Reading life review: November

Books read this month: 6
Books read in 2011: 108

I'm still serial-dating my books, still taking a number too great to be called decent out for a burger and fries, a movie, a kiss at the door even, and then not calling. Christmas vacation will offer the time I need to tackle the book stack of reproach. Until then, you must again sign me, An unapologetically promiscuous reader.

■ Blue Nights (Joan Didion)
Memoir. Related entries here and here.

■ Henry IV, Part II (William Shakespeare)
Play, classic. With the Misses.

■ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley)
Play. The excellent CBC Stratford Festival Reading Series recording accompanied my reading of this wonderful work. The recording also accompanied Mr. M-mv to and from work for two days and earned his recommendation. We're looking forward to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production, directed by Barbara Gaines and featuring Diane D’Aquila as Queen Elizabeth. (D’Aquila originated the role in the premiere production at Stratford Shakespeare Festival and voices Elizabeth in the recording.)

■ Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (Michael Pollan)
Non-fiction. This title arrived on my stack for one reason only: Maira Kalman's whimsical illustrations. (Related entries here and here.) That said, the book is a cheerful reminder -- one perhaps more than a few of us require during this food, food, food season -- to eat mindfully and well.

■ Toxic Parents (Susan Forward)
Psychology. Subtitled "Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life," this self-help manual provided background material for a recent research project.

■ DMZ: Volume 10: Collective Punishment (Brian Wood)
Graphic fiction. Apparently, the series will conclude with Volume 12, and I'm beginning to agree with some of the harsher critics: The plot has stalled.

Snapshots

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

Thanksgiving

Oh, we had stuffing and green bean casserole, too. (I made feast last Sunday, and I will make it again over the weekend.) But we spent Thanksgiving at the Brookfield Zoo, as did a number of other families who seemed to share our enthusiasm for something different.

Reading, watching

Reading

❧ World War Z (Max Brooks)
Yes, I should have made short work of this. It's compelling, easy reading. But this is a month of distractions, and I have not been immune.

❧ Henry IV, Part II (William Shakespeare)

If I do feign,
O, let me in my present wildness die
And never live to show the incredulous world
The noble change that I have purposed!

❧ Elizabeth Rex (Timothy Findley)
This play is included in our Chicago Shakespeare Theater subscription. What a moving, thought-provoking work.

Watching

❧ "Work of Art"
Like Jerry Saltz, we regret that the artistic force was not with the Sucklord last week. Would that Lola's efforts not work for the judges this week. She bores me.

❧ Henry IV, Part II
For this afternoon.

❧ Never Cry Wolf (1983)
During birthday week, I violated my "No more movie theaters -- ever again!" rule to see the (as it turns out) over-praised family film Dolphin Tale. As Mr. M-mv pointed out, the only absent cliché was the inevitable romance between the widow and widower -- and that, he hastened to add, was probably in there at some point but cut to ensure a fanny-friendly runtime. Apart from the beautiful scenes featuring likeable lead Nathan Gamble and the dolphin, Winter, swimming together, the Misses were equally unimpressed. But Ebert's review led us to Never Cry Wolf, in which Tale director Charles Martin Smith starred, and truth value of the source material aside (Wiki article link), this was a worthwhile movie.

❧ Crazy, Stupid Love (2011)
Mr. M-mv and I watched this after Melancholia, and it suffered from the unintended comparison. Still, there was nothing stupid about this rom-com for forty-somethings. And personally? I'd watch Ryan Gosling do laundry detergent commercials. So.

The recommended daily allowance

Melancholia
Highly recommended.

Reviews
"Bride’s Mind Is on Another Planet" (NYT, November 10)
"Apocalypse Lars von Trier" (Slate, November 11)
Roger Ebert's review (Chicago Sun-Times, November 9)

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

Curated content: The week in links

So It Went: A New Biography of Kurt Vonnegut Is a Portrait of an Artist who Cultivated a Scruffy Image

Vonnegut’s fiction was similarly deceptive; he addressed major themes in a minor key. “Mass destruction was a bit of a Vonnegut trope,” as Charles Shields observes in And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt and Co., 528 pages, $30.00). That this was so is undeniable, and yet the message of Vonnegut’s darkest novels must sound saccharine to many schoolchildren. He believed in common decency and common sense, in mankind over machines. He was big on being nice. Being nasty was a bête noire. To the madness of his century, Vonnegut, who died in 2007, applied the moral vision of a Mouseketeer.

