The Erinyes

Twice a year– once in the spring and once in the fall– the Chicago Public Library selects a book for the entire city to read. This spring, “One Book, One Chicago” enters its seventh year as a program to promote reading and discussion among all city residents. The selection is the 1953 Raymond Chandler crime novel, The Long Goodbye. The choice of The Long Goodbye marks the first time that the committee has selected a mystery novel. I do not usually read mysteries or crime novels. Those tend more often to be Whirl’s preferences rather than mine. Occasionally she will recommend one for me to read, most notably novels by James Ellroy. I am also somewhat amused that the 1974 Robert Altman film adaptation by the same name arrived in the mail yesterday. I do not remember which of us added that to the movie queue, but the accidental timing was perfect. And I should probably also note that another Chandler adaptation sits on my short list of favorite films: The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart. Suffice it to say I am excited to read this book.

The Long Goodbye is the last book Chandler wrote. It features his iconic detective, Phillip Marlowe. From the back cover:

Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he’s divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

I better go find out what happens!

Whirl has worked at the Field Museum for ten years. She’s worked for a number of departments and divisions in that time doing a wide array of different jobs. We have joked that she seems to be collecting various divisions as a twelve year-old boy might collect baseball cards and have gone so far with the joke as to tell it to several of her current and former supervisors. But one thing she has not done in all of those years work at the Field Museum is to attend Members Night.

Members Nights are the museum’s annual Open House. Individuals who have agreed to become members of the museum get an opportunity to enter the collections and research areas typically off-limits to day-to-day visitors. What I quickly learned after Whirl began working at the museum is that only a small percentage of what The Field Museum is involved in is visible to the typical visitor on the floor. The Field Museum is a working research institution, not just a collection of dusty artifacts from long ago civilizations and exotic lands. Hundreds of scientists associated with the museum perform primary research in Anthropology, Botany, Geology, and Zoology. Members Nights are the museum’s way of inviting interested people behind the scenes to explore that vital aspect of the institution.

This year, Whirl’s boss invited her to represent the Insects Division for the Zoology department. She had never done this before and so she attended for a short while on Wednesday night to get an idea of what to expect. On Thursday I went with her to explore on my own and to take a few photographs of her department and the other departments presenting exhibits at the museum.

Some highlights of this year included the preparation of a cheetah for display, newly received artifacts from the Marquesas islands, and hissing cockroach races. I also learned that fluorite is the state mineral for Illinois.

It is often that when Whirl and I talk about our work it seems like we are speaking entirely different languages to one another. The chance to see the museum in the same light that she does– if only for a few hours– was a treat.

It is uncommon for a film to have a dramatic impact upon me. While I like film as a general rule and I enjoy discussing them with my friends and family, I generally reserve my highest praise with more than a little caution. To confess in public to a film having significant impact upon me is quite rare. In the case of a film based on a book, it is more likely for me to read the book first, and then see the film than the other way around. For whatever reason, Into the Wild happened in reverse. Of the films I have watched in the last year, Into the Wild is my favorite. Sean Penn adapted the film’s screenplay from the 1996 Jon Krakauer book of the same name.

Jon Krakauer has done this to me before. A little less than a year ago I read Krakauer’s chronicle about the fatal 1996 catastrophe atop Mt. Everest, Into Thin Air. I was so engrossed by the book that I read it almost straight through. I paused in reading it for only a few equally compelling diversions: to go to work at a new job; to enjoy Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s video travelogue of their motorcycle trip around the world, Long Way Round; and to walk the entire length of Clark Street with my friends on a beautiful late summer Saturday.

Into the Wild attempts to tell the end story of Christopher McCandless. In the spring of 1990 McCandless graduated a top student at Emory University in Atlanta. After graduation he abandoned plans to continue to law school, broke off communication with his family, gave away his savings and began traveling the continent. For two years he made his way through the American Southwest, the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest. He alternated between settled periods where he would work a job and make friends and time spent living alone without money or human contact. His eventual goal was the wilds of Alaska where he died in August 1992.

Upon viewing the film, Whirl noted to me that the story of McCandless’ disappearance, death and discovery were front page news where she lived in Oregon. The story became national news as well after the 1991 Gulf War fell off of the daily news cycle. I was living in Germany at the time and unaware of McCandless’ impact. Krakauer’s book made McCandless a heroic figure to many. The abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped in Alaska has become a tourist destination and a campground. Others are more critical. Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate.” I grew up the west and am not unsympathetic to that idea. The wild is unforgiving. The wild makes no special provisions for hope or transcendent experience.

