"And, as they say, the incident is closed."

Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

This poem was found among Vladimir Mayakovsky’s papers after his suicide on April 14, 1930. The middle section, with modest revisions, served as an epilogue to his suicide note. Yes, plagued by critics and disappointed in his personal relationships, the poet, who had criticized poet Serge Yesenin for committing suicide, took his own life: You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.

And so it goes.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the popular press' claim of a link between suicide and the holidays is unfounded, a myth. "In fact," notes a CDC fact sheet, "suicide rates in the United States are lowest in the winter and highest in the spring."

In other words, March and April are the cruelest months. Hence, my annual public service announcement.

Twenty-eight years ago this month, someone I loved committed suicide. No one talked about it then. I didn't learn that his was a death by suicide until many years later -- because someone finally decided it was time to talk about it.

Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for all U.S. men, maintains the CDC (although, interestingly, Reuters Health reports that heavy men may be less apt to commit suicide).

Folks spend an awful lot of time fussing over (or at least paying lip service to) healthy hearts and arteries and muscles and teeth. Oh, and the time and money they throw at appearances -- hair and skin and nails... and weight.

But do they talk, really talk about mental health with their primary care physicians? Do they invest, really invest in their emotional well-being?

In short, will they seek help if they need it? Will they even know they need help?

Because, as it turns out, "with help comes hope."

"Suicide is NEVER the answer," asserts Suicide.org. "Getting help is the answer."

Getting help is the answer.
Know the suicide warning signs. If you know someone who may be suicidal:

If you know someone whom you think may be suicidal, show that you care by:

• Listening to them with sincere concern for their feelings. Do not offer advice, but let them know that they are not alone.

• Sharing your feelings with them. If you feel that they may make a reckless decision, tell them that you are concerned. They need to know that they are important to you and that you care.

• Inquiring if they have had suicidal thoughts or if they have made a suicide plan in a straightforward and caring manner. If you feel you cannot ask the question, find someone who can.

• Call[ing] the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, (800) 273-TALK (8255).

The Mayo Clinic offers these additional suggestions.

And, if you're like me, someone who knows someone who died by suicide, you may find the collection of articles at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) helpful.

From the AFSP:

[Y]ou should know that 90 percent of all people who die by suicide have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder at the time of their death (most often depression or bipolar disorder). Just as people can die of heart disease or cancer, people can die as a consequence of mental illness. Try to bear in mind that suicide is almost always complicated, resulting from a combination of painful suffering, desperate hopelessness and underlying psychiatric illness.

Take care of yourselves.

Take care of one another.

Reading life review: March

■ The Source of All Things: A Memoir (Tracy Ross)
Memoir; review copy. I gave up on review copies quite some time ago (because, darn it, I want to read what I want to read!) but when I received an email regarding this "[p]owerful new memoir about childhood abuse and the resiliency of the human spirit," something prompted me to accept a copy.

Ross first described her stepfather's abuse and the role nature played in her recovery in a full-length feature article for Backpacker magazine, where she is currently a senior editor. This book-length treatment enables her to more thoroughly explore her survivor's journey -- from the first episode of abuse to her stepfather's late-in-life confession -- and all of the dynamics at work in her family. As might be expected, while Ross eventually finds meaning and hope in the woods, on the trails, in her work, in marriage, and in motherhood, her narrative is painful, difficult, harrowing. (I'm thinking particularly of her mother's refusal to give up on her husband when the molestation is finally reported.)

Although the subject matter and the frank nature of Ross' narrative prohibit me from making a general recommendation, I was much moved by her account.

■ Heaven Is for Real (Todd Burpo)
Memoir; religion. No, this is certainly not my customary fare, but the father of my daughters' dearest friend pressed this on me, and I thought, Oh, why not? Insert self-mocking head-shake here. Why not, indeed. More about this publishing phenomenon here.

"Bright Objects Hypnotize the Mind":April is National Poetry Month.

As I've said several times before, you don't need a plan or a permission slip (or even a National Poetry Month) to enjoy poetry with your children. Simply pull down a collection of poems and read.

