happily hit upon a combined inspiration that should provide for a concrete path to a next poem. First off, young Miss M. finally eked out her report on butterflies, which is really a perfect theme for her (see photo). And it occurred to me that some of my best work was inspired by my friend Diane’s research on moths. My hope is to get back into that theme, which for whatever reason was so productive for me, and define some short-term requirement for myself (10 lines by next year, dammit!) that will be prescriptive enough to lead to some kind of output. Just to see how it feels to start and finish a poem, not on The Topic, in this new phase of my poetry life.

A Great Auk egg: while not a moth, this is nonetheless the egg of the beast whose name graces the American Ornithology Union's journal, in which Diane will soon have her article "Stable isotopes identify dietary changes associated with beak deformities in a small northern passerine”

And now through the magic of blogging, let me bring you “Moth Chronicle,” the poem I wrote as Diane was finishing up her PhD. Looking back I would identify these aspects, which in a corporate HR training setting we’d characterize in a “plus-delta” analysis (“plus”=a good thing; “delta”=something lousy that needs to change–God forbid you would say “Plus” and “Minus”):

On the plus side, I like the enthusiastic if ill-informed use of the Latinate etymology, eerily prefiguring my harping on such themes with patient and actual Classics-major Dan Chiasson; the made-up moth names, like “Lesser-Bellied Jack-o-Lantern,” which actually fooled some people; and the sustained effort to get at something universal in the lives and struggles of these animals. I also think I did a good job with my habitual blank verse. Areas for improvement: a habit of mine is to drift into rhyme or near-rhyme in the blank verse, which is almost as bad in a way as forcing the rhyme–it’s like, dude, either put up the net or don’t; the interweaving of Diane’s story/research with the various evocations of moths doesn’t work perfectly across the three sections of the poem; and there is a somewhat cheesy “e-moth” reference that is a bit too close for comfort to an extremely cheesy Prince song.

So like an Indiana Jones raiding Prince’s legendary vault of unheard songs, I hope to keep doling out old (or even new) sample of my work by way of urging on new material. Comments welcome.

No need to tell sophisticated readers that food trucks have transformed the lunch landscape across our fair country. While Boston hasn’t yet experienced the glories of Korean taco trucks, there is a special niche that only an enlightened MIT dude could identify and fill: Clover, the data-driven, organic veggie truck, now expanded to a small empire of several trucks and a fixed restaurant in Harvard Square. Which, I might add, was designed by my elementary school homie John Hong! Spring Hill School, holla!

Employee Number 2 for the Broccoli-Daikon Sandwich!

Having Clover’s MIT truck a few dozen yards from my office makes the vegan lifestyle so much easier to deal with. My mainstay is the seitan BBQ sandwich–if you believe Clover’s nutritional analysis, this bad boy has 17g protein, only 320 cals and 7g fat, presumably less if you pull an extra-virtuous move and hold the mayo. Today the one Clover employee who has managed to learn my name, Lucia, asked if I wanted to alpha-test their newest creation: the Broccoli-Daikon sandwich. Daikon strips, broccoli stem circles, sprouts and carrots with a soy-ginger spread in a whole wheat pita. In the spirit of quantitative truck operations, in which they try to report order times (manually on their whiteboard, or at the Harvard Sq location, digitally in real time), they were asking me to give feedback right away. Here goes.

Sectional view, Broccoli-Daikon sandwich

The overall vibe of the sandwich is definitely in the Vietnamese/Korean domain, with nice crunch and a serious, serious kick from the ginger in the soy spread. This is sort of like a spring roll but with the pungent intensity you associate with kim chee. My advice to the chef, who was standing by anxiously awaiting the Times reviewer’s word from on high, was to add a little sweetness to balance things out. As a glutton masquerading as a health-conscious person, I also wonder if this thing is going to hold me–recognizing that being “held” in the traditional giant pork burrito+32oz Diet Coke way I used to do is probably not a good thing and if you sneak back to Clover for a fried pickle after 3PM you are doing yourself a good turn.

Being a faithful account of my lunch experience,

J.S. Jacobs

The Emily Dickinson House surrounded by mini-houses painted with her words

We took advantage of the unlikely convergence from around the world of friends from the glorious (even if not actually the best) Amherst Class of ’92 to crash their Reunion this weekend. As usual the place was in verdant, classic-collegiate form, with fundraising officers disguised as trees and squirrels standing at the ready to accept Major Gifts from alumni overcome by sentiment. I felt the same as when I visited last September for a poetry workshop: these kids today don’t know how good they have it!

