Wor(l)dly

      Sometimes the world is so full of news --good and bad-- that you may tend to wonder why you  watch or read it.  Personally, I find myself asking this question with certain books or issues of magazines such as The New Yorker, or the "best of" series of books, often finding them so interesting and thus, time-consuming, that I occasionally hope that an article or story would not be worth reading, if only so I could move on to another.  And then a recommendation or a reviewer makes such decisions even more difficult.  Take this quick review of the book, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson: Once in India I saw what looked like a chrome rainbow wasp, so pretty I reached out to touch it, unaware it would sting.  Wilson's writing is like that, especially in this short-story collection -- so kind and funny you don't even see the knife.  I ordered the book...

     Another review on Stewart O'Nan's book, The Night Country, began this way: O'Nan dazzles by capturing the everyday and the human heart, so this tale --narrated by the ghost of a teen who died in a car wreck on Halloween night-- might seem like a departure.  Not quite enough to grab me, the non fiction reader (so said in that I so rarely read fiction) but in looking for the book, here's what else I found (and also ordered, even though I'm not what you would consider a baseball aficionado), Faithful.  It was co-written with Stephen King and is a non-fiction tale of two people's devotion to the Boston Red Sox; here's how the publisher put it: Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history.  They would sit together at Fenway.  They would exchange emails.  They would write about the games.  And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years.  What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan's notes for the ages.

     Another review had me start reading Grace, written by a young writer in his twenties who ended up becoming the lead speechwriter for former President Obama, a writer himself and apparently a prolific and intimidating one.  Here's how author Cody Keenan put it when he was still an intern at the White House: ...it could be crushing to see his edits across the page, his neat penmanship squeezed between paragraphs and along margins, thin lines surgically connecting his additions to the precise places he wanted them sewn it, each one a scalpel to my own self-confidence.  In meetings, such as the one that happened after a 21-year old gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle killed 20 school children (most of them ages 6 and 7) and 6 school teachers, Obama voiced his feelings to Keenan: The question that every religion seeks to answer is, Why are we here?  What gives our life meaning?  What gives our life purpose?  We are born and then we die.  During the years we have on this Earth, there are going to be fleeting moments of pleasure and pain.  And at the end of those days, we have to ask ourselves, What did all this mean?  What was God's purpose here?  What was our purpose here?  Were we true to that purpose?  Each of us grips through the darkness and confusion and we understand how limited we are, and that bad things happen, and we ask ourselves, why?  And the only anchor we have --the only things we are sure about-- is the love that we feel for our children.  The cling of those hugs at night before we tuck them into bed.  The warmth of their breath on our necks.  Seeing their joy.  That's what matters.  That's all we've got.  That's the only thing we're sure of.  So we gotta make that count.  Two months later, and despite 90% of Americans supporting Obama's proposed legislation for background checks before a gun is allowed to be purchased, Keenan wrote: "Republicans used the sixty-vote filibuster to block bipartisan universal background-check legislation, with those same parents watching aghast from the Senate gallery."  But suppose that didn't happen?  Suppose the Senate Republicans instead backed the legislation for universal background checks.  Would future mass shootings at schools and such have been prevented, or at least lessened?

Images: Stephen Keller/Germany

     Of course, such "what if" and "if only" scenarios have been played out numerous times on both television (The Man in the High Castle is but one example, where both Germany and Japan win WW II and split control of the US and the world), books (such as Childhood's End, or The Power where women discover that they have an inner power which can physically debilitate men and soon begin using that "power" to change who rules, who makes the laws, and who runs the government), and sites, many of them dealing with alternative outcomes of wars and governments, such as what if the bullets meant for Kennedy had missed their mark?  My brother took a more universal view and summed it up this way: what if all these charismatic people --people such as Hitler or Genghis Khan, people who could mobilize entire nations-- were forces for good instead of evil, and were promoters of peace instead of war?  

     Okay so this wasn't meant to be about book reviews or even about alternate endings; but now imagine a reviewer combining five books and summarizing all of them in an entirely new scenario, in this case the storming of the Capitol on January 6th.  According to Congressional testimony from a close aide at the time, then-President Trump was outraged that his Secret Service driver and detail refused to drive him to the Capitol and crowd following his speech.  "They're my people," he is reported to have said.  But reviewer Mark Danner asked, what would have happened if indeed they followed his "orders" and dropped him off in front of the crowd?  Would he have led his chanting, flag-waving followers through the ceremonial doors, past the looming statues, down the marble hallways, and into the Senate chamber, there to face squarely his white-haired, stalwart vice-president, poised in frozen shock on the dais? (Trump allegedly said about Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy”)  With his Senate supporters gathered around their victorious leader, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, would President Trump have smiled up at Mike Pence, held out his famously small hand, and demanded the certificates certifying the electoral votes of the “stolen” election?  And would Pence, a man who had shown himself until this very day to be one of the most obsequious public officials in American history, have dared refuse?  Then perhaps, in a dramatic gesture for his rowdy minions and the senators and the congressmen and the television cameras and the whole world watching, Donald Trump with his own two hands would have torn those tokens of legitimacy asunder...Would Pence, however surprisingly firm he had held to the Constitution those last few days, have dared oppose the president and his merry band in the Senate chamber?  And if Pence had not managed to perform his “ministerial” role, could the election have been certified for Joseph R. Biden that appointed day of January 6?  And if the election couldn’t be certified, would the matter have been thrown into the House of Representatives, where Democrats held a majority of seats but Republicans, crucially, controlled a majority of the state delegations, which the Founders in their wisdom had decided would be the deciding measure?  If all the Republican-controlled delegations voted for Trump, the House would have chosen him as the country’s next president.  Biden could have appealed to the Supreme Court, but could the Court, with six Republican votes, have been depended upon to render dispassionate justice, any more than it had managed to do twenty years before?     