Facebook tracking is under scrutiny

From this point on, each time you visit a third-party webpage that has a Facebook Like button, or other Facebook plug-in, the plug-in works in conjunction with the cookie to alert Facebook of the date, time and web address of the webpage you've clicked to. The unique characteristics of your PC and browser, such as your IP address, screen resolution, operating system and browser version, are also recorded. •Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log.

'The Walking Dead': Can Morality Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?

But Shane's hard-line pragmatism makes Rick worry that his "good intentions" are making the group weaker. He's asking the wrong question; splitting up, sharing resources, and giving away guns unquestionably makes the group weaker. The question is whether or not that sacrifice is worth making.

Brain Pickings: Digital Parasites and the Fight for the Business of Culture

I am a firm believer in content meritocracy and the pay-what-you-will model as the future of publishing, but I am also profoundly saddened by the way editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked, regurgitated, and spat out as sellable commodities not benefiting the original creator or curator in any way.

Chasing Ray: The hard cold reality of the long view

Somehow, in the midst of all this, I am supposed to still be a writer but now on something new, and still run a small business and still do all those other things that we all do. And I'm supposed to do this because this is just how it is now, this is what it is like for the average 21st century author. The question I'm weighing - seriously weighing - is if it is worth it. Is this life, where you feel overlooked and underappreciated and sometimes just flat out angry, the life I want to have? Did I expect a NYTimes best seller? No - please. But I expected just one - just one - response from all those emails and mailings. So I have to think long and hard about where I go from here and how far on this road I'm interested in traveling now that I know how lonely it gets.

Why Amazon Loses Money On Every Kindle Fire

Why does Amazon sell a product at a loss? Because, for Amazon, the Fire is a book store, and a movie theater, and a record shop. And (of course) Amazon is the one selling books, movies and records.

Letters of Note: It is the woman who pays

I told her one time, "I worry about women." She said, "Don't."

Risk Management and The Art of Dealing With The Fact That Life is a B**** – and Then You Die.

There is not always rational thinking behind the choices you and I make. We buckle up to be safe and find it ridiculous not to do so. But the majority of accidents in cars do not come from the choices you make but from wrong doing from others. So why even bother? I believe that we all like to have, or believe we have, a choice or at least some control of our potential life span. We pretend to make decisions all day that keep us safe for yet another day.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Recent acquisitions

❧ The Mountain and the Valley (Ernest Buckler)
Apparently, it's one of Paul Gross' favorite books: "A sadly overlooked, magical novel about the fragility of time and art."

❧ The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska (Colleen Modor)
An entry at Melissa Wiley's blog led me to this Chasing Ray entry: "It is clear to me that this is going to be one reader at a time, one book sale at a time, one long year of trying to gain notice."

❧ P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (edited by Sophie Ratcliffe)
I blame Girl Detective; she sent me the link, after all: "Countless readers of Wodehouse have testified to the way his novels have their own 'stimulating effect' on morale, providing not just comic, but almost medicinal effects...."

2.29.2000

I thought this photograph was lost.

Oh, I have a copy, printed on what, even then, eleven and a half years ago, was a cheap color printer.

But it is fading. And the disk drive that held most of the digital images became corrupted. And the email account I used to send the pic to farflung family and friends has not been active for a decade.

So I thought this photograph was lost.

And then my husband forwarded it to me this morning.

A few months ago, he tried to explain why he loves the fifteen-year-old archive of email he maintains at work. "I have all of the history. If someone asks why something is done a certain way, I can say, 'Let me check my records.' I nearly always have a memo or a message or something that will shed light on the current problem or situation."

That is one of the fundamental differences between the two of us: He saves email messages, pens, ticket stubs, love notes, and more.

I write about them.

Which is also a way of saving.

One that takes up significantly less physical space than some of my husband's "collections" (email archive aside), I might add.

Although it costs more, emotionally speaking, to save the way I do.

And that would be another of the fundamental differences between the two of us.

He forwarded the photo attached to the message I sent when our children were ten, four, and two:

The girls wanted to be just like Boy-boy and one of their favorite
characters -- Arthur! Here's my group in glasses.

I had two pairs of prescription-less glasses I wore when I worked as an eyewear specialist both during college and later, after Boy-boy was born. (All right. I save a few things. The right things? I will likely never know. I don't have those glasses anymore, though. Just my +2.25 reading specs.) The girls discovered them while "helping me" put away folded clothes, and a photo was born.

Miss M-mv(i) received dancing lessons for her birthday that year. She turned four in the month before this photo was taken, and she had recently taken to wearing black leggings and black turtlenecks most days. They were enough like her tights and leotard to appeal to her then "definition of self." Dancer.

