The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"

          I play "Scrabble" deep into most nights, a cut-throat, ongoing match against a computer that chews me up and spits me out with discouraging regularity.  But recently I stumbled on a way to be pleasantly distracted by YouTube classical music performances while I scratch my head over seven Scrabble tiles at a time.  I like the whole package--distraction, good music, and language.  It could hardly get any better.
          And then I discovered Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes singing a doo-wop classic, "Be My Baby."
          It's a 1963 song with the later-to-be-famous Cher singing backup, Cher's first recording.  Veronica Bennett, who had not yet become Ronnie Spector, was the lead singer, with her sister and cousin filling out the trio.  The girls and "Be My Baby" were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.  It's still sweet to see them on YouTube swivel-hipping their way into pop music history--and quite a few teenage hearts too.

The Ronettes, 1966.  Promotional

photo from Wikipedia.

Keep your cursor poised to click on the second version toward the end of the song, and try not to be mesmerized by Ronnie's syncopated hips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrVbawRPO7I

Front-Loading

   
         I have a good friend whose older brother was my teen idol.  He was a gifted athlete--tennis, basketball, golf--and endlessly fascinating to girls who seemingly couldn't wait to go out with him.  Which they usually did.  And he made money too--lots of it.  He had it all.  Make no bones about it, I envied him.  I'm pretty sure everyone from the old neighborhood did. Of course it was an empty life, even I could see that, but what did it matter?  He was having a lot more fun than I was.
          Recently I learned that in later life he has not been so fortunate, that he's had a bad time with health, money, and marriages.  I was sorry to hear it when my friend told me the story, which he laid out carefully as a cautionary tale.  This is what happens to people who are not sufficiently mindful of their early lives, who burn the candle from both ends, who in fact burn themselves out too early.
          I mulled it over for a while, then suggested that maybe his brother had simply chosen to front-load his life--that maybe he'd decided to live as fast and brightly as he could while he was still able to enjoy it.  Maybe it wouldn't last, but maybe it would.  And even if it didn't, he'd still have the past that would forever be his and his alone.  "Not even Heaven upon the past has power: / What has been, has been, and I have had my hour." The Roman poet Horace said that in the first century BCE.
          I'm not at all like my friend's brother, and yet, oddly, I front-loaded my life too, just differently.
          My dad, like his father before him, died of colon cancer when he was fifty-five.  His death was a relief, for him and for me and my mother--he'd suffered for a decade by then, not just from the cancer but from a serious heart condition as well.  Watching him die for so many years, I determined in my early twenties to front-load my life.  Don't put anything off for a later life that may never come.  For some, the thought of an early death urges a life of pleasure, but for me it didn't.  Instead, I developed an acute sense of urgency to become all I could before the family curse struck me down.
          I dreaded the year 1997, when I would turn fifty-five, but I would be ready for it.  If it was possible, I would have some achievements by then, something I could be proud of, something my father would have been proud of.  My goals were to earn a Ph.D., become a professor, write literary criticism and history, and in short be part of the scholarly dialogue.  I earned the Ph.D. in 1976 and have spent the last forty years learning, teaching, and publishing. The benefits of a front-loaded life.
          Meanwhile, medical technology developed a method to detect and remove intestinal polyps that grow into fatal malignancies.  Like the death row prisoner who is freed by an eleventh-hour pardon from the governor, I was unexpectedly spared.  Still, I sweated out my fifty-fifth year--and am now four months shy of my seventy-fourth birthday.  It's a miracle.
          Mind you, it wasn't easy to front-load my life with work.  I became a classic overachiever--a solid player, a starter maybe, on thin teams, but not a Hall of Famer.  I acknowledged my limitations from the outset, but I wouldn't let them stand in the way.  Work became my mantra.  And it required sacrifice--like weekend golf, say, or Sunday brunch.  I wouldn't be sidetracked by attractive, long-term do-it-yourself projects and only begrudgingly spent weekend hours mowing the lawn, fixing the leaky toilet, and cleaning out the gutters.  I would not allow distractions.  Of course, I did what needed to be done at home and at school, but I always returned like a bulldog to the work.  Later, when friends and colleagues marveled at what seemed to them an enormous output and asked how I'd done it, I would answer with a question:  "What do you do on Saturday mornings?"
          I'm long past my front-loading days, but even now, by force of habit, I work a little every day on something I call my end-of-life project, a book on poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Back-loading, it turns out, isn't bad either.
         

