Silent night, snowy night

Yes, it's snowing again here in the country.

Ed Paschke
The Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier is one of our favorite places in our favorite city. In the lobby of that wonderful theater is this portrait of the bard: a traditional image that the artist, as one Sun-Times writer puts it, Paschke-ized.

First he turned the single portrait into a three-headed creature -- giving us a triple view of the writer that suggested he instinctively understood that within every great artist there lie multiple personalities, as well as the ability to see the multifaceted sides of others. He then washed Shakespeare with the characteristic parrot greens, yellows, purples and other radiant hues that were part of his trademark color palette for decades. Most crucially, Paschke endowed the Bard with that magical, almost electrified buzz that seemed to emanate from every face -- real or imagined -- that he painted during the course of his long and prolific career in Chicago.

Ed Paschke died last Thursday. He was 65.

For a readable tribute to the teacher and artist, check out Neil Steinberg's column.

"Prof. Paschke," I said. "I don't know how to draw. I've never taken an art class in my life, and if I don't take yours, I never will."

He let me in. Just like that. Later, an art student I knew told me he showed his portfolio to Ed and also begged. Ed wouldn't let him, the artist, in. But for a guy who didn't know which end of the pencil to use, he made an exception. That was Ed's way -- quirky and open and generous. His paintings hung in the Art Institute, in the Louvre, but he also painted sets for Off-Off Loop plays and dance clubs.

Bird flu
Okay. I admit it. This has me a tad worried.

Latin
Have you seen this review? Writes Peter Stothard:

Once upon a time it was normal to learn Latin without taking a view of whether its earliest speakers were good or bad people. We could say amo, amas, amat without wondering whether I had been faithful, you had been a good wife or he, she or it had run off with the femina next door. Julius Caesar could divide Gaul into three parts without us worrying about the Gallic men and women who had been carved into three parts by his legionaries. An agricola produced food from his land and, if he had help from XII or so servi or captivi, that was nihil to us.

Latin is not so simple today. Tore Janson is a Swedish professor who represents the fashionable “terrific language, pity about the speakers” school of thought. He gives vocabulary lists that would satisfy the most traditional master. He adds a useful list of common phrases, ranging from “amicus certus in re incerta cernitur” (Ennius: 239- 169BC: “a friend in need is a friend indeed”) to “odium numquam potest esse bonum (Spinoza: 1632-77: “ hatred can never be good”.

Sounds like a terrific item to add to your favorite autodidact's gift list. Or your own!




Speaking of gift lists...
Just a little reminder to shop (in your flannel jammies!) via one of the Amazon.com links here at M-mv. Many thanks.

The Book Thing

Inside the basement and scattered on the concrete outside are tens of thousands of books -- all donated, all free. Shelves line nearly every inch of wall space; books that couldn't be crammed onto the overburdened shelves lean against them in stacks several feet high. Every Saturday and Sunday, Wattenberg throws open the door to the public -- everyone is welcome and they can take away as much reading material as they like.

...

[Russell] Wattenberg estimates that 20,000 books come in each week and 20,000 are taken out. Many are picked up by the weekend visitors or given away at major events such as the Baltimore Book Festival and ArtScape, but "the majority of books that go out are going to community centers, literacy programs, schools, libraries, prisons," he says.

Read the complete article here.

So cool. So very, very cool.

AnswerPoint is a service of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, VA. How do I know this? Well, I followed a trail in our site stats to this article by Adriana Puckett. What a delight to discover "Mental multivitamin" listed in the company of Dave Barry, Neil Gaiman, and William Gibson.

As I said, "Cool. So very, very cool."

Thanks for the nod, Ms. Puckett. We're delighted you found us.

The holiday weekend in...

...books
The Rottweiler (Ruth Rendell)
Many of you already know, of course, that Rendell also writes as Barbara Vine. Her books, under both pen names, are among my favorite reading desserts. (If Shakespeare and Austen and Wilde are meals, for example, Rendell (and, for that matter, Amanda Cross and Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith and Joanne Dobson) are acceptable (if store-bought (as opposed to home-made)) desserts.)

Every Secret Thing (Laura Lippman)
I agree with Stephen King: "Not as good as Mystic River, but almost as readable, and with that same grim vibe."

In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Carl Honore)
Picked this up after reading "Life in the Slow Lane" (Newsweek, November 29, 2004).

The Tree of Life (Peter Sis)
The Art Institute hosted "Exploring the World: Picture Books by Peter Sis" in 2003. Great stuff.

Margaret Peterson Haddix's "Shadow Children" series is not great lit, but the premise (the fate of illegal third-borns in a society that permits only two children per family) is compelling and the novels, readable.

The Iliad (Homer)
Perhaps you can't entirely relate to a family that not only re-reads but also quotes and playacts Homerian epics, but, really, we're not that strange. Really. Besides, what would prefer that we did on a rainy Saturday after Thanksgiving? Shop? Argh! Eat? Did that -- two breakfasts, one and half lunches, and two pots of coffee. Watch televised sporting events? Come, come. You know us better than that. Homer it is, then.

...DVDs
In Search of Shakespeare
Ayup. Bardolatry.

Das Rheingold
I've shared our interest in Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" before.

Red Fury
The Misses M-mv like a good horse story. This one is a solid B+.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Not my cuppa, but Mr. and Master M-mv enjoy such flicks now and again.

... and, yes, television
"Samantha: An American Girl Holiday"
Well, technically, we watched this and "L&O: SVU" before the holiday weekend (Tuesday night), but, since we watch so little television, I've lumped them in here.

All right. So. What was with the perfume commercial featuring an as-good-as-nude woman and her, erm, scent during a movie for little girls and their parents? Wow.

Anyway.

The movie was dreadful, primarily because the child-actors were, well, dreadful; secondarily, because the movie plot (such as it was) did not gel with the (admittedly, mediocre) series of Samantha books. While creative liberties are certainly acceptable when adapting a book for film (e.g., conflating and/or eliminating characters and/or plot elements), rewriting a well-known character's history really is not. The Misses M-mv spent each commercial break wondering at the many differences between the, as they said, "two Samanthas."

Law & Order: SVU"
Like "L&O: CI" a couple of weeks ago, this SVU episode let the viewers decide whether the accused is guilty or not. Interesting, if not terribly original.

"The Apprentice 2"
I would have fired them all by now. But that's just me.

Nope. No parades. No football games. What were you expecting?

An aside
Many thanks to those of you who have placed your Amazon.com orders via links at this site. We appreciate your support.

Quotations

Why should we need any more light on poems than the light which radiates from the poems themselves? (T.S. Eliot)

When ignorance gets started, it knows no bounds. (Will Rogers)

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants -- what are you industrious about? (Henry David Thoreau)

It is a great nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired through hard work. (W. Somerset Maugham)

Every artist was at first an amateur. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. (Joseph Addison)

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. (Lee Iacocca)

Who so neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future. (Euripides)

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Frost had something altogether more meaningful in mind when he penned his poem, I know. Moreover, his landscape was the northeast, not the midwest. But last night, inching our middle-aged van home along the path etched by the few cars ahead of us, I realized that sometimes a line of poetry can simply be the sum of its words:

The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

A snowy Chicago is, of course, a noisy Chicago. The city's snow plows and the citizens' snow blowers. The rhythmic scra-a-a-pe, scra-a-a-pe of a neighbor's shovel. The squeal of children. The screech of brakes. The insistent blare of horns. But then a moonlit Chicago is also a noisy Chicago, as is a fog-draped Chicago. A warm-summer-morning Chicago. A rainy-afternoon Chicago. A dusk-filtered Chicago. The city is always if not shouting then at least murmuring and sighing. It is never silent.

But here on the edge of nowhere it is often silent. And dark. And in the black, black silence of the country night, "the sweep of easy wind and downy flake" is deafeningly beautiful.

