From the Nebraska Country Side

A week ago today we were in rural Nebraska on the beautiful property of Charity’s aunt and uncle for a family reunion on Dad’s side.  Everything about the property was thoughtful: the alignment of the house to the sun, the location of the trees and the wind, and the sheltered play areas for the kids.  It was beautiful to look out over the rolling hills.  Living in central NC I miss views.  Being there was lovely.

A Big Swing Set Under a Bigger Cottonwood Tree

During our trip to Nebraska last weekend we had lunch with our an immediate family out at the local park in the little town where Charity was born.   It was a great park with lush grass, nice equipment and plenty of room to frolic.   We had the run of the place so, despite being over 30, I thoroughly enjoyed the winding slide (up and down of course).  I also enjoyed balancing competitions with my young brother and sister in-law up and down various pieces of equipment.  I think they’ve come to respect yoga a little more

The highlight of the park had to be this giant swing set built under this truly massive cottonwood tree.

Here’s a closer shot of swing with me caught on camera clearly enjoying myself.   The whole structure swayed a bit with Jacob and me on it so we took it easy but it was still a delight to be on something so big, fun and original.

RT and Shiloh Frolicing

From our trip this past weekend to NE.

Proposal Gaffe

“Where land is unequally distributed, income produced in agriculture is skewed towards a few very large farmers.”

My editor and friend, C, points out that this sentence structure makes it seem like obese farmers make more money, probably through their gravitational pull according to my sentence.  “Towards owners of a few very large farms” would probably be more accurate and make people less likely to laugh.  Oops.

Ah grammar.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

It’s late, much too late to be up even though we’re just back from central time but I just finished my second novel of the summer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer and I wanted to blog about it before I left its spell. There’s something about me that loves to read a novel that still has me aching 20 minutes after putting it down.  I picked it up at midnight and when I looked up 30 minutes later it was 2am.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a beautiful and aching story in which winds the love of a family winds around three terrible calamities.  The story, told by three different narrators, revolves around nine-year old Oskar Schell, his grandparents and their love story, and Oskar and his mother’s love for his father.  Oskar sets off on a peculiar quest around New York City: he has a key and name but cannot find the lock.

Foer’s imagination is as creative as the typesetting.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel but it blurs the line towards . . . towards art?  towards a graphic novel?  He violates the standard rules of the novel (black and white typeset only) in ways that showed how full and in love and how empty and lonely the characters are.  He did a good job of easing me into his use of color and space in the format of the novel (though I have to confess at the first violation I thought some *&%^* student had defaced the book).  As the bright red ink wove between the lines in places I wondered about how the printing press confined the novel and why adult books (unlike children’s books) are largely devoid of illustrations and pictures.

It’s a beautiful, funny and sparkling story.  The characters and their love is beautiful and it’s aching for the pain the suffer.

Granola

The other morning I got up to eat the “super nutty” granola I bought at Whole Foods.   I amended it with a a half cup or so of flax  that I’ve been trying to eat my way through.  A little yogurt along with some granola in a bowl and then I was off to eat while reading the news online.

The only problem was that it was crunchy.  Really crunchy.  Unpleasantly crunchy.  I was worried I was going to break my teeth.  The nuts would yield to my bite but only just.  I ate about half of it before swearing it off.  Yeah . . . so after my shower I put the left over flax seeds back only to discover it was barley.  Not quick cook kind either.  Real, raw barely.  Envision eating uncooked rice.

Oops.

Also, it turns out to be impossible to pick the barley grains out of the uniform brown of granola.  Sigh.  More expensive compost.

I decided to work from home that morning in case there were any . . . ah . . . ill effects.  Thankfully there were none but I don’t recommend it.

On Car Shopping

Today I went to an auto dealer and test drove two new cars.  Even as I type this I can hear the collective drawing in of breath at this startling admission.  Andy?  Owner of cars from 1985, 1995 and 1997?  Car dealership?   Here’s the deal:  the “cash for clunkers” bill is making its way through Congress and seems likely to pass.   Depending on how the bill turns out we might qualify for $4,500 towards a new car (though this chance is looking very small).  However dubious the economic wisdom of this policy in its current form, we still drove around a bit.

