Only connect--but how much?

It started innocently enough. I was in the Verizon store on a quick errand, and, just for fun, I asked if I was at that two-year mark when I should look at a new cell phone. Sure enough, the saleschild looked up from his screen and said, “Oh, yeah.” So I wandered, flirting with the chained-down models, and found myself seduced by a cute little almost iPhone-like Palm.

I played with the stuff on the screen and visualized myself with 24/7 e-mail access. I pictured myself looking as if I belonged in this decade with a colorful phone and a cute little charging stand. And apps. Apps? Apps!

“Would you use it mostly for texting and e-mail or would you want to have a lot of games?” the salesboy asked.

“I’d be using it mostly as a phone.” My answer was disappointing to us both.

“Oh.” But he tried to regroup, showed me lots of cool features. I could picture myself using one or two of them. I left intending to think about it, ask around, learn more.

But when the Verizon spell wore off, I was left with the suspicion that maybe I didn’t want to be followed day and night by all my e-mail. The spam? Those nice chatty ones from friends that serve as mini-visits--I wouldn’t want those to demand my attention just when I’m out doing something else.

One of my favorite things about e-mail is its ability to wait for you. It’s not a ringing phone; you get it when you want it, when you have time to read it. I appreciate that as a sender, knowing that I’m not interrupting someone, and as a receiver, having that control over my time.

Time. That’s the thing. The one definite, finite commodity of our lives. The one thing that’s ours to use, to waste, to make of whatever we choose. Do I really want to add a new level of outside demands on it?

It’s especially too easy for writers to spend their days avoiding the time they have. “Now I’ll sit down to write...but first I’d like a cup of tea...and maybe I’ll do the Times crossword puzzle/ read one more chapter/ throw in a load of laundry...” And that’s even before checking the blogroll (which, unlike the morning newspaper, has no end) or having the stray thought that demands satisfaction from Google. Then maybe just a quick peek at the e-mail--oh, the pooch pottie and I could change my life today with a degree in medical records...And all that is without the phone ringing.

In this morning’s New York Times Sunday Styles section, there’s an article about people bucking the trend toward more apps on their phones. One woman is quoted as saying, “There’s this sense that I’m missing out on something I didn’t even know I needed.” Exactly. Just because they’ve built it, do we have to come?

I’m not sure what my decision will be, but right now I’m leaning away from the adorable little Palm and toward just a basic old phone. I know I’ll have regrets about all that missed coolness and cuteness. (If only there was a phone that looked cute and cool.) But how much of my life do I want to make available to outside demands? It’s my time. I think maybe I want to decide how to use it.

"Mazel tov!"

I’ve just finished reading a strange, exhilarating, and fascinating book, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” a novel by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

It is the story of Cass Seltzer, who is drifting in the academic still waters of his specialty, the psychology of religion, when he is struck by zeitgeist lightning. He writes a book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion,” that makes a case for reason over faith. With religion on everyone’s mind, in art as in life, the book becomes a bestseller, bringing its author fame, fortune, a teaching offer from Harvard, and a challenge to debate the existence of God.

Around Cass revolve a constellation of academic types, including his unbearably beautiful, unbearably brilliant lover; his mentor who is just plain unbearable; a vibrant earth-mother character; and a remarkable child caught in an impossible situation. The book is filled with theological philosophy and send-ups of same. It is a delicious read, veering between thesis-friendly dialogue and chick-lit pacing, existential ponderings and egomaniacal panderings. It is curious, original, and ultimately makes a strong case for our complicated, flawed, and endlessly interesting species.

The book’s abundant Jewish references, coupled with Goldstein’s odd tendency to mention the upper lip of nearly every character, reminded me of an old Jewish legend about the philtrum, that little cleft below the nose. According to the story, in the months before a child is born the angel Gabriel visits the child and teaches him or her everything about the world. But just before birth, Gabriel touches the child on the upper lip and all the knowledge is instantly forgotten. The cleft remains as a sign of everything we spend our lives relearning. This probably has nothing to do with the book, but I love the legend. And the book is, at its heart, about what we believe, what we know, and how we make sense of the world. And maybe about how we try to relearn those lessons from the angel.

