Adam Yauch, aka MCA

This is turning into a regular season of remembrances that yank me back to my younger self’s passions and offer the same challenge of what the hell are you going to make of your life. First we lost Adrienne Rich, and now Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys, has died at 47 of cancer.

The classic take on the Beastie Boys is that they made hip-hop “safe for the suburbs.” That is certainly how they found their way to my ears: my first memory of listening to the BB is sitting in my car in the parking lot at Tysons Corner Mall at 10PM after finishing up my job folding shirts, rocking out to the Licensed to Ill album. What is really amazing about them is how they were able to stay together at the highest level as friends and creative partners while evolving so much as people. MCA was the lead jerk in the band when they were teenagers singing about Brass Monkey, but became the one to say “To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends/I want to offer my love and respect to the end” by the mid-90s (on “Sure Shot,” source for the title of this post), and shout out to his parents. There’s nothing here for me to say that hasn’t been noted elsewhere but his combination of maturing gracefully while staying (somewhat ironically) dope was unique.

My favorite Beastie Boys moment was in the summer of 1997 when my brother and I saw them as part of the Tibetan Freedom Concert on Randalls Island in New York–along with Blur, Bjork, Alannis and other mega stars of the 90s. The Beasties were in matching red mechanic suits, bounding around the stage at the peak of their powers. Watch the whole video, including the NYC skyline at the end. #RIPMCA

Neal Stephenson caricature by Flickr user DonkeyHotey

After my recent question about whether or not to read The Hunger Games, my scifi man JWH said if it comes down to a choice between that and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, go with Reamde. Reamde being the latest from the man that brought you Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Baroque Cycle, and other increasingly humongous and satisfying works of historically-minded speculative fiction. So I did, and I’m still plowing through the 1000+ page tome and throwing my back out carrying it to the train. But do I resent the lack of editing? Oh no. Let it go on forever. As usual, Stephenson is teh awesome. And there is some karma going on, as the man himself visited MIT this week to talk about his writing and how to make science-fiction like concepts a reality.

In a nutshell, Reamde is a novel about characters involved in a spies-and-terrorists global chase, kind of like Bourne but with irony and minorities, that also parallels and is interconnected with these same characters’ interactions within a big World of Warcraft-style online role-playing game. It is full of satisfying geeky exploits, awesome factoids that Stephenson digs up (though, to be honest, not as many per page as one finds in Baroque Cycle), and hair-singing gun battles.

What jumps out at me though is Stephenson’s shift towards a rather poetic appreciation for nature, in a way that is unusual for scifi, where you typically see the Earthly or extraterrestrial or orbital natural surrounding established in a minimal way to set a cool backdrop behind the writers’ battles and plot points. Take a look at this passage, maybe the most obvious example of this tendency in Reamde, in which Stephenson talks about the British Columbia landscape through which some of the characters roll in an RV:

Newborn calves suckling from their mothers’ udders. Huge geometric reshapings of mountainsides that she guessed must be mining projects. Canyons lined with marble the colors of honey and blood. Spindly steel-wheeled irrigation systems poised at the edge of barren cleared fields, like sprinters at the starting line, waiting for the season to begin. Mountains marching in queues from directly overhead to the horizon, one after another, as of to say, We have more where these came from. Deciduous trees budding out on the mountains’ lower slopes, engulfing the lone dark spikes of conifers in a foaming, cresting wave of light green.

The language here confers a lot of energy and seeming agency to nature, in particular in this last sentence with trees “budding…engulfing…foaming…cresting” like a wave up the mountain slopes, and enmeshes even the inanimate parts of the land with the life of its ecosystem, as with the canyon colored like honey and blood. It is beautiful work, much more like Adrienne Rich than William Gibson.

But why is Stephenson doing this? This is a guy who obviously cares about the landscape, but usually to make a scifi point, as in The Diamond Age where he has artificial islands and power sources whose geometry mimics natures (because that’s the most efficient structure), or to have the chance to evoke fractal geometry. I found myself torn between staying with this rendering of nature for its own sake and wanting to get to the next plot point. This tension syncs interestingly with observations that characters make in Reamde about the game-in-the-book, T’Rain (“Terrain”), whose underlying virtual landscape is supposed to be incredibly realistic but, as with this passage to a plot-driven reader, is usually just a scrim, a set of conditions to be dealt with unthinkingly as you rush to do battle and get gold.

Could it be that in his later career Stephenson is shifting the ground of speculative interest in his works from the built, fantastic/futuristic landscape of Snow Crash, to a natural landscape that can render (in the digital graphics sense) his characters’ interplay and struggles as either primal-timeless or very current? I don’t have a handle on this yet but it is interesting that in this, his first book in a while set in “the present,” and driven in part by parent/uncle-child relationships and older characters dealing with mortality, we see a turn towards a language of nature that many other authors have used to stage their wrestlings with these same emotions.

Amy's cornucopia of vegan Passover desserts (frum people, avert your eyes from the chocolate-covered marshmallows)

We went down to Connecticut to the Seder that my Aunt Marion has hosted many times over the years. I wouldn’t say I was feeling all vego-triumphalist or anything, but it was certainly a week full of affirmation for one’s vegan choices. Start with the high-profile Nick Kristof piece titled, appetizingly, “Arsenic in our Chicken?” Eat your Seder and Easter leftovers before you read that one. Amy had produced a magnificent vegan chocolate covered almond-encrusted matzoh selection. And then it turns out that my cousin Anne, who has to manage her health carefully, was advised to go vegan and (even with the occasional lamb chop) it is doing great things for her! It is a little weird to have a somewhat parallel existence health-wise, with us going vegan to one extent or another and one’s doctors (Anne’s unusually Eastern-Western medicine oriented doc excepted) generally just saying “drink plenty of milk” and get your protein.

L to R: vegan curry ginger carrot soup, full-strength matzoh ball soup. Flexovegan for Pesach, baby!

The good news is that Anne was able to rock a totally satisfying vegan stuffed cabbage and a curry ginger carrot soup to tide us over AND satisfy the Pesach rules. A perfect compliment to the decidedly non-vegan offerings from master Seder-maker Marion. Quinoa: not only nature’s super food, but pesadiche (with predictably stringent guidelines depending on which medieval sage’s followers you ask). Who knew? I’m going to assume that the tofu from the Momogoose food truck I frequent at work is sourced from a similarly magical-realist South American land whose so-called legumes escaped the notice of the medieval rabbis and are thus exempt from the traditional Ashkenazi strictures against anything your average Schmo might “confuse” with chametz. Between Anne and her sister Karen–temple education director and synagogue president respectively–and cousin David who is training to be a cantor, the group was if anything overqualified to steer the Seder ship. We got it done in a reasonable amount of time, none of the kids cried or freaked out, and it was both delicious and thought-provoking.

A and E and a bottle of M

Aunt Cindy and Aunt Marion, similarly blessed with cheeks, in a portrait by their grandfather

The New American line in the title is really a teaser to those MOT who are down with the New American Haggadah, the edition released for this year’s Seder season by an all-star literary lineup including editor Jonathan Safran Foer, translator Nathan Englander, and commenters including Jeff Goldberg and Lemony Snicket. I got a copy (sold out at the New England Mobile Book Fair! Panic in the aisles!) and read a bit this week. The two things I’d comment on are the text, from a user’s perspective, and the artwork. Right from the start, as a Reform Jewish reader you’re struck by the choice to translate Adonai as

Why is this place setting more righteous than other Seder tables? Not only do I have an awesome Egypt-motif placecard and well-rationed ingredients, but the use of my initial shows that the table is rich in Joshes

“Lord God-of-Us.” It has a vaguely science-fictiony feel–“we arrived at the third planet in the Gorblast system and were invited by natives to a seasonal ritual celebrating their Lord God-of-Us”–and obviously goes against the gender-neutral language that has become standard for Reform liturgy for over a decade. But this aside, it is a bit hard to imagine the multi-generational family group that would adopt this as their working haggadah, to be bought in volume and used for years. While there is some subtle cueing in the marginal notes, the layout’s unusual amount of perpendicular text and the text’s slightly precious quality–as young literary lions take on the ringmaster of the old-school haggadah–don’t make this version seem like one you’d hand equally to your great-aunt and your first-time Ma Nishtanahker. The artwork is grounded in beautiful thematic renderings of key Hebrew phrases from a given section with different graphic effects. In my visual arts-illiterate way I’d say that New American is comparable to the Open Door haggadah we used in their similar reference to the idea of remembering the Jews’ suffering under Pharaoh, the Nazis, and other enemies of the past by using a visual palette of looking through a veil, or seeing words/images disintegrated. I guess that is the look that inspires you to do some tikkun olam. Bonus points for Open Door: texts from both Adrienne Rich and Emmanuel Levinas (perfect together)!

Amy catches the biggest gefilte after four hours

My dad's mother Florence (center) with her sisters Sonia (L) and Lillian (R), c. 1950s

This Seder coincides with my finally trying to collect the minimum genealogical history of my family while the kids are young and everyone else is still lucid. Looking at the landing cards and naturalization papers, it is striking to see how in a couple of generations the family has been transformed not just in material comfort but in physical stature and health. The uprootings and traumas that these generations experienced make it not terribly surprising that their descendents have focused on the future, and (my aunt’s pilgrimage to Poland excepted) not looked back too much to the old country or the old neighborhood–though as time goes past we do have more and more people to remember with whom we once had the Seder. This makes for an interesting dynamic at Passover when we enjoin our children to remember the past and transmit to their children the story of the Jews’ escape from bondage. I’m still wrestling with what it means to balance the remembering and forgetting that are part of being in a family (especially of fairly recent immigrants) and the capital-R remembering that we talk about at Passover.

Happy Passover and Easter, to the tune of Ms. E on a shofar-like horn that Amy brought back from Chile:

All we can read is life. Death is invisible.

A yahrzeit candle belongs

to life. The sugar skulls

eaten on graves for the Day of the Dead

belong to life. To the living. The Kaddish is to the living,

the Day of the Dead, for the living.