What really surprised me was that driving either of the cars did very little for me emotionally.  I was expecting a thrill similar to when I go in the Apple Store.  There I reflexively think “wow this is beautiful and cool” and fawn over their products in a way that must make their marketing executives very happy.  Or I was expecting a feeling of being cool, like when I still feel slightly hip as I walk around in my new pair of shoes.  But instead while driving around, I got nothing, and I noticed that absence.

The cars were quiet, smooth, and high quality but in the end they both felt . . . well, functional, which I think is an unusual emotion to have around such prominent product especially given how charged most car commercials are with screaming danger and thrills or gentle feelings of communitarianism.  I know marketing folks want me to associate those feelings with the products on the lot today but it just wasn’t that exciting.  Even with the promotional material for the Fit, which is aimed exactly at my demographic, complete with buzz words that people like me emotionally respond to, it was simply a pleasant and comfortable car when I saw it in person.

I wonder my lack emotional response is because I reflexively think of a car as a means of transportation, not a thing that makes me cool or uncool, and sadly for the car industry, no amount of ad money has swayed me on this point.  It’s just a car, not an identity.  And yet . . . as I try to write that I have to confess, that even though our 1985 Ford Ranger is functional, we also think it’s pretty durn cool to drive around town.  Still it’s just a car, not an identity . . . and yet we still feel a bit sheepish when we pull up with our missing hubcaps beside business folks in their Beamers and Lexuses (Lexi?).

It’s an interesting interplay to pull out into the open and look at, this junction of shopping, of possession, and identity.

All of this makes me wonder what purchases I reflexively think of as cool and therefore I buy them.

And I also wonder how coolness and enjoyment are related to each other.  Can I really parse them apart?  I hope I can because at my core I think that sometimes the coolness factor is shameless self promotion at the expense of others.  When I enjoy dried black mission figs because I like the way they make me feel like I’m an edgy, educated and erudite eater, unlike the unenlightened then that’s shameful.  When I eat them because they’re a great taste that I haven’t eaten enough in my life, then that’s wonderful (literally).  The first is a sobering because I often do that, the second is a freeing because I love to rejoice in the beautiful.

I’m sure there’s more thinking to be done here.  Perhaps a theme to continue thinking on . . .

Gilead (or Shreveport)

This last weekend I had the treat of traveling to visit my Mom’s side of the family in the hot blaze of the Louisiana sun.  I traveled, played disc golf with the cousins, cooked up a fancy dinner, and went to church.  I sat with my grandparents telling them about my life and hearing about theirs.  And I watched my 86 year old grandfather begin to show his age.  These last years have mellowed him, gentled him.  I think it’s evidence of the Holy Spirit that he has aged into such grace and humor.  He forgets the conclusion of the story or the name of a family member, he trails off with a few laughing comments about how his memory isn’t what it used to be.  It’s hard to know that he’s irrevocably aging but wonderful to see him accept correction and smile at the memory renewed.

I really enjoyed the trip.  In addition to all the family I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the vacation aspects.  Each morning and afternoon I disappeared for an hour or two to read or nap.  It was really nice to have a break from thinking about and working on the dissertation.  I’ve read fiction, a rare treat given how much I read professionally.  Mostly I worked slowly through Home, a sweet, gentle and sad story of an old pastor and his two adult children who are driven home to him.  It felt restful to not check the NYTimes, or my email but once a day, or the blogs.  I was also surprised at how much I enjoyed not having chores, or cooking, or cleaning up the kitchen.

