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Boat People

My latest is up at http://www.broadstreetreview.com/books/daniel-james-browns-boys-in-the-boat

It begins:

The back cover of the paperback edition of Daniel James Brown’s bestselling “The Boys in the Boat” declares it “the improbable… account of how… working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.” This demonstration occurred when an eight-man crew from the University of Washington rowed against the “elite teams” of the world, most particularly the Germans competing “for Adolf Hitler.”

Any suspense over the race’s outcome does not outlast Brown’s second paragraph, which awards the gold medal to the Americans And one needn’t be cynical to think the result foretold earlier. After all, if the Nazis had won, as they did in 33 events that summer, what are the chances we would be hearing about this one? (American “grit” triumphed 24 times.) The questions are what accounted for this victory and what, if anything, it meant.

Identity

During a recent e-mail discussion in which I was a participant, while attempting to identify the source of a rumor about the plans of the new owners for the café at which the discussants hung, a finger was pointed at “that skinny guy who writes about comic books.” As keyboards turned in my direction, I pointed out that this description could not possibly refer to me since (a) I was not “that skinny guy” (confirmed by the new high-tech scale in our club’s locker room which places my BMI squarely in the lower third of “normal) but “that extremely handsome guy” (confirmed by my wife, the admiring Adele); and (b) I don’t write about comic books” but “about underground/alternative cartoonists.” (In my inner, more private, less public man-of-the-people self, I don’t write “about” them either. They are merely subjects through which I address matters of universal concern.

Still I mulled the description over.

Just suppose 74-years hard labor at crafting an identity had resulted in that. It was cooler, I supposed, than “that skinny guy who used to practice workers’ compensation law.” It was definitely preferable to “that skinny, bald, four-eyed…” (or, as my friend Cary said, to “that skinny, toothless crack-addict”). It also seemed an advance beyond the even more reductive “you skinny prick,” which I had been called by a passing drunk in 1959 (when, incidentally, I may have weighed ten-pounds more than I do now). (See: “How I Spent My Vacation.” www.thebroadstreetreview.com May 24, 2009.

It may even top “that pudgy ex-mime,” who authored the slur in the first place.

Smiley face goes here.

Existentially Speaking

I was going to write this as a blog. Then it got long enough I thought, Maybe I can get some money for it. I sent it to Broad Street, but it decided it didn’t suit the demographics for which it was aiming. So here it is. (I’m not sure why I wrote it in the third-person. Adele says it was for “Distance.”

EXISTENTIALLY SPEAKING

For a while, after leaving his six-month appointment with Dr. M, Levin felt fine.

His echo-cardiogram had been good. His increased Lipitor dose had his HDL/LDL balance back where Dr. M wanted, so the new drug would not be necessary. She had dismissed his reported shortness of breath when walking up hills with a “And a hot stick in the eye stings.” But she had raised the question of his blood thinner.

After Levin’s second heart attack, which had occurred because he had turned out to be among the small percentage of the population resistant to Plavix, Dr. M had put him on Effient, which had been developed a year or two earlier. Normally people stay on a blood thinner a year or two, but Levin had been on his five. He had been off it for a few months in 2014, but after an incident of chest pain, Dr. M had put him back on. It might have been nothing, but given his history…

Now he had passed the point where there was reliable data. The risk if he stayed on, Dr. M had explained, was a major bleed in his brain. But if he stopped, Levin risked an “incident” that might be something.

There had been some moments of silence, during which Levin had noted that Dr. M was not asserting a recommendation. There was no question, he knew, but that Dr. M was deeply concerned about him and his wife Adele. The weight, he had thought, of a doctor in her position must be enormous.

“My inclination,” he’d said, “is to risk the latter.” He’d had experience with “incidents” and none of them had killed him. Images of friends who’d suffered strokes had dropped into his mind like skeletons before children during a Fun House visit.

“I’m inclined the same,” Dr. M had said.

“Me too,” Adele said. “I don’t think either Bob or I would do well with a brain bleed.”

Levin would have a stress test. If that showed, as Dr. M and he he hoped – and expected – that his heart was strong and his vessels clear, she would stop the Effient.

Meanwhile she raised his Lexapro.

He was not long removed from the examination room before that seemed a good idea. The shell of well-being and positive feelings Levin had established in his recent hospital-free years had shattered. It seemed a delusion and he seemed a fool and all the activities in which had engaged with reliable ensuing pleasure seemed nonsense. There was a pit into which he was falling,

It continued for 24-hours. Then, even before the anti-depressant could be working, though it still seemed a b’rakhot, his mood floated upwards. An existential clarity seemed to adhere to his dilemma. Were we not all, Levin thought, walking around, unknowing, second-to-second, if our brains would bleed, our hearts clog, or a piano dropping four floors strike us?