"The Revenant"--Back from the Dead? Or Dead in the Water?

          It was twenty-six years ago now that a still-young Kevin Costner swooped off the prairie in an epic western to win best picture and best director Oscars for a sloppy sentimental movie called Dancing with Wolves.  I was barely able to sit through it.  However, now that I forced myself to sit through Leonardo diCaprio's performance in Alejandro Inarritu's western, The Revenant, which has just won the 2016 best actor, director, and movie Golden Globes, the Costner movie is looking a lot better.
          Based on a true story, which doesn't mean it happened at all like the way we see it on screen, diCaprio is mauled by a bear and left to die by his treacherous traveling companions.  It's a brutal movie with scalping Indians shooting fur trappers through the neck and eye with arrows, the trappers two steps below human on the evolutionary scale, and the bear doing a credible job as an angry mama protecting her cubs and taking out her frustrations on one of the trappers who wants to skin her alive.  It isn't pretty. 
         The work of director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki, however, goes beyond pretty to beautiful  and should result in the one Oscar that the film has earned.  Beyond that, there isn't much to pause over in The Revenant.  It starts out as a bloody survival story, which has limited appeal in general terms, and turns into a run-of-the-mill revenge story that would turn Dirty Harry into Mr. Clean.  And at two and a half hours, it doesn't even have the virtue of being tightly concise.
          DiCaprio has an actor's dream in this movie as he can overact to his heart's desire and get away with it just fine.  What's more, he didn't even have many lines to learn.  And when he does speak, it's in grunts and screams that are mostly indecipherable.  My guess is that he'll get his first Oscar for the role, only because the Academy won't be able to vote for it as best picture.  Inarritu, who won best director last year for Birdman, won't even be considered seriously this year.  The Golden Globe buzz is grossly undeserved.
          Wolves gave Costner overnight credibility in the film industry and allowed him to make mostly bad movies over the next twenty-five years.  The Revenant, which means back from the dead, should ironically bury DiCaprio.

Addendum:  DiCaprio did win the Best Actor Oscar, and Emmanuel Lubezki did win the Oscar for Best Cinematography.  Inarritu unfortunately won for Best Director for the second year in a row, but the Best Picture Oscar went to Spotlight, a heavily freighted account of Catholic priests as sexual predators--good theater that blurs the line between artistic film making and responsible journalism.  It was illogical to give the Best Director award to one man then decide that the picture he directed wasn't the Best in Show.  In this case, though, Academy voters knew in their hearts that The Revenant was razor thin and built on tired movie cliches.  Spotlight wasn't much better in its moral superiority and relentless preaching, but this was more a statement about the weaknesses of The Revenant than the virtues of Spotlight.  

$1.4 Billion. And an Update.

          On December 11, 2015, I posted "Your Chance of Dying," which was really about how unlikely it is  that anyone will be killed in a terrorist attack, one in 700,000, according to a report in the Tampa Bay Times.
          Today, however, as we await tomorrow's drawing of the Powerball numbers that will be worth an estimated $1.4 billion, the largest lottery payoff in history,  the Times printed a few more statistics that are fun--and maybe illuminating.
          1.  Florida has had ten Powerball winners in the last six years, and 207 millionaires in all from Powerball drawings.
          2.  There really is a curse on lottery winners:  70% of them nationwide blow it all in five years.
          3.  Last Saturday, January 9, between six and seven o'clock, more than two and a half million tickets were sold. 
          4.  Quoting the Economist, the Times reported that you have a one in 25.4 million chance of dying from a bee sting.  A one in 74.8 million chance of being hit by an asteroid.  And a one in 292.2 million chance of winning the the Powerball jackpot. So you are four times more likely to be hit by an asteroid than to be the winner of Wednesday's Powerball jackpot.