I enjoyed my grandparent’s stone flagged patio beside their house particularly with its breeze, the wind chime and the blue sky.  The wind blew off the clean white streets between the evenly spaced houses in their planned community.  It swept over the perfect grass maintained by the homeowners association, through the cast iron gate and down the stone path wedged between the neighbor’s high wall of bright brick which basked in the sun and my grandparents picture windows.  It passed over my right hand shoulder and over my propped-up bare feet before exiting that pretty alley over the top of the gray plank fence in front of me.  I sat in the shade and just felt the breeze and the warmth of the sun and the brick of the neighbor’s garage.  My grandmother’s beautiful plants surrounded me as I wrote and mused to a dear friend.  As I considered and pondered and prayed I delighted to be surrounded by various varieties of daylilies in full bloom, ranging from deep purple to frilly and coral, a lush and bright collection of red geraniums, stately red and coral canna lilies, and clementis vines wandering up their metal trellises with bright purple flowers.  The spindly crepe myrtle reached up towards a bright blue sky marked with only one small stationary cloud.

It was peaceful, beautiful and restful.  A real treat.

Robert Moses’ Lessons of Power

After finishing Power Broker last week I sat down to process a bit more about the book.  The biography is one part the story of New York, one part the story of the man, and two parts an extended lesson in how power is gained, used, and lost.  It’s a book full lessons about how to build a kingdom and I wrote out a list (see below), a bald and shocking list, to help me process and understand his methods, some of which are wise and some repulsive.  Many are relevant only to those in politics but more than a few are wise words for every setting.  Moses used them all, ruthlessly and effectively, and Caro details how he used each of them to create New York’s parks, bridges and highways, building some of America’s greatest public works, and used each of them to destroy people, treasured public places, and hundreds of thousands of homes.

I often think of novels as case studies that are amazing for how they show me how people think and how they live.  This biography was a case study of just how ruthless a person can become and Moses absolutely lived by these rules.

In the end, for all his kingdom building, for his unparalleled power, for his unparalleled 40 year reign, he still lost it all.  He ended exiled and ostracized, a victim of the rules he lived by.  I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes lately and the meditations on the loss of power in chapter two echoed through Moses’s story.  They’re a reminder of how temporary every earthly kingdom is.

Moses’s Lessons of Power

Gaining Power

1) Understand the realities of power where you are.  Understand who can crush you, how they can do it, and what they want.

2) Competence is rewarded.  The way to stay employed and at the center of any job is to be so competent that people need you.

3) Work harder than everyone else.

4) Know and write the laws.  If others are too lazy or trusting to read and understand them then you can create your own power.

5) Know the organizational structure.  Understand how everything is connected so you can know both how to attack and how to defend.

5) Create an organization of people loyal to you.  Pick the competent and reward them with responsibility and money.  Use them to stack boards in your favor.  Ostracize anyone who crosses you.

Keeping Power

1) Associate yourself with something virtuous in the public’s eye.  Who could be against parks?

2) Insulate yourself from public opinion, it will turn one day.  Create power that public opinion can’t take from you.

3) Create policies that outlast you.  For example, if you want to keep people can’t afford cars away from your parks one option is to ban buses from the access roads leading to them.  But this only works if you remain powerful enough to keep the laws from changing.  If you build the bridges to low for buses then people who have to ride the buses will never come to your parks.

4) You can’t win fight with the media, they control the dialogue.  Fighting with them inevitably makes you look bad.

5) Manipulating the media is key to success.  They are people.  Win their ear with hospitality.  Make them feel powerful.

6) Controlling money matters.  Money is where policy meets the road.  Politicians want jobs, parks, roads, schools, hospitals.  If you control whether and how those are built then you control them.

7) Winning flies with honey is important: if you can give people pleasure through food and drink and entertainment and they will thank you for it.

8 ) The media is powerful.  They are powerful in their monopoly of public discourse.  They can be blinded but they can be voracious when scandal drives their incentives to be so. But there are things more powerful than the media, particularly the law, so control the law if you can.

9) The silence and ignorance of the media are just as powerful.  They can’t report on what they can’t understand and the world is often so complex that they can’t get it.  Especially when blinded by preconceived notions.

Getting Things Done

1) Come to meetings with detailed plans to solve complicated problems.  Detailed plans get put into place.  Anybody can have vague dreams about building highways.  Having a detailed and completed plan when no one else has one makes your plan implemented by default.

2) Lie about people when it’s prudent and useful.  If you can destroy their reputations then no one will listen to their criticisms of you.