Adrienne Rich, from “Living Memory” (1988)

Adrienne Rich, one of the major American poets of the 20th century as well as a leading feminist critic and writer, passed away at 83 this week. I spent most of my 20s writing my PhD thesis and other essays about her work, and while I have never worked so hard on any one project as I did trying to articulate my sense of Rich’s vision, when I moved on to other things after eight years I still had not really scratched the surface. Rich’s 60+ year career was characterized by amazing transformations: in her use of form, in her identification as straight or lesbian, in her progressively more expansive and authoritative rendering of the lives of varied people throughout the world. My take on Rich was pretty focused and waned quite a few years ago, so I just don’t have the generalist view that suits a true public appreciation. But I want to offer some brief thoughts on what compelled me to devote myself to understanding her work, and what that time in my life looks like in retrospect.

—–

A classic 60s look

When I turned up at Rutgers University for grad school in 1991, I really, really loved reading modern poetry and fiction and writing about it. I had limited experience of mediating this reading and explication through any kind of philosophical or theoretical context, which it turns out is kind of the job of an English professor. As these new criteria for talking about literature were dawning on me, I remember being moved for the first time by a poem that was both immediately accessible in a gut-punch way but also demanded to be framed by the broader political and theoretical context of its time. This 1980 poem was, in fact, called “Frame” and is in Rich’s major volume of selected poems, The Fact of a Doorframe. The poem that we read in a windowless basement seminar room recounts a young black woman being assaulted and arrested by the police after walking into a building to get warm while waiting for her bus. What makes the poem is the alternation of the straight third-person narration of this incident with the voice of a first-person witness, “standing all this time/just beyond the frame, trying to see.” At the poem’s end, after the woman has been thrown in jail and her fate silenced, Rich’s witnessing voice defies not only that silence but even the removal of the woman’s story into the past tense of fate, or a future tense of legalistic denials, and instead claims an immediate, current presence:

What I am telling you

is told by a white woman who they will say

was never there. I say I am there.

——-

Emmanuel Levinas and Adrienne Rich: two great tastes that taste great together!

Somebody told me back then that writing the PhD is a process of coming to understand why your chosen topic is in some sense autobiographical. That folk wisdom was probably true in ways that ended up being painful for me later on–but at the time, I felt grabbed in a powerful way by Rich’s effort to see and testify to the experiences of various people outside the privileges of whiteness or education or money she had enjoyed. And at the same time, I started reading a French Jewish philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas whose writings explored an ethics of ultimate, uncompromised (and maybe impossible) dedication to an Other. So in my dissertation I tried to define Rich’s “ethics of location,” in which she situates the varied groups of people to whom her poetry bears witness, in landscapes that speak to those people as well as to their strands of American history. I put this argument about Rich’s ethical commitments to those she wrote about into the context of Levinas’ philosophy of extreme commitment to the other.

——

Rather than get into whether that worked, or was a good idea, I think the best way to convey what was so compelling to me about Rich’s engagement of a reader/other in a historically specific location is the beginning of the last section of her best poem, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” From her 1991 collection of the same name–which I dug out of a box (!) last night after I heard of Rich’s passing–this poem really links Rich to a powerful American tradition of evoking “the spirit of place,” to quote Rich’s earlier take on the theme, stretching back to folks like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, and others. What made this poem so moving for me was that it preserved Rich’s characteristically rigorous and unyielding eye for injustice, and her evocations of natural beauty and starkness in tension with those injustices, but with a magisterial sense of hope and possibility, even in such a fallen world and for privileged sinners like me. The poem’s concluding section is an amazing binding-together of Americans in their places, in their different readings of Rich’s poem, and in her attempt to render the truth of those readers’ lives:

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

…

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

How I struggled as a young know-nothing to do justice to these lines. I think this stripped landing-place is what inspired me, even then, to bring in the ‘ol Levinasian absolutes of self and Other. This sense that Rich was evoking both the totally historical facts of the places we live in, and at the same time the way that life can make us feel we are staring out from those same places in a brutally new way, bereft of any support from whatever might have come before or might be hoped for to come. Rich’s power here is to generously convene this disparate collection of people in America and find a kind of community across their different, passionate engagement with these words.

—-

Rich in New York, 2006. Her proud resoluteness here reminds me of my grandma. Photo: NY Daily News

I spoke with Rich a couple of times in the five or six readings of hers I attended over the 90s and 00s. What was striking even then, in her early 60s, was how incredibly weakened she was by the rheumatoid arthritis that eventually overcame her. When I asked her once to inscribe her book to someone, she said she could only sign her name, that anything more would be too taxing for her hands. But whatever effort it took her to make it onto the stage and over to the podium, she always projected a fierce, controlled presence in reading her works, or those of others (Rumi comes to mind). Here’s a video from her reading at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey in maybe the late 90s that became part of a PBS series called “Poetry Everywhere.” I think I was too young to recognize how much of a physical struggle it must have been for her to work as hard as she did, decade after decade, through multiple operations and who knows what kind of daily discomfort. Meeting old lions like David Ferry and Richard Wilbur at Amherst last year really brought home what kind of focus, abstinence and self-will it takes to push yourself as a writer every day without fail. I can only add this dimension to my respect for Rich’s achievement.

—-

How is it that I am not writing this as the Professor of Rich Studies at a college

Would you let this man teach your kids about poetry? My headshot as "Dr. J" after finishing my PhD, 1997. I'm wearing the Julius Erving Sixers jersey and applying the stethoscope to Rich's book. Get it?

somewhere, clad entirely in black (or tweed–or black tweed!), in an office surrounded by iPad 3s displaying a live feed of tweets about Rich and other meta-literary figures? The reality is that Rich and Levinas together were two extremely big apples for a punk like me to bite, and after chewing for a while what I produced was just barely starting to be the kind of material that gets people hired in a brutally competitive job market. There were other dimensions to my exit from the profession. My advisor, a trim South African who had unflappably navigated the academic politics of both Derrida and Joyce, sat me down belatedly at the MLA meeting in San Francisco in 1999–a couple of years after I finished my PhD and was wondering why I couldn’t get a job interview–to observe that people who do single-author dissertations tend to be identified personally and politically with the authors they write about. So there was a bit of dissonance between the weird-ass straight white male person pictured above and the avatar of Rich’s lesbian feminist poetry and criticism that search committees might have been looking for. But honestly, it all worked out much for the best. I look at my friends who have succeeded in academia and they came out of the PhD phase with a much more focused, coherent, savvy take on what they were doing and why people needed to hear about it than I had. Ironically, the 12 years since then that I’ve spent in higher ed administration, particularly the communications roles I’ve had lately, have forced me out of my happy poetical garret and made me a much better spokesman for myself and my passions. And the bigger life picture is that academic success would likely have meant sitting somewhere with “faint flakes driven/across the plains’ enormous spaces around [me],” far from Amy, far from my parents, when we have needed to be together.

—-

Rich’s 1988 book Time’s Power is I think the under-recognized gem of her career, which has a sustained, at times mystical focus on memory that still strikes me deeply. The book ends with a poem called “Turning” that characteristically traces lives across a Western landscape, provides a frank and loving appraisal of Rich’s partner Michelle Cliff, and ends with a direct address to what seems to be a G-d-like presence. I will close with these brave final lines of the poem.

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012. May her memory be a blessing.

Whatever you are that has tracked us this far,

I never thought you were on our side,

I only thought you did not judge us.

Yet as a cell might hallucinate

the eye–intent, impassioned–

behind the lens of the microscope

so I have thought of you,

whatever you are–a mindfulness–

whatever you are: the place beyond all places,

beyond boundaries, green lines,

wire-netted walls

the place beyond documents.

Unnameable by choice.

So why am I out here, trying

to read your name in the illegible air?

–vowel washed from a stone,

solitude of no absence,

forbidden face-to-face

–trying to hang these wraiths

of syllables, breath

without echo, why?

Who could possibly have a problem with attractive teens battling to the death to serve an autocratic overlord?

This week I polled FB to ask folks if I should read the Hunger Games books. From seasoned sci-fi people the answer was, yeah go ahead, it’s well-executed popcorn so why not. Don’t let your kids read it…yet. No question on that as our Miss A. is a sensitive soul and even the most youthful of pre-YA dragon/adventure type books raise some questions. But in fact there is not much chance I will read these books, and not because I’ve become a genre fiction-scorning snob (like my buddy who said, who has time for Hunger Games when W. G. Sebald beckons?). The strange reality is that after a lifetime of reading dystopian fiction I’ve become a bit freaked out by it. How could this have happened?

In thinking over the whole realm of alternative-reality technology-driven fiction that I’ve loved my whole life, I realize that I can scarcely think of a major figure that hasn’t worked in a little post-apocalpytic magic. Even ol’ Heinlein, who I look back upon as being Mr. Starship Optimist of the 60s/70s, had the militaristic post-alien-attacks Earth society of Starship Troopers, and of course Bradbury brought us Fahrenheit 451, not to mention the post-atomic Martian Chronicles stories. I read things like A Canticle for Leibowitz a bit too late, I think…even though the TV movie “The Day After” happened during high school for me, I was not marked as profoundly by worries about nuclear annihilation as kids maybe 5-15 years older than I was, though a lot of the books mentioned here were. But obviously William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which ushered in a wholly new and kickass period in the genre, rest on a foundation of dystopian (not entirely post-apocalyptic…except if you happened to be in Bonn when it was nuked) corporatist worlds with enfeebled nation-states and a lot of entropy. And then you’ve got the Terminator and Mad Max movies…nuff said. Clearly this is one of the dominant themes of great scifi. And for evangelical tastes, there’s the Left Behind series!