Play with the language.
Take turns delighting in silly poems.
Teach one another the importance of old favorites.
Recite from memory the poems you've learned.

Let favorite pieces become part of the pattern of your family's secret language, like lines from favorite books and films.

Love of language and learning does not grow from lists or lesson plans.

It blossoms in the place where children hear

To fling my arms wide,
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done,
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark, like me --
That is my dream! *

and can imagine the speaker, draw him, talk to him, and know what he'd say next.

* From the poem "Dream Variations" by Langston Hughes

A selection of M-mv poetry entries
■ "I’m not having a good light here at all." (1.22.2009)
■ Poem in Your Pocket Day (4.17.2008)
■ The recommended daily allowance (12.20.2006)
■ Russian lit (3.12.2006)
■ "Not waving but drowning" (2.19.2006)
■ "The Gift Outright" (1.20.2006)
■ Czeslaw Milosz (12.02.2005)
■ Stopping by woods on a snowy evening (11.25.2004)

You'll find other poetry posts here.

Poem in Your Pocket Day
On April 14, celebrate Poem In Your Pocket Day! Choose a favorite poem and carry it with you to share with family, friends, colleagues... even strangers on the el train.

From the Academy:

Poems have been stowed in pockets in a variety of ways, from the commonplace books of the Renaissance to the pocket-sized publications for Army soldiers in World War II.

In years past, I carried a poem in my pocket most days of National Poetry Month and posted snippets of several of my selections. The Misses and I plan to do the same thing this April and heartily invite you to do the same.

Some recommendations
Don't miss A Child's Introduction to Poetry: Listen While You Learn about the Magic Words That Have Moved Mountains, Won Battles, and Made Us Laugh and Cry (first mentioned in our 8.26.2006 "On the nightstand") or Garrison Keillor's Good Poems (found in "Writing warm-up" from 3.26.2006). I find many of my poem-a-day selections in these wonderful volumes.

Celebrating children's poetry
Once again, Greg at GottaBook is hosting "Thirty Poets / Thirty Days," a month-long celebration of poetry that will feature a new previously unpublished work by a different popular poet each day. Bookmark GottaBook and visit throughout the month.

A couple of things. Well, three. Or four. Whatever.

So. Spring is here, and you can have a fistful of it for just $1.99 at Dominick's. And, yeah, that's the obligatory picture of cats. What can I say? It's a blog. And finally, the world is infinitely more beautiful when seen through those glasses. I have not had rose-colored lenses since I was a child. They are world-changing. I only took them off to photograph them. Just $11 and change at JC Penney.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Ravioli con Trugole e Funghi

That's what the Misses and I chose for dinner at Vivere, one of the three Italian Village Restaurants last night. Mr. M-mv selected Gnocchi con Cinghiale.

One word from all of us: Mmmmmmm.

And dessert? Dessert was also something of a culinary miracle.

And then it was off to see F. Murray Abraham deliver a Lear-informed Shylock (i.e., one "More sinn'd against than sinning"; related entry with links to reviews here).

Absolutely amazing. Nearly flawless. (Would that the audience had been so, too. Ice cubes rattling in a plastic cup during the trial? Really? Who raised you? Llamas? Argh.) But amazing, folks. Get thee hence. It's in town for five more performances.

"Idleness is what supervenes on those too few occasions when we allow our pace to slacken and merge with the rhythms of the natural day...."

From Sven Birkerts' essay "The Mother of Possibility" (Lapham's Quarterly, March 22):

Idleness is what supervenes on those too few occasions when we allow our pace to slacken and merge with the rhythms of the natural day, when we manage to thwart the impulse to plan forward to the next thing and instead look—idly, with nascent curiosity—at what is immediately in front of us. It has been with us from the first man and woman—when self was in accord with all nature—and so along with being the core of our childhood sense of the world, it is also the center of our Western legend of creation. Unsurprisingly, it features—the longing, the evocation—through our literature and art from earliest times, changing inflection, intensifying and diminishing depending on historical context. Figuring conspicuously in the pastoral ideal and in the atmospherics of mythologies, the notion has over time taken on dense crosshatchings, in recent centuries at points almost suggesting an epistemology, the basis for a way of true seeing. But it remains a concept-rejecting word. Put too much of any kind of freight on it and its dolce far niente vanishes.