     Phew, tossing about alternate endings sometimes comes close to to bordering on conspiracy beginnings.  Or is it all as random as the drop of a ball on a roulette wheel?  My friend told me his gambling tale, he watching his wife play for hours on a machine in northern Nevada, dropping who knows how many hundreds of dollars into the machine before finally saying she was tired and would head up to the room.  He decided to stay just a bit longer and watched as another person almost immediately took her spot, put in the max, and on the very next play hit the Progressive for $2.9 million.  Now would his wife have hit that, or was it meant to be for that other player?  Or was it simply a random hit, as programmers of such machines are so quick to tell you?  Sliding doors or chance encounters that send us into a holographic universe of our own imagination? 

      Then came this piece about Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, and his rivalry with The Beatles. It was Elton John who noticed that Wilson's bass lines started "on the fifth rather than the root of a chord" which Paul McCartney also noticed and felt it "changed the character of his own bass playing."  But what I liked more about the article was the flashback to something tactile.  As reviewer Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in the New York Review: I’ve often wondered who I would have been if my family hadn’t moved to California when we did.  But who would I have been without the Beach Boys and the Beatles from ages eleven to fourteen?  This was all long ago, and it’s tempting to talk about what was missing then—the digital and informational ubiquity we take for granted now, everything everywhere, all at once.  But none of that was actually missing because it hadn’t been thought of.  When I walked down Main Street to the one store in Osage with a (tiny) record section and paid ninety-nine cents for a 45-rpm single (“Fun, Fun, Fun” or “Ticket to Ride,” for example) and brought it home and put it on the record player, I was the first person who’d ever heard that very disc.  I wasn’t siphoning the song from a ceaseless, invisible digital flood.  I experienced a discrete event contained in the moment of listening, a personally owned artifact of black vinyl spinning on a platter while a needle wobbled in its grooves.  How the wobbling turned into sound, how the record was written and recorded and produced and mixed and pressed and distributed, how the physical disc in its paper sleeve made its way to our little Iowa town to be traded for my allowance, and who made money from my allowance and in what proportions, I had no idea.  Only the music mattered—and what it made me feel.

     The debate thus emerges, a book or magazine you hold in your hands or something digital that appears "everywhere, all at once?"  I am the former, although I began using Libby and other digital "borrowing" services from my library (most of the magazines I subscribe to are also there, as are thousands of concerts and audio books).  Reading the pages on my phone virtually doubles my reading speed as the words condense and my "guilt" at skimming dissipates (I find this quite easy to do with fiction).  But what am I missing?  That glance at the bookmark to see how far I've read?  That slow absorption of words penetrating?  That feeling at the end when I physically close a book and sigh with the feeling that I've finished a good read?  There is SO much out there that it begs the question, why keep reading at all and staying on this hamster wheel?  But how to resist?  A recent issue of NYB had these titles: Who Am I?  What Am I? (on the art exhibition at the Met which partially asked: Think of Jackson Pollock, who work combined the regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton with Navajo sand painting, Surrealist automatism, Picasso's linear fragmentation, and the compostional dynamism of the sixteenth-century Venetian masters.  Sometimes young artists can't easily find one container for all their ideas and longings, one that also allows them to show off their understanding of the complexity of their historical moment.  These artists need to percolate longer...and while I know zip about art, such words do tend to tweak a curiosity); Life, Death, This Moment of June (on Virginia Woolf's novel); The Melancholy of Anatomy: A Morbid Guide (on one of the first books with a study of human anatomy); Being Me, Being You (on Adam Smith & the economy and empathy); Understanding Diabetes (on the death of Arthur D. Riggs who is largely credited with developing artifical insulin); and Throngs of Unseen People (on the popularity of the spiritual world during the time of Lincoln, which didn't sound so interesting until I read about John Wilkes Booth and his growing up in an acting family, Wilkes himself often portraying assassins such as Brutus and William Tell; said part of the article: At an early age, John Wilkes went to a fortune teller who said he was "born under an unlucky star" and was destined for "trouble in plenty."  She predicted for him "a fast life, short but...grand."  John Wilkes came from a long line of believers of seeing spirits, as did the Lincolns...).