There are several themes I find compelling in McCandless’ story without trespassing into hero-worship. McCandless and I would be close in age. We both traveled, often alone, into unknown territory around the same time. We both struggled with finding a purpose to our lives once unshackled from the expectations of family, school, friends and society. I never took the step of inventing a new life for myself– I could not, and cannot, loosen myself from the social bonds required by such a re-imagining. The romantic in me, the sentimentalist in me, the adventurer in me– still these are drawn by the possibility.

Krakauer’s wrote of the fatal mistakes on Everest with clarity and sympathy. I have great respect for him as a writer. I am very hopeful that his treatment of Christopher McCandless is written with the same voice. I could use that.

Three years ago, in January 2005, I suffered a serious traumatic brain injury. The injury placed me in a coma for ten days and the hospital for weeks more. The injury changed my life. Since that time I have looked for voices and means of expression of what I went through and continue to carry with me.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the English translation of the French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon written by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby served as editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine ELLE. In December 1995 at the age of 43 his life changed. He suffered a massive stroke. The results of the stroke included complete and permanent paralysis of almost all his voluntary muscles while retaining nearly full awareness of his senses. Vision, hearing, tactile sensation remained absent any ability to act upon the information those senses provided. This rare condition is known as “locked-in syndrome”. For Bauby, his sole means of communication to the outside world was the ability to blink his left eye.

Using that one remaining ability, Bauby wrote and edited this book– painstakingly, tediously, letter-by-letter, two minutes per word, he wrote the book over the course of a year. The book gives voice to his thoughts and feelings about his life and the situation in which he found himself. The title serves as a clear description: the diving bell refers to the empty shell he considered his body, the butterfly refers to his spirit. The book was published in 1997. Two days after publication, Bauby suffered a heart attack and died. His astonishing book continues to give cheer to those who face life’s ultimately impossible odds and the confrontation of the sudden, merciless, fickle nature of life. The book serves as an inspirational reminder of mortality: the plain fact that swift and sudden changes can sweep away anything we might have taken for granted.

From the book’s back cover:

In a voice that is by turns wistful and mischievous, angry and sardonic, Bauby gives us a celebration of the liberating power of consciousness: what it is like to spend a day with his children, to imagine lying in bed beside his wife, to conjure up the flavor of delectable meals even as he is fed through a tube. Most of all, this triumphant book lets us witness an indomitable spirit and share in the pure joy of its own survival.

I knew the Oscar-nominated film There Will Be Blood was inspired by the novel Oil!. What somehow slipped through my awareness was that Upton Sinclair was the novel’s author. This would be the same Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, the seminal novel about the Chicago stockyards in the 19th Century. I ran across the recent printing of the novel browsing the bookstore last week. I picked it up.

Contemporary society’s need for oil continues to dominate the social, economic and political landscape. I believe it is to this end that this edition’s back cover reads:

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy in this glorious 1927 novel to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California’s early oil industry. Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption and class warfare, feature a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. Sinclair’s epic drama endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.

Today’s oil fields may no longer be in America’s back yards of Texas and California but I do not think that makes them any less important or relevant. On the contrary, I believe that makes them all the more relevant, their impact all the stronger. While I do not live in The Jungle back of the yards, that particular Chicago that novel portrays continues to haunt me. Also, while I do not own an automobile– and thus avoid a more visceral connection to oil through the ritual of the gas pump– I suspect Oil! will likely have a similar effect.

The wars in Iraq have figured as prominent cultural events in my adult life. I arrived in Berlin two weeks before the 1991 invasion and experienced firsthand the anti-American sentiment that decision fostered. When I returned to the States, I noticed how differently my experiences were from those of my friends and family. Germany’s perspective on war is different from that of many other nations, the US included. The last seven years have been characterized by various iterations of the terror war. I believe, in time, America’s involvement in Iraq will become the defining characteristic of my generation– more culturally significant than the Internet, the cellular phone, or Seattle grunge rock.

It is with this admission that I am surprised at how little I actually know about US involvement in Iraq. My condition is not due to lack of exposure. I know Iraq has not wanted for lack of copy or airplay. I know the wars in Iraq have dominated news, business and politics for at least the last eighteen years. Still I am left wondering: why? What is it we are doing there? So I intend to correct that oversight. Generation Kill is an award-winning book by the Rolling Stone journalist, Evan Wright. For two months in 2003 Wright experienced the most recent invasion of Iraq as an embedded reporter with the First Reconnaissance Battalion in the United States Marine Corps. The New York Times described Wright’s work.

