Not Your Father’s Olympics

For sports that go on unnoticed most of the time, the Olympic Games are a bonanza.  Over the next two weeks, I’ll be watching every moment of track and field available, just as I watched every second of the U. S. Olympic Trials, but I’m not fooling myself—the Olympics probably won’t present the best performances, the best competition, or even the best stories.  For the loyal fan of track, the Olympic competition has become a strange beast.

As with most sports, the best track and field stories will be unexpected, Bud Greenspan moments back in the pack where athletes demonstrate again what heart we humans have.  Running and jumping and throwing are so elemental they often illuminate the essentials of sport—will, risk, courage.  The Olympics will provide performances no network or advertising executive can anticipate.  They always do, and I’ll be watching, loving it.

Yet… those stories aren’t unique to Olympic years—they are just more visible. Like the music fan who looks askance at people who have just discovered his favorite band, I can’t help feeling a little resentment.  Sometime over the next couple of weeks, one of the commentators will talk about an athlete “performing on the biggest stage” when, in track and field, the stage is the same 400 meters, the same infield.  It’s only the theater, the size of the house, that has changed.  A track and field aficionado might appreciate every notable performance on any stage, but, in this big Olympic house, the media spotlight is narrow and hot.

It’s true the Olympics present the best track and field athletes—no other competition is as selective.  To qualify in the U.S., athletes have to be one of the top three in one meet (the Olympic Trials) or the rest of their success—even world records—won’t matter.  Other nations who nominate athletes can be even more selective.  Sweden will send only eight track and field athletes to the Olympics, having deemed all others out of range for receiving medals.  The Olympic Committee itself posts “’A’ Standards” that athletes have to meet.  In recent years, some distance race winners in the Olympic Trials have not been eligible because they haven’t met those standards.  Whereas, in events like 110 Hurdles and the 400 meters, four or five Americans might reach the finals if that number were allowed to participate.

Does this selectivity—or elitism, if you like—lead to better competition?

In shorter races, you have to be at your absolute best to win against the best.  Though athletes posture between races, they can’t hold back during them.  Yet world records are relatively rare in the Olympics because the stakes are so high. Who wants to mess up?  The situation doesn’t encourage going for broke.  One of my coaches pointed out that you can run a track meet without a watch, but the absence of rabbits in Olympic distance races means they are nearly always strategic, filled with “sit and sprint runners” saving their best effort for the last laps or turn.  It is not uncommon to see faster times in heats than in finals.  Olympic final times rarely rank among the best times for the year.  So much is at stake, even talented runners become conservative, aiming for no more than is required.

And, though I’d never lead the cry to return to the naïve world of  “amateurism,” track and field has suffered from the same ills of professionalism all sports have.  Money makes winning everything, creates the impulse to take performance enhancing drugs, leads to packaging athletes for advertisers, and turns events into competitions of personality instead of accomplishment.  What’s great about smaller meets is absent in the Olympics: the presence of journeyman and journeywoman athletes fueled by devotion, desire, and hope.  Those qualities were once associated with “The Olympic Spirit.”  Anyone might dream, whereas, in this new world of professionalism, elite sometimes means privileged.

The warmth of the Olympics nearly always comes from the bit player, and yet network sports doesn’t work that way, focusing all its attention on one or two participants instead of telling the stories of all the athletes who have reached a final. I take some perverse pleasure when some unnoticed runner streaks to a win—it’s fun imagining the flummoxed announcers shuffling their notes—but I’d rather deal with the race as anyone’s race from the start.  Aren’t all races anyone’s, regardless of origin or popularity—isn’t that the idea of the Olympics?  Otherwise, why run?  In any case, a race that’s anyone’s is so much more interesting and stirring.

As a fan of Bud Greenspan’s Olympic documentaries, I recognize many of the stories of the Olympics are available only in retrospect and formulated to suit the outcome.  None of my misgivings will prevent me from watching.  Yet, at the same time, I can’t help lamenting how synthetic these “Games” can sometimes seem.  Though the performers will undoubtedly be among the world’s best, you might find just as much passion—and more “’Olympic Spirit”—in your local high school meet.

My coach was right, you don’t need watches to run a meet…or cameras either.

For Charles Bukowski (and the man with beautiful eyes)

The following is a response to a challenge on Scot’s Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers to react to the video of the Charles Bukowski poem below. My response was posted there, but I thought I’d post it here as well, especially as Scot is bowing out of blogging.

His site has offered brilliant examples of his own work and brought together a wonderful community of like-mindedly passionate lovers of poetry. I hope people can follow the link above before he expunges his work.

Let this poem be a tribute to all Scot and all he has meant to so many writers in the blogosphere…

The Video

For Charles Bukowski (and Scot)

You knew—
no sort of blindness
sees only things
or their surfaces.