But I’d be curious to know how many scifi children out there also were haunted and inspired by these slightly less mainstream but no less powerful books–listed more or less in order of publication–which may bear on my Hunger Games theme:

• Davy: this novel by Edgar Pangborn, from the mid-60s, recounts a young guy’s romp across a post-atomic North America. The part that stayed with me was where a woman in his troupe/gang gives birth and it is a mutant monster that has to be killed, after much hope that at last normal children could be born once more. I remember reading this in my room on rainy days while listening to “Under Pressure” by Queen and Bowie, and hope that my contemporaries can respect or take pity on the cultural matrix that created me.
• The Long Walk: Steven King (writing as Richard Bachman) produced in the late 60s (as a college freshman!) an obvious but little-acknowledged progenitor of the Hunger Games. The book is about teenage boys in a future Amurikka who enter the Long Walk, a chance to walk the farthest of 100 boys and win a big prize from the Major who rules the country. The winner walks, losers (anyone who falters) gets shot by the side of the road. I am always reminded of this book when setting out for a day of walking and reminding myself to wear leather-soled shoes and not sneakers…Tip #3 for Walkers.
• The Sheep Look Up: a John Brunner book from the early 70s that introduced me to the eco-dystopia genre. Lots of vaguely remembered, horrible scenes here, like a character looking out across the river in New York and seeing a big bunch of worm-like garbage monsters seething…that kind of thing.
• The Handmaid’s Tale: despite what you may think of me as an Adrienne Rich-lovin’ male feminist, I don’t really have the wymyn chops to claim this book as a major inspiration. But I find it comes back to haunt me in surprising ways: for example, when taking our girls as babies to the grocery store I was reminded of how Atwood’s theocratic revolution started–with crazed women stealing babies from their mothers at the supermarket, right here in Cambridge, Mass.

I see vampire people...

So with all this said, what would possibly give me pause from picking up the Hunger Games like the rest of the world? Last year I picked up a recent  entrant into the Twilight-inspired sweepstakes of defining a new multi-book, multi-movie franchise involving vampires, hot young things, and whatnot. It’s a book called The Passage by Justin Cronin, which starts in near-future US with an ill-fated military research effort to create a bunch of vampires (we’ll use them for special ops!) who end up escaping and taking over the continent. We then flash forward 70 years to a lone bunch of survivors who leave their fort to seek solutions…in Vegas it turns out. From an objective standpoint, you’d have to say this is a decently-written but derivative work, with big debts to The Stand, for starters. It is the kind of book I’ve been picking up and eagerly devouring for many years.

But I found The Passage strikingly, unprecedentedly troubling. It is almost embarrassing to tell, but there is a section that recounts the last gasp of the US as a functioning nonvampire state: a special armored train is prepared, with flame-thrower positions to defend against vampire attacks, to take some children from Philadelphia (last surviving city) to the fort in the West where a Citie upon a Hill will be founded to hold out against the darkness. Enough of the train makes it to seed an attractively multicultural group of warrior youths who represent the main cast of characters 70+ years later, whose minds are haunted/infected by the original bunch of vampires created by the military. Because the vampires have well-nigh supernatural powers, OK?

I read this while in Florida with our family and my folks. The train full of kids haunted me. Even (sorry) the whole brains-infected-by-uber-vampires thing was freaking me out. I had to stop reading and still had trouble getting to sleep…not exactly imagining what would happen to my kids in the train, or any transposition so direct as that, but still haunted. I didn’t finish the book.

There are some obvious changes in my life since my youthful heyday of reading this kind of thing: there are losses; there is the gain of wife/three daughters. Are these enough to explain my loss of appetite for this particular strain of scifi? Tell me, reader, it is not the vampire bit.

I went over to the Wikipedia page for the Hunger Games and felt some of this same anxiety creep over me when reading about Katniss, Peeta and pals. I think I might have to take a break from this post-Long Walk category. Actually an interesting test would be to read either the Long Walk itself, or perhaps The Stand, to see how I react to those. Then we could trace the literary virus at work here down the youthful-exploitation-dystopia or vampire branches of the scifi family tree. I hope somehow that I need to add fiber, sleep more and avoid vampires rather than avoid apocalypse and its aftermaths.

PORTRAITS IN ABJECTION

My commute starts with a bucolic walk down tree-lined suburban streets, where professional squirrels amble by on their way to Starbuck’s before their first therapy clients turn up. Then I take the Green Line-Riverside “D” Branch trolley–at the forefront of innovation when it was launched in the 50s–in to Park Street, where I trudge a few yards and transfer to the Red Line, an actual subway that goes past Mass General Hospital on the way to my stop at MIT. Whether it’s because Mass General is served by the Red Line or they just figure it is populated by people suffering from a whole spectrum of mental illnesses, the majority of in-car ads on the Red Line are calls for participants in various medical/clinical trials. Depression, post-traumatic stress, painful shyness, body image problems…all these conditions are sterotypically evoked, not with little funhouse mirrors to reflect back our own fellow straphangers’ insane membranes, but with stock photography depicting (usually) young women in various postures of despair or retreat from the world.

I got to thinking about the creative process behind these ads. These aren’t the slick Ad Council creations that tell us Dan Quayle’s mind is a terrible thing to waste. I picture an assistant communications director at MGH being tasked with churning out ten of these each week. She has a subscription to a stock photo website, the MBTA ad placement person on speed dial, and not a lot of time to get it done. Two minutes of googling for, say, “shy girl” images will reveal the startling pathologies that these health communicators must navigate…you’re basically split between hot teens in postures of debilitating, Demi Moore breakdown in St. Elmo’s Fire-style despair, and hot teens barely concealing their boobs with their hands because they are, um, so very shy.

I think given the circumstances these ads are not so appalling in their reliance upon images of female despair. But this is Boston, OK, the self-declared Hub and, not too long ago, the wellspring of a group of kickass poets whose self-declared mission was to get the most exacting details of their own sojourns through sexual and emotional hell on paper, or read aloud with cigarette waving to a rapt group of undergrads and divorcees. I’m talking about the Confessionals, baby, and so without further ado, let me try out a few revised public service announcements.

Robert Lowell. The daddy (to quote Sylvia) of them all. Who knows how many people might look up at this ad and think, “I’m not the only one who ties the car keys to my thigh. Maybe there is some help for me and that no-good bastard significant other of mine!”

Anne Sexton. She took the baton from Lowell and clocked the Brothers Grimm over the head with it. She is what Ani DiFranco is still working on becoming: a righteous babe. And her excoriating self-revelations, in lovely stanzas, are exactly what this town needs to wake people up to the fact that their lives are basically a big mess and people at social service organizations are waiting by the phone to help!

William Blake. He is the prophet whose cry echoes through the mid-century poets (at least a bit…OK he may be completely irrelevant but work with me here). And if you are an agency with a floral or baby or little lamby or chimneysweep-related mission…he could help you out, yo!

UPDATE: Just in time, a link to WWI and WWII-era anti-VD posters!

Watertown Baha'is rule!

As I write the Five Days of Ayyam-i-ha are winding down…Amy is rustling around downstairs getting ready for E’s birthday party on Saturday (24 3 and 4 year olds–brace for impact!), heedless of the fact that she must rise before sunup to eat and say prayers before the Bahá’í 19-day fast (Ramadan-style) begins. So let’s quickly explore this holiday that is both like and not like Fat Tuesday, sounds a whole lot like a Jewish ritual skullcap, and provides yet another opportunity to explore Persian rice-based cuisine.

Major League shortstop Khalil Greene: on the All-Bahá'i Team! You know he's down with Ayyam-i-ha.

The Bahá’í calendar has 19 months of 19 days each=361 days, four (or five) shy of a year. As befits a faith that views science and learning as vitally important, this shortfall is remedied by a five-day period whose name means “days out of time.” Bahá’ís see this as a time for doing gifts of charity and community service, welcoming family and friends, and, at least in North America, exchange gifts. For our girls, the modest gift giving at this time completes the extremely robust three-legged stool of gifting that they enjoy right through the winter (closing out the Hanukkah and Christmas cycle). In a way the experience of American Bahá’ís with Ayyam-i-ha strikes me (a friend, not an adherent) as kind of similar to American Jews and Hanukkah. Placed within the gigantic gravitational field of Christmas, we people of minority faiths seem to find a way to take whatever holiday happens to fall more or less within the gifting zone and make it work.

E the Pirate says, 'Aaarh-ya-mi-ha!"

So how is Ayyam-i-ha like Fat Tuesday? Last day (or five!) before a period of fasting and reflection…dedicated in part to celebration…and everyone competes to see who can get the most bead necklaces. Actually there is nothing in the sacred texts that defines what to do all that precisely, which sort of fits with my friendly outsider’s impression of the faith as taking much more of an open-source approach than the big three. Bahá’ís do not have clergy, so it’s up to the members of the local community to organize themselves and worship according to their own sense of adherence to the faith’s precepts. OK, those precepts include no drinking, so we can remove one Fat Tuesday parallel and generally deflate our dream of eating at a Bahá’í-themed chain restaurant in a big box mall near you.

Sabzi: not just for breakfast anymore

The local community in our town has many Bahá’ís who were born in Iran and emigrated to the US. Through them I have learned yet another horrifying aspect of the Iranian regime that most Americans probably don’t know, which is that Bahá’ís are deprived of all civil rights in Iran, cannot attend university, and have faced violence and death since the revolution. Having these Persian folks around provides a welcome opportunity to get to know this ancient and deliciousdistinguished culture without the terrible baggage of the current regime. It’s a comfortable situation as a Jew because all gatherings revolve around enormous, highly specialized and taste-specific meals. This particular dinner started with sabzi, which just means greens, to accompany one of the many awesome rice dishes that are the Persian specialty. Our elegant hosts (both doctahs, naturally) explain that the main dish tonight is adas polo: polo is the term for rice cooked with something in it, and adas are lentils. There is another kind of rice dish that involves saffron, and carefully burning the bottom part of the rice in just the right way, and flipping the whole thing so that the rice and whatever has been cooked with the rice stays together beautifully. I keep hearing it is a 2500 year old culture so give me a few more years to get all these down. Please pass the rice.

Years ago, Amy and I realized that Ayyam-i-ha sounds a heck of a lot like “Yarmulke” (pronounced “yah-mi-kuh” by us Amurricans). We thought, what more beautiful and instructional way to further connect our two faiths for the sake of the girls (sniff!) than to write a charming, best-selling children’s book that explores these punny relations. Like our other book projects and just about all our projects that involve creative time and reflection, this has not yet come to fruition, but with apologies to Richard Wilbur and his wonderful books of Opposites (poems for kids of all ages), here is my effort to bring these homonyms even closer:

Ayyam-i-ha tops off the year

With extra days and pre-Lent cheer.

