Through the Uprights!

[Dear Thomas Friedman: I have written your Sunday column for you. Sincerely, Sean Carman (with special thanks to Ezra Klein and Lucia Graves)]

I was taking a cab from National Airport to my apartment in Washington the other day. I live in a gentrifying neighborhood that is home to a rising, fairly well integrated class of African-American, Ethiopian, and white beneficiaries of globalization and the housing bubble. It’s a neighborhood of yoga mats, African cuisine, and hip-hop culture, but those are stories for another time. The question on my cab driver’s mind was simple.

“Tom,” he asked me. “You’re a nationally syndicated columnist and highly-paid luncheon speaker. What’s the bottom line on the sequestration fiasco?”

“Good question,” I said.

And one on which we all need to focus in the coming weeks, I could have added, if we’re going to understand the dynamics of Congress’ latest foray into fiscal brinksmanship. 

As with all American political quandaries, the first and most fundamental question is what sports analogy to use.

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A Brief Ode to Richard III

Beneath space 5 King Richard lies;
        Of his bones the tarmac’s made;
   Those potholes were once his eyes:
        Nothing of him that doth fade,
   His welcome here is o’er-stayed
   Six centuries’ fines unpaid.
   Parking maidens ring his knell:
                Ding-dong.
   Hark! now I hear them — Bloody hell.

First They Came for My Assault Rifle

I wrote this piece early in the morning on the day after the Newtown shooting, at the small desk in my room at the Milwaukee Hilton, where I spent the month of December for work. Yesterday it ran on McSweeney’s, to mark the passing of one month since the tragedy.

Resolutions

My new year’s resolution was to be more present. As a result, I spent the first few weeks of the new year scolding myself whenever I caught myself daydreaming, or absent-mindedly leaving my apartment without something I meant to bring along (the shoes I needed to take to the shoe repair store, for example). One day last week I caught myself returning the ice cream to the refrigerator. Later that day, I stopped myself a moment before I put shaving cream on my toothbrush.

That’s when I realized my mistake. “Who am I kidding?” I thought. “I’m never going to be ‘more present.’” 

I immediately changed my resolution to “try not to worry so much” and have been much happier since.

Geoff Dyer Writing About Not Being Able to Write

The best circumstance for writing, I realized within days of arriving at Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.

                            — Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

Precipice

“This time,” the Speaker said, “we have to insist on massive spending cuts.”

“Absolutely,” his first aide said.

“But we cannot propose any cuts ourselves,” the Speaker said.

“Goes without saying,” the first aide said.

“Wait,” the second aide said. “Why not?”

The Speaker and the first aide looked at him.

“I mean, for the sake of argument,” he said.

“Because no one wants them,” the Speaker said.

“Social security, Medicare and Medicaid,” the first aide said, frowning as he spoke. “Federal programs, infrastructure, disaster relief. Every line item turns out to be something someone needs.”

“That’s the Hell of this,” the Speaker said.

“Proposing cuts ourselves would be suicide,” the first aide said.

“I see it now,” the second aide replied. He was looking at the carpet.

The Speaker and his first aide surveyed the ceremonial office. It was paneled in carved oak and decorated with the insignia of power — flags, photographs of monuments and iconic vistas, a stuffed bald eagle posed as if in flight. The corner fireplace was cold, and went unused, but it had once been real. The second aide kept looking at the carpet. He saw a field of blue decorated with evenly and widely spaced gold stars.

“There has to be a panic,” the Speaker finally said. “A frenzy powered by euphoria, that borders on insanity.”

“Like when a mob begins to riot,” the first aide said.

“Exactly.”

“And becomes a single entity,” the first aide went on, “irrationally bent on violence.”

“That’s when we do it,” the Speaker said. “It’s the only time.”

“And what happens then?” said the second aide, who was still looking at the carpet.

The Speaker’s eyes, bloodshot from the long meetings and the sleepless nights, became glassy, then welled with tears. The tears brimmed behind his lower eyelids, then spilled onto his cheeks, like water pouring through the spillways of a dam.

“Oblivion,” he said, his voice choking just a little. He reached for his hanker-chief and dabbed it on his face.

And that was that. The two aides, somehow knowing the meeting was over, snapped shut their briefing books and took their leave.

Kryl’s Horn Still Blows

This weekend I was in Crawfordsville, Indiana, attending a celebration of the life and work of my great grandfather, the 1930’s cornettist and bandmaster Bohumir Kryl. Kryl carved the Indiana limestone friezes on the Victorian man-cave (personal study) built by Crawfordsville resident General Lew Wallace, the Civil War hero who wrote the novel Ben Hur. After completing the sculptures, Kryl left Crawfordsville to become first cornettist in John Phillips Sousa’s band. He went on to become one of the most famous musicians and band leaders of his day, and the greatest cornettist in history.

The Bohumir Kryl Project was the brainchild of Tim McCormick, a Crawfordsville insurance agent, musician, and antique phonograph collector who became somewhat obssessed with our great grandfather’s life and music career. The weekend program included a presentation of Kryl’s life by Richard Bowen, the Wabash College glee club director, who dressed as Kryl, and a rousing concert of period music (including Kryl’s “Josephine Waltz”) performed by the Crawfordsville Community Orchestra and musicians from across the country, including my cousin Mark Yancich, principal timpanist with the Atlanta Symphony (pictured above), his nephew Putt, also a percussionist, and Kurt Christiansen, principal trumpeter for the U.S. Air Force Band, among others.