Happy first snowfall.

Stealing words
Ran across this at the New Yorker:

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections. Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.

Read the complete essay here.

We've mused on the perils and evils of plagiarism before.

Just borrowing? (11.3.2003)
The recommended daily allowance (11.3.2003)
Plagiarism (7.13.2004)

Simple concept, no? Yet so many people. Just. Don't. Get. It.

Idiots.

Giving thanks
We covered this here. We'd only add our gratitude for our readers and your continuing support. Enjoy a happy, healthy holiday weekend. Hey, and if you must shop, do it in your flannel pajamas. Shop Amazon.com via one of the many links here at "Mental multivitamin."

On the nightstand (under the pillow, in the knapsack, etc.)

Ayup. Another month gone. Another heap o' books read. We tossed the joint yesterday, checking on nightstands, under pillows (and beds), in knapsacks, under chairs, on the library table, and in the, erm, bathroom. Here are just a few of the books that have recently become a part of the geography of our imaginations. No, you aren't imagining things; there are some repeats. That's allowed, folks, especially in the case of, say, Shakespeare. Or Boorstin. Or Tolkien. Etc.

The Discoverers (Daniel Boorstin)

The Complete Pelican Shakespeare

American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Robert Hughes)

The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (Sister Miriam Joseph)

Gilgamesh: A New English Verson (Stephen Mitchell)

The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde

The Mouse and His Child (Russell Hoban)

The Mary Celeste: An Unsolved Mystery from History (Jane Yolen)

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines (Thomas C. Foster)

Why Read? (Mark Edmundson)

Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 (John Julius Norwich)

Of course, there are more books, many, many more, but little time. So let me leave you, as I have before, with this reminder from an old favorite of mine (yes, a few of us discovered How to Read a Book years, decades before someone told us we should read it):

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. Atrophy of the mental musceles is the penalty we pay for not taking mental exercise. And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease.

Previous "On the nightstand" entries:
10.12.2004
9.13.2004
8.24.2004
7.19.2004
6.12.2004
5.19.2004
4.22.2004
3.12.2004
2.15.2004
1.26.2004
12.31.2003

Nihil agere delectat.

It is a delight to do nothing. (Cicero)

Ayup.

And that's pretty much what three-fifths of Team M-mv is doing.

Or not.

Playing. Reading. Hammering out a new a tune on the keyboard. Studying Latin. Talking with Aunt M-mv.

In our pajamas.

Yeah, that's where the "nothing" comes in, I guess. We made our beds and tidied the house. We showered. Even curled our hair. But then we donned clean flannel pants and sleeping sweatshirts. It was, after all, evening here before morning had even broken; it's that gray, so why not?

Hot pretzels. Warm pajamas. Good company. More coffee. Soft music.

May your weekend be as comfortable as ours. Perhaps we'll see you tomorrow with an "On the nightstand" entry.

Potty talk

Rich Rosenthal II is not quite young enough to be my son, but he's certainly young enough to have been one of my former students. His virtual persona is a blend of Chicago likabilty and goofy earnestness that makes a reasonably hip oldster like me nod encouragingly and mentally note the young man's similarities to, well, some of my former students, particularly the ones on whose essays I would note, "Another engaging submission that wants only proofreading. Remember: The best writing is rewriting." (Yeah. It annoyed my former students, too, that penchant of mine for distinguishing between, say, "they're," "there," and "their" or "you're" and "your." What can I say? We all have our annoying quirks, no?)

This is, anyway, how I have explained away my otherwise inexplicable soft spot for the somewhat spelling/grammar-impaired but bright, often laugh-out-loud funny blogger over at "Shockingly Provincial."

I don't have a chance to stop by daily, but once a week, I check in to see what he's up to. I really have no choice. You see, he flattered M-mv, and in both the virtual and the real worlds, flattery still has cachet. Imagine: M-mv is "partially to blame for 'Shockingly Provincial.'"

Heh, heh, heh.

Flattery. Now there's a subject for a blog entry, no?

Anyway...

When I checked in with Rich this week, I was dismayed to read his open letter to the parents of the world: "Make a rule of no books in the bathroom."

He exhorts:

Books in bed. Books with food (except when eating in company, unless both parties agree to forgo conversation for reading time). Books instead of television any day. Books in lieu of sports (not exercise). Books on a park bench or under a tree (not on the beach: Tanning is bad; you will get cancer). But never, ever books in the bathroom.

Oh, Rich. No books in the bathroom? I can't imagine. Are you really worried about germs? I wonder, do you have a hang-up with bathrooms in libraries? Or bookstores? Think about the many, many people who neglect to wash their hands after using the restroom, Rich. Think about all of those germs, the germs of people you don't even know. On the books. On the computers. On the card catalogue. On the videos and CDs. On the handles of the doors.

Eww.

If you're really worried about germs, put some Neutra-Air or Oust, a container of Chlorox wipes, and a filled soap dispenser on the bathroom counter, and make this rule: Do not leave the bathroom without spraying (the air), wiping (the toilet seat), and washing (your hands).

If you're tired of waiting for someone to finish a last page (or chapter) while you reflect on how completely you empathize with Roe Conn's goofy stories about "human urgency," make this rule: When at home (and, presumably among family), shout, "Does anyone else need to use the restroom?" before heading to the head. Wrap up business quickly if someone knocks.

But ban books in bathrooms altogether? Never!

Here at M-mv, we have books, magazines, clipped articles in folders, book catalogues, even the state's driving manual — all within easy reach. A bathroom visit sans reading materials? Unthinkable!

Why, no books in the bathroom sounds as barbaric as no coffee in bed.

If, in fact, my adult children live with me when, as you say, my "body starts falling apart one bit at a time and rapid access to the facilities can only be counted as a good thing," I will finish the second bathroom that the builder envisioned but never completed.

Rethink your plea, Rich. Hey, and enjoy your weekend.

Gray morning

The country landscape is draped damp drear, but the weekend morning is full of bright promise: Mr. M-mv rose early to take Master M-mv to his Saturday morning destination, while Mrs. M-mv and the Misses M-mv slept in, finally waking late, so much later than usual, to the smell of toasting bagels and percolating coffee. So, there's that... and the piles of books, films, and games we've assembled. I've already been trounced at Mancala, but rematches are promised after second-breakfast.

Just three links, then.

From "Of mice, men and in-between":

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.

In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.

In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls.

These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses.

From "Relative thinking":

But Simon Glendinning, director of the Forum for European Philosophy, read the coverage with a sinking feeling. "From the very first press releases carrying the news of [the] death [of Jacques Derrida] it was clear that the papers were going to have a field day with the kind of depressingly familiar distortions of his thought that he had to face so often - and faced so graciously - when he was alive."

The charge sheet is impressive. The New York Times accused Derrida and his theory of relativism (the idea that what is true depends on who you are) of "robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness". Scruton dismissed him as a philosopher who claimed that "anything goes". "Derrida, you could say, carried on the demolition [of objective truth and traditional morality] where Nietzsche left off," the Times declared.

And from "Personality plus":

Suppose that you were a senior Army officer in the early days of the Second World War and were trying to put together a crack team of fearless and ferocious fighters. Sandy Nininger, it now appears, had exactly the right kind of personality for that assignment, but is there any way you could have known this beforehand? It clearly wouldn't have helped to ask Nininger if he was fearless and ferocious, because he didn't know that he was fearless and ferocious. Nor would it have worked to talk to people who spent time with him. His friend would have told you only that Nininger was quiet and thoughtful and loved the theatre, and his commanding officer would have talked about the evenings of tea and Tchaikovsky. With the exception, perhaps, of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a love of music, theatre, and long afternoons in front of a teapot is not a known predictor of great valor. What you need is some kind of sophisticated psychological instrument, capable of getting to the heart of his personality.