I was a bit concerned about being seen as a total out-of-sequence weirdo for coming to some other Reunion but, with the help of my trusty nametag to reassure people that they hadn’t forgotten I was in their class, all was forgiven. There is almost always a pleasant surprise at these sorts of gatherings made up, in the words of our class bard, by “Someone who lost their job in publishing pretending to be interested in the internet; someone who got tired of teaching in an underfunded public school pretending to think charter schools are not late capitalism at its most insidious but in fact the answer to our prayers; someone who used to build buildings out of wood and bricks pretending they’d rather build them out of recycled shopping bags, for less money; someone living in another country who spends all day buying vegetables at outdoor markets.” [This is a joke. But not entirely.]

The Kissing List

For me this was getting to see our friend Stephanie Reents read from her debut book of short stories that just came out last week, The Kissing List. If you buy only one book this year by an Amherst and Oxford graduate about the lives, loves and losses of women in their 20s, tinged both with Surrealism and chick lit, let this be the one! Actually, all cheap laffs aside, this is a great collection that is full of surprising and acute language, unstinting and humorous looks at life, and a lot more formal inventiveness than you might be expecting if you’re an average overeducated Jane to whom this is (literally) being marketed as something to put in your beach bag.

Fun fact about Reunion and this genre! Melissa Banks’ collection The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which probably made more of a splash than any other short story collection about young women’s (as opposed to teenagers’ or vampires’) lives, includes a name check of my buddy Bart (’91)’s ex-dog, Flora the bulldog! You can look it up!

Some say the world will end in fire...but surely not until this lovely Reunion is over?

From a Reunion perspective, the interesting thing about Stephanie’s book is how, as she described it, she was looking around on her hard drive a few years ago and realized that there were enough stories about young women’s lives that she could write a couple more and, as she more or less put it, put out a “fun, girls’ collection.” The choice to characterize her work in this way was just one of many different possible directions, although perhaps the wisest choice in terms of publishable avatars to assume. The career avatar I’ve taken on these days, the “academic administrator,” is not so very far away from the original choice I made, which was “Amherst English professor.” But being in the presence of actual Amherst profs and of people like Stephanie who have stayed on the creative career path, some of the differences stand out more, like the fact that as a matter of routine I say things like “going forward” in office discussion, and represent the glory that is MIT to executives at global manufacturing companies.

The Reunion question, “Are you happy with what you do?” (which actually only people who know and care about you will ask), brings to mind the sort of self-characterization that happens on purpose or “organically” (business-speak for “by accident over time”) for artists. In terms of my own career evolution away from poet-ephebe to whatever I am now, overall I am a lot happier in the current avatar than in the one I originally intended for myself. But I’ve been waking up in recent years–through writing this blog and (barely) getting back to writing poetry–to how important it is to reclaim some of the core aspects of those earlier, more passionate directions. We’ll see how effectively I have done so when the Class of ’93 gets together (Amy’s freshmen when she was an RC)…and ’94 (weren’t they cute as freshman)…and on and on.

Shanghai skyline. It's big.

Technically I am in Shanghai for a few days to help run the board meeting and a visiting committee review visit for my program’s sister initiative, China Leaders for Global Operations, which like the MIT version is a dual MBA/Engineering Master’s at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. [If you click on their link you might see yours truly looking like a big Western stiff in a group portrait with SJTU’s president.] This program has been around for five years or so and is doing well, despite some local challenges such as the fact that your average MBA switches jobs every 18 months in Shanghai, so getting off the hamster wheel for a full-time two-year program is too much for many potential candidates to handle.

I'm smiling even though India is lodged in my skull

We participated today in the graduation ceremony for our students, who are going on to jobs in Apple, Dell, and Amazon and other such companies’ burgeoning China operations. Both the China LGO students and their MIT counterparts see the value in being connected to each other (through periodic visits and some cool joint projects). As one MIT student told me, even though he doesn’t plan to live in China, for his career in manufacturing/operations having an understanding of how China works and knowing people there are essential.