     Jumping forward (and back) to former President Obama, author Cody Keenan wrote about spending 2 days working on a speech about Obama's planned anniversary march on Selma.  The original march was led by Dr. Martin Luther King and a young 25-year old John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge and into the crowd of waiting police and others "warning" them to turn back.  The original march would become a catalyst for Civil Rights.  Wrote Keenan: It was a simple encapsulation of a clash of ideas that stretched through the full story of Black America but also rang true for every American who, like Dr. King, was "tired of marching for something that should've been mine at birth."  The story of justice moved forward thanks to women, farmworkers, laborers, Americans with disabilities, Americans of different sexual orientations, immigrants, the poor and the uninsured, and more.  According to Keenan, Obama mulled the speech then said: What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is unfinished?  The notion that we're strong enough to be self-critical, to look upon our imperfections, and to say that we can do better?...We are still engaged in that fundamental contest between what America is and what it should be.  Selma is about each of us asking ourselves what we can do to make America better.  That's the American story.  Not just scratching for what was or settling for what is -- but imagining what might be.  Insisting we live up to our highest ideals.  So let's translate Selma for this generation.  Let's give today's young people their marching orders.  Then he added two paragraphs to Keenan's draft:  There are places, moments, in America where the nation's destiny is decided.  Many are sites of war -- Concord and Lexington, Appomattox and Gettysburg.  Selma is such a place...It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills, a contest to determine the meaning of America.  Wrote Keenan: I sat back into the couch.  Damn.  That was it, right there -- the whole thesis of the speech.  Hell, in just twenty words, he'd described everything at the root of our political life.  The speech clicked for me in a way it hadn't before.  I'd had days.  He's needed thirty minutes...he grinned at me and pointed to the draft on the table.  "Go write that up."     

     Digital readers, book reviews, revisiting or reinventing history.  It can seem daunting, even for the writers.  How to keep up?  Depend on artificial intelligence to do it "for you?"  Don't laugh because there are already so many software "tools" to help you create fictional writing that some sites now provide a list of the "better" ones.  Said a piece in The Verge, readers give an author 4 months to produce another novel before they move on, according to author Jennifer Lepp.  Said the author (writing under the pseudonym Leanne Leeds) on finishing her first AI chapter: ...she sent it to her “beta readers” --a group that offers early feedback-- with special instructions to highlight anything that sounded off or out of character.  Nothing seemed amiss.  “That was kind of creepy,” she said.  “It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?”  Worse, some of the sentences her readers highlighted as being particularly good had come from the machine.  But the most disconcerting moment came when she gave the chapter to her husband to read.  “He turned to her and said, ‘Wow, you put our favorite sushi restaurant in here,’” Lepp recalled.  She hadn’t.  It was a scene that was written by the AI.  Perhaps somewhat cynically, Esquire wrote this satirical piece (I think) on switching away from having a real Christmas tree to an artificial one: If you're worried that going artificial means you'll lose out on some beloved Christmas traditions, don't fret: You'll make new ones...Do you need to inhale the smell of pine to summon the Christmas spirit?  Fine, get a scented candle.  After all, we accept a lot of fake things in our daily lives -- hair, tans, nails.  Why should Christmas be any different?  Bring on the flameless LED fireplace and faux flower arrangements.  What you'll lose in authenticity you'll gain in free time and sanity.

     All of this begs the question, how much reality do we want?  What's the goal of constantly reading or watching or listening?  Is it just to feel that we're keeping up?  Perhaps some information is too much; as one reader wrote in to a Smithsonian article on the new WW I memorial: The broken bodies, the human limbs scattered throughout the mud-soaked trenches, the soldiers reclining on the corpses of their comrades, the shredded dead suspended on barbed wire and the shattered psyches that came home might make for a more useful memorial, not to war but to its folly.  Honoring those who died does not require that we ignore the madmen who sent a generation into the slaughterhouse called the Great War.  Obama's words sound great, as do those of many historical figures; but as author Peter W. Fong wrote in High Country News: I was ignorant then, but not hopelessly so, and I forgive myself for not knowing better.  Personal history --like the history of a place-- is a sedimentary affair, accruing in layers that can be sometimes obscured, sometimes eroded.  Even if most of us declare that some truths should be self-evident --that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights-- others may choose a path destructive of these ends...What can I tell you sbout love and ignorance that you don't already know?  Either you are in possession of ample supplies of both -- or you are unaware the fathomless depths of their abndance.

     So what are we doing here?  What am I doing here, always seeking and searching, and yet quite content?  I think that I simply continue to marvel at the wonders of our world, that our minds are even able to wonder about the possibilities of other dimensions and realities.  Perhaps the universe(s) are well past what we can see, or think, or imagine.  And an alternate reality is little different than what we imagine to be life and death...or dreams.  What if, asked the movie (well worth watching) Slumberland, dreams are not an "escape, a chance to slip away from waking life, to a world without consequence."  Says the film: Your dreams don't just happen.  We make them happen.  And we design them with care just for you.  We have our reasons, and we have our rules. We make your dreams to help you on your journey.  The question then becomes, do we --will we-- wake up?