Over the course of the past century, psychology has been consumed with the search for this kind of magical instrument.

Friday final edition

Day two of a four-day weekend, and all is well, nay, wonderful. Well, aside from the fact that we were up early this morning for an appointment downtown. (Sending the Misses M-mv off to bed last night, we gently chided, "And no wiggling or giggling tonight. Straight to sleep. We'll be up early tomorrow." "Early? How early? 'Rosy fingers of dawn' early?" inquired Miss M-mv(i). Gotta love the family-centered learning project; it yields kids that casually quote Homer.)

"The most unfeeling child of all... Peter Pan"
From "Lost Boys" (The New Yorker, November 11, 2004)

[J.M. Barrie] would claim that children cleave naturally to the misshapen and the morbid; like Roald Dahl, he admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose hardening and cooling into casual sadism....

Housekeeping... in space
From "High Maintenance" (Popular Science, December 2004):

You might think that astronauts living onboard the International Space Station spend most of their waking hours observing Earth and conducting experiments. In fact, the bulk of their time is devoted to housekeeping: unpacking groceries, collecting trash, repairing everything from computers to the toilet, and slogging through mundane maintenance checklists. It’s not surprising that equipment breaks down occasionally—that’s why the space station carries backup systems and spare parts. But now that the station has been permanently occupied for four years, it’s beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

Aren't we all? Showing signs of wear and tear, that is.

Distant relatives
From "Fossil Sheds Light on Great Ape Ancestry" (Scientific American, November 19, 2004):

Researchers in Barcelona, Spain, say they have uncovered a relatively complete fossil of one of the earliest great apes, the category that includes human beings. A report published today in the journal Science describes the new species, Pierolapithecus catalaunicas, which lived between 12.5 million and 13 million years ago. Apes diverged from monkeys near the beginning of the Miocene epoch about 25 million years ago. As long ago as 19 million years ago, the great apes then parted ways with the lesser apes, a group that includes modern gibbons. Dozens of species of great apes lived during the Miocene, but only humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans remain.

"[T]he pariah of his profession"
But we like him, don't we? From "Harold Bloom Quests for Truth" (Harvard Crimson, November 12, 2004):

Much of Bloom’s scholarship is quite unorthodox in its claims. For example, his 1998 work, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, argued that Shakespeare “essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it.”

That’s a big claim, and Bloom writes about it as he does virtually every other literary subject—with eagerness, erudition, and a tinge of comic self-awareness.

M-mv on Bloom:

"Book wars" (11.30.2003)
"The recommended daily allowance" (11.30.2003)
"On the nightstand (under the pillow, in the knapsack, etc.)" (10.12.2004)

That reminds me: Time to cobble together the November edition of "On the nightstand." Over the weekend, I think.

Weird news
From "Overdue Books Could Bring Jail Time":

Stacks of chronically overdue library books may soon land some readers in Bay County, Mich., more than just a 10-cent-a-day fine. Frustrated librarians are proposing a crackdown on the worst offenders that could include criminal charges and up to 90 days in jail.

I don't know about you, but the most I've ever owed is $8 -- $2 a day on a video returned four days late.

The recommended daily allowance
We've recommended Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death many times, here and in other forums. Don't miss this one.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Advertisement
Apparently, eight hundred forty-five shopping hours remain. If you're in the giving (via online shopping) vein, consider using one of our links to Amazon.com. Many thanks.

Thank you... for everything.

On the day before Thanksgiving last year, I posted the material below in another forum. It's a little more, erm, sentimental than is my wont here at M-mv, but even an overalls-wearing, great-books-thumping, "mommy-blog"-disdaining curmudgeon can have a soft side.

Here's a glimpse of mine.

___________________________

On this day before Thanksgiving

I find that in addition to the obvious — my family, my health (which is in a compromised state these last few days, but overall, it’s a condition for which to be grateful), my husband’s job — I am thankful for a collection of ordinary and obvious things, as well as a few things less likely to make their way into the typical Thanksgiving prayer.

Thank you for my books — the bookcases, shelves, leaning piles, and overstuffed baskets of them; for the stacks and lists and reading plans; for the bookmarks poking from dozens of them at a time; for the worlds that exist in my flat because of them; for the smell of them, even for the dust they attract.

Thank you for Chlorox wipes. In one pass, they clean and disinfect. They make the place smell good. They save me a boatload of time.

Thank you for my vacuum cleaner. It’s not fancy or expensive. It has only a few attachments. Its cord is a little too short, and it’s rather loud. But nothing says, “This home is in order!” like the smell of the apples and cinnamon potpourri wafting from my vacuum’s fresh bag as I make neat, straight tracks on each room’s rug.

Thank you for freshly sharpened pencils and the nifty “industrial strength” sharpener that has not let us down all year.

Thank you for dollar stores.

Thank you for all of the science experiments that failed; they taught us so much.

Thank you for the few that succeeded; they enchanted and encouraged us.

Thank you for IKEA. Why must every other furniture store charge so much for bookshelves?

Thank you for DSL.

Thank you for a job with a company that pays for DSL.

Thank you for museums, parks, and libraries.

Thank you for overalls... and Birkenstocks... thick cotton socks and deliciously warm wool sweaters. And a husband who thinks this is a good look.

Thank you for Super Pretzels. Who would have known they would become a family ritual? Cheddar cheese, pretzels, and juice? It must be 11 a.m. at our house.

Thank you for virtual living rooms and kitchens and porches where I can talk and listen and learn.

Thank you for Shakespeare.

And the UPS truck.

And our mailman.

And Amazon.com.

Thank you for bringing me “pen-pals” at my advanced age. Who could have guessed how much I would enjoy knowing that I have mail?

Thank you for Mountain Dew and Trader Joe’s French roast. And Ritter Sport. And M&Ms. And Dove chocolate. Hmmm.

Thank you for this magnificent city.

Thank you for the way my children smell at night, after their baths; for their sleep-softened cheeks and the way they stir just a little when I lean in to kiss them on my 3 a.m. rounds.

Thank you for Latin. And logic. And philosophy. And everything that makes me think. Hard and long and in ways unfamiliar.

Thank you for children who have grown wise but not old before their years, who share many of my interests and who introduce me to new pursuits and new ways of seeing.

Thank you for central air-conditioning. How did I pass nine summers without it?

Thank you for an enduring marriage. They say it’s part luck, part work. Thank you for my good luck and his hard work.

Thank you for the color the sky gets on sunny October days. Some of it drizzled into my oldest and youngest children’s eyes. What a color!

Thank you for the half dozen times I reached into one or another jacket pocket and drew out a $5, $10, or $20 bill. Yes, I should be more careful of my money, but, oh, what a delightful “discovery”!

Thank you for all of the moments and acts and words and pauses that are this life and not some other.

Thank you... for everything.

Reading pleasures; writing life

For reasons that should be obvious to folks who visit often, "Library rooms hold keys to secret lives" was one of this week's reading pleasures. "I am constantly amazed by the secret life of the city," writes Monday Sun-Times columnist Tom McNamee. He concludes, "Makes you wonder about everybody in line at Dunkin' Donuts."

That, of course, is the hallmark of the writing life, that wondering about everybody in line at Dunkin' Donuts. Or Target. Or the library. Or the toll booth. About the (annoyingly slow) couple on the trail ahead. About the gloomy man who rings register at Borders. The neighbors. A murmuring senior on the bus. Commuters who linger on the platform when the rest of their breed have already slipped into waiting vehicles and sped away. (What are they waiting for? Tomorrow's train? A reprieve from the long night at home? What?)

The secret lives of cities or towns or people or churches or organizations or communities or whatever are the ones we most want to know. The secret lives are the ones writers most want to reveal.

