A Story in Six Words

SMITH Mag, home of the six-word story, has launched a contest to see who could create the best six-word story for an inanimate object. I thought this was a gimmicky, silly idea until I read a six-word story by none other than Ernest Hemingway. Check this:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

You instantly imagine a host of possibilities behind that simple sentence. It made the hair on the back of my arms stand up and I involuntarily shook my head to prevent my imagination from straying too far. The sentence is a perfect example of the power of simple language used well. Brevity, simplicity – the longest word has five letters. After reading that sentence do you really want to know more? Or would you prefer to move along to a story with a happier ending?

Let’s try it. Create a six-word story for this inanimate object:

 

Write six words to describe this object.

 

 

Sicko

I’m sick. Diagnosis unkown but I have a temperture of 101.5, ache all over, and have a thunderous chest cough that scrapes my throat raw. Lovely. These symptoms have persisted for three days and we’re beginning to suspect the bugaboo of the Fall, H1N1.

Are you aware how awful daytime television can be?

Anyway, I’m caving and going to the doctor today. I seriously doubt he can do much for me but it would be nice if we could confirm this is in fact the alphabet flu.

In the depths of my sickness I always reach a point where I can’t imagine ever being well again, and doubt that I’ve ever been healthy. I then thank my lucky stars that I live in the era of modern medicine, and marvel that less than 100 years ago the same ailment that afflicts me know routinely killed people, and not just the very young or the very old.

I read yesterday that the 20th century saw the average lifespan of North Americans increase from 47 years to 77 years. Just think of the implications of that fact, both on society and on individuals. I have no doubt, none, that I will get better. If it were 1909 my fate with a strong influenza bug would be much less certain.

Imagine the joy felt by someone who did emerge from serious illness – imagine the joy at simply living. Me? I’m thinking about how much work I’m missing and whether my employer suspects I’m a weakling who let’s a simple sniffle get in the way of a solid day of work. And I know this is ridiculous (it was my employer who ordered me home after I attempted to buck up yesterday). But I still can’t help wonder.

My fever is crawling back up so I’m putting down the iPhone. Here’s to your health!

High school football goes highbrow

I was surprised to learn NPR was launching a new weekly series focusing on high school football. The nationally distributed program is called Friday Night Lives, and true to its name, will focus on the stories behind the Big Game. I love NPR for its focus on hard news, particularly the work done by their international desk. NPR is also undeniably cerebral and that’s a good thing, but absent Frank Deford I find most of their episodic sports coverage dry and uninteresting.

When All Things Considered host Robert Seigel introduced the program this week it took 30 seconds for the discussion to swerve to the negative aspects of the sport. There was much to disagree with, but one comment in particular seemed quaint and disconnected from reality, which was the idea that football represents the great social divide splitting the “cool” from the “uncool” in the Darwinian world of high school social dynamics. This struck as just wrong.

It would be disingenous to deny the truth of this claim 20 years ago. Ten years ago (when I joyously crashed, ran, and tumbled across 100 yards of angry adolescent ectasy) the football team didn’t seem to divide the cool from uncool. Full disclosure: all male Catholic high school, thus no competition for females and plunder. Football was and is central to Rockhurst’s identity, but it didn’t create a pecking order within the school.

Today, ten years later, is there a better time to be a self-professed nerd or geek? It seems clear geeks have inherited the earth, or at least the 21st century economy. Geeks are steering mankind’s future by their mastery of the sciences. How we communicate, what we eat, how we perceive our place on the planet and in the universe have been shaped by geeks and nerds.

NPR might be reporting yesterday’s news here. Still, I think it will be fascinating to watch how they handle high school football. I hope they keep it focused on the players, coaches, and boosters of all stripes, to see football as the unparalleled drama that unfolds between the hashmarks but also as an intellectual and operational enterprise on par with any organizational effort, be it business, agriculture, the military – take your pick.

Football provides wonderfully contrasting characteristics that should make it difficult for liberally-minded NPR editors and reporters to pigeonhole. The aggressive (imperial?) nature of the game (taking territory, penetrating defenses, physical domination) is also undeniably communitarian. The individual is subliminated towards the whole, right down to the identity-masking uniforms. Sure, there are stars and heroes, but none of them can do something entirely their own. For every pass thrown someone else must catch it. For a yardage-chewing ground attack, there must be fleet-footed lineman pivoting and turning in concert to confuse and BLINDSIDE the man across from them. Defensive tackles have to engage the guards and keep them off the linebackers, who must read the guards and fly to the ball.

It’s a beautiful game. It will be fun and at times amusing to see how it’s treated by NPR.

Blech!

I’ve done a downright pathetic job updating this blog. Five weeks without a post? I think even  Adriane stopped reading. So what’s my problem?

1. I started this blog to talk about books. Way too narrow. I certainly don’t know enough about that subject to talk about it exclusively, and how often do you enjoy talking to someone who only talks about one thing incessantly?

2. Good writing is hard work (I know, I know – that means this prose should be easy), and I revise too much. It takes me too long to write a 250 word post.

3. Deep cultural malaise. But this, of course, is not my fault. Where’s my cardigan?

4. Travellin’.

5. Lacking a voice, in other words, simply having nothing to say.

But I’m kicking free of this garbage and starting anew with Ex Libris Bob. The title stays but I’m going to broaden my horizons a little. Everything’s on the table.

Read Lonesome Dove

Last week I watched the entire Lonesome Dove miniseries on AMC. I missed it the first time around, in 1989, but I remember my mother talking about it with a friend over the phone, talking about X characters death as if it were a family member. Still, not terribly interesting to a ten year old.