One thousand words

Mr. M-mv received one of those digital frame gadgets for Christmas, and we're finally getting around to deciding, Hey! This might be cool! -- a decision that precipitated a meander through the images on both this computer and my external hard drive, a meander that led to the (re)discovery of the two images above.

Sure, they scream, "Twee!" but we like 'em, and I haven't much posting time left this morning: We've got math, music, and The Merchant of Venice on tap before lunch, a lunch that I actually plan to prepare and serve (as opposed to have delivered to the door by one of several delivery personnel I now know by first name and auto make and model). So twee it is, for now.

Oh, The Merchant of Venice? Yeah, we scored tickets to the "rich and complex Shakespearean drama [...] headed by an old-school star like F. Murray Abraham," (another review here) and yes, we are beyond thrilled. (Still pondering the subject of cultural omnivores, by the way. Any thoughts on that, fellow readers, thinkers, and autodidacts?)

"You can try that one at home, you know."

"All you need are some castanets," quipped Jesse Gram, audience education manager at the Lyric Opera, on the subject of "Je vais danser en votre honneur," Carmen's calculatedly seductive dance in Act II.

Gram's witty pre-performance discussion about "the most popular opera in the world" was punctuated by appreciative laughter, audio selections, and an introduction to the five-note "Fate" motif that opens the second half of the prelude. Why does Bizet devote so much time to this theme? To get it in our heads! exclaimed Gram, as he described the composer's narrative genius. (Too bad Bizet died thinking Carmen was a flop, eh?)

____________________________

Our first foray into opera (last year) was a resounding success, but our second (last night) was a far superior experience. In fact, had we lost our "opera virginity" on this production of Carmen, I think we could have easily become shameless opera harlots! And we're not alone in our praise. From "Second time's the charm for 'Carmen' at Lyric" (Chicago Tribune, March 13):

[T]he singing finer than before and the dramatic chemistry much improved among the leads: now the admirable Bulgarian mezzo Nadia Krasteva in an impressive Lyric debut as Carmen, tenor Brandon Jovanovich as her hapless victim, Don Jose, and soprano Nicole Cabell as the good-hearted village girl, Micaela. The major returnees from fall are bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen as the bullfighter Escamillo and conductor Alain Altinoglu, a most idiomatic hand in the pit.

Krasteva's vocally and physically alluring Carmen has graced the theaters of Berlin, Moscow and Vienna, where she has sung nearly 30 roles. The rich, smoky colors and earthy sensuality of her voice were matched by the naturalness of her acting and a fiery temperament at one with this touchstone mezzo role. [M-mv: Yes! Yes, that's it! Krasteva looked and sang the part, but she also acted the hell out of it. I loved her performance, every inch of it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.]

[...]

Musically and histrionically, Micaela is a natural fit for Cabell, the superstar graduate of Lyric's Ryan Opera Center. The character showed vulnerability and, later, determination as the emissary from Jose's mother struggled to rescue him from Carmen's clutches. Cabell was charming in Act 1 and both delicate and vibrant in the famous third-act aria. [M-mv: I would add "show-stopping." Cabell's third-act aria was show-stopping.]

[...]

The revival director, Harry Silverstein, discarded elements from John Copley's original production, coming up with an essentially traditional production in which the drama moved swiftly and character interaction was clearly defined. Robin Don's handsome, sun-baked sets and Robert Perdziola's costumes looked as though people actually lived in them. All this makes Lyric's revival a "Carmen" worth catching, even for jaded opera vets who probably could sing you each and every aria from memory.

Admittedly, the Sun-Times was not quite as unrestrained in its praise: "Lyric’s recast ‘Carmen’ no less fiery" (March 14).