The only thing more tantalizing than the assertion "I have a secret," is the idea that everyone has a secret.

Black holes

From "Surprising Second Black Hole Found in Milky Way's Center":

Astronomers think they have found a rare if not unique black hole very near the center of the Milky Way. That would make two of the beasts in that part of the galaxy.

The discovery also adds weight to the idea that black holes come in three sizes, essentially small, medium and large.

Nine hundred one hours

Ayup. According to this counter, there are thirty-seven days, or nine hundred one hours, until Christmas.

A gentle reminder, then:

If you're enjoying your "Mental multivitamin" and a purchase, holiday gift or otherwise, that can be made at Amazon.com is in your future, please make your purchase via one of the many Amazon links on this site (including this one!). As we've said before, we're not in this for the (modest, very modest) income potential, but it does help.

Many thanks, readers, thinkers, autodidacts, and visitors.

The recommended daily allowance

I recently reread Mark Edmundson's article "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students." The controversial piece first appeared in Harper's seven years ago, and I'm guessing many of the readers, thinkers, and autodidacts who visit M-mv are already familiar with it. If not, spend some time with Edmundson, for gems like this:

It's too bad that the idea of genius has been denigrated so far, because it actually offers a live alternative to the demoralizing culture of hip in which most of my students are mired. By embracing the works and lives of extraordinary people, you can adapt new ideals to revise those that came courtesy of your parents, your neighborhood, your clan -- or the tube. The aim of a good liberal-arts scholar was once, to adapt an observation by the scholar Walter Jackson Bate, to see that "we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call 'circumstances' (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer -- freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value."

But genius isn't just a personal standard; genius can also have political effect. To me, one of the best things about democratic thinking is the conviction that genius can spring up anywhere. Walt Whitman is born into the working class and thirty-six years later we have a poetic image of America that gives a passionate dimension to the legalistic brilliance of the Constitution. A democracy needs to constantly develop, and to do so it requires the most powerful visionary minds to interpret the present and to propose possible shapes for the future. By continuing to notice and praise genius, we create a culture in which the kind of poetic gamble that Whitman made -- a gamble in which failure would have entailed rank humiliation, depression, maybe suicide -- still takes place. By rebelling against established ways of seeing and saying things, genius helps us to apprehend how malleable the present is and how promising and fraught with danger is the future. If we teachers do not endorse genius and self-overcoming, can we be surprised when our students find their ideal images in TV's latest persona ads?

And this:

Oscar Wilde, who is almost never wrong, suggested that it is perilous to promiscuously contradict people who are much younger than yourself. Point taken. But one of the lessons that consumer hype tries to insinuate is that we must never rebel against the new, never even question it. If it's new -- a new need, a new product, a new show, a new style, a new generation -- it must be good. So maybe, even at the risk of winning the withered, brown laurels of crankdom, it pays to resist newness-worship and cast a colder eye.

In Why Read? Edmundson picks up where he left off in that long essay. Consider this:

The question of canon formation, despite all its fancy baggage, is really a question about what to teach. What books shall we get young people to read? Right now this is a terribly vexed issue for a number of reasons. Traditionalists like to go around snorting about how the new cultural studies types want to replace Bronte novels with bodice rippers off the supermarket racks. But when you ask the traditionalists exactly what makes a Bronte novel more worth reading than a bodice ripper, they often can't come up with much... What the defenders of consequential writing need to do is to stand up and say that a Bronte novel can help you live better --- can, to use the idiom of this book, better enhance your expanding circle of self than a bodice ripper can.

And, by extension, the Atlantic can better enhance your expanding circle of self than People can.

Heh, heh, heh.

"When I was little..."

Over the last fifteen years, Master M-mv and his sisters have oft heard their mother pine for Kimba the white lion. "When I was little," the mild lament usually begins. And, having failed to convey anything more than my abiding affection for one of the few television shows worth remembering from those early childhood days, it lamely concludes, "Anyway...."

My remembrances of the lion past are fuzzy. A few beats of a catchy song. His name. His black-tipped ears. A faint recollection of how I loved Kimba's lope through the deserts and jungles of "deepest, darkest Africa," as much for how cute he looked as for the trumpet music that underscored his journey.

At a used book sale last month, I passed the software and video table quickly but not so quickly that the word "Kimba" didn't make its impression. "Wha-?" Yes! A video of original episodes from the 1966 series! Now the children would meet the character I had tried to conjure in a word picture.

It was late when I returned from the sale, but not so late that my discovery had to wait until morning. "Look! Look what I found!"

Master M-mv feigned polite interest and lingered long enough to fit another piece into the mental jigsaw puzzle that is "My mother." But the Misses M-mv were as captivated as I had been nearly four decades earlier.

This led to a Google search and a visit to our library's online catalogue. Had I but Googled the dear little lion's name I would have learned (years earlier!) that he was available on DVD, that I wasn't the only one who believed the writers and animators who brought us The Lion King must have grown up with the story of Caesar and his son Kimba, and that, in fact, Jungle Emperor Leo is the grown-up Kimba. I should have realized that Kimba was not so much lost to me as slightly obscured.



Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake were popular toys when my much younger sister was little, and these have all been reincarnated as popular toys for today's version of my much younger sister. The toys and television characters of my youth included a stiff-legged Barbie and Chatty Cathy, Kimba and Gumby. Aforementioned sister beheaded said Barbie, and I didn't have a Kimba toy. Why the white lion and his friends haven't earned rebirth when, of all silliness, Strawberry Shortcake has, is a mystery. An inconsequential mystery for most readers, thinkers, and autodidacts, I grant you, but a mystery nonetheless. (And, yes, of course, I appreciate that you've joined me for another uncharacteristic entry.)

Even with the benefit of Google and e-bay, the chances that Saint Nick will be able to satisfy the yen of the Misses M-mv ("Oh! Books, hard-backed sketch books in different sizes, new Prismas... and a stuffed Kimba!") are as good as nil.

But mine are inventive children. They've written and illustrated seven Kimba books and crafted a jungle, animal friends, and the white lion himself from Legos.

Anyway....

The thin Saturday paper

Newspaper publishers do readers a disservice with their slim pickings on Saturday. Conventional wisdom is that they're saving the "best" for that periodical behemoth, the Sunday paper. But certainly they must realize, at least in part, their miscalculation. After all, most papers offer an early Sunday edition... available Saturday. Morning. Which begs the question: Why not just offer readers a decent Saturday paper?

The seven basic plots
From "The simple magic of storytelling":

My old English teacher, Timothy Tosswill, was the first person to open my eyes to the fact that there is a limited number of stories in the world. One term we read Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale together with Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and noted many points of resemblance between these stories of tormented wives being put through unreasonable ordeals by tyrant husbands.

When we turned to King Lear the next term, Tosswill asked us if the story reminded us of another. There was the usual gormless silence, allowing the master to smile-sneer, "None of you, I take it, were read to when you were little boys a story about two ugly sisters and their patient, good little sister, Cinderella."

Overheard
The morning after watching Henry IV, Part II: "I am still torn up about that scene. It's hard enough reading or hearing it, but seeing it? I wonder what the beloved groundlings made of the rejection. 'I know thee not, old man.' Shakespeare. Does it get any better than that? Yeah, I didn't think so."

One of the many benefits of an uncommon education: uncommon interests.

From the (e)mailbag
This bit from the bottom of last Sunday's entry prompted two M-mv faves, D.W. and M., to write.

It is not so much that I long to talk with my former neighbors, or even share their space; vying for another centimeter of handle on the el train is an experience without with I can live. I do, however, long for the promise of such a varied lot of opinions, experiences, textures, and deliveries. The diversity (overused, I know) of any major American city and its people but particularly, in my experience, of Chicago and Chicagoans can either unnerve or enliven. For me, it was always the latter.