This website (via Wabash College) has a nice collection of photographs from the event, including one of Mark playing the anvil and brake drum for Verdi’s “Miserere and Anvil Chorus,” a shot of Tim McCormick presenting my aunt, Pauny Yancich, Kryl’s last living granddaughter, with a certificate recognizing her as the inaugural General Lew Wallace Museum Scholar in Residence Emeritus, and one of my cousin Dave returning the favor by bestowing upon McCormick a certificate of adoption into the family, which, Dave noted, McCormick had earned by demonstrating the ”interest, tenacity and, frankly, insanity” that qualified him to become a member of the family.

Michelle Dean on Leaving “Brooklyn”

We’ve all read personal essays that lurch from one subject to the next, their loosely-connected ideas rolling along like train cars threatening to jump a disjointed track. Michelle Dean’s Saturday Rumpus essay on realizing your dream by leaving the place most associated with it organizes its themes into a streamlined whole. Like any good story, every turn feels at once surprising and inevitable. Of course, I also liked it because it is about a lawyer’s dream to become a writer.

An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant Population

“It happened the previous year Kardamanov had sent to the magazine Niva an article entitled “An Interesting Case of Fertility among the Peasant Population,” and receiving a reply which reflected unfavorably on his pride as an author, he complained bitterly to his neighbors, thereby earning the reputation as a writer.”

Anton Chekhov, “St. Peter’s Day”

An English Translation of William Giraldi’s Review of Alix Ohlin’s Novel Inside and Her Story Collection Signs and Wonders

[With apologies to William Giraldi.]

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, William Giraldi wrote an inexcusably vicious review of Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside and her story collection Signs and Wonders. 

Unfortunately, Giraldi didn’t write his review in English. Instead, he wrote it in an ornamental, hyperbolic, pseudo-intellectual approximation of English, that employed synonyms and pretentious phrases that sounded like English, but didn’t actually make sense.

This left a number of readers puzzled. Giraldi was clearly angry with Ohlin, but why? All she did was write a couple of books. Did she borrow something of his and not return it? Maybe they dated at some point?

And why didn’t he like Ohlin’s writing? Something about it being “stiffened in a morgue of mentation” and that he didn’t like her titles. Apart from that, it was hard to tell. 

In an effort to get to the bottom of these mysteries, I took the trouble to translate Giraldi’s review into English. 

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“These Things Will Make All of Us Just a Little Bit More Free”

But for me this trial is a “so-called” trial. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood and fictitiousness, of sloppily disguised deception, in the verdict of the so-called court.

Because all you can deprive me of is “so-called” freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia. But nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to openness [glasnost], when this will be read and heard by thousands of people. This freedom goes on living with every person who is not indifferent, who hears us in this country. With everyone who found shards of the trial in themselves, like in previous times they found them in Franz Kafka and Guy Debord. I believe that I have honesty and openness, I thirst for the truth; and these things will make all of us just a little bit more free. We will see this yet.

— From the closing statement of Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot.

All three closing statements are brilliant. Read them here: http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements 

“So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each time as if it were something new.”

                                              — War and Peace

On Usain Bolt

You might think he has
the perfect sprinter’s name,
but in fact Mercury,
the winged messenger,
would be even better:
A fleet, antic
envoy between the
mortals and the Gods.

Olympic Poetry

Here’s my favorite of the Olympic poems I’ve found so far, “Once More,” by the Slovenian poet Ales Steger, featured on NPR’s Poetry Games. Translator Brian Henry notes that the Slovenian title would translate into “Encore” in French, but encore is an English word, too, and would make a better title.

So here it is, “Encore” by Ales Steger:

Encore

If a great idea is translated into a body,
Then Greg Louganis is an Einstein

If a body is translated into a great idea,
Einstein is Tralala Oompah

Which gods do chess grandmasters dream about?
It is time, my love, we all participate
In this outrageous activity.

Let bankers with pacemakers run the marathon.
Let naked sumo wrestlers decide our common fate.
Let us pierce the concrete with our heads.

Every time it’s a top score
And we are in no hurry to get anywhere.

/ /

The Scottish poet Jackie Kay reads three of her Olympic poems on the Guardian website. They are intricate, playful, and beautiful:

http://gu.com/p/39t95

The Poems of the 30th Olympiad

McKayla

On the runway she is either a rocket sled
or a girl sprinting toward a dream
or both,
but on the vault she is an uncoiled spring.

In the air she is a galaxy —bright, stretched out,
spinning with celestial grace.
She lands like a thrown-down switchblade — thump.
Arms raised, it’s over in an instant.

On the Small Travesties of NBC’s Olympics Coverage

On the whole, you can’t complain.
Five cable channels,
every event carried live
on the internet.
Even wake boarding, which,
if we’re being honest,
shouldn’t be a competitive sport.

But if, like me, you have a day job and no cable,
God help you. 
The prime-time
broadcast coverage
is just awful.