A yarmulke also sits on top,

A reverent grace note on your kopf.

Whether in Hebrew or in Farsi,

The Good Book says to raise the bar, see

How both years and heads can fit

A built-in extra little bit.

The Price is Right! Click for theme song

So I had some unplanned outpatient surgery last Sunday in a sensitive spot, and have been mostly flat on my back in bed or soaking in a tub since then. When I was a kid and stayed home sick from school, I would lie on the couch and watch game shows on WDCA Channel 20 until The Price Is Right ended at noon. Then it was a vast wasteland of soap operas for the rest of the afternoon and I was on my own in those pre-Internet, pre-cable, pre-Betamax days of yore. (So after a healthy lunch I would switch over to reading my parents’ leather-bound editions of Voltaire, Spenser, Milton, and other classix. That’s why I’m the blogger you know and love today.)

What have I been up to this week? For starters, a ton of work. It is pretty amazing what you can accomplish, even while clenched in agony or sprawled in a Percoset stupor, as long as the wifi is working and you don’t have to make a bunch of new friends with your pearly whites and manly handshake. I had a telecon with some colleagues who were basically talking over each other and not communicating terribly well for 75 minutes about budget stuff, relieved wonderfully by having loving Miss A. kiss my cheek, smooth my back and ask “why are they talking like that? And what is a receivable?”

I also have been spending some time with John Keegan’s one-volume “First World War,” thanks to my military historian advisor JWH. This is probably the first time since World Civ in 9th grade that I really studied the war and it was a shock to realize how quickly things escalated from ol’ Franz Ferdinand getting it in Sarajevo to the start of hostilities. Keegan’s insight is that the evolution of warfare planning, especially in the sort of general staff colleges that made a science out of “start dates” keyed to the transportation of men and supplies across a given stretch of railroad, coupled with the primitive old-boy state of diplomacy at the time, made it much more likely for any given spark to move events towards war than had been the case in previous eras. The scale of human loss in the war was unimaginable and makes me extremely grateful to be undergoing my own very mild procedure and recovery under the most accommodating circumstances.

What do these Economist readers know that you don't? Read the damn magazine and you'd find out

I also got to read almost an entire issue of The Economist. This magazine generates a powerful sense in me of participating in the world’s most urbane and witty seminar on what I scarcely realized was fascinating about, say, Malaysian ethnic politics, and at the same time illustrates the impossibility of ever really knowing shit about shit, to quote the Bard. The magazine just started having a special section each week with reporting on China, focusing on the leadership transition that’s happening over the coming year, the politics of the environment and the environmentals of politics, tea cultivation, all that good stuff. Having started to work over the past year in Shanghai, and still hardly knowing anything about China except from my few observations and collegial contacts, it is interesting to see how much mainstream Western media have made a priority of reporting on China in the past few years. I bet that if I had turned over from watching The Price is Right to read the Washington Post in 1979 that weeks would have gone by without a China story in the paper.

Then, just in the past couple of days, I caught the wave of #Linsanity that is sweeping the nation and much of East Asia. If you are my parents or aunt I probably need to mention that Jeremy Lin, Harvard ’10, is the first Chinese/Taiwanese-American kid to make it in the NBA. He bounced from one team to another and ended up playing for the hard-up Knicks this week, and in five games has led them to five wins and basically stood the city on its head. I turned on the Knicks – Lakers game last night for the first time since I lived in New Jersey 12 years ago and was thrilled to see Lin and the team beat Kobe and the Lakers. Just now, in what seems to have been a much worse performance, Lin nonetheless scored the game-winning free throw to help the Knicks beat the T-Wolves in Minneapolis. Let the Lintasy continue.

What’s next for the big guy? Long walks in the woods, carefree eating, and meetings conducted while sitting upright. Looking forward.

Me with Bart and Chris, 2012. Now scroll down to see an uncanny donning of hair and youthful boppiness through the years.

IN THE BEGINNING, there was schmaltz. From out of this primordial goo emerged an Eastern European Jewish cuisine that gave the world such delights as the latke, the more mysterious derma, and chopped chicken livers. Back in the winter of 1989, 13 of my Amherst friends and I went along with our worldly-wise NYC friend Bart to dinner at Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, at the corner of Chrystie and Delancey on the Lower East Side. Whether members of the Tribe or not, we were enchanted by the David Lee Roth-MCs-a-Bar-Mitzvah vibe, the hora dancing beneath a dingy ceiling filled with business cards and photos of a beaming Ed Koch, and the schmaltz-laden food that is surely the finest of its kind–besides your grandma’s. Bottles of vodka frozen in blocks of ice start the evening, and egg creams made with Yoohoo poured from a great height into glasses of milk and then spritzered complete it. Amen.

Every January since then, at least a few of the original posse, along with family and other Amherst and work friends who must number now into the hundreds, have gone out for dinner at Sammy’s. It’s a lot harder to get a minyan these days now that those of us that all used to live in greater NYC have scattered to other cities and continents. But the spirit of Sammy’s has persisted as a very meaningful way for us to stay connected with each other and with our more youthful, drunken and less-bald selves.

The food at Sammy’s really is pretty amazing, and consistent through the years, once you get through the initial perceptual alteration of seeing a diner-style syrup dispenser full of rendered chicken fat (schmaltz) as an essential condiment for every dish rather than an instant heart attack. Typically the starters are the big fan favorites, in particular the chopped chicken livers prepared tableside [see video above] with braised onions and schmaltz mixed in liberally, hopefully excluding the flop sweat of one’s appalling waiter. After the drama and sheer satisfaction of the liver, the garlic sausage (it’s amazing anyone ever hooked up after going to Sammy’s), and the derma

Pardon me, but could you pass the schmaltz, and remove your hand from my outfit? (c. 1995)

(seen by some as a lingering coelocanth-like relic of an ancient starfaring race that once dwelt on the Lower East Side), the vodka shots really start to kick in, and it is a wonder that anyone can ever touch the massive “flapper steaks” that extend over the slides of a plate like a giant squid’s tentacles over the sides of a fishing boat. Don’t forget the creamed garlic to mush in on top! After all that, or perhaps a Fred Flintstone-like veal chop, it’s rugelach and egg creams for everyone and a brisk walk along the Sarah Roosevelt Park towards whatever poor tavern is about to receive our merry group.

Please...go away and let me die (c. 1993)

But actually the food is just the delightful stage on which the real play of Sammy’s takes place: the revelry, dancing and singing that unite Jews and goyim alike in bliss. I have the song “Two Jews for Every Goy” stuck in my head, just one of the many kosher and/or offensive bar mitzvah tunes that a succession of Hammond organists have blasted out over the years to get the people off the wall and out of their chairs. The Amherst crew has numbered up to a max of about 35 and always brings the noise, peaking I think in the mid-90s when most of the core group from 89 still lived in the New York area. There was the anti-Sammy’s one year when for some reason we went to a Lebanese joint in midtown…the Sammy’s-in-exile the year of the massive blizzard when Sammy’s was closed but some fancy Japanese place was open…plus my bachelor party and other non-Amherst outings with the family contra all medical advice.

Me and Aaron, c. 1997

The stories I could tell…but not in this space. Suffice it to say that Sammy’s has been an amazing excuse for our group of friends to get together in totally uninhibited fashion and a convenient, if occasionally gross, venue for introducing girlfriends, parents, wives, and now kids (!) to our little community. If you have read this far, probably you are no stranger to Sammy’s or to the concept, and you are cordially invited to contact me about The Twenty-Fifth Annual Visit in January 2013. Start exercising now. Peace.

Robyn vs. Björk (Credit: neonlimelight.com)

A few of my friends and I have coincidentally found ourselves spellbound for the past few months by Robyn, the Swedish pop singer. She became a sort of neo-whitegirl-soul star back in the 90s with “Show Me Love,” but that didn’t seem so special to me at the time. Funnily enough, I got turned onto Robyn’s new material last September by a tweet from Spencer Ackerman, a writer on national security who is a big punk rock fan. Another tangential benefit of social media! Here is Robyn’s killer performance on Saturday Night Live in December:

My whole family and I have gotten into Robyn in a big way. Amy and I put her on to do fitness videos together and mute the oppressively annoying Jillian Roberts and her lame-ass faux-dance tracks. And the girls have all enjoyed learning the songs and admiring Robyn’s ability to dance (albeit weirdly) on five-inch platform shoes. So I really love her, OK?

But…for all of Robyn’s nonconformism to the stereotypical dance music chick persona, she still seems like a basically rational person, putting her own compelling and mature (like me! or maybe I’m just old) spin on the awesome house+Prince+Michael Jackson toolbox she picked up in Sweden. I happened across a YouTube of Robyn covering Bjork’s hit “Hyperballad,” done as a tribute with Bjork in the audience when Bjork was awarded some Swedish prize, and while Robyn sang her Swedish heart out there was an essential piece missing. I don’t know if it is the voice–massive, on the verge of breaking in the high notes–or the craziness behind the voice, but I still find that Bjork and P.J. Harvey, my two main singer crushes of the 90s, exert a more primal draw on me than Robyn’s irresistable beats.

For sure, in terms of pop songs and boyfriend characters, no would-be playa can “handle” Robyn. But I never doubt she can handle herself and that she is in perfect control of the tough-freak persona she has made for herself. With Bjork and PJ, on the other hand, I get a kind of Sylvia Plath feeling of intense craft being used to put a hex-line around incredibly powerful emotional forces that would otherwise split singer and listener into a million pieces.

I am a totally uninformed hack when it comes to the Classics, but for some reason in thinking about this PJ/Bjork vs. Robyn distinction, the two crazier singers were reminding me of Jim Morrison, and then my thoughts turned to the Apollonian (no relation to Prince’s girlfriend) vs.  Dionysian dichotomy of Greek drama. In crude terms the Apollonian tendency is towards order and rationality in the face of chaos and fate, whereas the Dionysian tendency is towards immersion in nature, chaotic forces, and the irrational or that which is beyond reason.

So bringing it back to Robyn: is it appropriate to label her as essentially rational and looking to exert a supremely danceable order upon the chaotic forces of bad boyfriends and jealous b*tches she encounters in her pop world? Or should I go back to my knitting (I’m doing a nice warm corset for Robyn in Amherst purple and white)?