When my own resources failed me, Chicago's museums, theaters, parks, libraries, and, yes, its people stimulated and sustained.

Here in the country, I occasionally glimpse the boundaries of a vast cultural wasteland, and it frightens me.

M. writes, in part:

Ditto on missing the diversity of a large urban area. Another problem I had when we first moved here was with a compulsion to eat out. “Why can’t they make chicken salad like that deli on 49th Street?” and “Where can I get pizza like the Liberty Street pizza?” (Must be gone now -- it was one block south of the World Trade Center). Man, it was tough! But I have found NYC-quality Chinese food at the mall food court, of all places.

M., I owe you a "real" note, but this much I'll venture here: The drive, about eighty-five minutes (sans traffic, weather, and one of three voices musing on the nature of "spedometer creep"), is not a problem. The miles that separate me from home base are. When the city is your classroom, home is, well, homeroom: the hook on which you hang your cape and lunch satchel, the cubby in which you stash a debit card and change of socks. When the country is your classroom, the city becomes a field trip: exciting and anticipated, to be sure, but not without its share of small crises ("Again?") and little inconveniences ("Are you sure?"). The van has become a home base of sorts, though --- slightly unsatisfactory but doable when you consider what's to be gained: the Art Institute, the Newberry Library, the Shakespeare Project, etc.

D.W. writes:

This diversity is something I have pondered long and often as I raise my children in the whiteness of our rural county. (I know -- diversity, blah, blah, blah, but the thesaurus offered up very little. Multifariousness was just too much for me in the morning.) I grew up in the shadow of San Francisco and spent many days and evenings on its streets. Hearing different languages, seeing many skin colors, seeing homeless folks asking for money, and watching Market Street financiers run for the train, were all part of a normal stroll. Here in our country town, our population is high 80something% Caucasian, and, with a significant Native American population, that leaves very little percentages for "multifariousness." I realize this is not just about skin color, but more about life experience, the view from their spot in the world, and the different smells, energy, and FEEL of city living. We do have very little variety of body odor in the checkout line at the market, that is for sure.

We traveled back to the Bay Area often in our first ten years here, to see friends and family, but also to get a decent cup of coffee or Mexican food that didn't look like it came from a T.V. dinner. We went to hear different languages spoken, to hear any music besides country & western, and to be reminded that most people hold views different than ours. It made my thinking sharper and made me figure out if I believed things for shallow reasons or for good ones.

But we have traveled much less in the last few years. Part of the reason is practical. It is expensive to drive a family of seven around, and our own family has moved closer to us. But part of it is an acceptance of where we live. Your thoughts this morning caused me to pause and evaluate... have "I" become "them?" Do I FIT IN now? YIKES! But, let me clarify... lest I sound like a real snooty-patooty. I have worked hard to understand my community and have come to admire much about the views and priorities of my neighbors. But I don't want to become like them just because I live here....and there are narrow views and prejudices that I would hope to never hear in my head, let alone be characterized by. And I still want to rub shoulders with people that hold different convictions and viewpoints.

I don't think I have become part of an unthinking blob, though. I have become remarkably more introverted (but I used to be off-the-charts extroverted.) The hard work it takes to crack through the shallow surface during conversations with a husband's co-worker, or an acquaintance at church, or a next-door neighbor, can be disconcerting. But it has caused me to pursue the life of a reader, thinker, and autodidact. Plus, the slower pace I experience here has helped me to create a home for five budding autodidacts to grow and think and wrestle with ideas that will keep them from blobbing into an unimaginative way of life.

So, amidst the sameness, we have discovered quite a bit of variety. We have found enough to cause us to put down roots, deep roots, and to not feel ripped off by a lack of something in our surroundings. It took a long time, but it is home now. Not perfect, but home.

But, as you say, The City (as any native San Franciscan would call it) still feels "familiar and right." Enliven IS the word!

... [T]hese are my thoughts on rural California living after sixteen years.

Always good to think, always good to look a little deeper. Thanks.

Nope. Thank you, D.W.

On other topics, R.T. sends this Bertrand Russell quote:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Doubt, in measured doses, is good. Too much, though, is crippling.

A thousand words

Tuesday before "Law & Order"

Yes, my affection for the "L&O" machine continues, unabashed, unabated. Deal with it.

Stand and stare.
Stuart recites from a William Henry Davis poem in Benjamin Cheever's The Good Nanny: "A poor life is this, if full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare."

Standing (or sitting) and staring shape the common repose of a reader, thinker, and autodidact. Imagine a life so heavy with care and worry that it precluded daydreaming, "zoning," or conversing (silently, of course, lest one alarm strangers and neighbors) with one's self (or selves — past, present, and future).

Horrible.

Now. Make a mental note to be courteous in all of your interactions during this rapidly approaching holiday season; in other words, don't add to someone's psychic noise by behaving unkindly during these stressful weeks. Make your mother proud: Use your manners. You're not required to engage in small talk with hapless clerks or the seemingly scattered senior in line behind you, but a smile for the first and an offer to go ahead of you for the latter might afford someone else a little time to just stand and stare.

And that, my fellow readers, thinkers, and autodidacts, would be a good thing, indeed.

I'm Mrs. M-mv, and I approved this message.

So there.

The Angel in the House begat the Bitch in the House.
But we figured that out already, didn't we?

How I managed to read the November issue of the Atlantic before the October is a mystery that, in an uncharacteristically weak moment today, I spent at least ten minutes pondering.

"Now how...?"

Anyway, "A Gloom of One's Own" is not to be missed, especially if you read The Bitch in the House. (We discussed it, briefly, here and here.)

One of the pieces I sold soon after becoming a mother was titled "My Angel in the House," so, naturally, Sandra Tsing Loh scored points with this Atlantic reader by tracing the geneaology of the Bitch in the House.

Lost? I'll help. The poem "The Angel in the House" (1854) was Coventry Patmore's paean to Emily, his perfect Victorian wife. A sample of her, erm, perfection: "Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf / Of his condoled necessities / She casts her best, she flings herself."

Yeah. What he said.

Not.

Seventy-five years later, Virginia Woolf, more Bitch than Angel, to be sure, killed the Angel in her house:

I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must concilliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed.

Read Loh's piece. Good stuff. Hey, and if you somehow missed Woolf's A Room of One's Own in your literary travels, we'll wait while you add it to your Amazon cart.

Back? okay.

My angel? Oh. Well. She haunts me still. Sure. She beckons me to the the bathroom where, if I don't drop everything and scrub now, mold may form on the grout. She gestures me to the clothes hamper and shakes her finger, chiding. She calls me to the front windows, which are a mural of my daughters' sticky finger- and lip-prints. She seduces me with the idea of pride in a home well cared for.

Ah, my Angel is clever. Each time I make to pen a few thoughts, she reminds me that dust clings to the ceiling fans, mattresses need turning, and mirrors beg polishing.

For nearly nineteen years now, my Angel has had allies: My husband and children are in unwitting cahoots with her. She knew what she was doing when she made me a wife and mother.

Yes, my Angel is clever, but I am more clever still. I can't bring myself to the violence Woolf suggests, but I can heartlessly, remorselessly ignore my Angel for short intervals. And I do. And some of it sells.

And that's good enough for me.

Oh. Another book you may have missed: (Woman) Writer by Joyce Carol Oates.

More on writing
Loved this bit from Neil Steinberg in yesterday's Sun-Times:

Occasionally, at the office, colleagues will complain about the difficulty of plying their craft amidst the bustle of a newsroom. They pine for the solitude of an office. I always want to say, "Have you tried concentrating?" But that seems so unsympathetic.

Which I am. I look askance at those who can't write unless they are curled up in a windowless room, with big, sound-deadening earphones on their ears and a white-noise machine whirring in the background.