In the book’s final scene (this is not a spoiler) people are joyously greeting each other with cries of “Mazel tov!” Although, in Hebrew and Yiddish, this translates into “good luck,” it is actually used, as Goldstein notes, to congratulate someone on whom fortune has already smiled. And so “mazel tov” to me and to those among you who have already had the pleasure of reading this book. To those who have not, “mazel tov” to you for getting this recommendation!

Reading the Sunday papers

Some days the news gives you news in unintended ways. In today’s New York Times I read the obituary of a poet named Abraham Sutzkever, whose beautiful, haunting, and heart-breaking work I discovered only recently. He wrote in Yiddish about the Holocaust and the lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

Here is one of his poems, translated by Jacqueline Osherow:

Written on a slat of a railway car:

If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life's own path until it's gone
somewhere in a fog and can't be seen —

If someone should find these pearls
let him know how — cool, aloof — they lit up
the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart
of the Paris dancing girl, Marie.

Now, dragged through unknown Poland —
I'm throwing my pearls through the grate.

If they're found by a young man —
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they're found by a girl —
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they're found by an old man —
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.

From Epitaphs 1943-44

When I turned from the Times’ news section to “News of the Week in Review,” I saw its lead story about political anger. It was illustrated with some of the most disturbing photographs I’ve seen in a long time. The front page photo is from a Tea Party rally. Pictured front and center are three women not far off my age cohort. One holds a sign that reads, “Gun Control is being able to hit your target.” The jump has a photo, too, this one from the 1964 presidential campaign. A woman identified as a Barry Goldwater supporter holds a “USA Love It or Leave It” poster. Her face is so contorted with anger that she looks more animal than human. (For some reason, the editors have selected women’s faces here. Food for thought. No comment.)

Left me thinking about hate in its various historical moments and incarnations and what it does to us.

The occasional recipe: oatmeal

It’s been a bad week. From truly disastrous news about Haiti and desperately ill friends to the minor annoyance of a cold. And, of course, I’ve yet to climb out of the slough of despond caused by now having a senator who is pretty much anti-everything except guns, trucks, and waterboarding. Ya-hoo.

Just one remedy: let’s make a bowl of hot oatmeal and curl up with a good book. This sounds a little pathetic, but trust me on this. The oatmeal I am proposing here is not the old favorite rolled oats, quick or old-fashioned. That’s still fine and indispensable for making cookies. But I’d like to suggest a game-changer in the oatmeal department--steel cut. I’m a recent convert, so of course I want everyone to know about this. You may already know, in which case why didn’t you tell me?

Steel cut oatmeal is to rolled oats as a good French baguette is to Wonder bread. You still want the sliced white sometimes for grilled cheese sandwiches to have with your tomato soup. But the baguette is the staff of a whole different life. Likewise steel-cut oatmeal. It’s chewy and nutty and so delicious that I’ve just been throwing in some raisins or a precious few from my frozen stash of last summer’s Maine blueberries and not bothering with the brown sugar, maple syrup, or other additive possibilities. Okay, it does take 30 minutes to cook, but--and this is how it’s revolutionized my mornings--you can cook up a batch, keep in the refrigerator, and take out a serving at a time all week. You just zap it in the microwave for two minutes and--ta-da--breakfast! Or lunch or even a lazy-night supper.

The whole recipe is this: a two to one ratio of water to oats (that’s what it says in real recipes, but I often add a little more water--you can figure it out for yourself.) Some people cook it in milk or half milk, half water. I’m sure that’s delicious, but I just use water. A little salt. Then thirty minutes on the stove with occasional stirring involved. And you’ve got it.

It’s hearty and nutritious and it makes you feel as if at least one thing is going right first thing in the morning. Try it and let me know.

What is art good for?