Mr. Wright’s portrait is nuanced and grounded in details often overlooked in daily journalistic accounts, like the desperate search for places to relieve oneself during battle. Or the constant use of racial epithets toward fellow soldiers and Iraqis. … [This is a] complex portrait of able young men raised on video games and trained as killers. There’s 19-year-old Cpl. Harold James Trombley, whom Mr. Wright describes as curled over his machine gun, firing gleefully, and whom he quotes, as saying: ‘I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush. “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,”’ he says, referring to a video game. ‘I felt like I was living it.’

Like most things in life, I do not expect to find simple, elegant answers– as much as I might wish to do so. I am diving into this unknown with that apprehension and understanding firmly in mind. What I do hope to find is some bits of understanding– however small they might ultimately be.

Three years ago I almost died. Do not worry. The story does not have a bad ending. I would not be sitting here writing it if it did. Besides, I have already told the story a number of times, so repeating it once more would not be particularly interesting for anyone. Including me. So I’ll sum up quickly: three years ago I was involved in an accident that put me in a coma. I suffered a serious brain injury, almost died and spent months in recovery afterward. I got better. The end.

That is the end of the bad part of this entry. The good part of this entry is that every year my friends and I celebrate this date by going to Las Vegas. Today marks the third year we have done so.

It was a really fun trip. The day before we were scheduled to leave two of our group wrote to let us know they would not be coming so there were thirteen of us instead of the originally-planned fifteen. We stayed at the Imperial Place, which is a dive-y sort of hotel-casino on the Strip across from Mirage and Caesars Palace and next door to Harrah’s and the Flamingo. This was the first time for most of us staying there. In previous years we stayed at the Tropicana on the south end of the Strip. This year we talked about getting a different view of things and Steamboat Wille and Hurricane scouted the Imperial Palace for us when they went to Las Vegas with Hurricane’s parents in May.

Imperial Palace is not fancy. It’s a little tired. A little run-down. It has some charm and some unique characteristics, but it’s not the brightest gem on the strip, by any stretch. I particularly enjoyed the Dealertainers.

In 2003, the Imperial Palace spun off part of their long-running tribute show, “Legends in Concert” as blackjack dealers. Now the likes of Britney Spears, Jake and Elwood Blues, Gloria Estefan, Dolly Parton and of course Elvis deal you cards. Every once in a while, they step back from the table, climb up onto a small stage, sing and dance. It works as a quirky, kitschy dive-y diversion and is a lot of fun– a good match for the Imperial Palace.

Before I go on, I should talk about the fire. This interesting event unfolded just as we landed in Las Vegas. The roof of the Monte Carlo casino caught fire. To the best of my knowledge there is no causal relationship between these two events. Correlation does not imply causation, as my scientist child bride is wont to remind me.

We were driving north up the Strip and saw smoke rising in the sky. It was difficult to determine if Mandalay Bay, New York New York, or Excalibur were on fire. We were diverted off the Strip before we were able to see the Monte Carlo and caught the rest of the story when we got to Imperial Palace and were able to watch the news. This was a big story for Las Vegas, a major casino on fire on the Strip. I could not help but wonder why it was such a big story, though. It looked fairly obvious to me that it was a small section of the exterior facade that was burning rather than anything of real substance. And sure enough, the fire was extinguished fairly quickly, despite the smoke, falling flaming debris and gaggle of gawkers down below.

I have seen big fires in Chicago before– most notably the LaSalle Bank Fire and the Dexter Building Fire. Those were events: several hundred firefighters and serious property losses as a result. This was not. Now it may be a tribute to the Clark County Fire Department that it never got out of control, but the skeptic in me wants to assign the blame for the magnitude of the story to the media. Contrary to popular sloganism, what happens in Vegas rarely stays in Vegas. Flaming 40-story casinos make for dramatic copy.

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Richard Matheson wrote the apocalyptic novel, I Am Legend, in 1954. It is the story of the last man alive in a world overrun by a changed, bestial version of humanity. It is partly a vampire story. It is partly a zombie story. It is one of the definitive end of the world stories. I cannot help but hear Michael Stipe’s rapid-fire mumble in the background as I read it. The novel has been adapted into film three times: Vincent Price starred in The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Charlton Heston starred in The Omega Man in 1971. Will Smith stars in the recently released film by the same name, I Am Legend. While I have only ever seen The Omega Man, I understand each of these film adaptations differ from the original novel in varying ways. I like a good vampire story; I like good zombie stories too. And you just can’t go wrong with positing the end of the world in gruesome ways.

