This grand old man

Raised in a semi-bookish household I was vaguely aware of John Updike (1932-2009) as a wunderkind of American letters long before I ever got around to reading him. As a snotty undergraduate in the early 1970s, knowing nothing more detailed about him than the lurid reputation he'd gained from the publication of Couples, I remember loftily disparaging him as a mere chronicler of suburban adultery. That was almost four decades ago: I began to discover, upon actually encountering his work in the short story collection Museums and Women, that he was a chronicler of genius, and I was subsequently to learn to my enduring sorrow that suburban adultery is a more piquant and, ah, fraught subject than I understood at twenty.

I wanted to write novels and stories myself, back in the day; a portion of talent and a vaster degree of discipline proved in the event to be wanting. It did not help that I'd accumulated some ruinous literary influences along the way--not themselves bad writers, but terrible mutagens, most of them, from the standpoint of a wannabee's embryonic DNA. Updike's influence was alone beneficent, and the only decent short story I ever wrote owed its closing cadences to a confluence of the final sentences of "The Taste of Metal" and "Your Lover Just Called" from Museums and Women:

He reached forward slowly, as underwater, and gently pulled the pencil from her hair. Rising with surprising speed she flowed into the embrace whispering indistinctly, please, please, eclipsed by kisses as he sought, still somewhat hesitantly, the softness of her small breasts. He wondered, as the narrow fissure of indecision closed, whether in the longer run of things he would credit this to volition or destiny, but in the longer run of things the distinction never matters; nor was it troubling him by the time there came again from the bedroom, in oddly muffled but imperative peals, the strident summons of the telephone.

From the late seventies forward I had a vague intention to drop a note to JU, merely a "well done." The notion flickered again early this year, but I imagined that I had another ten years at least to get around to it. As it turns out...not.

Tonight's assignment: read "The Happiest I've Been," which closes out Updike's first short story collection The Same Door.

Better late than never

A roof over his woof

Pictured above is "Ravi," rescued from the lethal chamber in Hollister CA early this month and at present being fostered here in the Crumbling Manse. He's eighteen months old, gangly, goofy and about a head taller than the incomparable Napalm, who's the senior dog on these premises. The original deal was that we would look after him for ten days, after which he would proceed either to another foster home or to a permanent gig. In exchange for taking him in fresh from his reprieve (rescue organization A plucked him from the pound in Hollister, eighty miles south of here, and handed him off to Berkeley-based rescue organization B via a veterinarian in nearby Fremont, a Bay Area locus of the Southwest Asian diaspora—hence his name, bestowed by the vet, a grandson of the Raj—where the contents of his scrotal sac were extracted and discarded, who then fobbed the creature off on us that afternoon) we have first refusal on that gig. Heaven help me, I think I'm going to say yes. I'm looking around me at possessions—books, DVDs, clothing—knowing that some of these will perish in the coming months in consequence of my softheartedness. I will be distraught, wroth. Will I benefit, I wonder, from remembering that I entered into this doggie pact with my eyes open?

Let me say at once that this is an adorable dog. His disposition is sociable, affectionate and curious; he is obviously intelligent; understands and complies with "NO!", albeit with a vanishingly brief retention. I can't believe that he's spent his life feral: he must have had a human family to be so well socialized. I surmise that the hypothetical family permitted him free run of their beds, sofas and chairs, a privilege he will not enjoy here in the Crumbling Manse. Napalm (also a "shepherd mix"; sixteen in March; remarkably healthy for a dog of his size) is concerned that his alpha status not be questioned, and does much posturing and snarling, to which the younger responds "Oh! The alpha male deigns to growl at me! I am not worthy!", conveyed with appropriately submissive body language and much tail wagging. Napalm appears gratified by this. Yesterday we took them both to "Point Isabel," the largest of the local off-leash parks, and Ravi behaved himself very well, never copping an attitude toward dogs or people. When a couple of other canines tried a brutal dominance routine on him, he did not respond in snarling kind but rather removed himself from the fray with an air of puzzled surprise.