Here is a mind-blowing performance by PJ and Bjork of the Stones’ “Satisfaction”:

At our synagogue, Temple Shalom of Newton, a year ago at the High Holidays our temple president talked about how uninvolved he had been in temple life about 8-10 years before and the slow, incremental process of engagement by which he ended up becoming president. He asked everyone to raise their hand who had nothing to do with the shul except coming for High Holidays, and when many sheepishly held up their hands, he said, congratulations,  you are halfway to becoming temple president! For many reasons, I don’t think that is in my future, but this week I joined two different temple committees/programs.

The first is the search committee for a full-time cantor. Growing up in the Reform movement, and in particular at the apex (nadir? apogee?) of Reform-ness in the 70s and 80s with a rabbi who pretty much rejected all the trappings and traditions of the faith, I had no idea what a cantor was. Since then I’ve had some brief experience with both a traditional, operatic male cantor at a Conservative temple my parents belonged to, and also guitar-strumming young female cantors at the traveling High Holidays service offered in town by the local Reform movement. And I’ve also listened probably three hundred times, mostly while driving in Portugal, to the Oy Baby! CD of beautiful child-friendly arrangements of Jewish classix by the singin’ Schneiderman Sisters of Portland, Oregon.

With all this expertise I was, naturally, a no-brainer pick for the cantor search committee and I am glad to be on it. The rabbis, board members, music committee chairs, lifelong singers and other machers have a lot to learn from someone like me. It was a karmically arranged prompt for me to start reading The New Rabbi, a book about the search for the head rabbi at a big Conservative temple outside Philadelphia, which I gave to Amy’s mom nine years ago while she was on the pastor search committee at her church.

I have also joined a group of temple leaders and staff in a series of gatherings called “Project Honi” that is working through some exercises from the management world aimed at getting the temple to an even better place as an institution. It was a fun and stimulating first gathering, if for no other reason than to meet some of the (actual) temple lay leadership and hear their perspectives. We watched a video of management guru Jim Collins giving a talk based on a recent book of his about how great institutions fall. The talk was given to a church-hosted gathering that our temple’s leadership attended last year and which impressed upon them the potential for Collins’ “good to great” thinking to inspire our temple at a time of several important transitions.

Now without question Collins’ framework, with thought exercises like “count your blessings–literally” and “who is on your bus” (i.e. who are the people in key leadership roles, are they right for your institution, what’s your plan if not), provides many good opportunities to motivate our group to work in a focused way on planning for the temple’s future. I am glad to have the chance to be part of the group as we address these questions together. But it must be said that Collins comes across as a fairly smarmy, self-congratulatory guy who acts as though he has to install an enormous step-down transformer to avoid electrocuting his audience with the sheer force of his brilliance. While we were watching I was struck by the physical resemblance of Collins to Alan Cumming, the Scottish-born actor who hosts “Masterpiece.” Tell me if I’m dreaming here. Something about the little moue that hovers on Collins’ face. I think this could be a great new role for Cumming if he needs the work.

Jim Collins, former "Cabaret" star

Alan Cumming, management scholar and motivational speaker

The LGOs look out over Boeing's Paine Field in Everett on a beautiful day

My all too short but intense journey with the MIT LGO class of 2013 on part of their two-week tour across the country to our program’s partner company factories came to a close on Friday in Seattle. We had a visit to two big Boeing sites: Boeing Field in Seattle, where we saw the 737 paint shop and customer delivery center, and the big-place factory in Everett along with the fancy 787 Dreamliner Gallery where customers pick interiors. Boeing has a huge backlog of orders–thousands for the 737–and is working hard to figure out how to increase their rate of production.

We started our day with a briefing by Boeing’s customer delivery leaders and split up to tour the different facilities. In the paint shop, we saw what might be the largest-scale arts and crafts project going: each 737 has its wings taped up with brown paper, which is not reusable but at least is recycled, while workers on scissor lifts or even suspended by harnesses apply the paint over a three-day cycle (four if you want a sponge paint look). While many airlines are shifting to mostly white paint schemes, because of cost and reduced paint weight, some like Southwest still find bright colors an important part of their brand. For Southwest, they paint the whole plane yellow, then the whole plane red, then the whole plane blue. What we saw in process was a Lion Air plane, which has a lion insignia in red on a white background. They have recently introduced stencil decals that stick onto the plane, reducing the need for hand taping–though they do still tape by hand for racing stripes. The paint shop workers are among the most desired in the company and from several perspectives it seems that Boeing has made it one of the top such operations in the world. It is a remarkably clean shop and demonstrated good collaboration of management and labor, for example in a recycling initiative that a worker suggested and Boeing implemented with great cost savings and positive environmental impact. But the skilled workforce is quite old on average and the company has a challenge ahead of it to transition to younger workers.

737 delivery at Boeing Field in Seattle with a lost 787 asking directions. Photo: Boeing

On the 737 delivery field, we saw all 17 stalls taken with planes ready for inspection and approval by customers. Their insignia show that most of the planes are going to developing-world markets. We got to walk around another Lion Air 737 and stick our heads into engines and wheel wells. One of our overeducated wiseacres asked if the noise baffle shielding around the engine might be called the “shroud of turbine.” We saw the Lion Air team walking the plane and putting red masking tape to indicate problem areas, reminding me of that anxious moment when you turn in your rental car after maybe incurring a few dings. All in all it was an amazing experience to see the planes bound for countries all over the world, and get a glimpse at the mundane reality of how customers kick the tires.

The Boeing 777 line in Everett moves a few inches each hour. Mind the gap. Photo: Seattle P-I

We rode out to Everett and had a great lunch discussion with Boeing execs, many of whom are LGO alumni (there are more alumni in Boeing than in any other company). Then we got a tour of the main factory there, the biggest building under one roof in the world, where the 747-8, 777, and 787 are built. It was a great learning experience to see how Boeing has refined their manufacturing approach for the 787, which has a super complex global network of companies building completed sections of the plane that are then joined together at this site and in Charleston, SC. The 777 line is much more mature, with the thousandth plane currently in process, and the line actually moves. The similarities and contrasts to the auto plants we saw in Michigan offered just the sort of big-picture manufacturing context that this tour is meant to provide to the students.

I think I'll take the lie-flat seat in an oxblood leather with heated cupholders

Boeing staff then made a presentation to the students about the internship projects being offered this year, and then we toured the Dreamliner Gallery, which has simulated interiors and showrooms full of the various standard selections for coffee pots, bathroom fixtures, seats and fabrics, and everything else you need to trick out your new 787. It was a reminder of how the sales process goes hand in hand with the engineering and manufacturing processes: if you want to design your own custom seat or pick a fabric that matches the Rosebud sleigh of your childhood, it has a big impact on the time it takes to order and get these non-standard items ready to install. The genial sales engineer staff said their lives and their customers’ experiences were much more streamlined with this new system, and it is certainly an inviting space in which to imagine your beautiful future. The Boeing LGO alums gave us some parting “flair” for our lanyards (cool aircraft pins) and we were done for the week–but not before another debrief session, which looked back at the faculty’s previous visits to Boeing and ahead to how what we learned and observed could help Boeing keep getting better.

All in all it was a terrific few days for me, and gives me a much more concrete sense not only of what manufacturing is about but of how special the LGO students are in their passion for thinking through the challenges of making jets, shipping millions of packages or how you do both of these massive undertakings.

Boeing: ready for anything!

This January, the LGO Class of 2013 is taking part in the program’s signature learning adventure: the Domestic Plant Trek, an annual two-week, nationwide visit to the shop floors of LGO partner companies’ most important facilities. The trek started in Peoria, Illinois, at Caterpillar’s factory and massive demonstration center. While I missed the

LGOs and the Very Hungry Caterpillar

chance to join the LGOs atop gigantic Caterpillar machines and witness remote-controlled mayhem simulated operations, I was able to join up with them as they arrived the next evening in Detroit for an intensive visit to GM, Ford, and the International Auto Show. It has been an awesome opportunity so far to walk through these global companies’ leading facilities, to hear their executives and union staff talk about daily challenges, and to see all this through the eyes of 52* extremely perceptive and fun LGOs.

At 0700 on Wednesday morning, the LGO group was about 90 minutes into the day and was greeted by the plant manager of GM’s Lansing Delta Township factory with a hearty “Welcome to operations hours!” LDT is one of GM’s newest facilities, and produces crossover vehicles across several GM brands. Despite the turmoil in the auto industry in the past few years, the management and UAW workers at LDT were quite upbeat, and distinctly proud of their product and of the facility. It was a homecoming for Brent Yoder ’13, who worked at LDT for two years before moving to Amazon and then to MIT.

The final assembly line at LDT showing an operator on the palletized line and a vehicle up on a "skillet" (Photo: GM Company)

We spent the full day at the factory, starting (for my group) with a tour of the entire facility from the stamping shop through to the body shop and general assembly: from metal plates to trucks driving off the line, the full process takes about 18 hours. Our group’s guide was a UAW team leader with 30 years in GM, who took pleasure in showing our group the site and explaining the many improvements in the production system and worker conditions since “the old days.”

The stamping shop was a good place to start in terms of orienting lay observers like me to the physical scale of auto manufacturing. The LDT stamping shop is focused on two block-long presses (one from Japan, one from Germany) that cost about $35M each and have multi-ton dies that can be switched out within 15 minutes. Most dies press several parts at a time, which flow out the end of the machine to where operators sort them onto racks on turntables. The stamped pieces are offloaded either to huge inventory racks, to trucks destined for remote GM sites, or directly into the adjacent body shop. The stamping shop leader pointed with pride to the progress board on the wall as evidence that they were on their way to exceeding the day’s goal.