The dance lessons were an utter failure, as far as she was concerned. The studio was lovely. The teacher was a gifted dancer. But somewhere along the road to the professionalism of parenting, early dance lessons (and music lessons, for that matter) became a sort of preschool clap-shout-bang-celebrate-childhood sort of pursuit, didn't they?

And Miss M-mv(i) didn't want to clap or shout or bang or celebrate childhood. "I want to DANCE." And when the class gave its first informal recital, and Miss Margaret led a parade of clapping-shouting-banging-celebrating-childhood butterflies across the room, Miss M-mv(i) made her point.

"Flitting, floating, flying, bee-yoo-ti-ful butterflies!" Miss Margaret encouraged.

And Miss M-mv(i) dropped to the ground and began leaping (quite well, I gathered, considering the height she reached, the distance she covered). "I am a FROG," she asserted.

And for the remaining minutes of the "performance," she rippited and leapt to the tsk-tsking of the other dancers' mothers, the hand-covered smiles of the few fathers in attendance, the open-mouthed confusion of her classmates, and the consternation of Miss Margaret.

The violin lessons she requested later that year lasted only a little longer than her dance career. The local Suzuki instructor was highly recommended. Those of you familiar with the method know that it does produce wonderful musicians, but the early training?

"That's not music," she declared, every time I inserted the required CD.

No. It really isn't.

I wasn't worried. I knew she'd find her rhythm eventually. I knew she'd discover the right pursuits, the appropriate classes, the compatible teachers.

And she did.

Miss M-mv(ii), just a toddler in the photo above, was too young for dance lessons but nonetheless insisted on wearing what Miss M-mv(i) wore. She had a mind of her own, but it would be a few more years before she would trust it more than she trusted her sister's or her brother's.

And Boy-boy.

I suspect that if you know that it's been nearly a year since he died, then you were wondering when I would get to this part -- the part where I address how the photo has informed my day.

He is gone. He is gone. He is gone. He is gone.

And yet.

He is always right here.

Because, for the most part, I did appreciate the moment when it was here.

It is a minute-by-minute exercise, but I have long subscribed to the idea that we must focus on the moment we are in. Am I always successful? No! No feckin' way! But I am aware that that's the goal: appreciating the moment when it's here.

Telling them how much I appreciate it -- and them.
Admitting how inadequate to the task I sometimes am.
Celebrating the commonplace since days comprise more of that than anything else.

And, as I've shared before, even on those days when little else seems to have occurred or been accomplished or appeared worth noting, I do this: I look at them as though I saw them, really saw them. And they know it.

He knew it.

I saw him. And he knew it.

Still, yeah. I cried. Again. Is that what really needs to be said, though? Is that what folks need to hear? Is that the point? No! The point is that I am so feckin' glad I remembered to pay attention, to see him, to learn about him and with him.

Because now that he is gone.

Even though he's still right here.

Even though he's...

You see, even though...

I have all the history. So if someone asks... I can say... And I nearly always have a memory or a story or a photo.

The Hill You Die On

Last night was the reading of Sheila O’Malley’s play, The Hill You Die On.

No traces of the play that had closed the night before were apparent in the small theater space where the reading was held. All that remained was bare, black, blank.

Expectant.

Two chairs and two stands on a platform. Another chair and stand off to the side.

The audience entered, greeted, rustled, embraced, connected, acknowledged, made room for, settled.

Introductions.

And then a relationship unfolded.

And I was reminded all over again that what happens to each of us is both unique and universal. The story is ours alone, but it has all been told before, hasn’t it? The coming together. And apart. The tenderness and sorrow. The beginning and the inevitable conclusion.

If you have heeded my recommendations over the years, if you have bookmarked The Sheila Variations or added the site to your feed or done whatever you need to do to ensure that you're keeping up with her, you already know that she can, vernacularly speaking, write her ass off. The Hill You Die On is simply further evidence of her gifts.

Humor punctuates the first half of the play; Sheila’s dialogue reminds us that laughter comes easily early in a relationship. Wit has a different sound when it ends, though, doesn’t it, and she captures that, too. Most importantly, she captures the truth of it all – the honesty that is both tender and devastating.

A quiet moment all but undid me: Jack explains to Neve why he reads obituaries. Over the past year, I’ve perfected the art of the silent sob, so I don’t think I distracted anyone with my reaction to that beautifully written, perfectly delivered scene.

And the conclusion… well, I don’t think I was alone in my response to that.