So while the wintertime temperature plummets in Chicago, I think I’m going to curl up with a good book, maybe light a fire and see how Robert Neville gets through the original version of this story. If he does.

I am away from home on business this week. I’m in Arlington, Texas, living out of a hotel. One of the perks of living out of a hotel– besides not having to make the bed or wash the dishes– is that the newspaper arrives right at my room every day before I get up. Granted, the newspaper I am receiving here at this hotel happens to be that stalwart of journalistic integrity, USA Today. And it is the lead story on today’s paper that has me once again asking the question: Why is this news?

USA Today’s lead story on the front page, above the fold complete with art, is: “Social, work lives collide on networking websites”. The story described how a woman updated her Facebook and MySpace pages shortly after she got married. She included pictures of her new wife. She received congratulations and blessings from her friends and family. And then a work acquaintance sent her a simple two-word note: “Nice pictures.” Her work life and her social life had collided.

Let’s walk through the basics of the story. She’s gay. People at her work do not know she is gay. She posts pictures of herself and her wife on the Internet. Unintended people find these pictures, view them, and then comment about having done so.

Again, why is this news?

I will set aside writing about the strong interdependencies between media and marketing for a moment: companies using the media to gain awareness with the public; media creating copy about otherwise flaccid goods and services in order to sell advertisements. I won’t go into that than to observe that social networking sites do not strike me as anything fundamentally different than the earliest college home pages I saw in the early ’90s other than to have a bit more automation and ease of use. Not that writing enough of the basic HTML to post “I ♥ Huckabees” is particularly difficult, but social networking sites have designed ways to make it even easier. That is MySpace’s contribution to the Internet, simple tools to make ugly web pages.

So we’re back to the fundamental issue of posting on the Internet. I liken Internet posts– of most any flavor– to walking into a very crowded room and broadcasting to anyone who will listen the intimate and mundane details of your life. Combine that with various methods of archiving data on the Internet, and those posts never completely die. They are always available in some form or another. Those stories were news maybe ten years ago. And for people who had been using the Internet since the 60s, I suspect they probably thought something similar in the 90s: this is old news. As a broader culture I think we started to realize sometime in the mid- to late-90s just how long a shelf-life data on the Internet actually has. Today, this is old news by any calculation. It is not relevant.

People are curious– some might say downright nosy. We want to know what is going on with people around us. From our innocent fascination with Boo Radley to the odious habits of Mrs. Grundy we all have a touch of voyeurism in us. The Internet expands our reach: we are no longer constrained to peeping in on our neighbors, but now can look at what is going on in most any neck of the woods. But the Internet does not fundamentally change the type of behavior, just the ease of access to it.

So the human behavior is certainly not new. Is it newsworthy for other reasons?

I am struggling to find a justification for the newsworthiness of this piece. I am failing. Yes, I understand that the boundaries between working life and personal life are blurring through technology. More people are working from home, or working on flexible schedules. More women are in the workplace than ever before. Mobile technologies like email, cellular phones, and laptop computers ease the ability to bring work with us wherever we go. This might be another example of that, I suppose. But it seems a pretty far reach to put a new spin on a story that has been developing for decades.

To paraphrase the voice in Field of Dreams, “If you post it, they will come.”

I’ve been following Barack Obama since his his 2004 Senate bid to replace the seat vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. A number of people claim that his presidential campaign began with his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The 2004 Illinois senate run was filled with scandal and controversy on the Republican side of the ballot. In the general election, Obama received 70% of the vote to Alan Keyes‘ 27%. It was one of the largest margins of victory in Illinois history. When he officially announced his candidacy for US President in February, I was thrilled. The turnout in Iowa has further bolstered support in Illinois, and the midwest in general.

All of this may be interesting, and may say something about how Obama came to the national political stage, but it explains very little about the man himself. To address that shortcoming, I have picked up his latest novel, The Audacity of Hope. The Audacity of Hope is Obama’s second book. It expands on a number of themes he introduced in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address. His positions on corporate governance, energy policy, network neutrality, taxation, the budget deficit, immigration and the environment resonate strongly with my own. I hope reading this book will give me further insight into this fascinating public figure in the midst of an exciting political run