When he reached us that first Friday, separated forever from his human family, fresh off a fortnight in the pound with some hardened characters, emasculated just hours earlier, a clown-cone affixed to he head and confined to a big plastic cage for transport, he was thoroughly traumatized and frantic. Sprung from the plastic cage he was so obviously distraught by the cone (intended to keep his wandering tongue away from those fresh stitches) that we defied the guidelines promulgated by rescue org B and discarded the device just five minutes in. I think we must have seemed to him the first human beings since Veterans' Day who'd done anything right, and that we secured, in that moment of his deepest doggie despair, almost inexhaustible moral credit for the remainder of our association.

There are issues. Abandonment issues. Separation anxiety. Ravi does not like being left alone, and sublimates this tension in...scientific investigation of his surroundings. His approach to the world around him, which he indulges when left unsupervised for even a short time, appears to be: 1) Is it edible? 1a) If yes, eat it. If no, might it be edible on the inside? 1b) Investigate with teeth. 1c) If inedible, destroy and discard; look around for another candidate to subject to the scientific method. 2) Rinse and repeat. Casualties of this approach thus far include two sets of wooden mini-blinds and two dog pillows.

And yet, and yet...A sweeter-tempered creature you could not ask for. Affectionate, attentive, eager to please and physically easy on the eyes. I fear that I've bonded (Lina, of course, was always in the can). He's here for as long as he wants to be.

How cool is that?

I have not been as proud of my presidential vote since I cast it for the first time against Richard M. Nixon, whose toxic residues continue to sap and impurify our precious political fluids, on this night in 1972, and I'm far more pleased with the result this time out.

(The image is the work of NYC-based designer Marco Avedo, and reminds me of why it is that I'm an obscure in-house art director whose work (largely for in-house consumption) is routinely derivative. I wouldn't have come up with this in a year of trying. Avedo's original entry here.)

I saw the best minds of my generation...elsewhere

Governor Sarah Heath Palin, concerned citizen:

Now, no one could have reasonably faulted her had she replied "Oh, ya know, that one a few years back where they said ya could lose yer home if, ya know, if the city wanted it for a shoppin' mall or somethin', you betcha!" without being able to identify it as Kelo v. City of New London. But it's quite clear from the embedded video that she was unable to think of a single case, and unwilling to acknowledge the fact. Instead she attempted to bluff her way past it.

I find this one point of common ground with many of her partisans: let Sarah be Sarah! Let her have "unfiltered" exposure to the Teeming Millions. For example, the CNN transcript of Thursday night's "debate" can be found here. Find the text string "Iran and Pakistan," and compare the candidates' responses on the issue. Biden doesn't do as well as he did addressing the same issue in one of the primary debates, but Palin is simply incoherent.

Plus, he has a young, charismatic heir apparent!

Reply to interlocutors tired of "holding their noses"

(originally posted on a discussion board; slightly revised for this blog)

...My, aren't we a couple of high-minded libertarian freethinkers, too fine-grained for the sordid political realities of this wicked world! "A" "tried that a couple of years back" and has "absolutely nothing to show for it so far" (o, the humanity!) and "B" is on his usual Noble Savage tear. Well, boo-fucking hoo. Ayup, I could get behind a candidate who never fudged, shaded or pandered on the campaign trail no matter how little his various audiences wanted to hear the unvarnished truth, and that might get me, and my hypothetical candidate, about a fortnight—if that—past the Iowa caucuses before he dropped out. "B" mentioned Khrushchev a couple of threads downstream (mangling the name, natch). Our younger participants will not remember, but Nikita Sergeyevich ramped down the level of oppression in the USSR an order of magnitude or two from Stalin's grim imperium. Life got a lot better there between 1949 and 1959, and this came about not because the Butcher of the Ukraine was a nice guy, but because he was, for the era, something like the best of all possible leaders, the nearest approximation to a decent human being in the Presidium who survived the literally murderous political ecosystem that surrounded Stalin. In Shrove's Amerika we content ourselves these latter years with mere character assassination, but the political process synthesized by a servile corporate press, a Beltway culture of snide courtiers masquerading as "pundits," and a voting populace largely debauched by soundbite coverage (including both outright knuckle-draggers and suburban naifs) is itself a pretty fucking harsh environment in which the pure of principle do not thrive, and certainly never survive for consideration on the first Tuesday in November.