Today was the final day of the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and I was glad I got there to see it. The Guggenheim is stunning, though, as my companion observed, maybe better for looking at people looking at art than for actually looking at art. There’s often an assumption with Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that human comfort can be sacrificed for artistic integrity. Perfect tradeoff in this case, even though the sloping ramp can feel like an uphill slog and the work doesn’t always seem shown to best advantage. And in this exhibit you get “looking at people looking at art” at its best: across the sky-lighted space you see people in dark silhouette against canvases exploding with color--quite amazing.

I read, in the wall text, about how as a young man Wassily Kandinsky had two experiences that determined his artistic mission--seeing one of Monet’s Haystack paintings and hearing a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He came away, it said, determined to create an emotional reaction through color and composition and, like music, in the absence of a recognizable subject. And above all, he believed in the transformative power of art to inspire human beings to a higher level of living.

As I walked the ramp and looked at painting after painting, I came upon several school groups clustered with their teachers in front of paintings. In each case, hands were eagerly being raised and ideas offered about the work. In each case the group was spending time looking carefully at paintings that offered no easy way in. It made me think of all the school budgets in which art education is one of the first things to go.

It made me wonder what the “takeaway” is from a school day. What, years from now, will those children remember? Photosynthesis? The rules of grammar? (I hope so!) The Treaty of Ghent? Certainly all of these. But more. How about the ability to look hard at a baffling painting and try to find something in it that tells them something new about their lives? How about the ability to appreciate what art can do?

Where the poem comes from: Mary Bonina

I probably first saw Mary Bonina’s work back when I wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe and did a story on the trail of poetry and prose inscribed on monoliths along the MBTA Orange Line. She wrote the poem that’s outside the Green Street Station. I can only imagine how satisfying it is to see your words carved in stone!

I talked with Mary on a fall day just as she was getting ready to go on a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts , where I've also had the pleasure of working. It was a little cool but not so much that we couldn’t sit outside at Cafe Pamplona in Harvard Square hunched over our hot coffees. She told me about the pleasures and challenges inherent in switching among genres, in her case fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and memoir She is the author of a poetry chapbook, “Living Proof.” Here is her poem, “English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect,” published in a 1991 issue of Hanging Loose, along with her description of how that poem came to be written.

“One of the many jobs I have held while trying to balance a writing life with financial needs, has been that of freelance ESL teacher to recent immigrants in their workplaces, mostly hospitals and banks in Boston. I was teaching adult students new to the U.S. from China, Haiti, Central America, Africa, Sicily, Poland, and other countries, students who spoke some sixteen different languages and held a variety of positions, including clerk, cashier, cafeteria worker, phlebotomist, research doctor, custodian, patient transporter, parking attendant, and nurse’s aid. Many of those I taught had had professional positions in the countries they’d left, but coming to the United States and not knowing English, most of them had taken service jobs.

“I loved teaching these students and I had great empathy for their situation. I suppose I was motivated to help them partially by my own family’s experience, immigrating from Sicily and Ireland, and having to negotiate a new culture and language themselves. So I took my role seriously, always prepared with a lesson plan I had labored over.

“Often though, after just a few exchanges of dialogue, I would have to abandon my script. Desperate to learn the language, to be able to navigate in a new culture, my students would interrupt me with their own pressing needs for specific vocabulary or grammatical construction; and when they did follow my lead, they asked questions and offered interpretations I had not anticipated when planning my classes. Eventually, I accepted and gained more confidence and got comfortable with allowing what I’d initially seen as interruption.

“I began to find it exhilarating, letting my teaching benefit from an improvisational style. I began to feel like a jazz sax player must, taking my cues from my students, and creating something new, building upon what they offered me. I felt like I was writing a poem, recognizing that familiar process of one word, one thought, leading to another -- often unanticipated – recognizing endless possibilities and finally settling on specific ones, when realizing a moment of revelation. I learned how to encourage the flow, to go with the stream of consciousness, and how to bring it back to my intended lesson.

“ The poem “English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect” is one from a collection of poems called Lunch in Chinatown, after the fact that one of my teaching sites was on the edge of Chinatown and students there often attended my classes during lunch break, “brown-bagging it.” This poem, as the title suggests, is about teaching the present perfect tense, a task that has stymied many an English teacher, even those working with native speakers of the language. It just might be the best example in the collection that illustrates the way I would encourage a riff to take its natural course, yet bring it back eventually to the original theme.”