Jeff Christian portrayed Jack. As I have mentioned, Jeff was the artistic director for the Shakespeare Project of Chicago (SPC), which played an important role in fostering my son’s (and my own, for that matter) love of Shakespeare. I had a moment after the play to tell Jeff how much I appreciated not only his wonderful performance but also his work with the Project. Damned if he didn’t ask me which plays we had seen. The Winter’s Tale, which we saw in February 2005, immediately came to mind, as did The Merchant of Venice from the 2003-2004 season, but for the life of me I could not remember Two Gentlemen of Verona, from that same season. “Uhhh….” It came to me as we were driving home. Of course. Well, we introverts don’t score high on small talk, do we? (More, let’s face it: Two Gentleman of Verona is not exactly one of Shakespeare's great ones.) Still, once I learned that he was going to play Jack, I determined that he must know how important his work with SPC had been to us – and that meant talking to him. So I tried.

And Amy Carle portrayed, no, became Neve. Had I simply read the character, I would have loved her, but Amy Carle’s performance ensured that Neve will roam the rooms of my imagination for a long time. Beautifully, beautifully done.

The reading was followed by a discussion with Sheila and the director, Mitchell Fain (who also deserves a shout-out, as does the person who read the stage directions, which required impeccable timing – and he had it; regrettably, I don't have his name). If all that I’ve already written hasn’t persuaded you that the play was absolutely terrific, then this confession may: Following many articulate audience responses to everything from scene changes to cultural references to character, I spoke. Pretty animatedly, in fact. Ayup. Deeply moved and likely inspired by the play's frank language, I attempted to describe what, to me, was Jack's emotionally brutish behavior during the "scorched earth" argument and in the penultimate scene.

And I did so in the most unflattering terms.

A slang word was involved.

Twice.

It will haunt me for weeks.

Couple that episode with my sincere but inept conversation with Jeff, and, well, there you go. The introvert’s worst nightmare.

Don't worry, though. I'll get over it.

Heh, heh, heh.

Sheila, thank you. Your characters, their relationship, your way with words, the wisdom and humor you revealed, the truths you told – all of it moved me, made me think, made me feel, made me hope to understand. Thank you. And congratulations!

Curated content: The weekend in links

Would-Be Sellers Become Reluctant Landlords (NPR, November 13)

There has been a big jump in the number of single family homes shifting into the rental market since the country's housing boom started to bust. Eric Belsky with Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies says during the boom years between 2001 to 2005, about 700,000 single-family homes became rentals. The latest survey tracking housing units from 2005 to 2009 showed a significant increase. According to Belsky, 2.3 million single-family homes "flowed from having been owned to being rented, and they're not just being offered for rent, but they're actually occupied by renters."

Showing Shuttles (National Geographic, November 2011)

After roughly 30 years of service, the remaining space shuttles are headed for the final frontier: retirement. Museums around the country have been clamoring for a chance to take one home.

For Gertrude Stein, Collecting Art Was a Family Affair (NPR, November 10)

Just as the painters who met in Gertrude Stein's apartment were inspired and influenced by one another's pictures, Stein herself was influenced by the art on her walls. You can see the effects in her writing. "She began to deconstruct the written word in the way she felt that Picasso was beginning to deconstruct the visual motif," Rabinow says. Cubism was in the air at 27 Rue de Fleurus.

Rebecca Coriam: Lost at Sea (The Guardian, November 11)

It's a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It's called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney's first. A few days ago, Rebecca's father emailed me: "Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest." By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.

The New Science Behind Your Spending Addiction (Newsweek, November 7 and 14)

Psychologists and behavioral economists, meanwhile, are identifying the personality types and other traits that distinguish savers from spenders, showing that people who aren’t good savers are neither stupid nor irrational—but often simply don’t accurately foresee the consequences of not saving. Rewire the brain to find pleasure in future rewards, and you’re on the path to a future you really want.

Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize (Discover, September 2011)

One of the most impressive features of brains—and especially human brains—is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes their way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master in a chicken-sexing task and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping, and operating space shuttle cockpits.

Objects 101 (The New Criterion, November 2011)

So is there anything new? Perhaps there is. When, in 1970, Kenneth Clark put the Apollo of the Belvedere alongside an African mask that had belonged to Roger Fry, he felt able to say: “I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask.” That was then. Today, when Neil MacGregor rates the significance of Michelangelo, Donatello and Cellini alongside a collection of bronze plaques from Benin, he manages to insinuate that the bronzes prove that in the sixteenth century, “Europe and Africa were able to deal with each other on equal terms.”