____________________________

Related aside
In her March 16 post for NPR's "Monkey See" blog, former "Television Without Pity" writer and editor Linda Holmes links to the March 14 Miller-McCune article "Dip in Arts Attendance tied to Decline of the Omnivore." This article led me to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) website and a a February 24 press release about three new NEA research reports about the NEA's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts:

■ Arts Education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation (Nick Rabkin and E.C. Hedberg)

■ Beyond Attendance: A multi-modal understanding of arts participation (Jennifer L. Novak-Leonard and Alan S. Brown)

■ Age and Arts Participation: A case against demographic destiny (Mark J. Stern)

Following these trails while still reeling from the wonder of last night's opera experience left me with a big ol' case of synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis: Are we omnivores?

More on that later. Until then, the first half of Entr'acte III is some of the most beautiful music in Carmen, isn't it?

She makes an excellent point.

Fanny Harville writes:

Just wanted to say: I enjoyed reading Epstein's thoughts about the (absurd) Northwestern sex demo, and I largely agree with him. But I take issue with the paragraph you quoted on your site.

This kind of false nostalgia for the supposed good old days of the classic canon implies that works were excluded from university study based on objective measures, Arnold's "the best which has been thought and said," instead of admitting that such measures were themselves culturally constructed. In other words, what we think of as "the best which has been thought and said" changes over time, and has for a very long time. For example, as I am sure you know given your deep immersion in his work, Shakespeare's canonization has a long, complicated, and fascinating history. Before the 1920s, novels were not studied in university curricula and were not considered worthy of the "elite endeavor" of higher education; would Epstein lament this change? Or is it only the inclusion of "second rate women writers" which bothers him? As a feminist scholar, I always bristle when male emeritus professors express their yearning for the exclusionary days of yore.

"Higher education used to be an elite endeavor."

From Joseph Epstein's article "Lower Education" (The Weekly Standard, March 21):

Higher education used to be an elite endeavor. The acquisition, in Matthew Arnold’s formulation, of “the best which has been thought and said” was what it was supposed to be about. But one has to have the authority to know what really is best, and confidence in the belief that acquiring it is decisive. This, somehow, was lost. And once it was, great subjects in the university curriculum were increasingly replaced by hot ones; just as often, traditional subjects were corrupted by politics in ways that constituted a frontal assault on academic freedom, though not many people in the university seemed either to notice or much to mind.

"Part of the problem people have with data mining is that it seems so creepy."

From "Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You" (Time, March 10):

Taking your information without asking and then profiting from it isn't new: it's the idea behind the phone book, junk mail and telemarketing. Worrying about it is just as old: in 1890, Louis Brandeis argued that printing a photograph without the subject's permission inflicts "mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily harm." Once again, new technology is making us weigh what we're sacrificing in privacy against what we're gaining in instant access to information. Some facts about you were always public — the price of your home, some divorce papers, your criminal records, your political donations — but they were held in different buildings, accessible only by those who filled out annoying forms; now they can be clicked on. Other information was not possible to compile pre-Internet because it would have required sending a person to follow each of us around the mall, listen to our conversations and watch what we read in the newspaper. Now all of those activities happen online — and can be tracked instantaneously.

"Solitude has long been linked with creativity, spirituality, and intellectual might."

From "The power of lonely" (The Boston Globe, March 6):

Perhaps this explains why seeing a movie alone feels so radically different than seeing it with friends: Sitting there in the theater with nobody next to you, you’re not wondering what anyone else thinks of it; you’re not anticipating the discussion that you’ll be having about it on the way home. All your mental energy can be directed at what’s happening on the screen.

"[T]hey can’t have a fun, low-stress childhood and also an Ivy League education."