Around the corner in the body shop, we beheld the results of GM’s focus on automation: a huge field of robotic assembly cells, some of them sheathed in plastic to avoid sparks or fluids flying out into the aisles, all whirring and welding in a way that reminded a few of us of “The Terminator” (final scene in a factory, “You’re terminated,” red spark of malevolent AI in the T100’s remaining eye finally extinguished by Sarah Connor using a massive machine press).  Of course, the (human) operators in the body shop are needed for quality control and testing—including UV testing of welds—but for sure this area of the plant was the maximal example of automation. Interestingly, one of the questions the faculty raised afterwards was a suggestion to the LGOs to ask how the decisions are made to have more or less automation. Each company has its own cultural affinity for a given balance of robotics and human labor.

Today's ergonomically assisted worker

In the general assembly shop, the better movie analogy might be the big assisted loader that Ripley climbs into at the end of “Aliens” for her battle with the alien queen. While there are many advances that were noted in the manufacturing system, such as the layout of the line and the flow of supplies from vendor trucks right onto the line for assembly, a striking difference from the old-school assembly line is the use of assistive technology to improve operator ergonomics and line efficiency. The vehicles move through the line on “skillets,” platforms that can adjust up and down to suit the height of the operator and the specific task so as to minimize crouching and stretching. Instead of walking alongside the conveyor, there are wooden pallets surrounding each skillet to allow the operators to stand and be moved along with the vehicle. Stations that require installing tires or other heavy components have lifts. Maybe the coolest hybrid-human innovation is an articulated seat that pivots operators into the vehicle cabin to install interiors without crawling, kneeling or otherwise getting yourself closer to disability or retirement. All this was evidence of GM’s business calculation to invest in improved operator conditions.

After the tour and a panel discussion over lunch with plant management, my group went through an accelerated version of the training given to new operators in the Simulated Work Environment. GM and the UAW created a miniature assembly line with wooden body

The Japanese fishermen used to hang a lantern, or "andon," on the boat when they needed help unloading. This has become the term for the system line workers use to ask for help.

frames and parts, real bolts and electric drills, a real “andon” (help) pull cord and progress board, and real application of the plant’s goals for safety, quality and other metrics. For the LGOs, this was a step beyond the production simulation using LEGOs they had conducted in their summer ESD.930 module on Lean 6-Sigma Methods. We did one 10-minute stint and reviewed our extremely poor metrics, and were asked to think about process improvements for the next round. Our team leaders, all UAW workers from LDT or other plants in the area, made a few suggestions to move us forward, and indeed the next round had some satisfying advances. LGOs, God love ‘em, are pretty obsessive about continuous improvement, and some focused afterwards on how the team leaders should have let us fail some more in order to keep asking our own “five whys.” That said, it was terrific fun to use a real drill to put on wooden “Cad” and “GMC” nameplates while trying not to drop bolts into the conveyor belt.

Next year's Corvette

We drove out of Lansing and past the fabled Eight Mile Road into Detroit, bound for the Auto Show. GM graciously hosted us at the show and provided a reception for the group as we heard from our LGO program sponsor and other executives and LGO grads about how the company is doing, as well as an overview of the LGO internship they are sponsoring this year in their powertrain casting operation. We then got to see the many electric vehicles highlighted in the GM exhibit and experience the powerful emotional response that all normal people have when standing next to a Corvette concept car with gull-wing doors.

After all that, I was extra impressed at the stamina and commitment of the LGOs and Prof. Brad Morrison and Prof. Shoji Shiba—who are accompanying the group throughout the trek—in conducting a serious debrief session in the Holiday Inn Express dining room, analyzing the operations, management, and strategy of the company through every interaction we’d had that day. The LGOs applied the principles they had learned at MIT with exactitude, and I saw why companies that get religion about operations want to hire these folks.

Built LGO Tough

The next morning we drove out to Ford Rouge, perhaps the most storied industrial manufacturing site in the US. We toured the Ford Dearborn Truck plant, the newest facility on the site, and tightly integrated with a Russian (what would Mr. Ford say?!?) steel plant and other adjacent production facilities. FDT makes the Ford F-150 pickup truck, about one a minute, and the strongest messages we got from our guide were pride in having achieved the Truck of the Year 2012 award and the importance of safety at the plant. We duly donned safety vests and goggles and went onto the floor, where we noted a more serpentine line orientation than at GM, but the same application of ergonomic assistance to the operators and what seemed to be relatively benign management-labor relations. It was another impressive view into how to handle a distinct set of operations conditions: in this case, slightly older production equipment, coupled to a hot-selling product, with the attendant challenge of maintaining continuous improvement while getting trucks out the door.

As I write this, we are in our last leg of the Detroit-Seattle journey. Tomorrow is Boeing day and we’ll visit three sites, hopefully seeing things more completely thanks to our six LGO13s who came to the program from Boeing. One last cultural comment: LGO is a posse, and the students’ camaraderie and good times compare favorably to my own first year of grad school, in which socializing was Friday afternoons with my fellow English PhD students around a dim table in New Brunswick drinking Rolling Rock served out of an industrial mayonnaise jar. But LGOs also demonstrated through their own organization of all the trip logistics the kind of experiential learning in leadership they get in the program. I’ve been trying to share my own by correcting their spelling and grammar. Onward to more vicarious LGO good times.

*INCLUDES TRACES OF MIT SLOAN MBA STUDENTS. USERS WILL NOT EXPERIENCE ANY PRODUCT SETTLING.

I am flying from Boston to Detroit as I write this, to join the students in the MIT graduate program I help manage—Leaders for Global Operations—on their annual Domestic Plant Trek. I’ll be part of their visits to GM and Ford auto factories in Michigan, and Boeing 737, 747 and 787 factories in Washington, plus a side trip to the Detroit Auto Show. Our program was founded as the Leaders for Manufacturing program in 1988 and this trip, maybe in particular these stops at massive automotive and aerospace factories that “bend metal” in a big way, is a unique opportunity to connect the students and our partner companies and get a hands-on, candid look into American manufacturing’s current state and future challenges.

The Boeing 787 line. Photo: Seattle P-I

For me, putting on a hard hat and stepping onto the factory floor represent just one more ironic/unlikely/terrific milestone in my journey along a career path far different than the English professor track I chose out of college. Back then, my father, who got his Bachelor’s in Engineering Physics at NYU in the Bronx and a Master’s at the MIT Sloan School of Management (not an MBA—he did a thesis, dammit!), said something along the lines of, “one generation goes into engineering and/or management so that the next can become poets.” This sentiment was probably 90% pride in my achievements and justified satisfaction at his own success in being able to open up such unlikely aspirations for his children, with about 5% ribbing thrown in and 5% indirect worry about how I would ever support myself and become a responsible adult.

After making a fortunate jump about 12 years ago from the (would-be) professoriate into an academic administration career, I found myself in the occasionally bizarre position of using my literary training to extol the virtues of MIT’s “entrepreneurship ecosystem” and innovations in technical education to international companies and universities. As one benignly crusty MIT lifer pointed out to me, I was the only English PhD in the employ of the MIT School of Engineering, maybe ever. My current job is strictly administrative and has me dealing largely with our program’s current and potential industrial partners. This is a great stretch opportunity for me in pushing my career and “head set” (wonderful corporate-speak for “one’s attitude and mental approach to issues”) even further outside the isolated garret that I had to climb into in order to finish a PhD. And it represents a full circle back to actually working at Sloan that is one big (happy) chuckle for my dad.

Danbury, CT, which in 1902 "led the world in hatting": site of Great Grandpa Katz's factory after it moved from Manhattan

But there is actually a manufacturing history on both sides of the family. My dad’s father Sam Jacobs was in the rag trade in New York: small-scale manufacturing, until that was killed off by WWII and union pressure on tiny owners, and then wholesale “jobbing.” And my maternal great-grandfather Frank Katz owned a hat factory in Manhattan, that then moved to Hat Capital of the World, Danbury CT. It’s hard to parse just what is most anachronistic about that statement…that hats were once an unthinking part of every adult’s daily outfit, or that factories once filled Manhattan.

Hopefully I can build on the gene pool of entrepreneurial strivers in the family and contribute (believe it or not) to American manufacturing and operations leadership for the future. Read this great Atlantic article, on the life of an unskilled auto part worker in South Carolina and the economic consideration that almost year-to-year determines whether she has a job, and you’ll see why this leadership is so important. As of Thursday I’m hoping to be the first person to shake the hands both of the Chairman of Ford Motor Company and of Adrienne Rich.

I have been totally impressed this past week to have two of my best friends put together fabulous (almost entirely) vegan meals on our trip to NYC and Baltimore, out of the kindness of their meat-lovin’ hearts and perhaps with a wistful look back at all the many extremely non-vegan moments we have shared together.

Bi Bim Bap: great name, great lookin' meal

In New York, Bart and Irene and Master C. welcomed us with a miso soup – the dashi, or stock, was made by Sensei Bart himself (and yes, even yellow belt vegans are aware that fermented fish is perhaps not compliant) – and then a splendid bi bim bap that Irene put together, with beef on the side for those wishing to partake. Irene also made a traditional Korean winter solstice soup, called Donji patjuk, which is a red bean (adzuki bean) soup with little sticky-rice flour dumplings. We all felt that we had done our part to ensure a good harvest for the spring as the days start to grow longer.

Whut the hiz-ell is up with th' tempeh?

Then in Baltimore, Pat took time off from holding back the city’s ocean of craziness and substance abuse to put together an astounding vegan brunch. He made the strong move to actually get a book called Vegan Brunch, and actually get heretofore unknown ingredients and make his own darned “vegenaise.” We also got to see Audrey when she took a break from tending to crazy people’s bronchial issues, and the lovely Miss H. and Master A. Pat’s dad absented himself during this abominable procedure, knowing that Pat was simultaneously brining chicken for buttermilk fried chix later that same day (!). The menu included:

All the vegan hippies in Baltimore are going nuts for these bad boys

Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes: remarkably like crab cakes in appearance and consistency. The remoulade, with the vegenaise, hot sauce, red wine vinegar, and whole-grain mustard, really makes this dish blow up. And I can attest that they wholly fulfilled the post-meal role of real crab cakes in terms of heartburn.

Banana flapjacks with coconut and chocolate chips: I guess one aspect of vegan baking that takes some getting used to is that the moisture of the ingredients can lead to things not baking through and/or becoming crisp in the way regular cakes/crepes do. But as you can see from young Master A. here, these pancakes totally did the trick.