If the pond had no depth,
tame goldfish would
swim to its surface.
As orange as they were,
you dreamt fire
swimming inside them.

The house
couldn’t be a house—
you waited for its master.
And even if what emerged
wasn’t what you expected,
he needed to live there,
was always there,
bottled spirits in hand,
waiting to come out
and name you.

What bamboo could be
thick enough,
wild enough,
uncombed enough
for truth to hide?
Each act is its motive
in the end.

You thought about it.
You decided—
all the beauty inside
has to blaze.

Writing Funny

You will have to take my word for it—in real life I have a sense of humor.  In our times, appreciating and laughing at absurdity seems essential, and I like to think I have that survival skill. But, while I try to write wittily, I doubt any reader of this blog would come here for yucks.  It’s tough to write full-out funny.

Oh, I’ve tried and tried and tried again, hoping that someone might laugh or smile, but that’s just the trouble with trying to be funny—it’s so much easier when you sense the results immediately.  In the absence of feedback, you can fall into formulas that entrap readers instead of surprising them.  Funny episodes or images and funny verbal combinations and crazy lists occur to all of us, but writing them down can make them sound artificial, contrived. And once you strain for a laugh, readers get stingy.

My wife is reading David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and, being a Sedaris fan (I’ve gone to see him read two times), I haven’t waited for her to finish to begin the book myself.  As someone who has read only the first few pieces—and who has just pointed our how hard it is to write humor—I shouldn’t criticize, but so far the book is not very funny.

I understand.  Funny is a cruel taskmaster. Having the name “humorist,” Sedaris leads his loyal readers to expect snorting, chuckling, guffawing even.  That expectation, however, must be the worst sort of imprisonment. Now, when he tries to say something illuminating or instructive, it seems glib.  When he tries to be poignant, it seems ironic or, worse, simply false.  And suddenly the disassociative associative style that once seemed fresh can come across as meandering, lazy.

The comedian Bob Hope, now long gone, kept a small and shifting stable of joke writers, and no one’s job was ever secure.  They met together to pitch their best stuff, and when you came to this meeting with Mr. Hope, he only accepted jokes that made the other writers laugh, which meant making people laugh even when laughing at anyone else could mean unemployment.

Being classified as a “humorist” only creates a tougher audience for Sedaris.  It’s no longer enough to be Sedaris and do what Sedaris does. At this point, expected laughs aren’t enough. As Hope’s mad method suggests, something is really funny only when you laugh despite yourself.  When readers know what’s coming, it becomes harder and harder to surprise them.

The half-lives of comic actors are much shorter than dramatic actors.  They play themselves out—and often we want them played out—or they turn to more serious or mixed roles. If they can’t be more than their usual clown, they grow stale.  If they don’t transition to making us cry or care, they’re gone.

And comic writing is more daunting.  Despite recordings and Youtube, stand-up comedy and comic acting are ephemeral.  In contrast, writing is there in black and white to be retro-engineered, disassembled to discover its workings.  A humorist like Sedaris might fear the “Hemingway Effect.”  When someone comes along to parody you with absolute accuracy, you are a known quantity and used up.

All writing is magical, but funny writing particularly so.  A writer can dazzle readers, as Sedaris has, with the escalating quirkiness and unpredictability of his actions and observations, but continuing success requires even more.  It requires reinventing the way you write to attain the poignancy of Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, producing effects that transcend pure humor or joke-telling.

So much of funny writing comes from being you.  But if every writer is finite—housed by his or her idiosyncratic perspective and approach—what do you do when you’ve overmined your life and find yourself sitting on a block of swiss cheese?

And for all writers, not just funny ones and not just Sedaris, the question raises another, more troubling one—what do you do when you’ve run out of material?

Gone Figuratively Fishing

Work is an essential part of being alive. Your work is your identity. It tells you who you are. It’s gotten so abstract. People don’t work for the sake of working. They’re working for a car, a new house, or a vacation. It’s not the work itself that’s important to them. There’s such a joy in doing work well.

—Kay Stepkin, U.S. baker, in Studs Terkel’s Working.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset…there is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

—Dustin Hoffman

The mail and newspapers are stopped. The garbage is out. The thermostat is turned way up. The lights are on timers. The neighbors are on the look out. They have all the numbers. We’ve invested in a full tank of gas.

And I’ve written and posted haiku for the next five days.

I’ll be gone for the next few days on a family vacation.

I’m not terribly good at vacations. As I have two months off in the summer and many breaks sprinkled throughout the year, I’ve never found my work onerous enough to need one. Besides, I’d be lost without my work.

But spending some concentrated time with my family—who are normally spread so far and wide that getting us in one place at one time seems as rare as snow in July—is something worth looking forward to.