You'll find the library of my links here.

"[I]t seemed modest compared to what some of our neighbors were doing."

"How a Financial Pro Lost His House" first appeared in the NYT (November 8), but it was picked up by Yahoo! News the next day, which is where I encountered the article and the, at this writing, 3,164 comments.

As some pointed out, the piece reads like a thinly veiled advertisement for the book Carl Richards -- the "financial pro" referenced in the headline -- has penned: The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money. If the responses are any indication, though, the confessional article may sink sales before the book is even released in January.

Richards' is a familiar story: In 2003, he purchased a more expensive home than he thought he could afford and borrowed one hundred percent of the purchase price. He writes, "I remember thinking something like 'Wow. I guess if they’re willing to lend it to us it must be O.K.'"

Yes, the professional financial planner estimated that he could afford a $350,000 house and then purchased a $575,000 house.

Because the lender said he could.

But that's not all.

Richards writes:

The market’s continued strength meant we could borrow even more. It was easy. In late 2004, a year after buying the house, we refinanced our mortgage with World Savings Bank, which later ended up in the hands of Wells Fargo, using one of the pick-a-payment loans that let you choose your own payment each month.

We picked the lowest possible payment, the one that added to our balance each month instead of subtracting from it. And we added a line of credit with Wells Fargo.

The extra borrowing power was important, because while my income was growing rapidly it wasn’t enough to support all our expenses. [... W]e were also borrowing against the house to finance our lifestyle. [... W]e were spending more than we should have on things like recreational gear and family trips for ourselves and our four children.

It was extravagant, but it seemed modest compared to what some of our neighbors were doing.

The mind boggles.

And yet....

When we moved out of the city, we spent quite a bit of time looking at real estate. It wasn't a great time for house-hunting, and I'm not just speaking in hindsight. We simply couldn't wrap our heads around the prices. Really? we mouthed to each other. Of course, everyone now knows that those prices were unrealistic.

No problem, a mortgage broker told us at one point. I can get you into a.... Blah, blah. Low interest. Blah, blah. Interest only. Low payments. Blah, blah, blah. Loan for the larger down payment. Blah, blah.

Over the course of our thirty years together, Mr. M-mv and I have certainly done some dumb things with money. It took a while, but we finally recognized our errors, educated ourselves about personal finance, and set about ensuring that our children were savvy about money management. When we arrived at the broker's desk, our money management skills were still in middle school, but they were sophisticated enough to shout, "No, no, no!" with their hands over their ears and their eyes squeezed shut.

But when everyone around you is saying, "Yes! More, more, MORE!" you begin to understand a sentence like Richards':

It was extravagant, but it seemed modest compared to what some of our neighbors were doing.

Perhaps what you can't understand is that someone who is paid to advise others about personal finance has made life-altering decisions based on the what the neighbors are doing.

Or seem to be doing, anyway, right?

Look. I am not a "financial pro." As I've already said, Mr. M-mv and I have done a number of dumb things with money over the course of our life together, and although we've done the hard work required to regain the financial ground we may have lost, we still think most of us are a catastrophic healthcare crisis away from undoing even the best planning.

Still, we have some advice:

Live below your means, no matter what the neighbors are doing. And teach your children to do the same.

Hey, and you don't even have to buy our book.

Chapbook entry

p.16

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I just said that, but what does it mean?

All right, of course, I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent?

Time passes.

Yes, agreed, a banality of course time passes.

Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once?

p. 46

I continue opening boxes.

I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see.

I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married.

I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

p. 53

On this question of fear.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

The ways in which for example we write novels "just to show" each other.

p. 64

"You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitation to the weddings of people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

p. 93

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say adult) life, to "raise" the child, to let the child go.

The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.

The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging other other.

You'll find a related entry here and another review of Didion's book here.

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

Curated content: The week in links

Why Curated Content Matters: A Lament for Reader Share

If you used Reader Share, you’re probably in mourning today. No longer can you click the share button at the bottom of a post in your Reader, sending it to a sidebar widget on your blog and popping it into the “people you follow” section of your friends on Reader. No longer can you count on that easy click in Reader to show you the links shared by the people you follow—those trusted curators of content whose taste and judgment you rely on.

Roger Ebert on the sudden death of film

Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly? The victory of video was quick and merciless. Was it only a few years ago that I was patiently explaining how video would never win over the ancient and familiar method of light projected through celluloid? And now Eastman Kodak, which seemed invulnerable, is in financial difficulties.