Hot and Sour Soup: note the huge dose of pepper in the middle

However, my true and lifelong purpose in being here, or indeed anywhere, is the food. My colleagues today actually went to two different locations of Din Tai Fung, probably the best dumpling joint chain in the world. I got to join them for dinner, where, what with the whole vegan thing, my experience was indeed different than in the past. I did have one scrumptious xiaolongbao (dumpling with crabmeat and pork in hot broth inside the pouch) just for old times’ sake, and had to try the Kung Pao Cat (shout out to JWH and Wu’s Garden fans everywhere) (that was a joke). But the real health benefit for me of being vegan is how it saves me from my gluttony–without it, I am the champion vacuum cleaner at any table, known to my boss from our last trip as the man who will eat anything; with it, a somewhat monastic abstainer who gets sidelong glances from normal god-fearin’ omnivores. Anyway, despite their dumpling awesomeness, Din Tai Fung actually stars for me in the hot and sour soup category. Most American-Chinese joints will serve you something that is barely soup. let alone hot and sour. This number is potent in each category. [I highly recommend you buckle up before clicking on the soup photo: it is a dizzying look into the maw of a soup whirlpool. Amazing what camera phones can do now.]

Flower delivery bike in Tianzifang

Earlier I got the chance to go do Tianzifang, or Taikang Rd., a totally charming area where old alley-style homes have been redeveloped as shops, cafes, art galleries. This has been done without turning it all into a luxury mall (like Xintiandi)–the electric wires are still strung along about head-height and shops have been built into tiny spaces with “charming” holes in the wall turned into window displays. Funny somewhat-ironic trend: Obama shirts with him as Chairman Mao. Actually, not so funny or ironic in some parts of America. This is still a residential area so after lunch I heard a kid’s flute practice coming out of a window, bird song, and nary a motor scooter.

US Commerce Secretary is delighted to be at MIT

So if I haven’t been the most constant of bloggers lately it is because this was the week that a two-day conference I’ve been working on for a year-plus finally happened, with my program’s major annual governance meeting right after. The conference was called the Future of Manufacturing in the U.S., and was aimed at getting some head honchos from industry, government, labor and academia together to talk about this now quite timely subject, and incidentally shine a light on our program, which for 20+ years was called MIT Leaders for Manufacturing and which has always been an important piece of the MIT manufacturing “ecosystem” as we like to say. As a reminder, I help manage what is now called the Leaders for Global Operations program, a two-year dual Master’s program (MBA and Engineering) for people who want to be future VPs of manufacturing or similar function at big global companies like Boeing, Caterpillar, GM, Novartis, e.g. My particular role is mostly about the relations we have with our industry partners plus communications, a China sister program, and other jobs, but for the last year this conference has been a major focus for me.

Thankfully the conference turned out to be a success in the areas I could control–full house, major media in attendance–and hopefully will turn out to be a success in the longer term by letting us attract new industry partners, applicants to the program, and recognition at MIT and elsewhere that we are an important connector between industry and researchers/education. You can see MIT News’ story about the conference featuring one of the photos that we’ve been working towards–the MIT President and the US Secretary of Commerce together saying (not in so many words) that LGO, and its remarkable Director of Operations and Partner Integration, are awesome.

Some personal reflections, in businesslike bullet form:

• The life of US Cabinet members and other high officials has to be pretty bizarre. I walked with the US Dept. of Commerce Special Protective Service officers and an “advance man” through the route that the Commerce Secretary took from where his motorcade would drop him, through some academic buildings and over to where he would have coffee with our President before returning to give a keynote talk. It is hard to imagine having your every move planned out to the minute.
• Corporate CEOs and other top executives are perhaps a little less programmed but their words are very carefully parsed. Which I guess makes sense if you think about how litigious our society is and how much a casual comment could impact share prices, etc. Happily the CEOS of two partner companies of ours that were present, Amgen and Novartis, gave interesting talks and did some real Q&A afterwards. Getting these guys to come helped the “buzz” of the event.
• We were fortunate to have the VP of the United Auto Workers, Cindy Estrada, give a keynote and speak on a panel about the Workforce of the Future. I had only just been in a factory for the first time this January and met some UAW workers at a GM plant in Lansing, Michigan. Cindy Estrada was the first union official I had ever seen speak on the MIT campus, or indeed at any campus I’d ever been part of, and she brought what seems like an obvious reminder–that workers are part of the discussion about the future of manufacturing and our economy–but one which clearly goes ignored at universities most of the time. It was great to have her passionate contribution to this discussion that has such a human component.
• I was tweeting like a madman throughout the conference, as was Prof. Charlie Fine,  who sent out hundreds throughout the two days and then did a wrap-up talk. It is amazing to think what an essential and expected part of an event like this the Twitter component has become. You can see a web-based “story” of all the tweets, photos, and whatnot here.
• Running these sorts of events is exhausting and all-consuming. Don’t know how people in media/event roles do it.