Yeah, this one's mine, pardner

Breakfast burritos: he soaked the beans himself. A testament to true friendship. This was the first time that soy cheese has gone over well with the kids. E. thought the yellow, somewhat inorganic-looking “chreese” strands were carrots.

Grilled potatoes: just damned good. No special white-dread affectation required.

Mochi! (for some reason this seems to require constant exuberance): some kind of glutinous rice, which as Miss A. said, “tastes sort of bagely” and squishy. Makes you feel like there’s a lunar festival going on in your mouth, in a good way.

I raised with Pat, who after all is a doctor at a world-renowned hospital, my idea that maybe the US medical establishment is setting the bar too low in terms of expectations for people’s diet. I.e., why can’t every primary care doc and specialist man up and tell people they can only eat Chesapeake Tempeh Cakes if they want to live long, healthy lives? Pat laughed and said that the kind of crazy he deals with makes animal protein pretty low down on the action list. But 2012 is a new year, right?

I just whip this kind of thing up while talking people down from the ledge on speaker phone. "Sir...the chreese won't hurt you anymore."

L to R: Santa, Hanukkah Man, Creepy Crucifix Dude

Each year since A. was born (except when in Portugal) we’ve spent Christmas in Baltimore with Amy’s family…this year was Christmakkah for the second time! Plus Shabbat! It was a regular ecumenical public service announcement, as the big Presbyterian tent opened wide to include Jews, Bahá’ís and Christian Scientists. After the schlep we had, there was room at the inn!

As noted, we had been planning to be in Israel right now, but it was really a blessing to hold off on that life experience until the girls

Eye to eye at the weigh-in with Santa

are older. The drive down reinforced that point in unsubtle ways. On the plus side, long drives open up space not only for screaming slug-fests but also for the occasional deep conversation. Today A. asked why all the manifestations of G-d (this is the Bahá’í manner of referring to all the founding dudes of the world’s religions) have been men. We asked why she thought that was, and she said she thought it was unfair because women give birth, feed people and keep everyone living and together–but that men had the power and everyone listened to them, so it made sense the manifestations were men. It was great to recognize in her this kind of awareness and questioning habit of mind, and we told her to keep it up and resist authority! except for your parents. And always say please.

High School Musical...celebrate where we come from!

We got the chance to meet up in Northern Virginia with some of my high school buddies and their families. We are coming up on a very significant class reunion in 2012, one that catapults years-since-high-school way beyond years-alive-at-high-school-graduation. I am grateful to still be in touch with this together, accomplished, and loving group of people (shoulder punch coming in 3…2…1…ow). Amy and I noted that of the six posse members in the photo, five married outside their religion/ethnic group/both (and the sixth sent three Christian kids to temple preschool and has a house full of menorahs), and the kids running around reflected that more hybrid/open reality that we are all hoping for in their future. On the other hand when we were asking the girls from different districts what grade elementary school went up to, one replied, “elementary is through fifth grade, then sixth to eighth is middle school, then you go to high school, college, and business school.” So the class/education barriers might remain pretty powerful.

A friend who I hadn’t seen in years turned up and immediately said how much she thinks of me and my family b/c of the loss of my brother Aaron. I was taken aback to realize how much I am The Guy I Know Who Lost Someone for so many people when they think about 9/11 and what it means to them. This is just reality–besides the caring words of this friend, who might have actually met my brother, there is a compulsion for anyone I encounter to confess to me where they were, what they were doing, how someone they knew was there but got out. I’ve come to take comfort from these moments where I can and I feel better for being “out” about my loss, but as this reunion approaches this moment made me wonder how we will all be defined for each other.

Given that we were pretty much amoebic sacks of pheromones and college acceptance letters when we graduated, there is a growing chasm of life experience, physical appearance, and everything else. As someone put it at our 10th reunion, it’s hard to recognize people when they are being so nice. So at the reunion, will I remain the future poet I was then, complete with paisley shirts and bowties occasionally worn in school to inspire confrontations with Metallica T-shirt-wearing dudes? The English professor I was going to be as of the 10th reunion? Family man? Vegan freakshow? Or The Guy I Know Who? Whitman said, “I contradict myself, I contain multitudes,” and I think we can all give a true dat to that. But how do you fit multitudes on the reunion nametag? This remains TBD. But looking forward.

Some of you know we were planning a family trip to Israel. In fact, we were going to be leaving tonight, connecting in strike-beset Rome, and carrying on to Israel, where we would spend nine days in Haifa as part of the Bahá’í Pilgrimage, then four days in Jerusalem. My parents were going to come too. This was going to be the trip that fulfilled a lifetime goal of Amy’s (Pilgrimage), mine (go to Israel), and help the girls feel their Bah´’ái-Jewish identities are grounded in an actual place where those faiths coexist happily. Plus, all that heavenly falafel was going to make this trip a vegan paradise.

Someday... (credit: Flickr user daveboudreau)

Alas, we decided we couldn’t go right now. My dad had some health problems that, while now abated, made it clear he and my mom would not be able to accompany us on the trip. And that was a wake-up call to really think about what it would be like to have Amy doing Pilgrimage stuff in Haifa—going to the major sanctuaries of the faith, places where silent meditation can easily be ruptured by a three year old yelling, “MOMMY, WHY ARE THEY QUIET? WHEN CAN WE PLAY?” Either Amy was going to have to peel off from the family, maybe with grown-up-ish Miss A., leaving me to doodle around the falafel joints and bakeries of Haifa with two restive bunnies all day; or, we’d try to do all the visits together, being braced to tear outside in case our kids were disturbing various pilgrims’ spiritual reverie. Plus, the hills of Haifa are steep, and gigantic Suburban-like double strollers are not allowed on the gravel paths of the Bahá’í World Center and its gardens.

So we put this off for at least three years, on the idea that by that time our juniormost mint will be together enough to keep it meditative and to tromp up and down the hills without needing a sedan chair—and also to remember it more than she would now. Given the vagaries of health and the political situation, we really hope that when we think we’re ready to go that it will be possible to get there.

PS everyone I recommend this to has already read it, but Start-Up Nation is a fascinating view into Israeli society and how it has succeeded so well in creating entrepreneurs

So yesterday was just another day at MIT…took in a lunch lecture by the Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), talking about how to avoid spending our entire GDP on one airplane by 2050 and avoid losing American manufacturing expertise, then harassed our students to do some more blogging, then SAW TA-NEHISI COATES LIVE IN PERSON. OK maybe not so typical…

I have been reading “TNC” since he started blogging for the Atlantic Monthly in 2008, and his real-time chronicling of his intellectual (and emotional) journey into Civil War history, 19th Century classic novels, and many other avenues has pulled me along with him in ways that have been very rewarding, and not at all like the relationship you might have to, say, Philip Roth.

TNC at MIT: you have to love the equations on the blackboard (and random a capella concert notices)

There is a lot to say about Ta-Nehisi’s talk, but to get this out in front of “The Horde” (TNC’s passionate commenter/reader community) and get it down for myself I will try to summarize. He went through his early history (as recounted in The Beautiful Struggle) of finding in Dungeons and Dragons and hip-hop a way into conjuring up a sense in language of a place, a time, even if you might not understand in a literal way exactly what Queensbridge or paladins are all about. Then as he got into college and was exposed to poets like Yusuf Komunyakaa he continued to focus in on how language can evoke, conjure up a sense of being somewhere–and that is the approach he brought to bear in Beautiful Struggle when writing about growing up in Baltimore. As he put it after reading from the memoir, his editors might have wanted him to do the whole Norton Anthology footnoting approach to help unpack his vernacular/mash-up language, but he wanted his readers to appreciate that (now quaintly pre-Wikipedia) sense of not knowing every detail but getting the sense of Baltimore and his young life.

TNC went through how after Beautiful Struggle he found himself needing to fill in his blind spot around the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and found himself moved again by books like Capital Men (on the Reconstruction-era Black Congressmen), Battle Cry of Freedom (James McPherson’s masterful one-volume Civil War history), and Frederick Douglass’ three autobiographies. Ta-Nehisi read from Douglass and from other primary sources from the period, and talked about what a distinctly different sense of language you get from hearing these long sentences, and the words of a freed slave claiming the land “he is locates upon,” which is more than just imperfect grammar but actually conveys the centuries leading up to that moment of claiming land and rights.Ta-Nehisi said that in reading this language from slaves and freed slaves–AND the language of white slave-holding women, also located in a bound/limited society but in a different position–he has tried to evolve as a writer to be able to evoke a language that is true to characters in all these different positions within society. This process (aided by further readings in George Eliot, Jane Austen, et. al.) has pushed him as a writer to transcend his own personal antipathy to the values or morals of these characters in order to find a voice for them that makes sense and conjures up their lives in that time.

What all this has led up to is TNC’s current project, which is a novel set in the Civil War era, based in four first-person narratives — two men, two women; two white, two black — that will in due time cohere around a slave woman’s escape and the attempts to recapture her. Ta-Nehisi read a passage in which the black male and black female characters recount their experience of meeting at an open-air dance. I found his language powerfully evocative of dancing as both liberating and unconstrained–he has the woman say “I would dance before I would eat”–while also being contingent, always marked by the relationships that might be started but then sundered by death or distance. I will certainly look forward to reading the finished version and felt privileged to hear this trial run, which as TNC mentioned in his post-script must have been moving for him too, to represent these voices in public for the first time.

From Baltimore Polytechnic Institute to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Besides all this recap, my little bit of Coates Studies analysis here that came out in the Q&A is that he developed this arsenal of myth-making or myth-referencing language through writing his memoir, through being steeped in D&D and Nas(rul), as his main mode of evoking the truth of his lived experience. But in his next non-fiction project (BREAKING NEWS), a book he plans to write on the Civil War as lived in the fantasies of North and South ever since, he plans to take on the incredible persistence of myth as the lens through which people see the war and its rationale/justifications/meaning. For years in his blog he has been doing this, for example citing the language of the Articles of Secession that specifically says “we’re doing this do defend slavery” and showing how little effect that historical reality has on those who have a stake in believing the war was about anything but. It should be really interesting to see how he builds on his own experience of language as “conjuring” to get at what the Southern post-Civil War language/acts of conjuring have meant for the country.