He looked forward to stepping on the treadmill and seeing where it took him.

I just finished…

…Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila,” the most masterful novel I have read in years, profound, deep, moving, insightful, original. It would probably help if you have already read “Gilead” and “Home,” which preceded it in Robinson’s oeuvre; but this is not necessary. Probably it would help if, like Robinson, you were Calvinist; but this isn’t necessary either.

Lila is the woman who appears in “Gilead” seemingly from nowhere. It is her son to whom the letter in “Home” is addressed. (There, I’ve given little away.) Now we have her story. Whether Robinson had some of all of it in mind when she began the trilogy, or whether she decided, Gee, I’d like to figure out where Lila came from, I do not know. Either way the achievement is a remarkable feat of imagination.

Robinson has wrought someone from a devastating past, who has navigated her way through a barely marked, devastating series of “presents,” about which a barely formed but continually forming intelligence seeks understanding and shape but whose completeness remains always in doubt.

Meanwhile we appreciate love, compassion, caring, and the Lord working in mysterious ways.

My latest

While my computer was out of action my review of Ghettoside went up at BSR. Here’s the link:
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/books/jill-leovys-ghettoside

Windows

In case you’ve wondered about my absence, well, my computer died. I know the flaw in temporal causality. That Even B follows Event A doesn’t mean Event A caused Event B. But I blame Windows 10.

For months I’d been refusing all pop-ups offering me Windows 10 because I’d been warned it was an invitation to disaster. Then one afternoon I walked into my study and my computer announced it was almost through installing it. I called my IT guy, Steve the Great, knowing he would accuse me of having clicked the wrong click. “You won’t believe me,” I said. He believed me. I was the fourth person in 36 hours to call him with the same problem. It seemed Windows had modified its pop-up. Windows 10 was no longer an option. It was coming unless you stopped it.

(Windows slips these pop-ups into its mostly helpful up-dates. Even if you know the code that identifies Windows 10 and remove it, it will come back at you. “Unconscionable,” Steve said.)

Windows 10 and my two/three-year-old, never-sick-a-day-in-its-life Dell co-existed happily for about a week. Death came suddenly and without warning. Steve took 10 days to resurrect it. I lost a few hundred e-mails I had saved for sentimental and other reasons in my Inbox. “The good news,” Steve said, “is you don’t have Windows 10 any more.”

I just finished…

…”The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt. It’s a big, sprawling, novel, NYC, Vegas, Amsterdam, romance, tragedy, murder, art theft, drugs, and sinister Russians. Personally, I could have done with less Las Vegas, but the plot and the characters, especially the central one, the narrator, and his predicament(s) kept me turning the pages. As for the High-ness of the “Art,” there was a lot more awareness and description of light than I think a teenage boy would be inclined toward and seemed the author striving to add a layer of luster of her own devising, but the prose was well-styled and toward the end the thought became resonant and eloquent.
But, again, at 73, I again found myself, “thought-wise,” pretty well stocked. Maybe if I was an adolescent or young man or even Tartt’s age, forty-ish when she wrote this… But in my present, the what-will-happen-next was the main thing.

I just finished…

…”Ghettoside,” by Jill Leovy. But I’ve also almost finished a review of it for Broad Street or FOM, so I don’t think I’ll say anything further now, except that it’s a fine book, with whose conclusion I did not agree. Stay tuned.

I just finished…

…”The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins. Kate Atkinson aside, I don’t normally like crime fiction. I didn’t like “Gone Girl” or “Dragon Tattoo” or a couple Gillian Flynn’s. I got bored by Alan Furst and Henkell Menning (or whatever his name is) and I couldn’t finish the one Jo Nesbo I began. But this one’s plot kept me going.

Until the morning after I’d finished, when I woke up staring at a hole in the denouement I could have driven all of Russian literature through.

Hawkins cheated.

The director of the fitness center at the Claremont was looking for stories to post on the bulletin board and feature in the newsletter which would inspire the club’s members. She heard about mine, and thought it would work. (Things seemed a bit slow, since my immediate predecessor had been a 14-year-old girl who had mastered the hula hoop.) Here it is: http://files.ctctcdn.com/84b02f5a301/9ee9fa90-8713-4a9d-a6b3-1b0586974b83.pdf

Book and film rights remain available.