3) Lie about costs of your projects.  Once 1/3 of it is built you will get the funding for the rest.  The people who approved the project will be too invested to not give you the rest of the money.

4) Lie about the costs of others ideas if they can’t prove they are right.

5) Use the resources of the state.  Private citizens can only fight as long as they can pay lawyers to do so.  Public servants have the state paying for their lawyers.  You’ll win through attrition nine times out of ten.

6) Start projects.  Even if you’re legally in the wrong if you’ve already torn down the original building then your project will follow.

The Lilies of the Field

It may be brief, but what glory it is.  Our neighbors gave these to us last year.  I just love them massed in a bright and tangled line of color blazing through the very heart of the garden.

(clicking on photo brings up desktop sized image)

What a glorious day here in Chapel Hill with blue skies, bright sun and cool shade.

Power Broker

For the last thirteen weeks I’ve been plowing through a long biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro.  I picked it up because my grandfather and uncle both recommended it and because I’ve read Caro’s other series and enjoyed it.  Over the weekend Dad asked me if I enjoyed reading Power Broker.  I said it’s hard to say one enjoys reading something so wrenching.

Though it was long (1,126 pages long) I kept at because it was the best book I’ve ever read about raw political power displayed in city and state government. In college the topic of city and state government put me to sleep but this book changed forever how I think about the awing power of city governments to build and shape their communities. Moses captured that power and wielded it like a sword.  His accomplishments are breathtaking for what they created and destroyed.

I think a lot about power these days.  As a political scientist power is ultimately what I study.  Professionally I study why governments take money or land from some people and give it to others but I do so from a 30,000 ft level.  Caro studies power on the street level (literally).  He details how Moses threw over 400,000 out of their homes, sometimes for the public good, sometimes as a favor to cronies.  Moses built himself an empire and it was so strong that, though unelected, he gave orders to mayors and governors.

Caro deserved his Pulitzer Prize for his portrait both New York and of Moses, a man who once held 12 appointed offices simultaneously and was so powerful that President Franklin Roosevelt was unable to displace him, and for creating a record of all Moses accomplished, both for good and for ill.

I won’t go so far as to recommend reading Power Broker (unless you have a fetish for 1,000 page histories or biographies) but I will recommend reading the introduction sometime when you’re in a bookstore and have 45 minutes.  It’s a short 20 pages that survey the massive book.  While few people today have the power that Robert Moses had, our society has its own power brokers and I think it’s worth reflecting a bit on the tremendous power that they have.  Most of what they do floats around on the edges of our consciousnesses . . . huh, a new school, a new highway, I wonder why they put it there.  I think it’s worth 45 minutes and a cup of tea to survey to bring those thoughts to the front of the mind by reading about how powerful Robert Moses was, what kind of person he was, and then reflecting about the power of the powerful today.

(and, as a bonus you’ll learn a bit about the great city of New York, a bit about how it and Moses shaped America, and about who Moses was as a person)

Magnificent

As a U2.com subscriber I get email updates about the band.  They recently released this music video shot in Morocco.  I love the music and the visuals are pretty amazing with the white sheets moving over the North African background of the city.  Pretty cool.

More Wildlife

Despite living adjacent to five parking lots our backyard is an oasis of animal activity.  On any given day we boast a collection of cardinals, brown thrashers, robins, several squirrels, and our three neighborhood cats, who follow each other through their prowling routes.  We have seen owls, woodpeckers, deer (curse them), and chipmunks.  And now we can add snakes.  I haven’t made an id yet.  Any ideas?

Irises

Last year we took a good bit of time to seperate out the irises in the backyard and we got about four flowers.  This year we’ve had 40 flowers and they’ve been a spectacular and prolonged treat.  Amazingly we managed to blindly seperate out the white ones into their own bed and leave the yellow and purple.  They’ve been beautiful.

Chives

One thing I remember well about the house Charity lived in before we were married was the huge chive plant outside their back door.  I like having this one in our backyard.  The flowers are beautiful and when we need fresh chives we’ve got them.  Haven’t needed them yet, but when we do we’ll have them!