English Lesson Plan: Present Perfect

1.

The Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker
shows a goofy mother, father, and children
seated all in a line, pressed tight together
between the sofa arms, staring at the TV:
“The Lintners,” the caption says,
“Stuck on the sofa since 1987.”

I show it to the class, thinking: will they laugh?
The clipping is an example I use
to illustrate the present perfect tense.
It gets passed around. Everyone nods,
very, very serious about learning
the present perfect tense.

Q. “How long have the Lintners been stuck on the sofa?”
A. The Lintners have been stuck on the sofa since 1987.”
2.
Stuck on a sofa, “hypnotized” by TV, brings up new
vocabulary. I explain “to be in a trance.”
This leads to “sleepwalking,” then to “daydreaming,”
and finally to “hallucination.”

“Hallucination” inspires Margarita to tell a story:
her last job....the State Hospital....there was a man
who had lost his mind when he lost his wife.
Whenever he got angry, says Margarita,
he would hallucinate that he was still in Cuba,
still in the hot sun. He would mime
cutting sugar cane with his machete

3.
Someone is using the word “cuckoo.”
I must explain that it is the name of a bird,
and not the right word to describe someone who is ill.
The Haitians think I’m talking about the owl, a bird that
frightens them, its face, the face of a cat, the eyes....
When they say nocturne I know
their mistake, draw an owl on the chalkboard.
4.
And the lesson for the day ends this way,
me saying, “It is an owl, not a cuckoo.
Haven’t you ever seen a clock shaped like a house
and a little bird comes out of the upstairs window saying,
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” the exact number of times
to tell the hour? The present perfect tense, like time
goes on and on, or like the Lintners, or the man who has
been cutting sugar can ever since his wife died, or
the owl that has been awake all night long, hooting.”

Books given and stolen

I always make sure to have plenty of books when I’m going on a trip--ones I know I’ll like and ones I take in case I don’t like others and ones I take in case I’m not in the mood to read even the ones I know I’ll like. So when I left on our family vacation, I had a good supply. I didn’t need another book. But...

...we passed a bookstore and Jenny and Nate ran in because they wanted to buy me a book. It was “The Book Thief.” They said it was a YA, but that they thought I’d like it. Jenny, Nate’s mother, was listening to an audio version. Nate, who is 14, read it a couple of years ago and considers it one of his favorites. He is currently reading ”To Kill a Mockingbird” and that’s already another favorite. Because of who he is, I know he has a lifetime ahead of him of reading books he will love.

I started it as soon as we got back to the house. A little strange at the beginning. The narrator was Death. There were some graphic elements, which I am never charmed by. But once the story really got going, I couldn’t put it down. The book is over 500 pages and when I finished it the next afternoon I cried. A lot.

The author, Markus Zusak, includes a lot of visual imagery in his unusual use of language. And I liked that the book’s familiar subject, the Holocaust, was viewed from a much less familiar perspective: the main character is a young German girl living with her German foster parents among their neighbors in a small town not far from the concentration camp at Dachau. The girl is the “book thief” who has a passion for books even before she can read and collects them whenever and however she can. As you might expect in a book narrated by Death--or, I guess, any decent book--the people run the basic human gamut, monsters to heroes, with most occupying the flawed and complicated middle ground.

And what a fascinating character Death is as Zusak has imagined him. He’s not an enemy. He’s pretty much just following orders, too. He goes where he needs to be and even seems to have a heart that breaks occasionally at what he’s called on to do. The souls he must carry away he bears softly, often tenderly, even sadly. He is nothing to be afraid of. He is just the natural consequence of what happens.

A gift carefully chosen is always a treat. But when someone gives you a book they have read and loved, it carries an extra dimension. The giving of a treasure from one book-lover to another is a gift of time well-spent and ideas lovingly offered. What could be better?

Thank you, Jenny and Nate.