However, with several hours together in the car ahead of us, maybe you should ask me later.

Journey to the Core

The unseen center of the earth
is liquid—a battery without parts,

a buried sun. Like a heart,
its power is warmth, not light.

With no requirement beyond being,
it aligns waves of magnetism

to dress the planet. The only instrument
to measure it truly is imagination,

and I picture it turning, newly sprung arms
of magma reaching in the dark

to embrace and absorb,
embrace and absorb in a perpetual hug.

And if hell is there, at least it is a place
protected from all of us.

The Spectators

A tree shoved by the wind creaks like a ship’s deck.
A gate rattles its latch. Birds announce every move
from branch to lamppost, broadcasting their bearings
from each new perch. You won’t find quiet outside

this time of year. Nor an orchestra. Nothing is ordered
enough for music.  Some time ago some more attuned soul
knew these noises as ticks of another clock, but
the increments are too fine to be read from this distance

and our hands blur endlessly.  Soon stars will
look down, marvel how beings so deceived
persist, and wonder—who will survive to look up
and ask what name constellations give themselves?

Lazy Is As Lazy Does

“Lazy” is a much more slippery term than it ought to be. What passes as fruitful activity can just stand in the way of what you really should be doing, and sometimes doing nothing produces positive results. Sometimes, whether you are doing something or nothing is a matter of interpretation.

For the last few days, since I finished teaching summer school last Friday, I haven’t made good on my intention to plan for the next school year, haven’t read anything from my formidable selection of summer reading, haven’t attacked my self-improvement list, and certainly haven’t done the chores I should have. I thought I might use this down time to reread material for my classes in the fall or gather poems for a manuscript or work on a gallery webpage. Instead, I’ve been doing painting after painting—chain painting like a chain smoker, just finishing one

to begin another

and another

and another

and another

And all of these are only details from larger paintings.

And, until now, I hadn’t given a thought to writing a blog post either.

Jules Reynard, a nineteenth century French novelist and playwright said, “Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired,” and by that definition I am the laziest person I know, believing myself worthy of a break even before I’ve actually done anything to take a break from.

Gandhi said “Indolence is a delightful but distressing state. One must be doing something to be happy.”

In a defensive mood, I might say I AM active—look at all the art I’ve produced over the last few days—but laziness is in the motive, not in the effort. Knowing painting is what I’d rather do makes painting lazy. A diligent person turns to tasks that are not only necessary but unpleasant and arduous. Arduousness in art doesn’t count…because I enjoy it. And, at the end of the summer, I know I will judge this time by how many of those unpleasant items I accomplish. I won’t be as proud of myself if I only get to cross out “Paint” or “Watch the entire Battlestar Galactica series.”

I try to believe the scholars on the other side, people like Soren Kierkegaard who called idleness “The only true good” but I never really succeed. And I’ve never been good at working for rewards. I’d rather skip to the rewards or, better yet, have the work be rewarding. I know my trouble, an unrealistic sense if how deserving I am. Don’t I do enough during the school year to earn some time off? But I can say that every day until it’s the first day of school. And if only I could stop believing I will say it until then.

Every teacher knows July 4th marks the psychological midpoint of summer, the moment when time stops looking expansive and “back to school” ads begin to grow like dandelions.

If I put half as much effort into doing things as I do agonizing over not doing them…

You complete the sentence. I’ve got to go.

A Eulogy for George Carlin

Perhaps my favorite George Carlin routine was his rant on “stuff.” As was often the case in his routines, he starts by alerting his audience to the absurdity of something and then, in a torrent of repetitions and distinctions, overwhelms you. By the end, he exhausts the word… and sometimes you.

Others are more qualified to address Carlin’s “process”—I don’t know how he rehearsed or how much—but so much of Carlin’s manic energy was magic. No one will ever equal him in the humor of lists—seven was an absolute minimum for George Carlin. He let the lists rain down, and his timing was so masterful he sometimes seemed a shaman. His quirky dance seduced you, and his endless renovations and innovations on a theme became a sort of conversion.

The job description “comedian” never fit him well. More accurately he was a satirist, his true business covert. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Carlin presented a mirror where people might see everyone’s face except their own. As indirect as his blows could be, he hit hard. At some point, the universal “you” changed into the personal you. The “you” that initially included Carlin sometimes didn’t in the end. The audience lay on the pyre.

As a satirist, Carlin was an equal opportunity offender. No spectator survived the evening without feeling targeted at least once. Watching George Carlin—especially late in his career—I sometimes laughed, sometimes felt defensive, and sometimes argued back at the screen.