          And yet, someone will win.  Someone will overcome those odds.

          Just for the record, I bought ten tickets on Sunday and my wife bought three more today.  That's thirteen chances and three days of fantasy before the billion dollar drawing.  Worth every nickel.

Finding Yourself or Creating Yourself?

          The renowned gadfly of American psychiatry, Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist himself and professor of psychiatry, famously denied the very existence of mental illness in his 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness.  Szasz, who died in 2012, was wrong about that, and saw his challenge to the profession become little more than a footnote in mental health books, if that.  More and more he is valued less and less.
          But Szasz is remembered nonetheless for something else he wrote--in a 1973 book called The Second Sin:  "People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."  That one still rings true.
          No one knows, of course, what to say when silly adults ask what you want to be when you grow up.  I remember my first ambition as a child was to become a garbage man.  I wanted to be the guy on the street who threw cans (they were steel then) up to a guy on the truck who emptied it and then tossed the can back down.  One of my daughters alternated between wanting to be a truck driver (Peterbilts were her favorites) and the editor of the New York Times.
          I never did figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.  My career as a college English teacher seemed to happen less by design than by random developments that gradually led me there.  But once there, I made two decisions.  One was to get a Ph.D. The other was to become a publishing scholar.  That seemed to me to sum up what a college English teacher is.  Or should be.
          So I worked my way slowly toward those goals--and eventually succeeded.  But it's the "slowly" and "eventually" parts that I want to emphasize.  It was such slow going that in desperation I gave up altogether on the fast track.  I simply could not rush the process.  I came to realize that inching my way forward on any given day was about all I could hope for--and some days I couldn't even do that.  These were valuable lessons, but never during that process was I trying to find myself, but was instead creating myself, in Thomas Szasz's construction.
         For me, the key was learning how to take small steps.  And then to be satisfied with them.    

         

On Writing Biography

     I am an academic.  That word smells bad to most people who think of academics as isolated specimens who live in something called ivory towers.  I don't like the word very much either, mostly because I don't like academics very much, not personally (they think way too much of themselves) or professionally (for the same reason).  They pose a lot.  They feel superior.  They make me sick.
     But that doesn't alter the fact that I am one.  For me, however, the word carries a different set of connotations.  For me being an academic is a noble calling.  For me the word identifies a person who dedicates his life to study, to research, to advancing knowledge by publishing previously unknown findings.
     At least that's the way it was taught to me by a great mentor, Warren Stanley Walker.  He was an academic too, the best kind, a scholar who pursued his work as though he were searching for the Holy Grail itself.  And he published a long string of impressive books and articles.  To follow in his footsteps was an honor I hardly thought myself worthy of.  That's why it's a noble calling to me.
     As I pursued a Ph.D., I fell eventually under the wing of another scholar of the first order, Kenneth Silverman at New York University.  Ken won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in 1984 for a biography called The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, and under his guidance I wrote a mostly biographical study of an early American poet, statesman, and businessman, David Humphreys from Connecticut.  It was published in 1982.  Then I wrote a full-dress life of the mid-century poet John Ciardi that was published in 1998 and got an award from the influential Choice magazine, Academic Book of the Year.  After that I tried my hand at autobiography, and published my own life in 2011.
    Which brings me to the work I'm occupied with right now, a look at the private life of nineteenth-century American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.   It isn't finished yet, and I don't have a publisher lined up for it yet either, but so far the book I'm calling "The Rustle of Silk, Longfellow in Love" seems to be coming along fine.  I can almost see the end in sight.  Not quite, but almost.
     Now and then, my non-academic friends show an interest in the mysterious work that keeps me tied to my computer for such long hours.  But how can I tell them about the business of biography?  How can I explain my calling without posing as an intellectual or "putting on airs"?
     It's tempting, of course, to launch into a lecture on conducting research, on taking usable notes, on learning all about the times as well as the work of your subject.  And it's tempting to talk about the art of organizing notes and creating an outline and writing sentences one at a time until they make paragraphs that eventually work themselves into chapters that finally become a book.  But that's way out of touch with what people, even good people, want to know.  It's way too much of an answer.
     I came up with an analogy.  "It's sort of like working on a ten-million piece jigsaw puzzle," I say.  "You've got all the pieces in front of you (if you've done your research right), but now you have to collect all the pieces and see which ones go where.  Eventually you will have the image of your subject, but until you've put the last piece into place, the whole thing is incomplete.  It's tricky that way."
     In the end, unfortunately and unavoidably, the business of being a scholar and writing biography turns me into what I dread most:  an isolated specimen living in an ivory tower.  I am an academic.