A person has to pull himself together.

...

To some, life is a distraction. To me, it's material. There is a lesson there whether you are a writer or not.

All right. More articles of interest.
"Mighty Macedonian: Alexander the Great." Tell me I'm not the only one who actually looks forward to her issue of Smithsonian. Golly, what a terrific magazine for autodidacts. (Yeah. The hints are a little heavy-handed, but know that we certainly appreciate your support.)



"The Third Way." (Also from the October issue of the Atlantic, which I read after the November issue. Still wondering how....)

Liberal education and professional education have traditionally been considered opposites. According to received academic wisdom, students seeking broad exposure to the arts and sciences should not be burdened with acquiring workplace skills, and students preparing for careers in fields such as business and engineering should not be diverted by more than a token engagement with "irrelevant" liberal arts content.

But this view is changing—which is a good thing. Slowly but surely, higher education is evolving a new paradigm for undergraduate study that erodes the long-standing divide between liberal and professional education.

Hey! The Atlantic is also a terrific periodical for thinkers and autodidacts.



Ran out of time.
Stand and stare, okay? Stand. And stare.

Added after L&O
This is what I saw when I stopped and stared today.

Monday late edition

Two related articles about improving the brain
From "Apply Current, Boost Brain Power" (Wired News, Nov.):

Sending a weak electrical impulse through the front of a person's head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20 percent, according to a new study by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In the study, researchers at the institute asked 103 volunteers to recall as many words that begin with a particular letter as possible. The researchers then passed a 2-milliamp current -- one-tenth of what is needed to power a small LED (light-emitting diode) light -- through electrodes attached to the surfaces of the volunteers' foreheads. When the volunteers were quizzed again while the current was still on, this time with a different letter, they were able to come up with 20 percent more words on average.

And from "Brain-boosting "cosmetic neurology" on the horizon" (Seattle Times, Nov. 6):

Some neurologists recently have wondered whether their field is the next frontier in elective medicine. The specialty now tries to protect ailing brains from conditions such as Parkinson's disease or migraine headaches. But doctors' efforts one day may extend to normal brains.

"This is coming, and we need to know it's coming," said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee of the University of Pennsylvania.

There's even a name for the field: cosmetic neurology.

The reading life
Don't miss this gem of an essay by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

Literary endings often raise these questions, because they remind us of the importance we place on other sorts of endings, such as the hope that our ends (desires) will be satisfied before our end (death). "Is this the promised end," Edgar asks in King Lear, "Or image of that horror?"

Fictional endings are the moments when speech topples over into silence, so they regularly provide concentrated images of the horror of death, from the corpse-strewn scenes that conclude Shakespeare's tragedies, to the newer worry over entropy that filters into a novel such as Forster's Howards End, which begins with Mrs Wilcox looking "tired" and ends with Mr Wilcox "Eternally tired".

But endings can also be more lively and enlivening than this. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending": George Eliot's "Finale" to Middlemarch points out that it is no easier to tie up all loose ends in a novel than it is to draw a sharp line between one life and another life.

Political musings
Outer Life's "An Open Letter to a Disconsolate Voter" is one of the most remarkable bits of post-election writing we've seen. "If you're still disconsolate over yesterday's results," he writes, "look deep inside yourself and ask whether it's healthy to allow your happiness and well-being to depend to such an extent on the outcome of a political contest."

More from "Open Letter":

If you think about it, political discourse revolves around a gigantic attribution error, as candidates take credit for all the good stuff that's happened during their term, promise to make sure good stuff like that happens in the future, and blame all the bad stuff on their opponents. Needless to say, at best this is extremely simplistic and at worst it's completely wrong. The world moves in accordance with deep fundamental principles that resist tinkering; there's very little one politician can do that has any effect on those principles. At the same time, the world is an incredibly complicated organism, a daily concert of trillions of decisions by billions of independent actors. Some actions end up being more important than others, to be sure, but the chances that your candidate's actions would have made a meaningful difference in the grand scheme of things are slim to none.

We've recommended "Outer Life" before. Consider bookmarking the site. And if you haven't already, bookmark "The Rage Diaries," too. Both sites make us think. And that's our highest compliment.

Quirky, original, different
Finally tonight, don't bother with the "Next blog" button. You'll end up with another picture of someone's cat. If you need something different, save time (and brain cells): Check out "Megan and Murray" or "Shockingly Provincial."

Sunday morning edition

"Music and the brain"
From Scientific American:

[I]n recent years we have begun to gain a firmer understanding of where and how music is processed in the brain, which should lay a foundation for answering evolutionary questions. Collectively, studies of patients with brain injuries and imaging of healthy individuals have unexpectedly uncovered no specialized brain "center" for music. Rather music engages many areas distributed throughout the brain, including those that are normally involved in other kinds of cognition. The active areas vary with the person's individual experiences and musical training. The ear has the fewest sensory cells of any sensory organ--3,500 inner hair cells occupy the ear versus 100 million photoreceptors in the eye. Yet our mental response to music is remarkably adaptable; even a little study can "retune" the way the brain handles musical inputs.

Cool article.

And, yes, I am studiously avoiding the subjects of politics and the recent election, except to note that the U.S. will not be changing horses mid-Apocalypse.

Hmmm. Music and the brain brings us to music and "Mental multivitamin," no? No, but I needed a transistion, awkward or not, so here are a few of our favorite entries on the music in our lives:

"Diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit diddit didda." (1.18.2004)

The soundtrack of our lives (6.11.2004)

The soundtrack of our lives (7.9.2004)


Take it or leave it.
When I am feeling a tad pettish, reading someone else's tetchy rant can make me feel, if not good, then certainly better.

From "Our First View of the End of the World" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 2004):

When their papers came in, one of the more intelligent young women in the group (or so I had judged her) had produced some garbled late-night drivel about how traumatic it was for Woolf to see the peaceful English countryside devastated by trench warfare during the First World War. Now I know academic piety insists that one hold one's students dear, even when they exhibit the most shameful ignorance and inattention. But for several days afterward I felt only rage at the student and a fairly mind-boggling hatred for my job. Why did I have to deal with such obtuseness? How could a seemingly good student get it all so bollixed up? Why did these intelligent Stanford girls (their hip-huggers and pedicures and blonde ponytails notwithstanding) have to be so blatantly oblivious? What was the point (splutter) of trying to teach them anything?

Indeed. What is the point? In a retrospective mood... our entry "About college."


"But first, the Marines had a little fun with the horses."
Heh, heh, heh.

Page 26A of the Sunday Sun-Times. (I simply can't be bothered with the local paper; it is worse than abominable.) My eye touched a large photo of men dressed as gladiators, jumped to a headline ("Troops blow off steam 'Ben-Hur' style"), and and rested on this sentence, "But first, the Marines had a little fun with the horses."

Ayup. It's the same coalescence of nature and nurture that resulted in my fondness for Mountain Dew, my penchant for overalls and thick wool socks, and deep appreciation for the genius behind "The Simpsons" (added later: neat story here) that triggered mirth when I contemplated that sentence.

Note: Master M-mv, a Marine in the making, exhorts me to add this clarification: The fun here is being poked at the good folks of the Sun-Times, not at our proud Marines.

Or their horses.




What we've been watching
We devote a lot of virtual ink to what we're reading, but we pass a few hours with good films, too.

Shackleton
Yes, Mr. M-mv is aware of my, shall we say, fondness for Kenneth Branagh. Call it the wordless acceptance of a partner's foibles, the same acceptance at work early in our courtship when I said nothing about his affection for reruns of "Wonder Woman."



Rabbit-Proof Fence
Mr., Mrs., and Master M-mv didn't talk for a long time after watching this. Too much to absorb.



Shrek 2
A sequel equal to its original; 'can't often say that.