[UPDATES: TNC is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT in 2012-2013! I added this link because this post embarrassingly is top result for a “coates MIT” search]

The cousins lock it up for Thanksgiving grace

We were down in Baltimore for Thanksgiving with Amy’s family (parents, two sisters, our kids’ cousins, Great Grandma, aunts and cousins, plus pets) and I certainly felt like we were sitting atop a mountain of things for which we are, indeed, very thankful. This past year has had some significant deaths, friends divorcing, etc. and we felt very grateful for the chance to gather together. Big knock on wood. I even ran the Charm City Turkey Trot 5K with Amy’s sister and finished ahead of some 9 year olds wearing polkadot tights (this is a riff on the fact that an increasing percentage of FB friends’ posts are related to Beach Body workouts and/or their marathon/IronMan/5K endeavors).

Dear John…I am a vegan

I'll have some of that gravy on my tofurkey

Now in week 6 or so of the soft-core vegan lifestyle I picked up from my friends who have taken the red pill and read The China Study, I found plenty to talk about with Amy’s moderately diet, health and fitness-obsessed family. There is something of a modest coming-out narrative around saying you are eating vegan and might just keep it up for the long haul. While I am quick to point out it is just for my own health, and not a political statement, I definitely sense how this comes across as radical in some circumstances. Probably most of all with young Miss A., who I think is threatened by this unaccountable change in Dad’s behavior and wants to know why–and whether she needs to drink crappy almond milk herself. This is a girl who has the seatbelt reflex deeply ingrained…if switching out cheese for chreese (I’m just throwing that in b/c it is a veganism that grosses me out) is what you are supposed to do, and she’s not doing it, it’s like she is dangling out of the car by her knees while I ride alongside her in a five-point restraint. Early days yet.

So far I’m down a few pounds to a post-wedding low, generally have fewer times of feeling logy or gross after meals, and am blithely continuing to eat Amy’s egg and butter-laden baked goods as part of Phase I of the long-term plan. Plus I took a vegan bye for Thanksgiving, but in a lifetime first for me did not have seconds on turkey–but yes on that Baltimore turkey accompaniment, sauerkraut.

The post-D&D memoir

I happened to finish a memoir by one of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, while I was in Baltimore. I first read TNC when he was transitioning in 2008 to being a regular blogger for The Atlantic Monthly, and (particularly from Portugal) appreciated his open, literate-but-down Black American take on the cultural and political bomb that went off with Obama’s campaign and election. The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood is his 2008 memoir of growing up in Baltimore in a complicated family situation, with an ex-Black Panther father and a mother both bent on Consciousness (i.e. African, post-slavery) as the essential path of young black boys through the menaces of growing up in America.

Reading this memoir while sitting more or less literally atop Baltimore’s Mt. White Privilege was another reminder of the blinders I have on in my travels through the earth (more so in America than abroad, probably). But one thing that I can totally identify with that TNC draws upon in conjuring up the threats he grew up with–both gangs from other neighborhoods and the existential threat of the crack age–is the dramatic scene and language of the post-Dungeons and Dragons era. The orcs surrounded him, hooded and dripping with blood, and against the dying of the light his father was a paladin who never lost faith in the ability to transform hidden/suppressed African-exiled Consciousness into a righteous sword. I think most of my close guy friends and I share a bit of this take on our history, the middle-school dynamic transposed into a battle mediated by geekily crayoned 12-sided dice.

On the flight back up to Boston we passed a few miles east of NYC. It was my first view of the Freedom Tower being constructed on the site of the World Trade Center. I have no plans to go down there but the building certainly makes the intended architectural statement of undying freedom / f***  you, we’re still here. All the way up overhead Manhattan and the Bronx I was reminded of the human impulse–whether through Olmsteadian parks, delineating with broad avenues (one of which my dad grew up on, Bronx Park East, overlooking the Bronx Zoo) suitably wild places of retreat from urbanity, or through the whole Tolkein edifice of fantasy–to define in art the lines between us and the demons, or between our base and enlightened selves.

I am really looking forward to hearing Coates talk this Tuesday at MIT about the Civil War-inspired novel that he’s working on, probably in the presence of the two major dudes who are on the MIT writing faculty: Junot Diaz and Joe Haldeman. Haldeman wrote The Forever War, for f***’s sake, something I read at age 12 or so and never forgot, and is still going. And Diaz, who busted into the consciousness of every New Yorker reader with his stories in the 90s, is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is sort of the next level of what you can do from a geeky childhood with orcs: an amazing book that has stayed with me these past four years since it came out. More on this later this week.

Amy and the girls, bedtime 2009, when the whole posse fit in a twin bed

Putting the girls to bed is a wonderful part of our parenting routine and offers unique opportunities to connect with them after the end of a long day. It can also be an exasperating time that seems to stretch out forever as the girls dither, stare at themselves in the mirror, mess around and generally seek to slow-roll the process…keeping me and Amy from our important adult work downstairs, blogging about how much we love our children! I was thinking this week how the songs I sing with each of them have changed over the years and how this kind of maps onto our evolution as parents, and the different personalities of the girls. This is mine own story, as Amy’s highly desired bedtimes with the girls are more intense, lengthy and on-key. Bedtime reading lists will have to be tackled later.

A.

A sleeping in a winter wonderland (3 months)

Set list: Brahms’ Lullaby, “He is God” (Bahá’í prayer), Oseh Shalom (Jewish prayer), Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, The itsy bitsy spider, Michael row your boat ashore, I’ve been working on the railroad…and more

From out of the Lactic Era, when all was formless crying, goo goo and nursing, the great division of the waking and sleeping worlds (really, the child’s bedroom and the parents’ bedroom) happened at about 13 months when Amy heroically weaned A. and I started having a nightly bedtime routine with her. In those early years I remember just endless singing as part of our somewhat terrified efforts to make sleep happen. For sure, the author of the recent hit book “Go the F to Sleep” has to be referring to his first child, because I look back and think, why did we make ourselves and A. prisoners of these elaborate rituals, which can’t have done much to abbreviate her embittered crying and jumping up and down? Writing this has reminded me of Dr. Weissbluth (known to us as Doctor Sleepypants) and the midnight hours spent poring through those pages looking for wisdom, or ideally silence. I think the worst example of first-time parents willing to do anything was when A. was two–maybe even three!–and I had a session of singing “Michael row your boat ashore” with her in my arms while doing lunges. I got a decent burn but did not, in the end, induce sleep.

A at rest

What strikes me looking at the song list here is that it shows how pretty early on we adopted at least one or two key songs from each of our religions that both Amy and I would sing at bedtime. Singing the “Sh’ma” is an occasion for me to think about my so-so performance as a Jew and hope for the best for Eretz Israel and the girls. With A. there is often a final burst of processing from the day’s action just before singing, and the repetition of these core songs acts as a cue or gives her permission to snuggle up and relax. As she gets older there is a somewhat weird divide between her surprisingly grown-up waking concerns and her lingering primal desire to have these bedtime moments with us, which makes me appreciative of however much longer I have to do the night night routine.

M.

Baby M. catching z's wherever the mood takes her

Set list: “Good night M.,” He is God, Sh’ma, I’ve been working on the railroad, and silence

Miss M’s bedtime routine was formed under different circumstances. As the second baby she knew the gentle squashings of her big sister and also had parents who couldn’t just drop everything to do squat thrusts with a squalling child in the hopes that she would pipe down and go to sleep. We lived in a chilly flat at Cambridge University when she was about 9-12 months old and, for better or for worse, were separated from her crib and her little double-wrapped form by several layers of doors and cement walls. So the Dr. Sleepypants method was almost redundant because we just didn’t hear the crying–probably the most soundproofed in terms of wakey-child noise of anywhere we have lived.

M. with her bunny

I suddenly lost a lot of the hearing in my left ear last year, and while I eventually got a good bit back and now am basically fine, it was a very scary week or so. I remember lying in M’s bed, as always with that ear on her side, and wondering if I would ever hear her snurfling breaths and other little noises again. These moments with the girls in the dark allow strong feelings of all kinds to emerge and be considered, making the routine but loving singing itself kind of an “om” that is part of a mental and emotional routine that can send you way out into unexpected corners of your history.

These days, while M. does appreciate the singing, she goes her own way at bedtime, as in most things vis-a-viz her sisters. She always asks me to just lie with her quietly after the songs are done and as she gets closer to sleep. And then, after I say “I love you” and creep toward the door, unless she is out cold snoring comes the request, “Can you ask Mommy to come in?” We joke that the girls are like Six-Dinner Sid, the cat who fools a whole neighborhood into thinking he’s theirs and gets 6x the food, affection and night nights.

Baby E sleeping in a moving box the day before we moved back from Portugal

E.  

Set list: Brahms’ Lullaby, He is God, Shema, and Twinkle in an emergency

For her first 14 months, E’s bedroom was a frigid little cubicle overlooking a beautiful lemon tree and, unfortunately, a yard where “Buddy,” our horrible neighbor’s abused dog, lived in squalor with several other dogs and barked 24-7. You know how it is with third children…the parents know the bounds of their own parenting ineptitude and that probably nothing will do serious damage.

E is ready for her close-up

Whether it is nature or nurture’s work, E has turned out to have a very matter-of-fact approach to bedtime, which nicely coincides with our totally adoring approach to putting her to bed that nonetheless takes into account that there is a good 60-90 minutes more after lights out for E. before the big girls are asleep. She is very verbal and likes to check off all the steps involved: what kind of pajamas she is wearing, what book to read (always asks for two, rarely granted), whether “Flauta” (her ridiculous dog-pony inflated toy) is comfy, and whether she is cozy enough in her blankets. When she got into a big girl twin bed like her sisters about a year ago she was just in heaven, and still gives herself up to lying in bed with total abandon. E. has learned from day one that she has a major challenge in getting her parents’ attention as the littlest sister, and happily has landed lately upon one very effective strategy. Periodically throughout the day, and pretty often as I am finishing up songs, saying good night and getting out the door to finish the dishes, she will say “Daddy? I love you.” These psychological wiles will get you everywhere, girl.