Twenty years later, however, I thought it was fantastic. But it has Robert Duvall, so how it could be anything less than fantastic? You could put Robert Duvall in Encino Man and make it an Oscar contender. I also knew Lonesome Dove was a book before a movie, but I didn’t realize it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. I simply needed more of Duvall’s wise-cracking Gus

I stopped by the Corinth library to see if they had a copy – no luck – but Amazon got my fix with their preview of the first chapter, parts of which I’m reproducing here. McMurty is a genius. The opening paragraph:

“When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake – not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck and the shoat had the tail.”

How can you not instantly be sucked into this world, where pigs prey on rattlesnakes? Later, Gus goes to retrieve his whiskey bottle from a work shed…

“When he opened the door he didn’t immediately see any centipedes but he did immediately hear the nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that was evidently smarter than the one the pigs were eating. Augustus could just make out the snake, coiled in a corner, but decided not to shoot it; on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications. Everybody in town would hear it and conclude either that the Comanches were down from the plains or the Mexicans up from the river. If any of the customers of the Dry Bean, the town’s one saloon, happened to be drunk or unhappy – which was very likely – they would probably run out into the street and shoot a Mexican or two, just to be on the safe side. “

Gus lets the snake go, but his friend W.T. Call would have done things differently…

“Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. ‘A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,’ he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said.”

A little more about Gus…

“As was his custom, Augustus drank a fair amount of whiskey as he sat and watched the sun ease out of the day. If he wasn’t tilting the rope-bottomed chair, he was tilting the jug…The whiskey didn’t damage his intellectual powers any, but it did make him more tolerant of the raw sorts he had to live with: Call and Pea Eye and Deets, young Newt, and old Bolivar, the cook.”

I could go on. In less than four pages McMurty tells you so much about Gus, Lonesome Dove, and life in south Texas with economy, verve, and humor. I might have to buy this one.

Listen to The Dead Weather

This has nothing to do with books, but Jack White kicks ass, and his new band releases their album next week. You can click on widget below to listen to the entire album for free.

Best of the NYT Book Review #2

I have a terrible sense of direction, as my beautiful and multi-talented wife will attest. And no, I don’t want to stop and ask for directions. But it’s not my fault, according to Colin Ellard, or at least, it’s not a problem uniquely my own. Ellard’s book, You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall examines the amazing navigative  abilities of ants, geese, turtles, and asks why many humans can’t get from one side of their resident city to the other without help from MapQuest.

Get this: ants navigate by “counting” their steps between destinations, and they can follow a path a long as 20,000 of their body lengths, which is the equivalent of a human following “an uncharted path 22 miles long.”

You can read the whole review here.

The Best of Indie Kansas City

Check out the home page of IndieBound.org today – they feature a few of the best small independent businesses in Kansas City: http://www.indiebound.org/.

We also have excellent indie bookstores – all of which are featured in my Favorite Bookstores links on the right side of the screen. Rainy Day Books, Prospero’s, Spivey’s.

Read Jim Harrison

It’s fair to say Jim Harrison is an iconoclast. In our era of technology, metrosexual men, and an ascendent feminine spirit, his voice may seem retro or downright weird. Everything about him seems an affront to our popular culture and values, which is why I find him so fascinating.

I never read his stuff until this year, and when I finally did I couldn’t get enough of him. He’s prolific and versatile, publishing 32 books over the course of his career covering fiction, poetry, memoir, and cook books.

Harrison has led a hard life and looks older than his 70 years. He’s blind in his left eye and suffers from diabetes, but he appears to be more physically vigorous than most 50 year-old men. Jeffrey Brown of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer recently profiled Harrison and discussed his recent poetry collection, In Search of Small Gods. Take a peek. If you’re interested in reading Harrison, you could start with his collection of three novellas, featuring Legends of the Fall (later adapted to film with Brad Pitt), Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name. If you like him I would then recommend True North and Returning to Earth, to be read in that order and consecutively.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module_byid.html?s=news01s2c23q5de

UPDATE: the Wall Street Journal has a great story on Harrison’s tremendous appetites and a slideshow of his home in Montana.

Make Love Not War (And make it crazy, reckless love).

I haven’t read Christina Nehring’s new book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the 21st Century yet. It’s hot off the press and enjoying quite a bit of free publicity right now thanks to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s (very) public revelation of his affair with Maria Belen Chapur.  Here is Nehring’s contrarian view on how the Sanford scandal compares to it’s Washington kin.

Nehring’s book is a polemic on the state of modern love. I can only report her thesis from other reviews (check out the NYT review or the Salon review for two well-done reviews), but she’s calling for a return to Romantic love and cautioning against the comfortable routine into which  she thinks most modern relationship inevitably slip. Her models of love are the grand but often ruinous relationships like Heloise and Abelard, or those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Sure sounds great, but at the end of a long day when the kids need to be fed, bathed, and put back to bed (repeatedly), keeping that consuming fire lit seems not only inconvenient, but silly. After all, passion is by its very nature fleeting. Nor is passion to be trusted. It can distort and it can destroy. Just ask Jenny Sanford.

Romantic love between two people is rarely only between two people. The children that are the product of romantic love are inextricably wound into the fabric of that joined life. That fact, that perspective, is wholly absent from Nehring’s vision, and from her analysis of Sanford’s behavior. Sanford’s heedless pursuit of “authentic” romantic love will have a profound impacton his four sons. It’s hard to tell, but she seems to acknowledge the “risk” to his relationship with this sons as just another value to be balanced in the equation, along with his political career and his marriage.

On Wednesday my wife and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary. If you’re reading, honey, thank you for eight wonderful years of adventure and love, and may we always be in heady, reckless love, and embrace new experiences and opportunities.

How about we ditch the shell mac ‘n cheese tonight and go with the curly-q instead? I think the girls would get a kick out of it.