Stage Fright
We love a good Hitchcock film.




Buried on the back page
Miss M-mv(ii) and I drove to our adopted (now abandoned) city yesterday morning. It was sunny and warm in Chicago, but for all the spring-like breezes and murmurings, it was still the city in November, gray and stripped bare. Yet it charmed me, as it always does, and it felt familiar and right in ways our new home does not.

I am not a people person nor will ever be, but it is, fundamentally, the people of Chicago I miss most. They look as different from one another and sound as different, even smell as different, as the plants in the Garfield Park Conservatory.

A sameness marks my new neighbors, a lock-step of pedestrian thought, Wal*Mart fashion sense, and bland political sensibility, that is as depressing for a reader, thinker, and autodidact as a meditation on a world without, say, Shakespeare, the Art Institute, or philosophy.

It is not so much that I long to talk with my former neighbors, or even share their space; vying for another centimeter of handle on the el train is an experience without with I can live. I do, however, long for the promise of such a varied lot of opinions, experiences, textures, and deliveries. The diversity (overused, I know) of any major American city and its people but particularly, in my experience, of Chicago and Chicagoans can either unnerve or enliven. For me, it was always the latter.

When my own resources failed me, Chicago's museums, theaters, parks, libraries, and, yes, its people stimulated and sustained.

Here in the country, I occasionally glimpse the boundaries of a vast cultural wasteland, and it frightens me.

An uncharacteristic entry

Before dawn
Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest planets, hung in the eastern sky in a conjunction seemingly crafted exclusively for early-rising stargazers.

From Sky & Telescope's Skywatch ‘04, Your Annual Guide to the Night Sky I learned that today Jupiter and Venus appeared only one degree apart. Hold your arm out and raise your pinkie. The two planets were even closer than the width of your little finger.

And I saw it with the naked eye.

Heh, heh, heh.

Here's a story for you.

The naked eye
In April 2000, the youngest M-mvs were just 10, 4, and 2.5, but we had already enjoyed several stargazing sessions, including classes at the Adler (Mrs. M-mv and Master M-mv) and star watches at the Nature Center (the family M-mv). Our "private star parties" (i.e, M-mvs only), though, were among our favorite adventures in astronomy, and our April 9 party was particularly memorable.

To escape the light pollution, we drove ninety minutes out of the city. Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn "set," and the stars "rose." Amazing. We had worried needlessly that the thin layer of clouds would prohibit good observation; it was the best star party yet.

As always, throughout the party, Mr. M-mv, Master M-mv, and I frequently compared notes on what was observable with the naked eye versus with our binoculars. And, as always, we spent a bit of time wishin' and hopin' about the acquisition of a Dobsonian.

"Did you have a good time?" I inquired of the littlest astronomers when it was time to go.

"Yes!" the youngest M-mvs yelled. "We did!"

"Could you see the moon and the stars?" I asked, hoping to keep their spirits high because a long drive separated them from their beds.

"Oh, yes," said Miss M-mv(i). "And I could even see the naked eye!"

"Me, too! Me, too! I saw the naked eye!" said Miss M-mv(ii).

"The naked eye! The naked eye! We saw the naked eye!" they chanted together.

For an hour and a half.

Yes, that night I titled the book I will never write about our learning adventures.

"The naked eye! The naked eye!"

After dawn
Ayup. Another story.

In late November 2002, we met Chris Van Allsburg.

The award-winning author and illustrator did not read his classic, The Polar Express, aloud. Rather, a professional storyteller gave a reading and Mr. Van Allsburg waited (imperiously) outside, deigning to sign books as frustrated children and their annoyed parents flooded out of the stuffy auditorium at the Museum of Science and Industry. (Do I sound a little uptight about this? Even now? Four years later? Call it the anal-retentive in me. The event was advertised as an author reading. It was not.)

Still, our two minutes with the author actually became a passage in the family narrative: Van Allsburg spoke to each of us and expressed (seemingly) genuine interest in the fact that we regularly used The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (which we brought for him to sign) for story-starters and writing prompts. And Miss M-mv(i) (who was a few months shy of seven by then) had an opportunity to tell her then favorite artist how much she admires his "artwork."

Van Allsburg: How are you today?

Miss M-mv(i): Fine, thank you. And how are you?

Van Allsburg: Very good, thank you.

Mr. M-mv: Gabby is our resident artist, and she really admires your books.

Miss M-mv(i) (with her trademark animation): Yes, Mr. Van Allsburg! I just love your artwork! It's so wonderful! You do. Such. Good. Work!

Van Allsburg (a little taken aback): Well, Miss M-mv(i). I think you have a future on the stage.

(This remark on the heels of Master M-mv's orthodontist talking with an (as usual) animated Miss M-mv(i) just a few days before and concluding, "She's going to be an actress, no?")

This morning, I opened The Mysteries of Harris Burdick to a page at random.

MR. LINDEN'S LIBRARY
-----------------------
He had warned her about the book. Now it was too late.

He does. Such. Good. Work.

At 7:03 a.m.
Birds at the feeders. That and the black blanket dotted with stars like Nan's robe of starry-brightness in The Wind Boy (Ethel Cook Eliot) — the night sky in the country. These are the things I like about life here.

I watched the birds over my coffee and copy of the Sun-Times. And suddenly I remembered the owl that we saw on the roadside Tuesday afternoon. Whether he was dead or gravely injured or simply pausing in his travels, we'll never know. He was as still as death, eyes shut. But he was erect and not in the road.

So large. And beautiful. And incongruous. What sort of owl was it? A Great Horned Owl, I think. Telltale ear tufts.

Birds in the feeders. Night skies.

And the view from the kitchen window.



And the view from the big window in the livingroom.

Trees and grass.

Chipmunks, squirrels, and the pair of racoons who peek in the window every night to see whether it's a book or a film or a game that we're about this time.

Garage parking. Our own garage.

Deer.

The sounds of silence.

The way the morning smells. And the night. Clean and clear.

Pine needles in the girls' hair when they come indoors.

Even piles of leaves.

These are the things I like about life here.

But I miss Chicago. And now I've said it.

This is our family's birds-at-the-feeders-and-night-skies time.

A return to Chicago is inevitable, though. A return to Chicago is inevitable.

If one says a thing often enough it becomes a truth. Of sorts. And one can then amble on, content.

For now.

Then, at 7:15 a.m.
Flipping through the paper, "The Meeting Place" banner became, perhaps appropriately enough, "The Mating Place" to my reader's eye, and I had to page back to ensure that, in fact, the good folks at the Sun-Times had not changed the name of their personals pages.

They have not.

At 7:22 a.m.
The Art of Making and Using Sketches (G. Fraipont) was first published in London in 1892. Our copy was published in 1916. We found this treasure at the [insert county name] Historical Society's Cider Fest last month, and it is now one of Miss M-mv(i)'s regular companions, as much for what it contains, I suppose, as for the way it feels and smells. She read aloud from the introduction on the way home from the fest:

The art of making a sketch is, in fact, the art of recording by a few strokes of the pencil or touches of the pen the remembrance of a thing we have seen, or the impression of a scene we have imagine.

A sketch bears the same relation to a finished drawing as shorthand notes bear to a revised report. I here speak, of course, of the note-sketch rapidly set down....

7:25 a.m.
And then they were all awake. Hugs and hellos and hotcakes and Hamlet and "Hurry! Hurry!" or "Hush, hush" (depending on which creature was visiting the feeder or mincing its way across the property or porches or patio).

By the late afternoon
I had learned:

That when the hair stylist asks if you want your hair blown dry, you must (a) admit that one of the reasons you favor a medium-short bob is because any stylist with a license can do it (right?); hence, you can choose a salon that accepts competitors' coupons and spend the money saved on books; and (b) realize that more money is involved — exactly $8. So much for money saved.