Vieques, Island Paradise?

     From South Florida, it's about a thousand miles to Puerto Rico, out past Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.in the Caribbean.  It's a flight of about three hours.   If you walk through the airport and follow the signs, you get to the Vieques Air Link desk where you sign in for the eight mile hop to the tiny island of Vieques, twenty-one miles long by four miles wide.  Tiny.  It has one zip code.
     Yes, zip code.  For like Puerto Rico proper, Vieques  belongs to the United States, which used the island, at least a third of it, for bombing practice in World War II--and kept using it (and charging other countries for the pleasure of bombing it too) until 2003, when protesters from around the world supported the people of Vieques, and the United States government finally pulled the plug on bombing.  The island is still waiting for significant cleanup efforts to begin and a timetable for the island to reclaim the land that has been off limits for most of a century.
     And through it all, Vieques has managed to attract increasing island entrepreneurs and tourists (maybe by the thousands, but certainly by the hundreds) to see its splendors--its gorgeous beaches, its 2,500 wild horses that wander freely over roads, lawns, and cemeteries, and its look of a time-forgotten paradise.
     Like Puerto Rico, Vieques is a poor country, and because all local improvements get caught up in "mainland" politics and bureaucracy in San Juan, which has plenty of its own financial problems, very little in the way of self-improvement money ever gets appropriated for the roads, say, which are among the worst in the hemisphere, especially the ones you have to drive to get to the most beautiful, and most isolated beaches in the world.  They are winding dirt roads with pot holes the size of lakes and five-mile-an-hour speed limits that are actually set too high.  You have to inch along in places as you serpentine your way for a couple of miles before you get to the beach.  The local car rental company only carries four-wheel-drive Jeeps.  And every road is so narrow that you have to squeeze to one side whenever another Jeep comes the other way.  Especially when horses decide to walk down the road too.
     Vieques isn't perfect--you'll need lots of mosquito repellent!--but it comes close to being an island paradise.  Close enough anyway.

   

Your Chance of Dying

          Of course, on any absolute scale, your chance of dying is 100%.  But that's not what I'm thinking  about.  No.  It's the rash of mass murders over the last couple of years that has given me pause--me and everyone else, if the wild popularity of presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Pied Piper of scared rats, is any gauge.   It's terrorists we're all terrified of, if you'll pardon the redundancy.  They strike everywhere with recent executions and bombings in Paris and California and Brussels cases in point.  (Paris, Nov. 15, 2015:  a series of attacks that killed 130 and left 368 injured; San Bernardino, California, Dec. 2, 2015:  14 killed, 22 seriously injured; Brussels, March 22, 2016:  34 killed, 190 wounded.) 

          Most of the attacks are by Muslim terrorists, but it's good to keep in mind that there are also Christian terrorists who open fire at Planned Parenthood clinics, racist terrorists who gun down blacks in churches, and various other berserk nationalists who shoot down foreign airplanes to send a message.  For thirty years or more at the end of the twentieth century, the Irish Republican Army waged a bloody reign of terror on the United Kingdom.  Add up the fatalities and you have plenty of reason to worry about dying in a terrorist attack.
          Or do you?