NASA Satellite Spots New Behemoth Sunspot

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has spotted one of the largest new sunspots to appear on the surface of the sun in years. It is nearly 25,000 miles wide, or more than three times larger than the Earth. The enormous sunspot was seen rotating over the sun’s northeastern limb on Nov. 3.

Facebook's Frictionless Sharing: A Privacy Guide

So, now everywhere you go, everything you do is being sent back to your Facebook friends and stored on company servers. Creepy, right? Maybe. But if you don't want your friends to know you love to read news stories about Lindsay Lohan or that you follow the details of every gruesome murder across the country, here's my advice: authorize wisely.

The Art of the Novel

There is a widespread nostalgic fondness for the first Penguins, with their bands of color that made every book look the same within whichever category of writing — green for crime, purple for . . . something else? The same is true of the early Modern Classics featuring drawings, but for someone of my age — born 1958, buying and reading from the mid-1970s — these editions were the stuff of used-book stores. They all looked pretty much the same: old, dreary and therefore oxymoronically unmodern. Whereas the 1970s livery with titles and authors’ names in sharply discreet Helvetica was the pristine look of modernity — sometimes modernism — itself.

The Truth about Violence

Nothing good ever comes to people who allow themselves to be moved to a remote location at the mercy of a violent predator. The police call such places “secondary crime scenes.” They are always better for the attacker and worse for his victim because they are more isolated than the first point of contact. And although your home may be the most familiar place on earth to you, the moment an intruder enters, it becomes the equivalent of a secondary crime scene. You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you’re inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn’t. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in.

NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Launch in 15 Days

The rover, nicknamed Curiosity, weighs in at nearly 1 ton and is a little bigger than a Mini Cooper. The probe is expected to survey the Martian landscape with HD cameras, examine the chemical surface composition within 20 feet of the rover, monitor the planet’s weather, and search for signs of habitability and life, past or present.

You'll find the library of my links here.

Fine Art Friday

"Work of Art: The Next Great Artist," Season Two

An article in EW (the hard copy includes images of pop art challenge-winner Young Sun Han and his piece), a comment from an M-mv reader, and a stroke of scheduling serendipity found the Misses and I riveted to Episode 5 of Bravo's "Work of Art," Season 2 on Wednesday night.

We caught up on the season's four previous episodes online... and we're hooked.

We may, in fact, never glance at our -- until now -- beloved "Project Runway" again.

This is what the Misses have wanted -- process, mental and physical, evident in conversation, sketchbook, and execution. Less drama, more process, they have always suggested. Well, now they've got it. Oh, sure. There's some weeping and snarking and luggage-carrying, but it doesn't overshadow the artists' work.

Cool, cool.

We haven't yet read any buzz beyond the aforementioned EW feature on Young, but the artists who have really captured our attention are, in no particular order, Sara, Dusty, and Young. (And, yes, the Misses and I do think Dusty was robbed in Episode 5.) Miss M-mv(i) would hasten to point out that what Michelle does with paper is cool, and Miss M-mv(ii) and I also like Kymia's skills. Man, that girl can draw. But Sara, Dusty, Young? They're standouts for us.

Do any of you watch this program?

"All of a sudden—and this is something you cannot learn in film school—I knew I had to crack him open."

From "How Werner Herzog Filmed Death Row" (The Atlantic, November 9):

Of course, I should mention that there is much more deliberation later on and much more shaping, more off-the-film editing, but that is a separate phase of filmmaking. During work it's very, very intense, and editing is even more intense. Both editors and I started smoking again. Both of us could only work five hours a day on it. Normally we are regular eight-hour guys. But it's so intense. You do this work and then you are glad to be out of there and not reflecting anymore, just breathing and walking a few miles in the woods.

Script reading: The Hill You Die On

WHAT:
Reading of The Hill You Die On

WHO:
Writer: Sheila O’Malley
Director: Mitchell Fain

CAST:
Neve: Amy Carle
Jack: Jeff Christian

WHEN:
Monday, November 14, 2011
7 p.m.

WHERE:
Theater Wit
1229 W. Belmont
Chicago, Illinois

Yes, that Sheila O'Malley, the incomparable voice behind some of the best prose on the web. And, in one of those "Small world, isn't it?" moments, yes, that Jeff Christian, one of the founding members of The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, which I've mentioned here several times over the last eight years.

Argh.

Apparently, Facebook and Twitter are more important / useful to M-mv's readership than I ever realized. Until I figure out a viable alternative, then, I have reactivated the accounts.