Yeah, we all want a presidential candidate who opposes every federal policy, be it war or subsidy, that we dislike, and who promises to maintain or enhance every program of which we approve. We want him to nominate judges who will rule our way every time on issues concerning which we feel strongly. The good news is that this candidate exists. The bad news, my friends, is that this candidate is otherwise manifestly unqualified, for it is each and every one of us, a constituency of one. But let's return to the real world.

In the "real" world (assuming that this shoddy simulacrum of a century, so at odds with what we were all promised, can be dignified with that adjective) we live in a corporate-dominated duopoly that tolerates the franchise provided that the actual options are severely restricted. Unfair? Of course. Get over it, sports fans. Does this mean that the functional distance between the options is less than we might like it? Yes again. Suck it up. Are we therefore to conclude that the differences between the two candidates are immaterial, that the consequences of victory for the one would deviate from the consequences of victory for the other in negligible degree?

Bush v. Gore, motherfuckers. If you think we'd be in this fix today had organized partisan thuggery, media complicity and magisterial prejudice not contrived between them to fix the 2000 election, then just click away to another blog. Your money's no good here, as the unfriendly bartender says.

Election's coming up. The GOP was so damaged, its "base" so fragmented, its candidates so dreadful (Hillbilly Theocrat? Il Duce? Folksy Second Coming of the Gipper? Lunatic Libertarian? Magic Underwearian?), its record so utterly discreditable, that the "Maverick"—talk about living on capital!—was the last man standing. A rational electorate, weighing a rational discussion by actual "pundits," might conclude that the GOP standard-bearer sallied forth for consideration beneath an utterly discredited banner. Certainly his differences with his royal predecessor are slender. Surveillance, torture and "the surge"—hey, McCain's golden. His volatility, impulsiveness and gambler's temperament have all been amply documented, but he survived [something] at the hands of the North Vietnamese communists! He is a manly man! —and of course, "He's a man of conviction! He doesn't waffle! Once he makes a decision he sticks to it, even if events prove him utterly wrong—he'll never compromise his principles!"

Where have we heard that last bit before?

Obama is no one's perfect vehicle. I wish that he had stood firm on FISA, but he's running for president, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. I wish he'd set forth the grim and—largely thanks to the feckless actions of this regime—narrow options that the next administration faces, but I have a more nuanced (there: I've said it) view of these than does the Sarah Palin-besotted "hockey mom" imagined by the popular press.

What I propose to vote for is an obviously thoughtful and intelligent candidate, perhaps not ideally seasoned (seasoning isn't everything: look at Dick Cheney, with a distinguished executive résumé—his shogunate has been an utter clusterfuck) but clearly a quick study, a competent campaign field marshal and, looking back on the Democratic field, in retrospect the best choice, "choice" being here defined as the nexus between candidate chops and administrative potential. My candidate's opponent is an elderly man who has nakedly compromised most of his best-publicized previous "maverick" stances in order to make himself right with the theocratic faction of the GOP (today a criminal conspiracy masquerading as an American political party), and who was demonstrated with his choice of Sarah Palin a stark naked contempt for the office to which she might thereby be made eligible someday to ascend.

To those of you in deep "red" or "blue" states who might be inclined to abstain or to vote your simon-pure "conscience," for Nader or some other deluded enabler, I'd remind you that according to Newsweek's post-election account in 2000, a Bush campaign official cheerfully acknowledged that they'd thought that they might win the popular vote while losing in the Electoral College, and that in that event they'd planned to scream bloody murder and to challenge the legitimacy of Gore's election. In the event, of course, they turned effortlessly on that dime, as Republicans will, and they carried the day, to our and the world's cost. If you despise the party of authoritarian theocracy, and unless you are prepared to countenance its continued rule until your hypothetical perfect candidate is elected president, you should take your fingers out of your fucking nostrils, wipe them off, and vote for Obama, who will need both for the election and afterward as solid a mandate as he and we can get.

But if it's all about your rugged individualism and your preternaturally discriminating sense of smell—hey, go crazy. It's not like it'll be a long walk.