          Recent charts in the Tampa Bay Times and the New York Times suggest otherwise.  Your chance of dying of heart disease or cancer is 1 in 7, a truly sobering statistic that manages not to disturb many people.  (Go figure.)  Your chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 112, while your chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 8,015--but we all knew that it's safer to fly than drive.  (It turns out it's a lot safer.)
          Guns kill people at the rate of 1 in 358.  That's the rate of "assault by firearm."  The rate is 1 in 6,700 for "firearms discharge," the difference apparently being that if you are assaulted by someone with a gun, you're a lot more likely to die than if a gun should mysteriously discharge while you happen to be in the vicinity.  And "sugary drinks," according to the New York Times on July 7, 2015, kill 184,000 people every year, 25,000 in the United States alone.
          It's hard to know where the truly oddball statistics come from or what they mean.  Coconuts, for example, are said to account for 150 deaths a year, champagne corks only 24; ladders cause 355 deaths, vending machines only two--and 450 people die every year falling out of bed.
          After that your chances of dying are sky high:  1 in 55,000 for death by stinging insect; 1 in 116,000 for death by dog bite; and 1 in 164,000 for death by lightning strike. 
          But you are two and a half times more likely to die of a lightning strike than from a terrorist on a shooting spree.  The odds against your dying that way are a staggering 1 in 700,000.
          What this proves is that terrorists aren't nearly as great a threat to you as sugary drinks, which really should carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

"Unprepossessing" and "Prepossessing"

     Most of us are unprepossessing.  It's a five-syllable word that doesn't enjoy much currency anymore, if it ever did, sort of a bulky word that stumbles coming out of the mouth.  Unattractive.  Which is good because that's exactly what the word means, unattractive.  In spades.  Online dictionaries say "unprepossessing" is the same as "unremarkable," "nondescript," "unpresentable," "unpleasant," "unappealing," "unsightly," and "uninviting."  Quite a chorus of negatives.

     It's opposite is "prepossessing," which enjoys even less currency, though it is a syllable shorter and a positive rather than a negative.  No one describes anyone who is pleasant and attractive as "prepossessing." No, the only way we know the word, and clearly very few do, is through its negative.  Which makes either or both words even less attractive.  Perfect.

     All of which is preface to my point:  when I look into the mirror, I don't see someone attractive, someone who makes a good first impression, someone who inspires confidence.  Not by a long shot.  I'm old now, and it hardly matters, but looking back on a lifetime of being unprepossessing, I've lost countless opportunities because of it.  It's maddening, of course, but I'm in good company, for most people walking the planet are just as unprepossessing as I am.

     That's a lot of unprepossessing people.   As of this moment, and you can look it up by going to www.worldometers.info/world-population, there are 7.382 billion people on the planet, and it's growing at the rate of 275 births per minute.  We lose only 115 per minute, a net growth of 160 people every single minute of every single day.  We'll hit 8 billion in 2024, a mere thirteen years after we hit 7 billion.

     And most of them will be just as unprepossessing as we are and will learn, as we have, how to overcome our disadvantage.  We work hard, for example, develop fortitude, and learn new skills, both on-the-job and inter-personal.  Of course, talent (always attractive if we happen to have any), makes up for a lot of it.  But even so, the way to the top is easier for the prepossessing people who can smile their way to the top--an unearned advantage if there ever was one.  The masters of the race, damn them, are the talented, determined, prepossessing people of the world, a minuscule minority of our 7.382 billion.  The world is their oyster.

     But as for the rest of us, I have three words:  get over it.  Make whatever mark you can on the history of the species.  Don't be content until you do.  Be proud of yourself and proud to make whatever contribution you can.  Today.  Make a difference.  Force yourself not to be satisfied.  Work.  That's what prepossessing looks like, not the image in your mirror.