Wishy-washy is the last adjective anyone would ascribe to me, but on this issue, it sure seems apt, eh?

Thanks for your patience while I figure this all out.

Fall behind

Did you know daylight saving time ends this Sunday at 2 a.m.? Related items here and here.

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

"Darkhorse" Battalion and the Afghan War

A year ago, nearly 1,000 U.S. Marine officers and enlisted men of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment deployed to restive Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. By the time their tour ended in April 2011, the Marines of the 3/5 — known as "Darkhorse" — suffered the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the past 10 years of war. This week, NPR tells the story of this unit's seven long months at war — both in Afghanistan and back home.

The seven-part "All Things Considered" feature:

Part 1: "Afghan Success Comes at High Price for Commander" (October 30)

Part 2: "An Afghan Hell on Earth for 'Darkhorse' Marines" (October 31)

Part 3: "As Casualties Mounted, So Did Marine Families' Fears" (November 1)

Part 4: "Strategy Behind A Marine Unit's Dangerous Mission" (November 2)

Part 5: "A Marine's Death, and The Family He Left Behind" (November 3)

Part 6: "For Wounded Marines, the Long, Hard Road of Rehab" (November 4)

Part 7: "'Darkhorse' Battalion and the Afghan War" (November 5)

Fine Art Friday

Vater Staat (2010)

Thomas Schuttë, German (1954-)

I took the image above during my 9.17.2011 trip to the Art Institute. According to the plaque near the statue:

The sculpture of Thomas Schuttë mines both his own earlier work and the art of previous eras -- particularly monumental and memorial genres -- to address the burdens of traumatic history. He is primarily concerned with the human condition and the affect that contemporary political structures have on the lives of individuals. In Vater Staat (which translates as "father state"), an imposing bronze statue towers over the viewer, immediately establishing a power dynamic within the space. The patriarchal figure, representative of a totalitarian regime or state, is shrouded in a cloak that binds his arms, rendering him helpless and immobile. Schuttë's selection of material -- in this case, patinated bronze -- allowed him to address the historical use as a staple of public art. Here, as in other works, the artist engaged the tendency toward monumentality in order to subvert it -- this figure is actually an antihero.

[An aside: Does the use of "to address" twice in a 149-word sample annoy anyone else's inner editor? Mine is beside herself.]

The human condition, totalitarian regimes, and "monunmentality" aside, what struck this viewer was not "the power dynamic within the space" but the sculpture's expression, which, depending on the angle, appeared either surprisingly tender or menacingly blank.

The percolator stopped working.

Warning: This post may contain mildly offensive language.

Miss M-mv(i) says she enjoys making my coffee in the morning, and frankly? I enjoy having my coffee made for me. It's something of a ritual: The alarm sounds. I silence it and call, "Coffee, coffee," in a voice that sounds as if I am narrating a ghost story -- Caaaaaw-feeeeee! Caaaa-aaw-feeeeee! Good-natured giggles follow, with a steaming mug of coffee not far behind.

Not a bad beginning.

So this morning, the alarm sounded. The last twenty-four hours had not exactly been the finest. Oh, sure. Everything's relative. (Don't I know it, eh?) Still. Not a wonderful Wednesday. So, the alarm sounded. And it was a brand new day.

Caaaaaw-feeeeee! Caaaa-aaw-feeeeee!

And then Miss M-mv(i) replied, "It's just water."

And I discovered that the heating element on the percolator had... I nearly wrote, "died," but was struck by the unintended pathos of that. Too much, the inner editor warned. Too much.

Oh, yes, it's too much. It's altogether too much. Too the feck much.

AND NOW I CAN'T EVEN HAVE A FECKING CUP OF COFFEE!?! REALLY!?! THAT'S HOW IT IS? REALLY?!?

Ahem.

Let me emphasize that the above was strictly an interior monologue. Oh, I railed. How I railed. Just... silently.

So.

We went out for breakfast this morning, after which we stopped at the store for a new percolator. Which will also die (Feck you, inner editor!), probably about eight months from now. Which is why I bought TWO percolators and hid the second in the garage. Yes, in eight months, I will amaze and delight when Miss M-mv(i) calls out, "It's just water," and I respond, "Use the new one." It will be like Prometheus bringing fire to man, won't it?

Yeah. I rock.

_______________________________

You know, this was supposed to be a post about gratitude. No, really. It was. At some point this afternoon, I realized that twelve weeks ago today, I awoke from surgery. My note to self that night was to remain grateful, to remember each and every day how fortunate I am.