That a dash of fatalistic humor is required in order to drive oneself from the service station back home to shower and change after dousing one's own foot, leg, arm, and abdomen with gasoline. Quite by accident, of course. While filling the family mini van in preparation for the weekend's adventures. To take everyone's mind off the stench and the potentially explosive situation, I popped at Donut Gem in my mouth whole and blew powder through its tiny hole, sending the young M-mvs in giggle spasms and earning an appreciative smirk from Master M-mv. I was thisclose to choking on said Donut Gem when I recovered myself.

That I am much too old to stuff my mouth with Donut Gems.

That I am much too old for Donut Gems. Period.

That when Miss M-mv(i) asks for shells, apparently she does not mean stuffed shells. I learned this after a $75 trip to Dominick's, ostensibly for shell fixin's, but, naturally, for everything else on the family's running list. Bleach. Orange juice. Cereal. Chicken's on sale. And so on. Home again, home again. Bags unpacked. Water on to boil. Oven preheating. One cheese grated. The other mixed. Shells stuffed. And so on. A hyphenated meal (lunch-dinner) is served. "Why are these shells so big?" asks Miss M-mv(i). And then, with something approaching horror coloring her voice, "And what on earth is inside these things?" It seems that all the young artist wanted was pasta shells. You know. Those cute little shells in box. Boil ‘em. Throw some sauce in the pot. A dollar a box at Jewel.

That if you have six items on hold at the library and you drive right past the library because you are certain that, since they called yesterday and you already picked up that item, nothing could be there for you today, then, when you arrive home, there will be a message from the library indicating that an item you have requested is being held for you for one week. And you will be a little frustrated. Especially if you listen to such a message after learning that "shells" doesn't mean "stuffed shells."

At 4:44 p.m.
The library in our town is small and mostly features the sort of books that will end up lining the tables of a Friends library sale in a few years. But they get what I need, quickly and without too much eye-rolling.

At 5:13 p.m.
Jewel. Only two items on the list: shells and Christmas tree incense, which goes on display there on November 1 and stays there until the day after Christmas.

At 6:15 p.m.
While waiting for brother, the Misses M-mv identified in the is-it-already-night dark sky Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, and Pegasus and discussed Bruce Coville's retelling of Hamlet with a sort of matter-of-factness that staggers me.

It's 9:29 p.m.
The Misses M-mv are quiet, if not quite asleep. Mr. M-mv has finished Shipwrecks of Lake Michigan (Benjamin J. Shelak) and is casting about for a new friend. Master M-mv has declared The Greenhaven Press Literary Companion to British Literature: William Shakespeare, The Histories, "Adequate but hardly Bloom or Asimov," and is angling for an extra hour or two to spend on what he calls "his reading," which currently comprises four selections from the history book club, including The D-Day Experience (Richard Holmes). And I am ready to curl up with Benjamin Cheever's The Good Nanny, which ranks up there with Little Children (Tom Perrotta; see our 6.9.2004 RDA) and The Nanny Diaries (Emma McLaughlin) as scathing social commentary on contemporary parenting and coupling and careerism and... Oh, bother. Read them. They're quick, good, thought-provoking.

At 9:49 p.m.
From the window behind my rocking chair, I can see a large patch of black blanket sky sprinkled with stars. It awes me. And then I remember that I am driving into Chicago tomorrow. And I think, in teenage vernacular, "Awesome!"

"The art of saying goodbye"

The [Terra Museum of American Art] was the brainchild of Daniel Terra, a son of Italian immigrants who made a fortune in the printing business. He used his wealth to acquire art -- initially European masters, but by the early 1970s, he had expanded his collection to include American artists, including John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton.

In 1980, he opened his first museum in Evanston in a building that had housed a flower shop. By 1982, his collection had outgrown the space, and Terra began to acquire real estate on Michigan Avenue. In 1987, the museum opened at its current and final location, 664 N. Michigan, as an intimate showcase for the Terra collection.

And now that "little-known gem in Chicago's cultural crown" is closed, although the collection is available online. (An aside: The piece featured on the page we've linked, Samuel F. B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre, is one of our favorites.)

Read the complete article about the Terra here.

A short ode
The Terra's family program, generally held the first Sunday of each month, featured a forty-five- to sixty-minute gallery walk-and-talk followed by an hour in the museum's wonderful studios, where participants applied the techniques they had discovered and discussed in the galleries. Family M-mv participated in too many of these programs to count. The program was, simply put, a integral part of our arts education.

We'll miss the Terra, its collection, and the many fine people who guided us through the galleries and set us free in the studios.

Changing horses mid-Apocalypse

Will we? Won't we? Wait, wonder, watch.

But first, vote.

The most important right granted to U.S. citizens is the right to vote.

Oh, you didn't know that? What else don't you know about the supreme law of the land? Take the U.S. Constitution Test. And if you get more than, say, three questions wrong, spend some time with The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution (Linda R. Monk).

Oxymoron

Worthwhile quiz. Who knew?

Three from the (e)mailbag

Thank you to all who wrote about last week's entries, the site's new look, and our one-year anniversary. We appreciate your comments and encouragement and look forward to another year of reading, thinking, and learning with you.

The following three messages, in particular, gave us "warm fuzzies." (Yes, even curmudgeons can feel warm and fuzzy. We're people, too.)

A. writes, in part:

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know how much I've enjoyed reading Mental Multivitamin for the last year. I've been reading it from the beginning, and it's one of two blogs that I read regularly. It is so pleasant to read something written by a mother who doesn't feel the need to complain about everything involved with being a full time mother. You complain about worthwhile things. [Heh, heh, heh. You mean like raking leaves?]

I've read some good books that were suggested on your blog, and I enjoyed ... the recommendations from your other readers. I'm reading several of them now. My husband isn't a big reader, and my children are just learning to read, so it's nice to have a place to come where I "discuss" books (if only in my own mind). And you like star watching too!

Thank you, A. We're glad that the hike has been worth your while.

Another A., one who has also been with us since the beginning (I think), writes, in part:

I like the new look of M-mv. It is easier on my eyes, too.

Actually, [M.], I always thought those people without collections of books were a sorry lot. I have books that help me to cry, books that help me to laugh, books I am so familiar with I have only to page through them to savor the feelings they bring up. How can a person read a book only once and then never read it again? And until your post about books this past week, I thought everyone had book friends like I did. Books and cookies don't yell at me. They never did. People did enough of that when I was a child that I still wince, awaiting the yelling, when I voice an unpopular opinion. I suppose I should go to a psychologist and discuss the wincing and mistrust of people, but I don't see the point. I am content with myself as I am, bookish as that may be. Others may not approve, but I have progressed far enough to smile and tell them they may disapprove of my books, my lifestyle, my family, and my Starbucks addiction, but it won't change me.

Happy country living!

"Others may not approve... but it won't change me." Wise words, A. Thank you, as always, for your note.

And D.W., a card-carrying member of M-mv's "best and perfect" audience, writes, in part:

To accomplish something important, two things are necessary: a definite idea and not quite enough time.

GREAT QUOTE. J. said, "That's TRUE! As soon as you have 'enough' time, you go make some coffee."

...

Just wanted to say, "MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF M-MV's ANNIVERSARY." What a great year it has been. And, OH! the problems you have caused me. Where to put all the books? (In the bathrooms... maybe we could design a bookcase for behind each bed and couch...is that a weight-bearing wall?) When to sleep when there are books to read, and there are invigorating ideas to discuss with the people I value the most. Sigh. What great problems to have. Thanks for stretching your personal space to include us cyber-folk. You have made my life a richer and more sane one with your wit and wisdom and common sense. THANKS.

Three cheers to the M-mv team! You are appreciated....

Thanks, D.W. We appreciate you, too.