He hid less near the end. At times his bitterness was explicit. But Carlin’s rift on “stuff” finds him in wiliest form. He never uses the word “materialism” as he targets Americans’ materialism and our belief that happiness is just a thing away. “That’s the whole meaning of life,” Carlin crows, “trying to find a place to put your stuff.” We organize our lives around “stuff.” We build houses—really “piles of stuff with covers on them”—to protect our stuff and buy new homes so we can buy more stuff. We travel with stuff, resent other’s stuff, and worry which stuff should be with us at all times.

Carlin was hardly the first person to insult us so. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that our possessions possess us. Thoreau famously said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” As we accrete stuff, Thoreau argued, we give up freedom and flexibility in proportion. Worse, we become accustomed to our diet of excess until it takes more and more to feed us. In this matter, as in many others, Thoreau proved prophetic.

But Thoreau wasn’t funny. He was a scolder, a proud party pooper, and, where Thoreau revels in hyperbole and spleen, Carlin could draw people in before springing a trap. He could be late because he was looking for a place for his own stuff. He didn’t start out, as Thoreau did, playing the exception. In the end, he obviously wasn’t.

Sure, Carlin had a Thoreauvian guise too. In his bitterest work, he attacked openly, and some critics slammed his later work as dour and, particularly damningly, preachy, not funny. Yet, while some of his routines did amount to, “People are so full of shit,” you knew he was willing to exempt you during the performance, as long as you didn’t exempt yourself afterward.

And he always made me laugh—he was certainly more funny than Henry David. I will miss him. The world needs Carlins as much as it needs Thoreaus.

Going West on North Ave.

Summer and the city
seems to empty, spirit
leaking by drips and
people seeping
into the space at their feet.

Everyone left
marches east to the lake,
so sure, so right
in their direction. Only I
walk the other way,

fighting the sun,
carrying a book
as if it were the ark,
dreaming of reasons
to go inside.

Oversharing Again

During my break from blogging, I’ve been thinking about blogging—more specifically why I do it and what I hope, however foolishly, to get from it. Part of what stirred my thinking was A New York Times Sunday Magazine article (“Exposed” by the former Gawker blogger, Emily Gould) and some thoughtful comments on Gould’s essay by Deborah Barlow and others.

Mostly, though, I’ve been mulling over a comment on my last post. Cole was identifying with my need to get away, and she said, “I don’t think you’ve really ‘made it’ with your blog until people start to say negative shit. Although, you are far from controversial.”

It’s true, I’ve received very little negative shit here. Perhaps I’m too dense to recognize shit when it’s negative and subtle, but aside from anachronistically naming Basho’s work “haiku” instead of “hokku,” and mildly annoying an author whose work I cited, no negative, no shit. And I’d include my own posts, which are anything but negative shit. I’m not controversial, and sometimes qualifications seem to accompany almost every word I speak. Everything “seems”… and always sometimes, often, or occasionally so. Everything “may” or “may not,” “might,” or “could possibly be.” Whenever I get near controversy, I bow, apologize, and crawl, crablike, away.

Which is worse—me, who creates no controversy (just angst) or Gould, who seems so shocked to discover she makes everyone angry?

Maybe there’s something controversial in being so accommodating—I bet it bugs the crap out of some people—and it certainly runs counter to most of what you find in the blogosphere. Controversy is a convention of blogging. Shock sells product. When I started this blog, I remember reading WordPress advice on how to attract an audience. “Be controversial,” they urged.

Maybe I should be. I tell myself my niceness is honest, and that spewing vitriol would be, for me, the worst sort of pretense. It’s true I don’t have much respect for hot-heads, but I’m not without strong opinions. I wonder how much bile I might swallow to get approval. I wonder how much I’m swallowing all the time.

In “Exposed,” Gould writes:

It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.

While some bloggers brim with confidence, full of the worst sort of unthinking un-self-conscious controversy-mongering conviction, Gould’s sort (and my sort) aren’t any better. Sharing mental space with reality TV stars is a step too far for me, but am I trying to get in the first humiliation, seeking to confess one more fault than anyone else could throw at me? It sometimes seems so. When I’m being third person here—talking a about a poet or artist or broad concept—I feel good about this blog, but I inevitably turn, as now, to confess. I’m smarter than Gould in keeping particulars to myself, but, in the end, my alias is a half-hearted feint—I must want to be seen and known. Only my method is different.

Gould calls herself an “oversharer.” “Long before I had a blog,” she says, “I found ways to broadcast my thoughts—to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life.”

That description might fit me as well. The same anonymity that allows angry and bitter venting online makes confession easier too. Oversharing here somehow feels safe…and expected. The courage—or lunacy—of Emily Gould’ confessions creates a broader market. The prurient details of her life embarrass and humiliate those around her.

I try to make sure my confessions of doubt humiliate only me. But we are both oversharers, and I wonder if that’s what a blogger, by definition, is.