And today, I was grateful. I was frustrated, to be sure. And I was shrill (in my mind, anyway). But I was also grateful.

For my daughters. Of course.
For coffee. Goes without saying.
For the ability to buy two percolators. Not something to be taken for granted these days.
For Aunt M-mv. Who received the unexpurgated version of the rant above. I love you.
For my health. Which has been better in these last twelve weeks than in the twelve years before (and I wasn't unhealthy then).
For the smell of burning leaves.
And the taste of frosted cookies.
For Mr. M-mv. Who checked all the doors (again) at 3:14 a.m. and then held my hand until his alarm sounded an hour and a half later.
For the scar that reminds me to be grateful.
And for that other scar. The invisible one that reminds me that I was right, I am always right when I insist: Life is short. Find the joy. Say what you need to say. Do what needs to be done. Let them know that you love them, that you're grateful -- grateful for them, grateful for every, every minute you spend with them.

_______________________________

The percolator stopped working. But I'm still going. Ah. That's what this post is about, isn't it?

I'm still going.

And in spite of everything, I am grateful.

Five months ago today...

I entered the twenty-first century. And now, for a number of reasons (including the ramifications of "frictionless sharing" and search engine indexing), I've decided to deactivate the M-mv Facebook and Twitter accounts. I know, I know. Nothing is private. M-mv going to lose readers. Blogs are already obsolete; why make it worse by eliminating M-mv's social media presence?

I've heard it all already. And still I've deactivated the accounts.

I'm stubborn that way. Comments remain open, though, and email messages are always welcome. And thanks to Melissa, I think I may establish a Diigo account to share curated content via a sidebar scroll here.

I'll keep you posted. (Did you catch that? Blogger humor. Posted? Heh, heh, heh.)

"[Y]ou might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them."

Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, writes:

One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.

Which is why phrases like "wage slaves," "inescapable debt," and "force" "force" "force" leave me feeling like a brother from another planet. Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. You could try to make it in Minneapolis before living the dream in Williamsburg. You could stare into the face of a no-money-down, adjustable rate 30-year mortgage at the tail end of a housing-price run-up and conclude "Maybe that one's not for me." You could even choose to turn down a bad if high-paying job when you're living below the poverty line. If we indeed live in a "candid world," let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who "forced" you to "play by the rules" is more than a little pathetic.

I hate to say, "I told you so," but...

From "Nope, just debt" (The Economist, October 29):

Two things, however, are clear. The size of student debt is vast (see chart), and lots of borrowers are struggling. More than 10m students took out loans for the latest academic year, according to a report issued on October 26th by the College Board, a consortium of academic institutions. Almost a third of students graduating from college, and 69% of the ones dropping out, hold debt tied to their education.

The total amount of debt is staggering. The New York Federal Reserve Bank puts it at $550 billion, but includes a footnote in the “technical notes” section suggesting this may be an underestimate. Sallie Mae, the school-loan equivalent of the housing industry’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reckons there are $757 billion-worth of outstanding loans. A bank heavily involved in the area says there is at least another $111 billion in purely private loans, and with new lending estimated in excess of $112 billion for this year alone, the total amount outstanding will surpass $1 trillion in the not-so-distant future.

Related entries

■ I've been singing this song for eight years.

■ "This ugly partnership of deceit"

■ “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education.”

■ “‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’”

■ Community college

■ Paying for college, revisited

■ Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions

■ About college

"When we talk about mortality, we're talking about our children."

From "Sorrowful 'Blue Nights': Didion Mourns Her Daughter" (NPR's "Morning Edition," November 1):

Most of Didion's books contain little mantras — quick phrases, repeated here and there throughout the text. In Blue Nights it's this: When we talk about mortality, we're talking about our children.

She means the responsibility we feel for them. Our fear that harm will come to them — from a swimming pool, an elevator, a bottle of Drano under the sink — that we can't protect them well enough. For Didion, the apprehensions arrived gradually. Just after they adopted Quintana Roo (they'd seen the name on a map of Mexico, liked it, and chosen it) the writer says she acted as if she'd gotten a doll to dress up, not a real baby.

And later:

In Blue Nights, Didion writes that in theory, these mementos should bring back the moment, but in fact, they only make clear how inadequately she appreciated the moment back when it happened.

People trying to be sympathetic will say, "Well, you have your memories" — and Didion says she never really knows how to respond to that. "Yes, I do," she says, as though the memories make it better. Talking about this, she laughs.

It's hard — but good — to laugh. It's a way to get through harrowing times and unimaginable losses. And writing ... helps.