From "The Ivy Delusion" (The Atlantic, April 2011):

You should know that the good mothers have been mad—and getting madder—for quite a while now. The good mothers believe that something is really wrong with the hypercompetitive world of professional-class child rearing, whose practices they have at once co-created and haplessly inherited. The good mothers e-blast each other New York Times articles about overscheduled kids and the importance of restructuring the AP curriculum so that it encourages more creative thinking. They think that the college-admissions process is “soul crushing.” One thing the good mothers love to do—something they undertake with the same “fierce urgency of now” with which my mom used to protest the Vietnam War—is organize viewings of a documentary called Race to Nowhere. Although the movie spends some time exploring the problems of lower-income students, it is most lovingly devoted to a group of neurasthenic, overworked, cracking-at-the-seams kids from a wealthy suburb in Northern California, whom we see mooning around the enormous kitchens of their McMansions and groaning about sleeplessness and stress. It posits that too much homework can give your child stomach pains, chronic anxiety, anhedonia.

The thesis of the film, echoed by an array of parents and experts, is that we can change the experience and reduce the stress and produce happier kids, so long as we all work together on the problem. This is the critical factor, it seems, the one thing on which all voices are in concert: no parent can do this alone; everyone has to agree to change.

[...]

And more to the point, while you’re busily getting your child’s life back on track, Amy Chua and her daughters aren’t blinking.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

"Is convenience really the highest American value?"

From "Writer's Block: The End of Bookstores" (The New Republic, March 24, 2011):

After all, what good does this access do if we can only find our way back to ourselves, the same selves, the same interests, the same beliefs over and over? Is what we really want to be solidified, or changed? If solidified, then the Internet is well-designed for that need. But, if we wish to be changed, to be challenged and undone, then we need a means of placing ourselves in the path of an accident. For this reason, the plenitude may narrow the mind. Amazon may curate the world for you, but only by sifting through your interests and delivering back to you variations on your well-rehearsed themes: Yes, I do love Handke! Yes, I had been meaning to read that obscure play by Thomas Bernhard! A bookstore, by contrast, asks you to scan the shelves on your way to looking for the thing you had in mind. You go in meaning to buy Hemingway, but you end up with Homer instead. What you think you like or want is not always what you need. A bookstore search inspires serendipity and surprise.

The bookstore-that-must-not-be-named in both my town and the next town over is closing, and it occurs to me -- Too late! Alas, too late! -- that no real harm could have come from naming it. Yes, I was, up until December 1, 2009, an off again, on again Amazon associate. But even if I had continued that relationship with more zeal, I would have been dumped, so why hadn't I just said it? Why hadn't I admitted, "When I need to feel a book before I buy it, when I can't decide what to read next, when I have a gift card or a coupon in my knapsack, when I can't wait until tomorrow to own this book or that, I go to Borders"? Loyalty to Amazon? The need to seem unbiased on the subject of chain bookstores? What? And now the chain is dying before my eyes, and there is nothing I can say or do about it.

Except to admit -- Too late! Again, too late! -- that I loved Borders, and I loved that there was a Borders less than three miles from my home. I loved the coffee drink that tasted like liquid cake, and I loved the sea of magazines through which I waded to arrive at the science fiction and mystery sections. I loved the tables of books and the ladders leaning against well-stocked shelves. I loved 33 percent and 40 percent off coupons, and I loved my Borders Reward card, Borders Bucks, and the kindness of the the local store's staff, who always managed to "find" a coupon when I misplaced mine.

I loved you, Borders, but I didn't love you bravely. And I will always regret that.

Thank you for losing the film.

Remember this entry? Well, Todd Bieber found his "mysterious European friends."

Why we write about grief

Joyce Carol Oates in an e-mail correspondence with Meghan O'Rourke for the NYT:

[T]he act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension, and, in a childlike way, control; we are so baffled and exhausted by what has happened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakable will make it somehow our own.

"But there are things education can’t do."

From Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in yesterday's NYT:

In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

Anticipation

April is National Poetry Month! (Related entry here.)

Reading life review: February

This month, I was not a reader of books. Oh, I was a sorter of books. A duster of books. A mover of books. A reorganizer of books. A weeder of books. But a reader? Alas, no. I will make up for it, though, beginning with Kill Shakespeare (Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col, Andy Belanger).

Until then, here's what I've been up to.